Sub judice or another kind of domestic violence

Often hearing about domestic violence, Tom decided to visit the subject afresh to find out whether any other act can also be called by the same name. He chose an idle afternoon to get to the bottom of the affair and wrote down a series of questions and his answers below each one of them. He wondered how he can forget Muser who is his inspirational guide. Tom liked to write with pen or pencil and this gave him the satisfaction of emulating Muser, who is a sworn longhand writer.

The first question that got on to the paper was “Which other act or acts can be considered as ‘domestic violence’?

After a little thinking, he came to the conclusion that apart from getting physical, the common form of domestic violence, strangling of free thoughts and expressions, needless comparisons and enforcing likes and dislikes on others  are the other serious forms of that violence which  goes unreported as no punishable laws exist!

The second question, he wanted to answer was, “what are the external indicators for these confrontations?”

He characterised the nature of these violent occurrences as giving raise to voluminous sound “bytes” accompanied by contorting facial muscles. This exercise invariably leaves bitter feelings burning a hole in the minds of those involved and spares neither the initiator nor the receiver.

Tom felt a sense of de ja’ vu after successfully answering his own questions. He sat thinking for few minutes to frame his next set of questions to himself. Feeling like some on appearing for an examination, he was scared to write down a tough question which may not be easy to answer. 

“Which are the potent subjects that might trigger this form of domestic violence”?, was the next question that came to his mind.

He opted for the children or grandchildren in the house as the first choice that seldom fails to deliver, when tweaked a little. Figuratively speaking, the trigger, for a verbal violence, is in the hands of a man or a woman who conveniently selects a wrong moment to point out a fault in the child or grandchild - of being untidy, naughty or unhelpful or haughty. If the discussion on the ‘faults’ stops at an early stage, the tempers will remain under control and instead of that if the man or woman attempts  to bring out behavioural similarities or anomalies within the family of the ‘other speaker’, the outcome is a series of arguments and counter arguments which will finally end in a disastrous conversation. In a similar spirit, arguments, liberally laced with spite, may start about a *–in-law and erupt in a volcano of innuendo.

As he was finishing the above answer, this question popped up: “What is so special about ‘examples’ and ‘comparisons’ and how could it lead to further flare up”?

The game of comparison can be played across a spectrum of generations. The wife may suddenly jump the rails and happily start a verbal documentary on how ‘his close friends’ shoulder responsibilities or shower affection and understanding, at the drop of a porcelain cup or go the extra mile to understand the sufferings of a homemaker. 

The husband tries in vain to bring home the point that “individuals are unique and trying to fit any individual in an equation, for comparison, using chosen set of parameters is arbitrary”. Instead, he stops short of saying, “it would have been better for you to have married in to that family or this family rather than me”.

Though the answer to this question will certainly have a repercussion in his personal life, Tom chose to go ahead by penning his thoughts. May be the mellifluous scratching noise of nib on paper urged him to sail against this domestic danger!Enlarging his list, Tom added faith and disbelief, likes and dislikes, style and disgust as other potent subjects to brew in-house trouble as they behave like North and South poles of magnets or matter and antimatter of cosmos!

The choice of god or guru or method of worship is equally important as a threat perception for the youngsters and non-conformists in the family.The devout and the rest of them in the family take turns to propose and dispose faith in god and need to regular worship. With religion occupying prime slots in the morning TV broadcasts, the devout gets ample chances to guide the errant flock to the salvation centers. Munching on their own problems along with breakfast, the members of errant flock tend to ignore the baptism on the breakfast table. This is the fuel for the fire waiting to be lit, in the devotee’s mind. In this state of high alert, a witty comment intended to be a pun turns sour.

Though these are all individual preferences, the involvement is passionate and devoid of reason. In this galvanised mêlée, passion and reason act similar to like poles; repel each other. Arguments and counter arguments collide like matter and antimatter to annihilate each other! Tom was very pleased with the examples he could come up with.

Tom asked himself, “Will there be a way out of such an argument”?

In this state, even a small talk, on sundry things, has the potential to become another artless war of words. In such a situation, even if one of them wishes to accept the truth in the comparison or wants to bring out the untruth in the argument, a graceful exit has already been closed because of the disastrous conversation. The aggrieved person, upset with the lack of logic in comparisons, decides to walk away in silence to cool the tempers and to attend to the bruised ego.Tom started to explore the basis for these opinion clashes under the question: “what catalyses these chain reactions, which ultimately ends up as a form of domestic violence”?


The deemed infringement on freedom of choice or taste of an individual sets the ball rolling. The conservative middle class elder is often the epicenter for this domestic violence. To this elder anything chic is bad taste and waste of money and never fails to pass a comment on the choice of clothing or food. The youngster is in no mood to understand the effect of this cultural shock on the elder or worry about the dwindling personal bank balance. The youngster feels at ease with the current way of life and hates to be in the bygone era. The contentious issues about food and style leave both in bitterness.

Tom came to the important question “Why and does it suffer a generation gap?”

As people age, likes and dislikes also change but keep raising anachronistic questions like “You liked this then, but not now, why”, “You did it then and why not now?”, or “I like it and why you don’t too?”, “I don’t like it and why you do? Nobody wants to hear these stale reminders and aggressive statements, anymore now. People have become touchy.

This form of domestic violence is not restricted to the older generation in the family. The same type of situation could easily arise among the youngsters themselves. The changed script could be: friends, entertainment, casual approach to life and things or even a hairstyle. Though he wanted to delve deep into this topic, he curbed his enthusiasm fearing over statements.

