Meghna Pant’s Boys Don’t Cry is a brilliant, though heart-wrenching story of marital abuse. It’s very difficult to believe that an educated woman from a well-to-do and progressive family would put up with domestic abuse, but that’s exactly what Maneka Pataudi does. After a fair amount of abuse, when Maneka aka Manu is on the verge of walking out, there is a reconciliation and peace prevails for a while. Then it’s back to square one and the cycle repeats again. Forget, forgive, move on, suffer again, prepare to walk out, reconcile, forget, forgive, suffer once more. As a reader, I lost track of the number of times this happened.
Pant is an excellent raconteur and her language is simple and straight forward. The book begins on a semi-funny note and then there is a sudden vertical drop for which the reader isn’t prepared. The ending is equally unexpected and Pant makes full use of her writer’s licence to serve her readers an unexpected dessert to end her tale.
Does Manu manage to escape her domestic prison and walk away or is she trapped forever? Do please read this wonderful book to find out more.
Warning: Spoilers Ahead!
The stars willed for Manu to meet Suneet in New York. It was love at first sight. Manu gives up her job as a TV news reporter in Mumbai and everything else she had to move to the USA to be with Suneet. Suneet was an MBA student – his older step-brother was covering his tuition and Manu was unemployed. Suneet beats up Manu badly before their wedding, but Manu goes ahead with the wedding nevertheless. Why did she do that? Was it because her parents had already spent a lot of money on the wedding? Was it because she wanted to avoid the shame and embarrassment that comes with the cancellation of a wedding?
Suneet is good looking, the sort of handsome man that made him a catch. Suneet’s father is a doctor who used to work for AIIMS. Later he gets a job in Dubai. Suneet’s mother is one of the main villains in the drama and once again we see a case of a woman being another woman’s chief tormentor. Manu is treated on par with a domestic help while Suneet is expected to be treated like royalty. There is verbal abuse all the time and the rare physical violence. Suneet and his parents act in concert, with a lot of planning, to torment Manu. The idea seems to be to subjugate her and make her conform to Suneet’s family’s values and notions of a woman’s place in a household.
Manu knew that Suneet took drugs even before she agreed to marry him. However, he was handsome and was the sort of man Manu could introduce to her friends. That Suneet didn’t gel with any of Manu’s friends from day one is a different matter. Was Manu the typical woman who was subconsciously looking for a husband who ticked the right boxes and when she met Manu, couldn’t say No to him?Towards the end, Manu concludes that Suneet is probably bipolar, offering a possible explanation for his violence and occasionally acts of kindness.
Boys Don’t Cry poses many questions for which there are no easy answers, but that shouldn’t stop us from searching for solutions. In this day and age, there is no reason why women need to put up with domestic abuse. Period.
Highly recommended!
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