India is one of the oldest civilizations to exist. Our history is brimming with harrowing poems of kingdoms warring, valiant tales of silently marching for our independence, and sagas of the building of the Taj Mahal.

Yet as a society, we tend to wash over the grimier and unfortunately still prevalent parts of our history. We don’t acknowledge India’s relationship with the caste system. We loudly boast that our family doesn’t care about castes at family gatherings. But when it comes time to marry our daughters, we advise it would be easier to marry someone with the same background.

We pray towards female gods like Parvati and Lakshmi to bless our families. Yet a woman menstruating is soiled for five days and cannot step foot into the temple.

Instead of opposing India’s anti-blackness, we use it as a punchline for movies and buy Fair & Lovely products.

But somehow, Meena Kandasamy’s voice pierces through the white noise and forces light on difficult topics. Her books are raw and truthful yet satirical and tragic. This dissonance forces the reader to examine their own lives and their own values.

Kandasamy, in When I Hit You, purposefully uses an unnamed narrator as she describes her own marriage with her abusive rapist husband. We journey with the narrator as she moves to a new town away from family and friends. In public, the language barrier forces her to only be able to haggle for vegetable prices. In the privacy of her own home, her husband manipulates her to delete all her social media accounts and to give up her cell phone. Soon in his quest for her to be a glorified obedient Indian wife, the beatings and rapes follow.

This book does not focus on the blood and the broken bones. Instead, it focuses on the quiet, subtle ways of stripping someone of their autonomy. It emphasizes the pervasive Indian culture that allows us to justify such vile actions. It is a slow but desperate attack on both her mind and body. He takes away the narrator's social media because he wants their life to be private. He hits her because he loves her. He rapes her because “a polluted body can be punished as a man pleases.” And as Kandasamy rightly writes: what is more polluted than a woman’s body. Menstruation, childbirth, the death of a relative, premarital sex all claim that a woman’s body is polluted.

And most importantly, we see how others react to the narrator's marriage. We see her parents cajoling her to stay and try to work it out. They rationalize this behavior as normal and ask her to control her tongue in order to control his anger. That if she leaves now it would be a mark of shame on the family.

After she escapes, she is met with people questioning the validity of her rapes: “Are you sure some of it wasn’t consensual?” Others attacked her upbringing: “It’s because your father brought you up as a son.”

Kandasamy shows how the abuse the narrator endured did not simply end when she ran away but continues with the social stigma that pervades India's society.

Instead of being received with understanding, she is forced to put up with people tarnishing her character and questioning the severity of her situation. “Why didn’t you say anything?” “Is there nothing redeemable about your husband?”

And finally, “This couldn't happen to me. I wouldn’t let it.”

But it could.

Domestic violence does not happen to simply one type of person. It can happen to anyone. It doesn’t matter whether you are a virgin or whether you enjoy sex. It doesn’t care whether you work or you’re a stay at home mom. It doesn’t differentiate between whether you can cook properly or not.

Kandasamy shows that the narrator's story is not just the story of one person. It's the story of millions of women in India today.

About once every five minutes, an incident of domestic violence is reported in India. And this is simply the number that is reported. The social stigma of being divorced and staining the family’s reputation prevents many women from reporting domestic abuse. And to cope we justify it.

The study below focuses on the percentage of respondents who said domestic violence would be justified in a set of scenarios places by researchers.

Attitudes by gender, 2005-06

Source: DHS programme

And so When I Hit You is a desperate but much needed punch to the gut. It forces us to question our views on female sexuality and domestic abuse. It makes us think back on hushed gossip about the aunt that got divorced or the last time we rationalized our partner’s actions as “my mom had it worse.” It cuts through the blatant ignorance and forces us to just get it.