Question

how did author know That meena had changed completely

Answer 1

In Meena Kandasamy’s Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlisted novel, a middle class Tamil woman is keen to point out that she has experienced no Western-approved stereotypes of Indian drama: “no incest... no Isis, no jihadi boyfriend... no child marriage”. Like the author she is a poet, journalist and a feminist; the men she knows are politicians, students who read Pablo Neruda and Susan Sontag. And the villain of the piece is an educated, cultured brute. “As far left as they came and as orthodox as it was possible to be,” he teaches postcolonial and Marxist theory. When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife – based on the author’s own experiences of marriage – is a very of-the-moment story of domestic abuse. After a courtship of mansplaining, then two weeks of marriage, the husband (none of the central characters have names, just roles) burns himself with matches until she deactivates her Facebook account.

Intellectual and physical cruelty is explored with Nabokovian ingenuity. The narrator’s husband says writing articles about female sexuality in English is pandering to “vulgar imperialist culture”. He deletes every email she has ever received to “set [her] free”. He forbids her from writing poetry about his abuse because it will create a “material basis” which their relationship cannot transcend, then writes
his own dreadful poems about abusing her as his own therapy. The title of the book comes from one his poems called When I hit you,Comrade Lenin weeps. And when the narrator finally begins standing up for herself, he rapes her every night