I couldn’t believe he’d called me a bitch, and in front of all his friends. He continued to lecture me about smoking, and it turned into a dramatic scene outside the restaurant. I barely had any money on me, but I walked off towards the tube station anyway, hoping to jump a barrier and get on a train home. At the station, though, I realised I was stranded. I didn’t have enough for a train ticket, and this was not my local station, where security was lax. This was in central London. Here, there were eagle-eyed staff everywhere. I had no chance of sneaking past the barriers.
Maanav reached the station a short while later and, in his usual charming way, convinced me to allow him to drop me off at home. On the way home, we made up.
Perhaps this could have been the point in my life where I realised that this would be a foretelling of things to come, where I understood my self-worth and walked away for good before it was too late. But, perhaps because of the abusive household I’d grown up in, I thought language like this between couples was normal, and besides, Maanav didn’t hit me, so it wasn’t that serious, was it?
…
What he eventually did, however, had a lasting impact, just as great, if not greater, than all the abuse I’d suffered as a child. (More on this later on.)
There are people in this world who will love you like you are the only person that exists in their world; they will put you on a pedestal and worship you… as long as they get what they want from you, as long as you do as they say, as long as they have a level of control over you.
But, if you try to be your own person or don’t fall in line, they can show you a side of them you never thought possible. In the split-second reaction time that Maanav had when he stepped out of the restaurant and saw the cigarette smoke, I was given a glimpse of this.
“I wish I had better self-esteem,” “I wish I’d known better,” “I wish I hadn’t met him when I was so broken and vulnerable,” “I wish I hadn’t found a man with traits like my father.”
These are all things I could have said to myself over the years. But then I wouldn’t be here now, would I? So, I’ve made peace with the fact that what you will read in the following episodes all happened exactly as it had to happen, and that whatever karma had to be cleared between Maanav and me had to be cleared in this very lifetime. Our bond was like no other I’ve experienced. I do not doubt that we carried it over from a previous lifetime. Perhaps we had an agreement from a previous life. Perhaps I had karma with him that I had to pay for. Whatever it was, Maanav was the medium to break me apart completely. What I’d experienced in my first 16 years was just module one. Maanav was going to become the catalyst for me to experience life’s deepest lessons.
…
So we’d had our first fight, and we’d gotten through it okay. I told myself that all couples go through it at some point. I’m glad ours was early on, and we made up quickly. Maanav was careful not to call me something like that again, and I tried harder to make all the changes he wanted. It was alright for me to drink alcohol and get drunk with him because he did, but it wasn’t alright for me to smoke cigarettes or weed because he didn’t, and eventually, I gave up eating meat too. After all, he and his family were all vegetarians.
The next thing Maanav convinced me to do was to give up my room in Molly Way and go back to live with my parents. He knew what had gone on with my father, but he thought it didn’t look good for his family if I didn’t live with mine. How could he introduce his girlfriend to his family when she lived alone above a chippy? I had to hide the truth again. First, my age, and then where I lived and the truth about my history with my father.
I was apprehensive about this because I’d hardly been in touch with my family since I’d moved out. I didn’t have a phone, except for the street pay phone. I had zero contact with my father for obvious reasons, and my brother was out of the picture because he was dealing with his own trauma, plus he didn’t like me very much then either. If my brother did speak to me, it was usually only to tell me how messed up I was. The only person I kept in touch with was my mother. I spoke to her on the phone once in a while, and once, when I was really ill with the flu, she fed me home-cooked food and nursed me back to health. Thank you, Mataji. I love you.
When the day came for them to meet Maanav, my parents were over the moon. I had brought them the perfect ‘let’s make up and brush everything under the carpet’ gift — a wealthy man to take over and finally ‘fix’ me. The man of my father’s dreams. Maanav had all the bells and whistles he could ask for.
Suddenly, I was the perfect daughter. Living with my father became much easier. We got on as if nothing had ever happened. Maanav would come over all the time; he loved my family and my mother’s cooking and often had dinner with us. I think my parents were so relieved to have Maanav in our lives that they agreed to anything he wanted. He stayed over often. Because we only had 2 and a half bedrooms and a cousin from Kenya had come to live with us at the time, we put mattresses on the living room floor and Maanav and I would sleep there on the weekends.
Maanav gave me a travel card so I could go and visit him in the city after work. He took me to restaurants and bars and showed me a life I’d never seen before. I had so many firsts with him. My first concert (which happened to be Michael Jackson’s last), my first West End musicals: The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Oliver and more. As an ex-performing arts student, I was mesmerised by them – the music, the singing, the dancing, the colours, it was truly an extravaganza for my senses. Maanav also took me on my first trip to Disneyland Paris and later to America – New York, LA, Florida, Disney, Universal, Epcot, the lot.
