To Mr. Suri, With Love

Dear Mr. Suri,

I have been taught that all letters, even disagreeable ones, must begin with pleasantries. So, let me start by expressing my sincere condolences to you on the passing of your wife. As someone who knew her intimately, I believe that her demise was a gross cosmic miscalculation. A woman of Tara’s compassion and resilience does not merit being taken away so soon, especially when the reasons for her departure have so little to do with her own choices.

She will be dearly missed. May she rest in eternal peace.

Now that the formalities are out of the way, let me check on you. How have you been doing? The last couple of months must have been a trying time for you. The transition into parenthood is not easy, even in the best of circumstances. No amount of rehearsal can prepare anyone for the challenges that two toothless cherubs can send their way. Considering you intended to play no more than a side role in their upbringing, this tragedy must be especially overwhelming.

I can picture you right now, pacing up and down the corridors, trying not to lose your cool even as the babies refuse to sleep. If one dozes off, the other lets out a shrill cry, with no particular aim but to rouse his twin. Then both are up, and they bawl together, and managing them becomes a complex game of Chinese Checkers. You must feed them, bathe them, dress them up, and sing to them, all while relying on animated claptrap to ensure neither feels neglected on account of the other. The end-goal of each session, of course, is to put them to bed, and if by any stroke of divine mercy they happen to snooze at the same time, you must launch a strategic intervention to get the house in order before they awake. Phew.

This must be rough.

How does it feel to walk solo into an unending night, Mr. Suri? Do you feel dazed all the time? Are all your clothes layered in myriad combinations of bodily fluids? Do you wish somebody would take the babies away and let you sleep for two weeks straight?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not criticizing them. Babies will do what babies are meant to do. It would be unfair to resent them for their needs.

My point is, it gives me much perverse happiness to realize that your grand plans for life have boomeranged. There was nothing you wanted more desperately than to imprison your wife, isn’t it? You wanted to extinguish the fire in her belly. Now you must navigate the minefield of parenting all by yourself, two prams in tow. Well served, well deserved.

You must be terribly vexed by my nameless presence now, so let me identify myself.

You do not know me, but I was Tara’s closest friend and confidante for three years. Call me Raya.

I met Tara in January 2017. It was the first day of the English vocabulary workshop we attended together at the City Management Institute. Tara was a brand-new wife then, and you had come to drop her off to class that day. I watched her clamber off the scooter from behind you, taking great care not to trip over her saree. She looked exquisite, like a flower girl at a wedding, acutely aware of the entire congregation’s gaze upon her. Even as a woman, it was difficult not to notice her arresting presence.

I remember checking you out too. You were wearing a white checked shirt and a pair of grey trousers. You had thick glasses and a deep frown. When Tara got off the scooter, she adjusted her pallu and promptly turned around to bid you goodbye, but you were already gone.

She stared at your receding figure in surprise, her waving hand suspended mid-air. For some reason, even though we were strangers, I found her disappointment disturbing.

Over the years, I have learned that my first feelings about you were accurate. At the risk of sounding dramatic, something about your presence felt ominous from the start. I could tell just from looking that you weren’t right for her; she was going to be unhappy all her life, and you would be the reason.

Why did I feel this way? I eventually found out.

Tara and I didn’t exchange a word over the course of the vocabulary program. But on the final day of the course, we became friends under rather unusual circumstances.

That day, our instructor announced a group assessment in class. We had to work in pairs and come up with a one-page text that we would read out in front of everyone. The text had to include at least ten words we had learnt in the course of the workshop.

We had to pick any one topic together for this assignment–workplace jargon, human attributes, figures of speech, and so on.

I looked around me. Most of the other learners had quickly picked their partners and subjects. Tara was still available though, and she looked anxious at this sudden turn of events. She had not been particularly vocal in class, so I guessed she felt uncomfortable looking for a partner.

I walked up to her desk with my notepad in hand, asking if she wanted to work together. She agreed.

“But what shall we work on?” she wondered. “The only topic that remains now is figures of speech. I’m not very comfortable with those.”

“We can pick some easy ones,” I replied. “How about metaphors, alliteration, onomatopoeia?”

“Actually, I don’t know that one. I was absent the day they taught all this. What on earth is this ono… onomatopoeia?”

