Chaste – by Suri Matondkar
ISLAND | ISSUE 165
I once lived in a city where the buildings stood too close, edges brushing like sardined shadows on public transport.
I lived in an apartment on the third floor, sharing a room with a pair of girls. We sat on that floor, arms outstretched on either side – wingless birds imitating flight – joking about how our fingers touched each end of the room without even trying.
Stuck in that cage of cement. A luxurious one. Western toilet with flush, shower we never switched on. Buckets stoically awaiting flood. A ceiling with a bulb and tube light. Never to be used during the day, even if the room was bathed in gloom, because light was only needed at night.
The front door was held together with a chain that anyone could unhook with a floating arm, desperate fingers scraping until the metal clicked apart. Perfect for surprise wellness checks to ensure we weren’t being dirty girls who would invite dishonour into the house.
Across from the apartment was a small building. Jaundiced white façade raked by rain claw-marks. We never did learn who lived inside, but it had a gaping terrace on top. And there, shaded by aluminium sheets that wailed in the wind – nestled next to an outdoor squat toilet with a door that could barely hold on – was a room so small it was barely more than a crack in the wall.
A couple lived in that room. Her hair forever uncombed. Eyes wild with the unseeingness that comes from seeing too much. He stood around in his underwear waiting to show us his cock.
When we told our landlord – Aunty, she insisted we call her, wasn’t she like a mother to us away-from-home girls? – she said, he is mad fellow, just ignore.
Not that it was the first time we’d felt a cock’s presence, of course. Buses, trains, sometimes even roads. But it was always a shadowy thing – often hidden by gaping pant wings that drooped around their waists as they pissed in the shrubs, or by the schoolbags we used as shields, trying to put some distance between it – them – and us.
This was the first time most of us had seen it this close, just a well-aimed jump away. A blind thing that watched us as we rushed to put on our shoes before running down the stairs and out the main gate.
***
My country has a pledge we all know by heart: All Indians are my brothers and sisters. Maybe that’s why we pretend we never fuck.
Sex coils around our music, breathes in our books. Yet we act like this sort of want is a foreign thing created by colonisation and left to us to misuse.
“Sex coils around our music, breathes in our books. Yet we act like this sort of want is a foreign thing created by colonisation and left to us to misuse.”
This, when our movies mix love and lust as if they are the same. Where the heroine is shown time and again that, despite what she believes, the man knows best. Then they trot out one skimpily dressed girl for no reason at all, no connection to the plot, but to give those watching men a reason to dictate all their saliva over someone on the screen they can get away with blaming for their wants.
This, when our songs speak of apsaras that sway lustfully for the gods. When we sing of cobras that dance for just a glance of the naagins slithering suggestively out of their holes. Songs where the sound of bedsprings creak in a chorus of fucking, reminding us what we use bedsprings for – these are the songs we play for our children to dance to at school events and wedding functions. The ones we let loose through the crowd, interspersed with bursts of firecrackers and cymbals, as we pray to gods we are supposed to be chaste for.
When we know that being pure, virginal, relationship-less is still the basic requirement for a marriageable girl. Abstinence is a religion all its own. Geared towards anyone they perceive as female because they think we are goods, and who would want a second-hand item that someone has returned?
***
There is a list of things decent girls do not do:
leave their hair loose
wear kajal unless there is a function to go to
bend over without putting a hand at the collar of their shirts
choose the person that becomes their spouse
talk back with their eyes
let hands wander between their thighs
want.
Want is more dangerous than a poisonous snake. The snake will only kill; the want leaves you infected always.
“Want is more dangerous than a poisonous snake. The snake will only kill; the want leaves you infected always.”
My mother once told me that I attract bad thoughts. That they stick to me like iron filings to magnets, a cloak of spliced storm clouds that etch into my skin and wrap around my blood. What she means is that I have the audacity to say, I want.
My father is a volcano of a man, dormant until the conditions are right. Then the lava erupts, covering everything in sight. My mother has spent decades making a home over his boiling veins. Calluses too thick to be afraid. But I, with my wide-open mouth, and why nots? scare her because our people are quick to swallow girls who question their unspoken laws.
There are different kinds of wants. Breathe. Speak. Touch. Hope. Each more sinful than the next. But of them all, touch is the one our society watches most. Stalks. Each move, each glance a confirmation of the extent of punishment a girl deserves.
So, she tried to train me to be decent. Quiet. There is no escaping society and its pitchforks, but there is a little protection that decency affords because if you are caught and sacrificed at least nobody can say, it was her own fault for being ‘that type’ of girl. But every girl is assumed indecent when she is taken – why else would they have come for her?
