eye-☾ to be

ngl reading this part actually makes me sick. but also this memory is so interesting to me because it says so much about all three of the siblings. starting with chandra who grew up in aditya’s shadow, with aditya being well-liked and considered the ideal person to rule, something that lead to deep resentment and rage which chandra deals out in the form of punishment, like the kind inflicted on malini and in his treatment of aditya’s friends as ‘lesser’ because of his fixation with his idea of righteousness and control.

his idea of loving malini even later on is rooted in control and expecting sacrificial transformation from her, a possessive kind of need for her willful compliance that she fails to meet even when she ‘flee from him in bitter disobedience’ on him punishing her for ‘ill-bred’ behaviour. his idea of love and care manifest through possession and correction which is so fucked up. destroying the parts of malini he dislikes is his expression of care and she becomes the perfect target for these impulses because she embodies everything that cannot be neatly ordered, a direct deviation from his ideal of womanhood, a direct threat to his virtues.

and this memory and similar instances were also formative to shaping malini into someone who had to learn to use her emotions to get the desired results: if she was meek/cried, he would stop hurting her. so despite the shame and humiliation, keeping up a timid demeanour to survive her own brother wore her down until even tears weren’t signs of grief at all but a tool. malini operates in tools but underneath that is rage for what chandra did to her. she wields herself. she is her own weapon. she forged herself into one to survive and then to conquer. 

and aditya doesn’t really intervene much when chandra is doing this to malini, like he tells him to stop and and then reassures malini that no one else thinks like chandra later but when malini questions his protection (who will protect me from my brothers?) all he does is assures her chandra would never do her real harm. after she has already felt emotionally harmed and physically had a form of autonomy taken away. his attempt to keep the peace and smooth things over comes across an awful lot like passivity i.e. on some level he denies her experience of reality in order to appease the situation as a whole and instead she ends up internalising this sense of feeling unsafe and learns to manipulate her emotions instead.