The word did not exactly roll off her tongue like a song. She kept getting stuck, as if trying to read the botanical name of a plant species. She broke the word up into several parts, saying oh-no-may-tow-pow-aya. I suppressed a chuckle.

“Have you ever used words like swish-swash, boom-boom, and thud-thud?”

“Umm, yes. In nursery rhymes with my niece. Why?”

“Those are some simple examples of onomatopoeia. It means using words that convey sounds.”

She gave me a suspicious look.

“With a name like that, it can’t be that simple!”

“What? Okay. Remember ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm?’ It has the simplest examples of onomatopoeia you can think of.”

“Oh! So moo-moo and quack-quack and bow-wow?”

“Yes! Cluck-cluck and meow-meow and hee-haw too!”

We burst into loud laughter, temporarily forgetting that we were in an adult classroom. The solemn-looking folks around us were taken aback by our moment of mirth. We downplayed our merriment and got down to business.

The presentation was a hit. Tara and I were chemistry in action. We had written a paragraph of about twenty sentences, and we took turns reading the lines. We knew when to stop and let the other take over. United in thought, delivered in one voice.

Our friendship from that moment onwards wasn’t explicitly offered or accepted, just understood. Our mutual love of the English language had sealed our amity.

Do you know what binds women, Mr. Suri? Sometimes it is common passions. At other times, shared sufferings. Tara and I commenced our journey with great excitement over the former, but ultimately bonded in solidarity over the latter. Bechdel wouldn’t be happy to hear this, but in our country, men are the most common reason women forge lasting friendships.

After the workshop ended, Tara and I met at the municipal park every evening. Since you never got home before 9 p.m., we could comfortably step out for a couple of hours. We started off by discussing all our favorites: movies, singers, food, authors. We discovered that we were equal admirers of indie films, we were both unwilling cooks, and we loved reading books by women, about women. I remember how thrilled we were the day we found out that The Palace Of Illusions figured in prime position on both of our lit-lists and that The Handmaid's Tale was next.

A few weeks into our whirlwind friendship, our conversations about the outside of our lives were replaced by confessions about the inside: the inside of our homes, marriages, bedrooms, minds.

In our culture, women are told to keep their secrets locked up in closed fists and shut mouths. They must follow this dictum with utmost obedience, even if the charade takes them nowhere. They are conditioned to believe that an admission of marital discord is a declaration of a failed life—after all, the chief function of women is to maintain men’s happiness, isn’t it? I have lost several friends to this devious patriarchal construct, for the fear of losing face makes liars out of women, and I can’t stand lies. Which is why I am supremely grateful that Tara understood the futility of upholding the pretense of normalcy.

One evening, she told me about your staunch disapproval of her wish to work. She had a tempting job vacancy in sight: the role of an Academics Coordinator at a popular school in your part of town. She had enrolled for the vocabulary workshop with this role in mind.

You called her “a silly girl” for having the audacity to dream. You reminded her that you made enough money to feed and clothe your only wife and that she had no reason to expose herself to the world when money was never going to be short. Tara turned up at the park that day looking lost. Her eyes roved, her feet staggered. “Is the point of marriage needing a man to sign off our every move?” she wondered, as if speaking through a haze. “Am I a child? Infirm? Mentally unstable? What am I, Raya?”

We sat in silence, trying to recollect a single instance of our fathers seeking permission from our mothers to make a career move, to meet a friend, to buy furniture. It had never happened in either of our homes, nor in the homes of any of the people we knew. For as long as we’d lived, we’d watched men decide and women abide.

“Maybe this is how it is meant to be then,” Tara said eventually, with a face so forlorn I had to look away.

No. We were under no obligation to maintain the status quo. Just because something had been happening a particular way for years did not mean it didn’t merit being reconsidered or altered or even outright abandoned. “When men created the world order,” I reminded her, “they never asked us how we’d like to see ourselves in it.”

“Shouldn’t we decide for ourselves then?”

“It’s about time.”

I suggested that she bring up this matter with you, as gently as possible, and let you know how intent she was on acquiring an identity outside of wifehood. I even supplied her with some handy phrases she could use during the discussion–plain, inoffensive statements such as “I want to do more with myself” and “I’d love to put my knowledge to good use”–that would come across as factual rather than combative while helping her achieve her aim without affronting your very fragile sense of self-worth. When I rattled them off, Tara was so impressed she decided to take notes on her phone. We rehearsed them and I told her what intonation and inflections to use, when to smile, where to pause, how to convince without threatening.

