The journey

Although the train journey started only 30 minutes ago, the journey she was on started eight months ago. Samiksha made her way to the door of the compartment. The train had picked up speed and the wind lashed around her. She closed her eyes and breathed in her freedom. Gently, she sat down at the door, her feet on the steps below and looked out. The sky above was cloudy mirroring her thoughts. It was never meant to be this way.

After completing her graduation in data science, she expected she would work for a few years before settling down as her parents no doubt wished. But while she was sending applications to jobs, her parents were sending out feelers for a match for her. There was no lack of interest. 5’8”, fair, from an upper caste family, educated, pretty by conventional standards – there was a lot of interest in her. It didn’t hurt that her father was rich. The boy and his family could expect her to bring gold and money into the marriage.

Advaith was the third man she was asked to parade before – a software engineer from IIT, working in Bangalore. In her brief interaction with him, she found him interesting. Not only was he good-looking, but he was well read and articulate. Soon they were following each other on Facebook and talking late into the night on their mobiles. While getting married so early was not in her plans, Advaith was good enough for her to change those plans.

The wedding, as expected, was a lavish affair. The run up to the wedding and the days after it were a blur. His family was sweet to her and welcomed her warmly. But she couldn’t help but feel that something was off. There was a hint of tension in the air as if she would discover that everything was a facade. She felt like Jim Carrey’s character in The Truman Show.

A month later they were in Bangalore. Advaith joined work the very next day. She spent her first day alone fixing up the house, making it a home. By the time he was back from work, she’d finished cooking, bathed and ready to spend time with him. But he’d needed to get into a call with a client from the US, which he took from the hall. So, she went into the bedroom and waited. After an hour, he was done, and they sat down to dinner. It was a disaster. He complained about the salt in one dish and too much spice in another dish, while a third one he felt was too bland.

The first day set the pattern for the rest of the week. Nothing she did seemed to please him. Her cooking, housekeeping, washing, ironing was all commented upon negatively. By the end of the week, Samiksha began to spend quite a few hours crying over the phone to her mother, who told her to be patient and to learn her husband’s likes and dislikes. She promised things would get better. That Sunday Advaith asked for her phone. He scrolled through her call records and chats. Then he decided that her subpar work was because she was spending too much time on the phone. To help her focus better, they decided it would be better if she didn’t have a phone. The next morning, her phone went with Advaith to work.

But the quality of her work continued to be less than expectations. To help her think about and consider her mistakes, Advaith would lock her in the cupboard in the bedroom. In the evening, after he returned from work, she would walk him through everything she had done. He inspected her work in detail. If something met his standards, he was effusive in his praise. But where she fell short, his disappointment was palpable. The inspection would be followed by a stretch in the cupboard. There was no standard time for her punishment. Some days she was let out in 30 minutes. There were days when she spent over 3 hours in the cupboard.

Next came the beatings. For recurring mistakes, he decided the spell in the cupboard was not doing the job. So, he coupled it with spankings with his belt. The spankings would be followed by his contrition when they were in bed. Stripping her naked, he would apply balm to ease her pain. All the while, he would tell her about the high expectations he had from her. He confessed his pain at having to punish her while professing his unending love for her. This usually ended with him using her for his pleasure. It couldn’t be called lovemaking since love was markedly absent in the interaction.

Her calls home was always made in his presence with the phone on speaker mode. The conversation was usually between him and her father, with Samiksha agreeing to everything Advaith portrayed as their life. It was a life in which most evenings were spent discovering the city, cooking together, and watching movies. The life she had dreamed of.

She couldn’t recollect exactly when she began collecting the money she would find forgotten in his trousers. At first it was just a way to do something he didn’t know about. But soon it became her ticket out. Like a prisoner working towards her parole, Samiksha secreted the money in a hole she’d discovered behind the cupboard.

A one-way ticket would cost Rs. 1250. It took her eight months to collect the Rs 2000 she felt she would need.

Eight months of being told how inept she was. Eight months of almost daily spankings, to the point where many nights she couldn't sleep on her back. Eight months of hours spent crying silently in the dark cupboard. Eight months of having sex devoid of any feelings.

She couldn’t just leave through the front door because he locked it when he went to work. But his toolbox had a hammer and chisel which she used to break open the lock. That was the first time she had left the apartment after she had arrived as a new bride. She made her way out of the building complex without being noticed. On the street, she looked around for a bus stop. There was one on the other side of the road, a few meters away. Fortunately, she could get a bus to the railway station from there. As she stood in the line to buy a ticket, an icy thought began to creep through her.

“What if there were no trains?”

Her fears were unfounded. There was a train in a couple of hours. Buying a general ticket, she made for the platform. All the while she expected him to appear and drag her back home. She didn’t go on to the platform where her train was expected. Instead, she waited behind a telephone booth from where she could watch the entrances to the platform. As the train began to pull in, she darted out of her hiding place and ran over the foot-over bridge. Moving at a steady pace so she didn’t stand out, she made her way to the general compartment. It was only when the train pulled out that she let out a sigh of relief.

An hour into the journey, the train seemed to burst out from the cloudy, depressing atmosphere. The sky was a clear blue and around her she could see green paddy fields all the way until the horizon.

The journey was well and truly on.