Our Fights
Marriage is a bit like democracy. Which democracy can thrive without open, heart-led fights?
The Boxing Ring
Fights broke out in my home like pimples on an adolescent’s face, ditchwater after frequent rains, the attack of sneezes on heavy pollen days, and the post-Diwali surge on the weighing scale.
They were daily, seasonal, and predictable.
Fights woke up with us at 5 am, followed us into the kitchen, and nudged us to argue about the aroma, body, and bitterness of our coffee.
“ My coffee is smooth, you should start drinking my brand,” my husband once said to me.
“No thank you. Smooth is not me. I like strength,” I replied.
“Of course! That’s why you are the Dara Singh of women’s rights and start-ups,” he joked.
That’s all I needed to transform into a 5-feet by 3-feet Dara Singh. I jumped into the boxing ring and started a fight. Words came rushing out of me like sweat and snot. My husband jumped in with his (verbal) punches. We stung each other like bees and dodged the hurts like grasshoppers.
Then, after five minutes of dashing each other to the floor, we picked ourselves up, brushed the slight off our clothes, and settled to drink coffee on the balcony before proceeding to do yoga.
Fights were a constant in our marriage. We took our wrestling pit with us everywhere. While most fought in safe, quiet spaces, we had open public spats.
We often dragged our clans, languages, professions, politics, music, and friends into the boxing ring. Bong vs.Bania; Corporate vs. NGO; Hindi vs.Bangla; Bollywood music vs.Rolling Stones; Intellectual Vs. Emotional. Complicated Vs. Straight talking.
We raked, ribbed, and roasted our differences.
The Rainforest
I bloomed late on social media. By the time I signed up on Facebook, my friends already had hundreds of followers in their newsfeeds.
As an intentional latecomer, I hoped to nurture a contained garden of friends on my social media handles. My feeds would be well-manicured garden paths, where I would take pleasing strolls, and look the other way when strangers approached.
But quickly, a small rainforest erupted in my social media handles. Friends of friends of friends, my husband’s friends, family friends, work friends, and non-friends, all layered up upon each other as foliage and canopy, the understory and the overstory of my lush friend zone. There were family members too, who occupied the forest floor with 2 percent of sunlight.
Those days everybody had a voice. We spoke, spat, and sang at will. We dropped ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ here and there with generosity, and enthusiasm as we scrolled.
Fights showed up here too, fluttering like tropical birds. If they found my husband and I perched on different feeds, they locked our horns and lured us into a fight.
My husband would light the match with a comment on my post. I would stoke a fire with my stinging reply. Friends would add small inflammables as comments. A simple post would quickly transform into a mini CPIM demonstration of the Calcutta of the 80s. Red flags, some slogans, and a huddle of participants who after a point couldn’t quite remember why they were there in the first place.
“You guys fight a lot. He provokes. You respond full throttle,” our closest friend commented with a wide grin and chuckle.
“Please fight some more. We need entertainment,” another requested.
But we were not performative fighters. We fought somewhat like a running team: closing one fight, then starting another, in a never-ending relay of tolerance, debate, and dissent. When we ran out of breath or got bored of handing the baton to each other, we pulled in our friends.
Our Need to Fight
I grew up in a large joint family where we had to raise our voices to be heard in the orchestra of many people speaking at the same time, all the time. The pitch and volume of my voice got set to a range higher than the regular, polite tones.
To the outer world, my need to converse sounded like a fight.
My husband grew up in an intellectual family that could debate on the length of an iron nail to the face cut of their pet dog, to the Communist Manifesto to Mrinal Sen to the sting of the mustard in the Hilsa jhol to Foucault.
His need to provoke had roots in the debating vibe of his family.
To us, our fights were not an indicator of dysfunction in our marriage. They were ways of starting a homely conversation with family and friends. For sure, our fights exhausted us. But so did children, parents, colleagues, and clients. We embraced them, and we embraced our fights.
The Oil Spill
Then the climate changed. There were heatwaves and mob lynchings. Inside and outside. Families cracked. Friends turned the poison chalice on each other. No fight could be light.
Junaid went shopping for Eid with his brothers. He was beaten to death on his way back. He was 16.
A temple in Dadri falsely claimed that Akhlaq had slaughtered a cow. 200 people entered his home and murdered him.
Demonetization sent all the small village business owners I had worked with into the smithereens.
The jammers blocked 8 million in the Kashmir valley into a black prison hole for 365 days.
1.9 million farmers, weavers, petty shop owners, drivers, butchers, and labourers folded up their lives to file into the detention centers of Assam.
All or any talk, on these or any such matter, opened up pathways for fights.
Fights transformed from tropical birds to Pariah kites. They circled over our newsfeeds in the hunt for eatable garbage. They dropped communal bird shit here, and there and created a stink on every post that my friends and I wrote on democracy and plural India.
Soon, small forest fires erupted in my rainforest. I opened water cannons on the trolls and threw sand on incendiary ‘friends’. I unfriended several followers. But the fights kept returning to turn friendships into oil spills.
By the time 38 million migrants set out on an exodus to reach their homes, crossing thousands of kilometers on foot, cycles, and other unusual transport, we were fully exhausted by our fights. Post 2021, we and our fights were crushed by lockdowns of all kinds.
The Lost Tongue
At home, the pattern of our fights changed. When I fought, my husband turned up the volume of the music on his headphones and tuned out. When he fought, I retired from the fighting ring and closed the door of my room.
Mornings became still and quiet. We drank coffee without speaking to each other. I had banished fights from our home, and now there was no one to remind us that we could headbutt each other.
Fights had helped us to sit with dissonance, differences, and disagreements. When we lost our fight, we lost our voice and our tongues.
I am not sure when I fell silent, when I hacked down my rainforest into a sanitized urban park, or when I folded up our boxing ring and put it away. But I know that climate grief shriveled up our fights.
These days we lie in wait for positive weather reports: news of climate stabilization; or a time when we will return to the times when our fights were a daily, safe practice of democracy in our lives.
An early draft of this essay was developed at .
I confirm that all ‘boxing matches’ mentioned in this essay are metaphorical. No physical boxing matches were fought or even attempted in the event and years described in this essay.
What an extraordinary portrait of a colourful marriage. Celebrating itself for what its personality is.
Banishing shame. Demonstrating radical acceptance.
Thank you Roshni, sumptuous is the word! Manisha, personal, political and poetical. sub kuch ho gaya.. you inspire me to learn more about how writing works.. how words carry sounds and meanings and more meaning than what meets the eye.. ♥️