Boy, some homework that was! The things we must do to subvert the male ego. The eggshells we must walk on, the tight ropes we must tread! It’s excruciating.

Tara had started to trust me implicitly by this point. Despite a solid fear of stoking your ire, she decided to go ahead and give my plan a shot. She brought it up that night when you got home from work, and she tried to handle it as best as she could.

Back in my bed, I tossed and turned for hours, terrified that this endeavor could spectacularly backfire. I wanted to believe that she would make it, but my gut predicted otherwise.

My worst fears came true. Not because Tara was unable to do as directed, but because she had made an appeal for empathy in a man who had none.

That night was the first time you grabbed Tara by her shirt, slammed her against the wall, and violated her casually. You have gone off the rails, you said to her. Watch that head of yours. It’s galloping out of control.

The next day, when she narrated her ordeal, I wept. I wept like I hadn’t wept at my mother’s funeral.

Tara bled for three days. She turned down my incessant requests to see a doctor. She used the spotting to pretend she was on her period so she could escape from you for a few days. She limped for a week and shuddered involuntarily for months.

Needless to say, she never dared disobey you again. And I never dared to motivate her again. You terrorized your wife into submission. She gave up. I gave up. We lost. You won.

Why do men do the things they do, Mr. Suri? Where do you get this sense of ownership from? How do you live with yourself? How do you never recoil from who you’ve become?

Tara’s grief was not hers alone. It quickly became mine. I watched as she lost her exuberance and sank into resignation. She stopped talking about books and libraries and the Latin and Greek origins of words. She no longer used the vocabulary we’d learnt together. Most evenings that we met, she was mentally absent, looking for ways to redeem her existence. The despair in her eyes was heartbreaking. I wanted to help her, but the task seemed impossible.

Exactly a year ago, on this day, Tara discovered that she was carrying your spawn. And that there was not one but two of them.

“Congratulations!” I said, and hugged her when we met. But she was crestfallen.

She told me she wanted to abort. She had decided she did not want the children–not because she was unprepared for motherhood, but because the thought of being bound to you for the rest of her life was unbearable. It occurred to her, in that moment, that children would seal the marriage. She still had a shot at a different life, if only she could muster the courage to leave. The realization sparked something inside her, and for the first time in a long time, I saw her eyes shine.

We walked up to the medical store together. I had done my research on mifepristone and misoprostol. I had scoured countless medical forums for advice on how to manage a termination. I was prepared for everything that could go wrong. We bought the pills. I took her home. She told you she was staying over at her cousin’s place for a family engagement.

But it never happened. Tara was unable to swallow them. She started out strong, but when it was time for the plunge, she spat out the mifepristone and collapsed in my arms, trembling. “I can’t do it,” she repeated over and over again, and though I wanted to change her mind, I just nodded and stroked her hair until she felt better. When she stopped trembling, I helped her to my bed. She stared at the ceiling for hours. I knew she did not want me to goad her, so I didn’t. She had reached a point where she genuinely believed she owned nothing, not even her own body. Anything I said to the contrary was not going to make a difference.

Tara spent the remainder of her pregnancy faintly hoping that the arrival of the children might transform you. That you might become a different person: less violent, more patient, less accusing, more forgiving.

She did not live to see the outcome. Perhaps for her own good, she perished while bringing them into the world.

When Tara died, I promised myself that her children would learn of her story.

The boys deserve to know about their mother, the woman who birthed them, and the horrors their father unleashed upon her. They need to learn how truly despicable you are. They need to know what sort of man to never become.

I have evidence. The assignment we did together. Pictures of her wounds in the park. The prescription of the pills she never swallowed. The job description she’d cut out from the Ascent page of the newspaper and showed to me but never applied to. 

Any attempts to trace this letter will be futile. The CMI shut shop two years ago. The phone Tara used is long gone. We had no common friends. I left no traces.

You will never find me.

But I will be watching you. No matter what you do to keep me out, I will always know what you’re up to.

And when your children are old enough to know the truth, they will know.

I promise.

Have fun,
Raya

Illustration by Myriam Louise Taleb