The rains that everyone had warned me of, which were said to be the stuff of nightmares, having caused typhoons and cyclones that can wreck civilisation, had somehow passed. Now the only thing that remained was a rather spooky thunder, so loud it rattled your bones through the walls of the old houses in Kolkata, like the one I was in. I had walked upstairs to the terrace to see flashes of electricity across the sky and, shaking with the booming thunder like a scared child, had almost immediately shut the door to the terrace and gone downstairs. Empty noises had never threatened me thus.
My mind drifted once again to India’s 73 million single women, hundreds of whom had shared their stories with me. I had given a talk to a group of them on why it was difficult for people to love strong women. Now, free in many ways, having chosen their freedom, their PTSD was like this scary thunder, about now harmless past lives but still ringing loud in the lives of these single women.
My elderly journalist friend and his wife are visiting Kolkata from Delhi, and they text me, living up to their promise of showing me Kolkata. First, we have lunch at a Bangladeshi restaurant close by and then head to Kumartuli, the historic potters’ area, which is around 300 years old. But according to legend or rumour, depending on who you ask, it is far older. It is a special place and the energy is instantly infectious, mesmerising even to atheist tourists and observers of culture, let alone believers and worshippers. Sculptors and potters lovingly shape grey idols. Painters with the greatest tenderness and care paint the eyes, the eyeliner, eye shadow and makeup, the final perfect touches before the goddesses reach the Durga Puja pandals not just across this ancient city but across the country and to many places in the world where they are shipped to. Like my friend’s house in Delhi for their house puja. And the local puja pandals in the San Francisco Bay Area. Weeks later, it would be my first Durga Puja in Kolkata, West Bengal, but right then in Kumartali, it was most surreal and enchanting to be there, surrounded by these goddesses for the first time in my life.
They were all single Indian women. Soon the artists would assign them families and roles invented by humans, turn them into mothers laden with the responsibilities of answering the endless human prayers and wishes (of wealth, wisdom, health…) that would come their way and of protecting humans against demons and all things unwanted. You see, humans were/are selfish creatures, everasking; there is no unconditional love humans are capable of, even for their gods and goddesses. (After festivities and after each puja, I would come across hundreds of idols of goddesses strewn along the edges of roads or lakes, like garbage nobody had picked up or wanted to pick up.) One minute you are goddess, next minute you are garbage. Such was human love, even for the gods. What hope then for fellow humans?
But right now, here in Kumartuli, at this very moment, the goddesses were free of the burdens of conditional love, the burdens of humanity, of any meaning and symbolism put into them – the clay sculptures could be anyone and anything. They could be any of the armies of 73 million single women in the world’s largest democracy who had freed themselves, putting themselves first, reclaiming their lives piece by piece, sometimes broken shard by broken shard, like Ramya.
They could be Roma, a lawyer in her mid-forties based out of NCR, who, like every married Indian woman, had tried hard to fit into the roles of wife, daughter-in-law, mother. Domestic violence, strangulation, physical and sexual assault by her husband ended it all. Mind you, the husband was a doctor. Yet, he showed little empathy and demanded sex from her throughout her pregnancy, periods and even a couple of days after she was discharged from the hospital after a C-section surgery to deliver their baby. He had abused her and said she was “crazy”, “mental”, that “something was wrong with her” because she did not want to have sex. It was a classic form of shaming and blaming, as old as time, which countless women are put through all over the world in their marriages. Most “adjust”, as women are taught to, in every role and area of their lives, most perhaps as wives and daughters-in-law. So of course Roma adjusted as well. But he took the decision for her and threw her out. After eleven years of marriage, at the age of 35, Roma found herself homeless. She has since then built her life from scratch as a single mother, sustaining herself and her child for over seven years. It has been no walk in the park, and in spite of her being a lawyer, the legal process and the patriarchy involved, which Banshee too had to face, were no less torture than her “eleven years in hell”.
“My husband had made me swargwasi (a dead person), and now, as a single working mom, I am living in heaven,” she says with a smile.
Single women resulted from all kinds of situations. Some were divorced, having escaped from abusive marriages and relationships, some were widows, and then there were those who were single out of choice, perhaps due to abusive childhood patterns repeating or even as a result of a happy childhood (psychological patterns addressed in a later chapter on therapy jargon and childhood enmeshment playing out in adult relationships).
In her early thirties now, Iva, a social media professional, was sexually abused as a child, the trauma of which remains unresolved. Opening up sexually to anyone is an incredibly big deal for her. Two out of her three relationships were abusive, induced by sexual demands. All of her exes had demanded sex from her and only one had ever made her feel safe. “And I did feel safe enough to get intimate with him, but the relationship ended,” says Iva. “I am so much happier being single, with none of this baggage and stress to deal with.”
