I’m retiring this story, so here it is one last time

Don’t you have some stories, some phases from your life that you get tired of retelling? Or maybe, you’ve told them in parts on and off and the entirety of it now escapes you? There must be some anecdotes you’ve used to evidence your argument, only to look back and wonder how many times you could do that still.

I know I do. This is a story from my early 20s. I’ve told it a few times. I’ve referenced it many times. But I’m certain that no one actually, really knows what happened. I also know that what happened then no longer really bothers me. I’ve moved on in every sense of the word. I’m a different person, a different woman. And because this story (and my experience in it) shaped me and changed me, I feel like it I owe myself and my world a fuller version of it.

This telling is from an article I wrote for a friend who had asked me to help him with an art project they were working on, with the central theme of taking a negative and making it a positive. Even as I wrote it, I felt lighter, because I had never really put it all together before. But, curiously, now when I read it, I feel tired of thinking about it and I no longer want it to linger on, to be anything to me. I want it to reduce itself to nothing. And what better way to achieve that than to make it written, make it public, make it belong to the unknowable universe of readership! So, with that intent and without ado, here it is one last time.

From the personal digital library of Karishma Gaur April 2018
Not to be reproduced without permission. All rights reserved by author. ®

“I come from great privilege. You must understand that before I tell you my story because if you don’t, (and if I don’t acknowledge it), it may come off as entitled and rather insensitive to certain groups. I come from a family of highly educated, well-paid government officials and a largely matriarchal fabric of operation. That automatically puts me a place of great privilege and the kind of specific struggle that only apprehends those at the helms of the upper middle classes. It is making me wince even as I type this, but this is a story of struggle, and it was my struggle and it was valid. Here is my negative to positive.
In the summer of 2004, after our final uni exams, my girlfriends and I took a girls’ only trip to the hills and came back to the city to join our very first summer job. It was a marketing project led by some ad agency and we had to attend to customers buying McDonald’s’ Happy Meals and have them take their photographs with the then new Nokia camera-phone and give them print outs in different templates, nicely inserted in a pink card paper frame. It was cool, and we got free burgers out of it, so, it was every girl’s dream job. I was dating who is now my favourite ex-boyfriend and a very close friend at the time. Life was peachy. The guy running the entire operation was this 26-year-old tall and dark guy who used to ride the Indian version of a Harley and listen to still-cool rock bands. He was interesting, but I soon found out that he was interested in me. I regret everything that I will type after this sentence.
One afternoon, he and I were in our base office working on some projects and we decided to get a beer. The beer turned to a couple of vodka shots and it was almost 11 pm when I realized we had been drinking all evening. I called home and said I’ll be home soon. And as I hung up, he pushed me to the couch and we made out. We made out a lot after that. After that first night though, I met with my boyfriend at the time and told him what had happened as it had happened, and he broke up with me with good reason.
Then this guy broke it off with the girl he was half-seeing and we started going out. Except, the ‘going out’ usually meant holing up in the shitty back office, getting drunk and making out till he would pass out or I would have to go home.
The fighting began soon, and one day he threatened to raise his hand after saying some rough words to me. I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore. He didn’t take no for an answer and soon after, showed up with alcohol in his hand and on his breath and forced himself on me and snatched away my first experience of making love, replacing it with what you would today call rape. I never called it that. I’m not sure what to do with that information or fact and I have moved on.
I’m sorry if you disagree and I’m sure you are right, but this is still my verdict.
After that, I couldn’t break away from him and I didn’t know what else to do so I continued to date him, whatever that entailed. Roughly, it was lots of long nights on the phone, studying when I could for an MA in English Lit. and working to pay rent because I had moved out and wanted to be an adult, smoking to miss meals and to numb out whatever thoughts crept up in my head and crying the rest of the time. I wouldn’t want this story being found by my maybe-grandkids someday, honestly. His anger and booze-addled temper tantrums became worse, to the point that he would get drunk just to call me up and rile me up till I would respond in meek anger and he would start threatening to come over and physically hurt me, and he did a couple of times. He also made me pay for a lot of stuff because he had drunk his company under the table and had no money. I even took a small loan out for him to start his own business (ha!) but thankfully I got the whole amount back because he got drunk the same night and fought with me and came to my house to throw the money in my face. That did not hurt, to be honest.
