Boys Don’t Cry by Meghna Pant – A Tale of Abusive Relationship

Boys Don’t Cry by Meghna Pant is an autobiografiction based on her experiences during her first marriage in which she was abused physically, emotionally, & financially. It mainly deals with how supposedly modern and independent women stay in abusive relationships. The instances of atrocities in the book are disturbing.

About the Author

Meghna Pant is an award-winning author, journalist, feminist, and speaker. She currently lives in Mumbai with her second husband and two daughters.

Boys Don’t Cry is her eighth book. She won FON South Asia Short Story Award, was shortlisted for Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, was longlisted for the prestigious Frank O’Connor International Award and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

Meghna calls herself a prominent and proud feminist. She curates a monthly panel discussion on feminism & gender equality called Feminist Rani. She not only talks about the abuse of women but men as well. She is a Domestic Violence Survivor and speaks about it on various platforms. Her TEDx speech popularized the slogan “Stop The Silence. Stop The Violence.” This is what she’s trying to do with this book as well by speaking up through a story.

She has worked as a business news anchor for Times Now, NDTV, and Bloomberg-UTV in New York and Mumbai. In an interview, she mentioned meeting Obama, Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Manmohan Singh at the White House in Washington.

Core Subject & Issues Dealt in Boys Don’t Cry

Despite being a journalist and having such powerful connections, she suffered in an abusive relationship for about seven years. But the question is WHY? Why did she remain a victim of domestic violence for so long? Why didn’t she come out of it sooner?

The book, Boys Don’t Cry, addresses this WHY in great detail. The author begins with the very basic: the general perception of abuse in society.

I know it sounds foolish, but I didn’t know what abuse was. I thought a woman had to land up in a hospital for it to qualify as physical violence. I didn’t know then that even a slap qualifies as abuse

The author covers a vast area. She talks about the mentality of the abuser as well as the victim, conditioning behind these mentalities by society, the role of parenting, the contribution of patriarchy, mechanism of gaslighting, possibilities of mental health issues, etc.

Apart from pointing out the tell-tale signs of an abusive relationship for early diagnosis, she also lays out a detailed strategy on how to come out of domestic violence. Divorce is dealt with significantly along with the taboos attached to it.  Everything is explained extensively scene by scene.

Meghna also touches on the topics of racism, the sati system, LGBTQ, police & judicial system, Einstein’s ‘God does not place dice’ statements, etc., fleetingly.  

Plotting of the Story

The book begins with the protagonist visiting a florist to buy some flowers. The florist enquires about the occasion to arrange the flower accordingly. The protagonist replies that they are needed for a divorce party. The florist then says that he doesn’t have special flowers for such occasions, she should try another shop.

At the party, some people come in police uniforms, the guests think of them as gigolos, but they turn out to be real police. They come to arrest the protagonist for killing her ex-husband.

The real story starts at the police station when the protagonist begins to narrate her story of how she fell in love & got into an abusive relationship. But there’s a catch. She agrees to tell her story to the police but with one lie, and the police officer has to find that lie.

Though Boys Don’t Cry begins with the murder, the book isn’t a murder mystery novel because its priority isn’t to solve the crime by finding clues but to state how one gets trapped in an abusive relationship & how one can come out of it.

Writing Style

The book starts on a lighter note but slowly & gradually gets grimmer. The atrocities are described vividly. The scenes of brutality are disturbing. It isn’t an easy read though the author tries to present light moments through the conversation between the protagonist and the police official. But they are very few. Such conversations should have been frequently in between the serious stuff for the readers to catch their breath. 

For a normal reader, the book may seem to be repetitive as one can get the message from the fewer events of atrocities as well. Also, the things that are shown are told too.

But maybe these repetitions are necessary to alarm the victims so that they can identify the tell-tale signs of abuse very early in their relationship. The author herself is a survivor of domestic violence, and it seems that she doesn’t want the potential victims to miss any point.

The book is written keeping in the mind the potential victims as well as the victims who mistake possessiveness as romance & are delusional that their love can change their abusers. In the acknowledgment section of the book, Meghna says:

If you’re one of the 200 million abused women in our country, or know someone who is one, please don’t stay silent. Silence is the biggest violence…..

As a survivor I can tell you that once the veil around your eyes lifts, you’ll open up little sifts of light under those clouds of darkness. Like me, you’ll be able to see again, breathe and even smell those little flowers in the sidewalk. Your smile will come back to you….

The book is written in first-person narrative. Its USP is its metaphors, one-liners, & quotable quotes.

The Making of Boys Don’t Cry

It took Meghna eight years to write the book. Every time she tried working on it, she would break down. For writing, she had to visit those moments, and it’d drain her emotionally. The article Why Men Hit and Women Stay that she wrote for Femina in July 2015 paved the way. This resulted in an outpouring of messages from all over India.

The same was the case with Tomichan Matheikal. He was able to complete his autobiographical novel, Black Hole, only when he dealt with his emotional blocks by writing his memoir.  

Since Boys Don’t Cry is a fictionalized version of her ordeal, I thought that the tortures were exaggerated, but after reading some of her interviews, I came to know that all the brutalities happened with the protagonist in the novel were happened in reality with the author.  

She was denied access to sanitary pads on the day of the release of her first novel when she got her periods that night. She was lifted & flung, which made her pass out. She was landed on her neck. She could have died if an inch was here or there.

Quotes from the Book

• Friendships are not an option, they are a choice.
• Divorce is not the worst-case scenario in a bad marriage, living with your own stupidity is.
• There’s nothing you can do about what happens to your life when you’re not looking.
• You can’t argue with an angry lion. You can only become its prey.
• We seek to love someone who makes us fall in love with ourselves.
• Hypocrisy is a boil and lancing a boil is painful.

I received the review copy from Penguin through Blogchatter Book Review Program.