Iva had told each of her boyfriends – the list also included a married man – that she didn’t want marriage. “But all of my exes were commitment phobic, even for a relationship.” Iva wanted true intimacy, a sense of dependence, support, someone to bank on and emotional closeness – why we get into any relationship (romantic or platonic) anyway. “But it’s always only sex that is offered in the name of intimacy. And many of us (women) fall for it,” she says. An only child with ailing parents, Iva had wanted her married boyfriend to check on her and hold her hand when her mother was hospitalised, or while she settled down in a new city, or when her friend committed suicide, when, not knowing how to deal with the loss or grief, Iva was baffled. When her employer gave her a break she called up her then boyfriend. “He responded three hours later saying, ‘Let’s have sex, you will feel better.’ Sensitivity, mutual support and basic dependence were always absent.”
In an India of extramarital affairs, it is not uncommon for single women like Iva or my feminist friend (or the ones mentioned in the later chapters) to have flings, full-blown affairs or casual sex with married men with no guilt. But without the human connection or true intimacy, the point is lost. Sex is not the real need. Peel the layers, as we saw in Mumbai or in Iva’s case, and intimacy or human connection is the core human need. More and more women like Iva are realising this, thanks to their bodies that were unable to orgasm.
Even in relationships where women are not abused, men often tend to demand certain sexual acts without making the partner feel safe enough to proceed. When the women refuse, their consent, or lack of it, is respected, but there is pouting, uncomfortable silence and painful, passive-aggressive behaviour, making both partners feel betrayed, rejected and hurt, and ultimately destroying relationships. All of this can be resolved with heartfelt, healthy communication. Several women prefer to avoid the whole drama and choose to remain single.
According to the International Academy of Sex Research’s journal, Archives of Sexual Behaviour, 59 per cent of women in America have faked orgasms. That so many women in the world’s most developed country feel the need to fake what is supposed to be joy and liberation tells a lot. Are they safe to be themselves anywhere?
In a society like India, where women are constantly slutshamed and made to feel unsafe, irrespective of whether they are covered from head to toe or not; where the woman is seen as property, especially after marriage; where it is her job to serve her husband and be an object to be controlled and moulded. Her sense of safety, so that she does not feel she is walking on eggshells in the relationship, and her freedom to even know who she is, so that she can try to be that self, are rare luxuries. How, then, can she feel free in bed?
According to the National Family Health Survey (2019–21) by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, 83 per cent of sexually abused married women were abused by their husbands. In other words, they have suffered marital rape, something that is still not considered a crime in India.
Radha had to have an abortion because, on their wedding night, the husband decided to have unprotected sex without her consent. She says that while she was pained and felt betrayed, he is otherwise “a wonderful man and a caring husband”, and she doesn’t even see this as rape because of how common it is.
She is right about how common and, therefore, “normal” this is. And this is scary. Has she been able to orgasm ever since? Obviously not. The body stores trauma, which prevents us from relaxing unless something is done about it. There are also many kinds of trauma – same-partner trauma, like in her case, and therefore, the inability to orgasm with the person who may have sexually, emotionally, or physically abused or disrespected (abandoned) them.
Or in the case of my friend Katie back home in California, who in spite of enjoying most of the privileges of being a white person in America, was regularly molested by gangs of men (not too different from Indian eve teasing) while growing up as a teenager in her unsafe LA neighbourhood. There is such a thing as general trauma from general abuse, which has nothing to do with a specific partner. It was the same story everywhere. Women were women, whether in the posh bubble of Silicon Valley or all over India.
“If women realised how we showed up in bed is how we show up in life, they would consider working on building a stronger mind-body connection,” Katie texts me.
Women’s bodies also store trauma and consequent posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and suffer from a host of common illnesses, like endometriosis, polycystic ovarian disease (PCOD), polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), cysts and other complications in the uterus requiring medical attention and surgeries, making sex painful and the need for safety even greater. There is even a condition called vaginismus, which is born out of deep anxiety. It is the body’s automatic reaction to shut down due to a deep fear of vaginal penetration. Orgasm is not about sex. It is a reflection of our lives. If our women are not truly free or safe anywhere, how can they feel free or safe in bed? With all of this baggage of trauma, and with their men constantly failing the responsibility bestowed on them by nature of being the protector-provider rather than an aggressor causes feelings of lack of safety or an abuser or someone plainly oblivious to the suffering of the women.
Excerpted with permission from How India Loves: Love Stories from the World’s Largest Democracy, Rituparna Chatterjee, Bloomsbury India.