Tom wondered, “What common thread runs through all these upheavals?”

In all these cases, the milder aggrieved person would be in a fix to say categorically “Yes or No”. The preference to act as an emotional sink overrides the impulse to put an end to the matter there and then.
In these careful acts of retreat, the aggrieved perceives a greater sense of purpose – to keep the pendulum of harmony or whatever is left of it swinging.  May be the aggrieved thinks that the accruing bitterness and its weight on the conscience is a small price to pay for a larger cause!

After rereading his notes, Tom felt emboldened to offer few solutions to manage the outbursts. A problem remains a problem as long as they are fed with dosages of hurt or helplessness or revenge. He chose to make his point with a simple example of garlic and onion. Only garlic leaves a heavy odour, for a long time but both are lachrymatory. These characteristics do not depend on whether they are garden fresh or off the shelf. A brief smile played on his lips, mischievously, when he wrote this comparison.

For the record he detested garlic more than the onions! Likewise, young and old in a family should try to understand and politely disagree with the other view point and become the onion people – cry a little and forget the bother.

He heard the approaching foot falls of Mrs. Tom and hastily closed the notebook on which he was writing. He will reveal the contents to her only after showing it to Muser. He considered the matter sub judice till then.

The leaked diaries or how a tiger became a cat!

Bystander was furious and as the one who shows his anger in full glare of the public, he was ready to explode like a thunderclap. His internal processing unit started working at terra flops speed to identify targets and the verbiage. He believed that the message should go down the throats of the prime mover and the secondary injection systems. It is his experience that a team work is always behind any inconvenience caused to him. However, he carefully left out the almighty for a future occasion!

As this turmoil was going on, his family members sensed a storm brewing in their midst and got ready to brave the fury. The pity was they had no clue as to the how or when or where? Because Bystander had this habit of traversing his gun through 360⁰, in ever increasing circles, to fire his anger at his clan, relatives and friends. It is rumoured that once he even contemplated to dispatch his verbal missiles over all the continents.

Bystander’s fury was on the selective leak of information from his diaries and the person responsible for it. He had taken so much care to keep them in safe custody, all these years, and yet somehow the security has been breached. Someone in the family had been smarter than him to get at those diaries.

He cursed himself for the habit of filling a diary with honest opinions, for the past 35 years. Since he started writing a diary at the age of 25, the bygone years, from childhood onward, were accommodated as a part of the new diary he began every year. He worshiped logic when not in anger!

It was an exercise to keep alive his interest in writing, hoping to become an author one day. Simply his jottings were a nursery of ideas and incidents for replanting in paragraphs and pages of fictions he planned to finish. Based on this plan, he had taken certain liberties in describing the actual persons finding a place in his narration of events. This proved to be his undoing and the reason for his blinding anger.

His wife had collected the photographs of each of the family member, from childhood to the present age, and got them fixed in a large frame. Another frame kept pictures of animals on display, below the family photos. One day as Bystander was within earshot she nonchalantly commented, “I have aged as the others in the family have done. If I look like a bear now, others can search among the other animals to identify a look alike for themselves”. 

“Wow! These diaries contain so much information and now that we know his secrets, we can easily tackle him, word for word or deed for deed! ” his son and daughter, who have come down for a visit, continued their assessment on the worth of the information on hand. Out of respect, they held this discussion as an aside but Bystander could not help hearing it.

“Had he taken to his studies seriously, he might have earned a doctorate degree, who knows?” his grandson told his friends as he was passing by. “The one who had escaped lectures to the cooler ambience of a theater is now objecting to someone watching TV!”. He heard his granddaughter telling her grandma, ignoring the grandpa sitting nearby.

A close cousin visits them twice or thrice in a week and the arrival always coincided with the lunch time in the house. Bystander’s son and daughter, when they were growing up, and now the grandchildren bonded well with him. During the previous visit, Bystander heard him say, at the dining table, “It is not that all the crows get fed from a plate; only the special ones! Even then, it is not the crow that begs for food but the giver begs the crow to take it, if you understand what I mean”. The gathering nodded in silence leaving him fuming.

A bosom friend became so close that he started to call the shots in the matters of children’s education, career and marriage – the last two not necessarily in the same order. Secretly Bystander started getting annoyed with this free run his friend had in the house but went along with the drift. In a direct speech that friend said,” “Mountaineering guides do not shout at the climbers from the hill tops; they lead by pitching their tents alongside theirs”

These increasing incidents of family members using odd tangential references and whispered asides were the indications that his future fiction works have been proof read, that too in secret. His belief that these secrets remained within the family received a high Voltage shock when a cousin, who was close to the family, and a bosom friend threw their veiled remarks at him.

Every one of the speakers has done a verbatim hijack to fix him for good. He regretted those descriptions and sentences finding a place in the diaries. He himself felt like a caged tiger and a tongue-scalded pussy shying away from a bowl of milk. The tiger will remain caged always but the pussy might be allowed to roam freely in the house. He decided to gladly exchange his ambition of becoming a writer of fiction with that pussy! Unbidden, his eyes came to a rest at the framed picture of a cat slurping milk, contently!

 He was troubled by the nagging questions, “How, Who and When?” He was not going to rest till the answers are found. But in his mind the transition from the wild to a caged tiger and then becoming a cat did not make much of a difference at all; all belonging to the same family of felines!