It’s Only Human
Image: Unsplash
Recently, I read an exceptional memoir called In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. It works as a collection of essays that details Machado’s relationship with another woman, someone who was initially her friend and soon became her lover and, very quickly after that, her abuser. This memoir is gut-wrenchingly, bone-chillingly beautiful. It’s remarkably well written and incredibly fascinating to observe Machado pick apart her memories and thoughts in these essays as she explores the phenomenon of queer abuse, specifically abuse between queer women, through her own experiences. Machado also discusses how queer relationships between women are often toted as paradisical – a safe haven for women, the easiest manifestation of a perfect relationship. This representation, she notes, is part of the urge minorities have to present themselves in the best possible light so as to win tolerance and acceptance, an urge that I, as a queer Tamil woman, have felt deeply from the standpoints of race, gender, and sexuality. Machado writes that this representation can’t be all there is to queer people, who are, ultimately, utterly, people. She notes that queerness “does not equal good or pure or right,” but that it is “simply a state of being – one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind.” Placed within their own context, Machado encourages every facet and being there can be to queer people, including villainy. As part of the celebration of Pride, of the recognition and uplifting of LGBTQ+ people, I wanted to bring to light a story of abuse between two Tamil women and discuss it within our own, intersecting contexts.
One of the women of this story, Kothai*, doesn’t label her relationship with Saranya* as anything more than a friendship. “Nothing physical really happened,” she said, “I don’t think it counts as a [romantic] relationship.” Now, in her early twenties, almost five years after the end of this relationship, Kothai identifies as pansexual. However, while she was friends with Saranya, at ages sixteen to seventeen, she hadn’t considered being queer as a possibility for herself. Kothai moved to Canada when she was fourteen from Sri Lanka and being raised as a conservative Hindu in an environment in which sexuality is rarely discussed or acknowledged had not left much room in her mind to consider her own. In hindsight, now, Kothai recognizes that her relationship with Saranya wasn’t strictly platonic. “I was in love. I don’t know what kind of love, but we both loved each other,” she said. “I did anything and everything to prove it to her.” This interview with Kothai was deeply personal. The two of us spoke for a lengthy amount of time, picking apart her memories and feelings, trying to understand a past in retrospect. Kothai admitted she repressed a lot of this past, being too painful and confusing to wrestle with. I appreciate her candor with me, her openness and willingness to explore this relationship, its effects, and its significance.
Kothai became part of a larger friend group in grade ten – a group of roughly eight girls, of which Saranya was also apart of. She was new to the area and to the school, and these girls were among the first friends she made in this country. Kothai doesn’t remember meeting Saranya, only that she had at some point. They weren’t so close initially, she said; they hung out but as part of the group. It wasn’t until months later, when Kothai told Saranya about some issues she was having with another friend, that they became closer; Saranya understood and comforted her well. They were also going to summer school together in which it was only the two of them in that class. They began doing everything together, hanging out, talking for hours after on the phone.
When I asked Kothai what was it about Saranya that drew her in so closely, she said, “It was at the time when I felt like I needed to fix people. She was closed off and hard to read and I felt that it would be a little accomplishment if I could get her to open up to me and be close to me. I really wanted her to feel safe enough to come to me for things. This is how I kept people around, by solving their problems.” She continued on and said, “I also really wanted to know her better. I did think she was really cool and I had her on a pedestal.” She recalled, then, a time when she was talking about Saranya to a friend of hers after the relationship ended. She remembered saying, “No one is as pretty as this girl, I can’t compare, she’s gorgeous,” to which her friend was confused by, given that Saranya was not considered attractive by men. I asked Kothai what Saranya looked like. Her lips twitched in a slight smile and her eyes drifted away when she said, “She’s petite. You’d never expect what she did looking at her. She had really long, thick, curly hair; she often put it up in a bun. I liked it when some of her strands came loose and curled. She always wore dark maroon lipstick and black liner. She had a leather jacket she wore a lot. She was light skinned and had really pretty light brown eyes.” I asked Kothai if, perhaps, she wanted Saranya to open up to her due to attraction to which she said she wasn’t sure, “It wasn’t a thought at the time. I can’t be certain.”