***
Everyone knows how the trouble starts. These girls looking for touch, sex, love – all used interchangeably because they are all dirty wants – when they should have been focusing on being good marriageable girls.
Decent girls only have marriages society approves of. Always parent-arranged, of course.
I assumed somehow my mother’s teachings had stuck. That, though I scoffed at her – this touch-sex-stuff is all spoiled western thought – she was not wrong. Because though I threw myself into those things, I couldn’t feel anything save uneasy when I pressed my lips to boys and girls and whoever asked. Staggering limbs seeking sparks.
And if I couldn’t even feel those harsh fingers digging into my flesh, why would I feel my own? Besides, there is no drama in masturbation, just your word that it was done – no hickeys to prove that you had violently spit on their rules. No rageful purple-blue stripe that screamed look. At who I am. What I do.
No announcement of the denouncement of the chaste cause.
But want is supposed to be a tsunami of a thing. A natural phenomenon melting in an earthquake within. I always thought the word so small, benign on the page. As if it could lock all that turmoil, the jagged curves of the ‘W’ struggling to cradle the desire, and the ‘T’ attempting to hold it neatly down.
Yet after the third time I rolled around in someone’s bed, the word seemed the right size. I was afraid that my mother was right and that shivering sensation they warned against was just a fiction made up in people’s minds.
***
Sex and marriage are intertwined, a messy tangle of societal needs and sanctioned wants.
The first time an adult said the word ‘sex’ in front of us willingly, we were ten. Sitting in a muggy room while the boys played outside, because they did not have to listen to how much responsibility came with being a girl in the world’s eyes. There was also a warning to be gentle with boys since they aged differently, were less mature.
Be patient. Be kind. Do not expect them to control their base desires.
It was up to us to keep our heads clear, be decent and hold the boundary line.
My friend rushed out of that room to vomit in the bushes outside. Overcome, she said later, by the filth that was being spoken about. The dirty talk.
The next day she hesitantly said she had made her peace with it, if it is something my parents had to do, it cannot be that dirty in marriage, only before.
This was what we knew of sex for years to come. Stolen snatches of porn that we heard some boy had seen in another school – always some mysterious unfaced boy – with one of those magical expensive things called pen drives.
Before the internet opened its doors and showed us a community, should we choose to find it, of who we could be. Who we were. Gave us the words to exist, even be reborn.
Before somebody told me a condom feels like a plastic bag on your cock, and I thought how much sense that made. How my entire body felt like it was double-bagged in latex under someone else’s touch. That was why I didn’t feel it the first time I kissed a girl and the first time I kissed a boy and the first time I kissed the person who would be my partner for the rest of my life. I loved them all and wanted to be loved in turn, so I did the only thing that could be done and acted like there was no invisible barrier separating us each time. I let them touch me some more and pretended it felt right because love and sex and touch were supposed to be flickers from the same fire.
Before I learned that there was such a thing as asexuality, and there was nothing wrong with me for not feeling hunger when touch is involved.
The alternative would have been admitting I did not feel that delicious rebellion, that desire. Want. The only girls that did not like sex were the ones they forced us to become. The girls that kept themselves bubble-wrapped in mint-packaged condition until the suhagraat. Licked by patriarchal approval.
***
When I was twenty, a new friend shyly said she didn’t know much about blowjobs and how a penis felt.
She felt ashamed she did not know and begged we wouldn’t think any less of her because she assured us she wasn’t one of ‘those people’ and had every intention of being a rebel girl.
This was a problem we’d all encountered since we first sensed those patriarchal binds. Of wanting to be rebel girls but lacking a guide. So, we helped each other along with information we stole in snatches from television and books. We took risks nobody ever should – smut rarely talked about using condoms for oral sex – all because the worst thing we could think of being accused of was being chaste and good.
We lost our respect for this world the first time we were touched and everyone just watched. When we were told of precautions, but nobody bothered to treat the cause. When we were told not to talk so much because it would harm no one but us.
To be chaste was to be right and approved of by the very people who had turned their heads away when we complained that the man on the last seat had tried to put his hand on our chest. To be clean, brand-new, unused was a betrayal of the women who had sacrificed so much so that we could at least hope to buy our own contraception proudly without shame or a mangalsutra weighing us down.
My lack of want, of desire, came as a shock. How could I consider myself a proper insurgent if I couldn’t feel those sensations they insisted all dirty rebel girls harboured?
“My lack of want, of desire, came as a shock. How could I consider myself a proper insurgent if I couldn’t feel those sensations they insisted all dirty rebel girls harboured?”