I had many friends around me and they kept me college-level sane and helped me every day, for many months. I may not have thanked them then, but they stay with me always and I have only deep love and gratitude for them.
There are a lot of days of this relationship which I have blocked out and some others that I have retired because it pays no one any relief to have them recalled. One day, he finally tipped me over the edge and I ended things with him, which in turn triggered a six-month long tug-of-war of me ending things and he trying to get me back. I moved back home soon after and was almost finished with the MA when I started sensing the sadness part of it. Till then, I’d never really encountered sadness, and so it was hard to recognize and even harder to process. Instead of solving it, I chose to beat it; poorly I might add. I gained a lot of weight. And then I gave myself a makeover (a very movi-white-girl move, to my mind today, but I was heavily influenced by Hollywood and that’s what you did). But the makeover worked for my self-confidence and people noticed immediately. This is not the negative to the positive. This is the beginning of the real negative.
I told you it was about privilege. This above, wasn’t privilege. This was just what being a woman is, for a lot of us.
I never told my family what had happened in full detail. I couldn’t do that to them. My father saw me in a state and said that he didn’t know what else to do to fix me but if I needed money, I could have his credit card. I took it, maxed it out and asked for another. This time, he gave me a brand-new HSBC Gold credit card with a limit of 1,25,000 INR. I spend that on shoes, new coats, a perm and some kinky jeans that made me very popular with my new office girls and their guy friends. Then, I asked my father for a loan, so I could clear up the lump sum on the credit cards and keep paying easy instalments on my smallish salary at the time. He did get me a loan, but by that time, I had also earned enough to be eligible for my own credit cards, and so, the loan did pay off *most* of the outstanding on papa’s cards but it had no inkling of the fact that my cards even existed yet. This slippery slope had become a mountain of debt by the end of 2006, when I got my first serious full-time job in teaching. My cumulated debt was at 5,60,000 INR. My salary was 15,000 INR p/m. This was bad math.
From then on, though, my first hike was a 100% in the first four months of joining and there was no stopping me after that. My résumé went from a paltry MS-word table of degrees and awards to a three-page celebration of my capabilities and achievements in the professional sphere in less than two years. I worked, got paid, drank and smoked, paid off some, and repeated until July 2010. It was the month of my last EMI on my last loan. I had been working for four straight years, and during that time, I had earned a first division at M. Phil in English Lit, won a full scholarship grant for my thesis on sitcom humor from the most prestigious department of Mass Communication in India, and had represented my uni at two international research seminars, all while getting a steady rise in my learning curve *and my earning curve* (had to). I paid my final installment, wrote an email to ICICI to pre-close my loan, typed out my resignation and sent it all through (well, maybe not that dramatically and not all in that one afternoon) and by August 2010, I was done.
For four years, my most-opened bookmark was the CIBIL score website. For four years, every time I got paid, my first move was to pay off the minimum and 17% more on two credit cards, then two loans and then one EMI for my laptop or mobile phone (because tech-worm had bit me) and then find out that I had less than my needed travel money left in my account. For those four years, I lied to myself so much about loving a 13-hour workday that I fully internalized it and have only now, about two years ago, managed to shake it off. For a very long four-year period, I didn’t travel and I didn’t go anywhere fancy, ever. I made it a mission to hate brands and despise labels (and succeeded, happily so, because turns out style has nothing to do with labels anyway and have you met me?). For the last time in my life, for four years, I kept retelling myself the story of what toxic romance can do so I would always be a little wary, if also a little worse for wear.

That loan-y pony rode me like a ghost of a boyfriend past for four sick years but all I walked away from, from that experience, is that money counts, both coming in and going out. And till the day that I have the mental faculty, the ability in my throat to produce sound and two legs to stand on, very few things were going to stand in my way of peace and complete autonomy over my life. Since then, I am sure I have made stupid money decisions and I remain one of the freer spenders in any circle that I am a part of, and I take vacations on pay-day loans sometimes, and on a bad day I might even go Amazon Prime crazy, but what is always true for me is that I know where my next paycheck will come from, I always have more than I make in my savings and I never EVER look back at that time from my past to doubt the fact that I lived through that dark green time, all on my own.”