The ways in which Kothai and Saranya’s relationship veered from being simply friends were largely small and subtle. They spent most of their time together, told one another they loved each other frequently, cuddled. A few times, Saranya cornered Kothai in empty areas, reached into her pants to grab her underwear, and give Kothai a wedgie. After fights, Kothai told me, she used to brush her fingers through Saranya’s hair while she laid her head in Kothai’s lap. It was easy to excuse the intensity of their intimacy as merely platonic, and so this was how the two of them proceeded – two best friends, closer to each other than anyone else. This is what Saranya told Kothai when she demanded for her to change in front of Saranya. Kothai shifted when she told me about this, looking away and then back before saying, “We hung out in my room a lot and whenever I would go to a different room to change, she made me change in front of her. She would say, ‘What are you hiding, we’re friends. We’re like sisters, just do it. It’s just me.’ So, I turned my back to change.” There was a pause in our conversation while I nodded before Kothai rushed to continue. “I did it so that I didn’t show everything. At first, it felt weird. Back home, you don’t change in front of people. I didn’t know how friendships worked here and I never had friendships that went as deep before. But Saranya said it was normal here and whatever she said, I believed her… By then, we hit a point in our friendship that whatever she said, I did. I didn’t think about it.” There was a pause again before Kothai laughed; it sounded nervous and she looked away again. “One of those times, she pinned me to bed on my stomach while my shirt was off.” Kothai described to me how Saranya took the towel Kothai was using to cover herself as she changed so that she had to hold her breasts, in some modicum of coverage with one hand, while she tried to grab the towel back with the other. “We were play fighting for a bit. And eventually I was pinned on the bed, under her…We both paused before she let me go.” I nodded, slowly, and asked how Kothai felt in that moment. “I was very unaware of my own body still and sexually repressed. I felt very confused and was struggling with potential feelings with a woman on top of that sexual repression. That’s when I knew this isn’t something I can tell people.”
In hindsight, it seemed that Saranya did not want most of her relationship with Kothai to be public knowledge. “At school,” Kothai told me, “she wouldn’t hang out with me alone or be seen by people. It was one of the things we fought about, actually. She would tell me, ‘I don’t need to show everybody you’re my best friend’ when I brought it up. In public, she would wrap her arm around Malar* – she was taller, skinnier, lighter, and prettier. You could tell that she did it to make me mad.
She started making me skip classes. I would go out on a walk with her; I’d leave every period for like thirty minutes. That was our alone time.” When I asked if Kothai wanted to leave her classes, she said, "I was partly scared and partly wanted to be there…She would get mad, really mad, if I didn't leave class for her." Kothai describes Saranya’s anger to not have been the violent, explosive kind. She had, instead, accused Kothai of not loving her enough, telling her that if Kothai loved her, she wouldn’t do this. Saranya would also be petty by ignoring Kothai if she was mad – ignoring her texts and instilling discomfort and worry in her absence.
“I was also abusive,” Kothai wanted to make clear. She looked me in the eye, looked filled with intent, while she told me how. “I’m not a good person. I got mad and violent. We went at each other physically; fifty to sixty percent of the time, I was physically abusive. When she said things like that, that I didn’t love her enough, I got really frustrated. I don’t hold back and I get really physical when I get mad, I didn’t sit there and take it. She would say something and I would slap her. Hard. I felt instant regret after, everything in me would break. I would hit her and then realize it [when] she would cry. And then I would hold her and tell her, ‘Nothing happened, you’re fine.’ I would hug her, brush her hair. I knew I was being manipulative. I knew what I was doing. I didn’t want to tell people; I didn't want to be seen as evil. I hated who I was with her. She did the same thing to me. She would hit me, and she would say, ‘We’re like sisters, this is what sisters do.’ And I believed her – I never had a sister but she did.”
Much of Kothai and Saranya’s relationship, how it devolved, how it was abusive, circled around Saranya’s suspicion that Kothai did not love her enough and Kothai trying her best to prove it to her. Beyond skipping class and changing in front of her, Kothai wasn’t allowed to have friends, was forced to give up her phone and passwords for Saranya to go through, had to be sure to respond immediately when Saranya texted or called, and text her good morning and good night. "Whenever I didn't message her for a long time, she'd get mad. A few times, I told her I was showering and she texted me back saying, 'I need proof, I need to see that.' I took photos of me, not naked, but in a towel with wet hair…It wasn't a nude but. You know.”
“It wasn’t a photo you wanted many people to see,” I supplied.
“Yeah. She showed it to another girl in our friend group, Malar. She didn’t show her the texts where she asked to see me, she deleted those. She showed it in a ‘look at what Kothai sent me, she’s so weird,’ kind of way. I didn’t send her anything after that, I was afraid.”
