Question- What is the introduction of the novel 'When I Hit You?

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Write the summary of the novel 'When I Hit You?

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Kandasamy has written about her own marriage for the Indian magazine Outlook in 2012; now using an unnamed narrator speaking in an urgent, first person voice, 'When I Hit You': Or a Portrait of the Artist as a young wife gives us "a woman at whom society cannot spit or throw stones, because this me is a she who is made up only of words on a page, and the lines she speaks are those that everyone hears in their own voice."

The journey towards that assertion is a tough one, it begins with a stripping of the narrator's autonomy after her marriage to a university lecturer, Marxist and one time revolutionary in South India who uses communist ideas "as a cover for his own sadism" when she moves with him to an unfamiliar city, an assault on her tongue, mind and body begins. The language barrier ensures that in public she can only speak words of wifely domesticity. Shopping for vegetables or cleaning products. Her husband manipulates her into the surrender of her email accounts, the suspension of her Facebook page; he polices her mobile phone. Beating and rapes follow with every middle-class implements weaponised: the hose of washing machine, the power card for her laptop. Shame, pride and a society in which everyone from parents to police expects a woman to put up and shat up force the realisation that only she can save herself.

Kandasamy writes with poetic intensity. "Hope presents me from taking my own life. Hope is the kind voice in my head that prevents me from fleeing. Hope is the traitor that chains me to this marriage."

In Meena Kandasamy's 'When I Hit You': Or, A Portrait of the writer as a Young Wife," the evidence of a crumbling marriage can be found on the bodies of the husband and wife: "thin, red welts" on her arms where her laptop card has lashed her; scorched skin above his ankle after he holds a ladle over the stove and then presses it to his leg until she agrees to see a gynocologist about starting a family; a dull ache where a broomstick has pummeled her back. A smattering of burns like freckles on his elbow where he holds one glowing match after the other, singeing himself until she gives in and deactivates her Facebook account. (He objects to "its narcissism", he says. "If you love me, this is the quickest way you will makeup your mind.") The slackening of her legs, how she learns to "go limp" when he drags her to their bed to punish, to "tame" her. When the unnamed narrator returns to her childhood home, her parents decipher this marriage story through her ailments. "Her heels were cracked and her soles were 25 shades darker than the rest of her", her mother tells gaggles of curious relatives, "You could tell that she did nothing but housework." And then there is the story of the lice, repeated again and again: "That criminal had cut my daughter's hair short, and it was in fes-ted." Little can be more evocative of the rot of this partnership than the image of swarms of little creatures scuttling about on her daughter's head, But lest four harrowing months of her life be whittled down to an anecdote, the narrator realizes she can be the only one to tell us what happened.

It would be easy to ask, "what kind of women would allow that?" Or even, "Why did she stay?" In 2012, when kandasamy, a poet, translator and activist, wrote about her brief, violent marriage for the Indian Maganize Outlook, these are the kind of questions she was asked. "When I Hit You" is her urgent searing answer. She does not give her readers the sense of certainity a memoir might offer; she is very clear that this is a work of fiction- of imagination, not of memory. In India, where Kandasamy lived with her ex- husband, the National Family Health Survey last year found that over 30 persent of woman have been physically, sexually or emotionally abused by their partners at some point. This book is Kandasumy's rebuke to those who think privilege financial or educational, protects against harm. Her characters are never named, their anonymity allowing the reader to skip easily into their skins.

Summary of 'When I Hit You': The Protagonist is a young woman-a poet, a romantic - heart broken at the end of a love affair. If you have ever felt the sting of rejection, kandasamy tells her reader, you will know the antidote that a new relationship can offer the embrace that marriage promisese; "There was no dull ache of desive in this manhunt", she says "I was only looking for safety." If, like the protagonist, you have read enough love stories to see only the rosy hues of possibility in committing to a union with a virtual stranger, you might cling to that fantasy right up until you find yourself against a wall with an open palm pinned to your throat. And kandasamy is too skilled a writer to give us a caricature of an abusive man. "He made the best rasam I've ever tasted", the wife remembers. He sang out of tune always, but with no hint of shyness." It does not come off as an apology for his cruelty when she explains that "his father, a major in the Indian Army, had beaten him aften as a child. He made a note of it every time it happened in asmall pocket book." In Mangolore, where the couple move after the husband, a Marxist lecturer, lands a teaching job, the wife finds that her world has strunk. Far from friends and unable to speak the language, she struggles to find work. She picks up a few words in Kannada: "esthu' how much; haalu milk; anda : eggs; hendathi wife." Here, she sees, "in this language, I am nothing except a housewife." There are other lessons she must learn, as well: Her husband tells her a good wife would be content keeping his home, she would not need to work (or without a job or friends in their new city, to have aphone), she would stop wearing lipstick that only served to make her more beautiful for other men, she would not do a hundred small things (overlasting his food, disagreeing, writing poetry? that ink him, that call for punishment. "When I hit you," he notes mournfully, "Comrade Ienin weeks". He is forced to betray his ideals to forge the perfect wife from the scraps he has been given.

The story opens five years after the wife has fied; we already know that she lives to tell the tale. This is not just a story at survival, but, more important, one of self-preservation. For what is turned into record is not the husband's confession of why he hits her, but the wife's impression of how it hurts. "I am already' transferring what I see and experience in the privacy of our home into art", she thinks. "He is becoming the first semblance of a plot."

As he wipes her computer's harddisk, erasing and belittling her work because it takes away from her chores, her husband asks, "Should I remind writer madam that she is also a wife?" The book's subtitle makes an ambitious nod to James Joyce, to the coming of age genre. Each chapter contains an epigraph by the likes of Kamala Das, Margaret Atwood, Anne Sexton, Zora Neale Hurton.

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