And everybody, each one of those friends and neighbours were suddenly neither comfortable in her presence nor as sympathetic. They told her she was making a mistake. ‘Where will you go, Deepthi?’ they asked her. ‘A woman’s place is with her husband,’ they reminded her.

Everybody had sympathy for the martyr; no one was willing to stand by the warrior. She was the slattern who was leaving her husband. Yes he beat her, yes he was nasty but ‘Arre, this is India, we stick by our husbands’. No one helped, not with money nor advice nor cooked dinners. But she went ahead and did it.

Is she happy now? I don’t know. She struggles. There are hard days and harder days. There are days when she is very lonely and other days when she is scared. But never a day when she is not proud of what she’s done. Her ribs have been fine since.

There was another woman. Her husband verbally abused her before his entire family. Every sentence he ever spoke to her began with ‘you bitch’ or haramzadi. Every command—never a request—ended with ‘… or I will kick you’. He slept with her only till she got pregnant, then he never touched her—not once in thirty-eight years of marriage. But he continued the abuse.

His family, though, loved and respected her. She was bahu for the elders and maami for the kids—but no one ever spoke up for her. Not the man’s three brothers or his sisters and definitely never his mother. The woman didn’t think about divorce or leaving him or calling the police. She didn’t even complain to her own parents. She just kept her head down and suffered it all.

She was a good Indian woman, a good Indian wife—and if it was her destiny to suffer, she was going to do it while cooking excellent meals. She is dead now. She died two months back of renal failure. While she lingered on in hospital, her husband never once went to see her. He didn’t need to. His family was there lending their full support. After all, she was so well loved.

So I never left him because I didn’t want to be alone, afraid, unfucked—and also because he never beat me. How could I justify leaving him?

There was a time once, much earlier in my marriage, when I contemplated leaving him. I’d called my mother to discuss it with her. She reminded me of the money spent on my wedding, how my father was in debt because of it, how her weak heart couldn’t withstand the shock of a divorce. And anyway, she asked me, why did I want to divorce him?

‘Marta hai kya—does he beat you?’ Ma asked.

‘No Ma,’ I said. ‘But there are … other women, I think.’