There was also an element of evident jealousy that defined their relationship. “She was always talking to guys but wouldn’t tell me anything about it. I never actually knew who they were, never saw their faces or knew their names. She would tell me to make me jealous.” Kothai described a time when Saranya thought she danced on someone at a school dance and became furious. “She said that she didn’t want to be associated with someone who does stuff like that. It wasn’t me; it was the wrong girl. I was begging for her to believe me. She told me, at the time, that the seniors were talking about me and making fun of me. I realized, later, that it wasn’t true, but Saranya made sure to make me think that she was the only good person in the world.”
Kothai also told me about how she was jealous of Malar, how much she hated that Saranya would only be publicly affectionate with Malar. “We fought about it. I would ask her about what she did with Malar when they hung out and she would say, ‘none of your business, what do you care.’ Saranya thought Malar was cooler and prettier, she wanted to hang out with her. I thought she was replacing me with Malar. Instead of coming to my apartment, Saranya would go to her place…Their relationship was built on humiliating me, it felt like it to me. And it was at times. They said shit in front of me, I can’t imagine what they said behind my back. As time went on, Saranya would say that Malar was so important, was also her number one. I thought this wasn’t okay, it wasn’t what we talked about. I gave up everything to be her number one.”
During this time, Kothai became closer with another girl, someone who was outside of Saranya and that group of girls. Saranya was not happy about Kothai spending time with Rithika*. “I was hanging out with Rithika one day and Saranya texted me. I had to go, I told Rithika if I didn’t Saranya would get mad at me. She said, ‘What the fuck is she gonna do, just stay.’ [When] Rithika entered my life, I realized I don’t owe Saranya anything.”
The end, Kothai told me, happened slowly and painfully. “I went back and forth with Rithika about ending it. I would tell Saranya that I couldn’t do this anymore whenever we fought but she would say, ‘I love you, don’t do this, I won’t do this again.’ Around the same time, I was struggling with an eating disorder. She knew. I isolated myself from the friend group and would go home to eat alone. They always had something to say and I wasn’t comfortable around them; I felt a lot of tension, so I chose to be alone. I was very depressed and self-harming a lot. One day, we got into an explosive argument in the bathroom. Rithika and another girl were there. I was very weak; the eating disorder took a lot of my energy. I was crying a lot and struggling to stand up…Saranya said, ‘Fuck, I can’t do this anymore,’ and left. I cried so much I vomited after; it was pure acid, I wasn’t eating. When she left, I realized she wasn’t here for me. As soon as I was inconveniencing her, [I realized] she would leave…[A few days after], I blocked her number. I felt immediate relief when I did. Saranya still tried to contact me after, knocked on my door, would call. She got scared and hung up when my dad picked up because he yelled at her. I talked to my parents and told them to not pick up when she called or to say that I wasn’t home. The last time she talked to me was at a school dance. I was scared to go but I went with some friends anyway. She came up to me, asking to come talk. I started shaking and kept saying, ‘I can’t go, I can’t go.’ I started crying, I had a full-blown panic attack. [People] got involved and got her to leave eventually. That’s the last time I spoke to her. She stopped contacting me after. I think she realized [from] how I was breaking in front of people. That was the first time she saw me do that. I didn’t cry in front of people about her before because I didn’t want people to see her in a bad light.”
At the end of our conversation, Kothai told me that she realized that her relationship with Saranya wasn’t strictly platonic roughly three years after it ended. “I figured out I was attracted to women, at least sexually. Later on, I realized I never allowed myself to get to that point emotionally to be romantic and that I have a lot of commitment issues because of her.” When I asked if she would ever want to see Saranya again, Kothai immediately said, “No. I’m scared to see the damage I might’ve done to her. I don’t know if she knows me outside of that. I’m scared if she thinks the life I have now is undeserved. But I did a lot of work to not be the person I was with her.”
It is impossible to guess what Saranya thinks of her relationship with Kothai, if she even feels that there was a romantic aspect to it at all. Nevertheless, it is evident that the path Kothai took to understanding her sexuality and making sense of her lingering trauma from this relationship was unnecessarily convoluted and difficult. Abuse between women, especially in the context of queerness, is something that happens, something that must be acknowledged so that more people can be afforded protection and a way out. It is also something that can only be acknowledged if queerness itself can be recognized as both something that happens and that is natural, without the strings of morality attached to it. There is, evidently, work that must be done within our community. The condemnation and blind eye given to queer people, particularly those within our community, allow relationships like this to grow and fester. The isolation that so often comes to queer and questioning South Asians allows for them fall into toxic situations with little support and, therefore, little recourse. The telling of these stories, the recognition of queer people and their humanity, is the only way out for our community to adequately support all of our members – it is the only way out for all of us.