It wasn’t so much society telling me good women did not lust, but the delight it took in my assumed obedience that caused me to spiral out of control. Because the only time Indian women are allowed touch-want-love-sex is when it is tied firmly to marriage. Womb. We are meant to be blank pages when we come to our husbands’ homes – always a husband – unlined and uncreased. Ready to be used.
In this, the idea of being asexual – not wanting that touch, not desiring fingers and cocks and tongues – feels so wrong. A betrayal of the sisterhood.
***
I pick at myself now until there are scars, ice-pick craters that delve under the façade I kept in place for too long.
I spent too many years pretending to be someone I am not. A lot of us do this. Act as though we feel this rush that people talk of. Overcompensate even, to prove we feel those wants.
I was terrified that despite my intentions, I had been converted after all. That somewhere I had internalised this chasteness and it had become who I was. Fears fed by every rebel-in-arms who joyfully celebrated my bisexuality but twisted their mouth over the ace part. Didn’t I know rebellion must be sexual to count? Convinced I just hadn’t met ‘the one’. Too focused on keeping the chasteness at bay to realise we were dangerously close to becoming more like them, less like us.
Now, I know rebellion is untameable. The ocean at rest and a stallion without a bit – impossible to corral or predict. Know this unfeeling feeling is my reality and there’s nothing wrong with me, because wanting to have sex or not does not affect my desire to fuck the patriarchy.
There are other things, of course. If I am a good girl for not thinking of wants before, I become a wicked one for not thinking of them now. The rules change just that fast. A good unmarried girl must never think of that space between her thighs. A good married woman must spread herself without hesitation, but with an appropriate amount of innocence in her eyes.
If I have no desire or dislike touch and my husband does not employ force, it’s a favour he bestows. But if I swallow my distaste, the cold sloshing in my chest, and give him my body to slake his lust – just lie back, close my eyes and take it all – then I’m finally getting around to doing what I was supposed to be doing all along.
Wickedness, like chastity, is a feminine thorn.
“Wickedness, like chastity, is a feminine thorn.”
***
I fuck in my head. My bed is for rest.
The first time I successfully masturbated, I was twenty-five and engaged to be wed to a person I trust.
He gave me a toy, shut the door behind him and told me from outside, it’s okay if you do not like. But switch off your brain, try.
I was a fool to think masturbation was too quiet, unseen. Masturbation is the celebration of a freedom without seeking justification or providing proof – exactly as freedom should be.
That first vibrator was a revelation, and so was porn, smut, erotica that finally made my brain cells vibrate enough to reach that elusive explosion that was supposed to be synonymous with lust.
Orgasms, I have discovered, are everything they feared would empower us.
I felt guilt over the experience at the start; despite all my efforts it would appear that wicked chasteness was bone-deep after all. A need to seek permission although my partner has never denied me and insists it is my pleasure and I should do as I want.
I masturbate when my anxiety ricochets and when I need some space in my brain to calm. All of it, utilitarian. I do not masturbate out of desire, or overwhelming lust. My desire is a foreign thing that I watch for curiously but rarely shows up. I masturbate because of the after. The after where I can sleep better, concentrate more, breathe easier, write clearer. I masturbate the way people exercise – to be healthier.
Angela Chen said that an asexual liberation helps everyone because it comes with rejecting the rigid definitions of sexual and romantic normalcy. Imagine a world where chasteness no longer exists. Where we finally overcome the orthodox patriarchal constructs that insist we be either Madonnas or Whores. Where the only wants that count are our own.
Where we no longer confuse touch, sex and love. Do not believe a female’s worth is tied in her ability to keep her body untouched. Or that romantic worth is solely tied to abilities to make a partner cum. That wanting or not wanting sex is not a criterion for patriarchal rebellion.
I cannot orgasm every time. I need to distance my brain from my self before I can achieve that crest, but I’ve learned it doesn’t matter. It took some time to realise that the people before me didn’t just fight for a sexual liberation but for a liberation of the self. To accept their wants and let themselves be wanted in turn. Accepting every part of who I am has given me that liberation as well. Because ace people cannot be pinned down by the rigidity of traditional want. We both desire and don’t, all of it defined on our own terms. An ever-changing fluidity – what a beautifully defiant thought.
Besides, there is enough rebellion on this path. My sanskari society would buckle if they learned of the nights I marry the bed with my wand, while my husband waits chastely on the couch. ▼
Image: Erda Estremera
This essay appeared in Island 165 in 2022. Order a print issue here.
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This essay was shortlisted in the Island Nonfiction Prize, which was supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.