5. THE NEED TO STAY
At 9, I read the quote on a billboard, ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result’. At that time, I thought of the wife, praying over and over again to the same deity believing He could change him.
At 15, the diety hadn’t changed him and I suggested to her in what I thought was the most adult-like demeanour, that perhaps it was best to leave. But as you would now know, she was perseverant to the highest of faults, and if she had a hundred lifetimes to wait on that deity, she would have lived all 99 in misery in the hope that the hundredth was her absolution.
I often wondered when we would leave. Even then I knew it would be forceful, not amicable. He’d drag the luggage down the red stairs, out of reach of those green walls and toss it outside the cemented ground, tailored clothing spilling everywhere. I’d imagined the dog barking, cause non-human as it was, it seemed to have a sense of intuition. She’d be in the bedroom weeping while he came back for another luggage. I imagined the children assembled in her room. One weeping with her, perhaps two consoling her, and one standing at the door frame, scowling as he came in, conjuring thoughts so evil the phosphorescent rosary on their neck wouldn’t glow.
Ultimately, she would never leave, but he would. One day the man in the green house would learn that he can leave. There’d be a fight and naturally, he would be cruel. The wife would fill the tub with water and immerse herself as though she could bring herself to remain under, still, till all her problems had floated above her, like oil in water. When her lungs can’t take it anymore, she’d bring her head up and hit it on the ceramic tub. He’d hear the constant thuds, pick up his keys, his unpacked luggage from a previous trip, and he’d leave, drive all the way to the other house. The other house whose aura was even worse than that of the green house, but suited him perfectly regardless. That would become his happy place. The empty sand-coloured house nested at the very end of the road, quiet and lonely.
It’d be days later she’d plead with him to come back.
Years later, I’d ask why, and when I try to remember her answer, I’d find that in a state of cognitive dissonance I must have erased it.
What is to be said of an inhabitant who chooses not to flee a mined homeland out of civic responsibility to stay? The woman in the green house gave a lot of reasons, and one day in exasperation she asked, where would you want me to go? I think of that as the moment I knew she would always stay. Patriotic to that green house.
I imagined she lived one day at a time. Any day could have been the last, but when it was all said and done, and she survived, she mistook her survival for a belief she could survive anything. It was always like that with her. Like a game of endurance. Like she was telling herself if she’d lived through it this long, it mustn't be that bad. In these days, surrounded by a haze of robustness, she forgets how bad it could get. That was her undoing, cause forgetting made her stay. What is one more day?
One day becomes a brand new one, and that one becomes another day.
Week.
Month.
Years.
That’s how you stay.
That’s how you never leave.
In my later life, I’d find myself questioning the intent of abusers. I’d think that it’s not just the victim that suffers, the abuser by the act of inflicting violence, consciously loses a part of themselves, like cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Later on, I’d be consumed with so much guilt for condoning such a thought, like by the mere act of inwardly empathising, I have done a great disservice to victims.
In these moments, engulfed in a pool of guilt and candescent anger, I’d glimpse a part of the man in the green house in myself, and shamefaced I’d think, it’s not just the man in the house who needed to be prayed for.
He had passed his anger and what she called wickedness on, and it’d continue to be passed on like a gene, a generational curse. That is how curses are made. An angry man, like a stick figure in a green house, and a persevering woman, a broken stick figure who puts herself together every other day but refuses to leave.
At 32, I thought, maybe faith is insanity.
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