And he was full of tricks to get things cheaper or to get better/quicker access and entry. For example, he taught me about ‘student standbys’ at West End theatre shows. I had a student ID card from when I’d been enrolled at college, and even though I wasn’t attending anymore, the card was still valid, so on certain days, Maanav would carry a backpack and a change of clothes to the office with him (otherwise, he wore a 3-piece suit every day). He had a handsome boyish face, so he looked younger than his 24 years. Add that to his casual clothes, a backpack, his charming personality, and a genuine 16-year-old with a genuine student ID, and the theatre show staff were none the wiser. They assumed he was a student too, even though he said he forgot his ID on those days. We got top-priced tickets just before the show, at a fraction of the cost.
We went to Disneyland Paris with another couple, and Maanav wanted to get through all the rides and attractions without queuing, so he had a plan. He carried an ankle bandage with him from England. The plan was that the other girl in our group would pretend she’d hurt her ankle and wear the bandage. Maanav and his friend collected the tickets and pointed out to a staff member that she required a wheelchair.
It worked like a charm. Disney gave us a wheelchair for the day, which meant instant access to all the rides. The queues could be 30 minutes to an hour long. But if one of us was in a wheelchair, all four of us could go straight to the front. And at some point in the day, we found another Disney wheelchair that no one was using and I hopped in.
It can take a couple of days to get enjoy the whole of Disneyland properly, especially during the school holidays. The other girl who was with us was a school teacher, so that was the only time she could go. We did the whole park in an afternoon, some rides twice. That little trick saved us time and money, and Manaav and his friend bragged to everyone when we got back about how ingenious this idea was. At the time, I did too. It was a feeling like, we’d beaten the system and we felt clever and laughed about a lot afterward.
I’m writing this because it happened, but not because it’s a good idea. Some people genuinely cannot walk unaided and require wheelchair access, and it’s wholly unfair to them when perfectly able-bodied people use their access, so please don’t do this. I didn’t see then how highly inconsiderate and disrespectful it is. That’s the thing. When we look up to others and are taught by them that something is acceptable or even good, we believe it. I was still developing my own faculties of moral judgment, and so I lied when Maanav told me to lie, and I conned when he told me to con.
Maanav always said, in the art of negotiation, the one thing that stops us is the embarrassment of asking. We should get over that and get the thing we want. For example, when we were shopping for clothes, he would look for an item with a slight defect, like a tiny stain or a loose thread, then he’d ask for a discount in his charming way, and he always got it.
I tried it once, but I felt silly. To me, it wasn’t worth the effort. When I was completely broke, without money to eat properly, I jumped train barriers or used a trick on the payphone. But if I had money in the bank and could easily afford something, I didn’t understand the point of trying to be clever. My brain couldn’t devise ways to negotiate for pennies or invent stories to dupe others to get my way. I wasn’t built like that. But Maanav could do anything. To the inexperienced, unworldly me, he was the brightest, smartest, most charming, intelligent man I’d met. His ideas were ingenious. I idolised him.
One night, after we’d been dating a while, Maanav decided it was time to take me home to his place. To meet his parents, I thought? No, not yet. After his family had gone to sleep, he blindfolded and led me from the car through the garage and kitchen, so no one heard the front door. We had to be really quiet so as not to wake anybody. With the blindfold still on, he guided me all the way up the staircase until we reached the third floor, where 3 of the house’s nine bedrooms and one of the five bathrooms were all for his use. Unsure of what to expect, when we reached the centre of his main bedroom, Maanav sat me down and removed the blindfold. I blinked and looked around in the dim lighting. I got it, it was a big, impressive room, but I didn’t understand the point of the blindfold. He seemed pleased with himself though and if he was happy, I was happy.
…
The next morning, there was an impatient knock at the door.
“Oh, crap!”
Maanav was late for work, and his mother was tapping at his door, calling him to get moving.
Maanav planned to say he was taking the day off because he wasn’t feeling well, so I could hide in the room until everybody in the house had gone to work or school, and his grandmother and mother were in a different part of the house doing their daily chores or prayers. The house was so large that it would be easy to sneak me out unnoticed. But his mother was suspicious; why was he late today? Why was the door locked? She was persistent with her knocking, then began shouting at Maanav to open the door.
“Now what?!” I was panicking.
First, Maanav motioned to me to lie like a log on the floor along the far side of the huge bed, and he would hide me under the enormous duvet, making it look like half of it had casually slipped off the bed. I flat out refused.
Then he whispered to me to hide under his desk in the corner. I guessed this was the more dignified of the two options, so, attired in his red, cotton, paisley pyjama set, I scrambled onto my hands and knees and into the little space beneath the desk, wondering if this wasn’t the first time he’d hidden a girl in his bedroom.
I held my breath.
Maanav unlocked the door.
I was expecting to hear his mother barge in, demanding to know what was going on. But I didn’t hear anything, only silence. Thank God. It sounded like his mother had given up and gone back downstairs.
(Originally published on os.me on May 4, 2021)