My daughter recorded my abuse and saved me from my marriage

55-year-old Chetna Bhatnagar on what it took to finally walk away after 20 years

In 2021, I was visiting my side of the family in Pune; my daughter’s classes were still online and we thought it would be a good opportunity to spend time with them. I called up my husband who was home in Mumbai to remind him to pay our daughter’s school term fees. The fees were expensive but it was he who had insisted she go to this school because he had studied there. Now he told me, “I don’t have the money. If you care so much, you pay it.”

But he knew I couldn’t because he had full control over our bank accounts. I had been a housewife for a decade after he had ordered me to stay at home and raise our daughter. He did not want her to grow up with a working mother like he had.

Panic-stricken, I turned to my brother and parents for help. They paid the fees but felt guilty because they thought he was acting like this because of them. A few days before, he had abused me and my family on our common WhatsApp group because my father had put some money into his granddaughter’s account as a gift. According to him, my father had to ask for his permission to do that.

I missed the signs

We met on a matrimonial website in the 2000s. We chatted online for almost a year before I came down from Ludhiana to meet him in Mumbai. I never ended up going back because he proposed, and within a month we were married. I stayed back and started working in his father’s pharmaceutical company in Mumbai.

He was always controlling. On our honeymoon itself, he refused to go to any of the places I wanted to see—and when I insisted, he’d go on these long rants that would end with me in tears. I didn’t register it as control in those initial years. I just thought he’ll get better with time, maybe it was temporary. Yet, without noticing, I had begun censoring myself around him, always taking care to avoid fights, because I was scared of his reaction.

When my daughter was born eight years later, in 2010, I appreciated how hands-on he was with her care. But then he wouldn’t allow anyone else to take care of her, not even my mother when she was in town.

He was also bad with money. He stopped going to work on the pretext of looking after our daughter. He would overspend a lot and had complete control over our bank accounts. It always had to be his way or the highway. If anyone went against him, he would become angry and curse so loudly that everyone in our six-floor building could hear him.

This behaviour worried me as much as it did his mother, but she never intervened because she didn’t want any kalesh.

The final straw

After the Pune-trip drama, I took my daughter and went back to Ludhiana with my parents. We ended up staying there for 10 months. Any time I booked tickets to go home, he would come up with reasons to keep me and our daughter away. I cancelled our tickets thrice. The fourth time, I didn’t listen to him.

He did not come to pick us up at the airport or greet us when we entered the house. He never even explained what happened during those 10 months and why he didn’t want us coming back. I never wanted to know either.

It was almost Diwali when we returned. One day my daughter and I were at a friend’s place, when he called her screaming and swearing. I came back home to see what the fuss was about and we ended up having our worst fight ever. We were in the kitchen, and I was so scared he would pick up a knife. Luckily, he stormed off instead.

The next day I was trying to keep things as normal as possible because I didn’t want to ruin the festivities. I took my daughter for a haircut and while I was waiting at the salon, I got a call from my brother. He asked me, “Are you outside right now? Free to talk?”

He proceeded to tell me that my daughter had texted him the evening before when the big fight happened. Turns out, she had recorded the entire 35-minute fight on her phone and she texted him saying, “Mamu, if mom ever wants to divorce dad, she can use this recording as proof.”

Still blinded by the idea of keeping the family together, my first reaction was to tell my brother everything was fine, not realising that my 11-year-old daughter wanted me to divorce her father more than anyone else.

Leaving after two decades

Eventually, I told my brother the truth, and he told me he was booking me and my daughter on a flight out of Mumbai right then. But I told him we’d have to wait—my husband had locked away all our official documents and we couldn’t fly out of the city without them.

Over the course of the next few days, I started emptying out my drawers, my daughter’s things and most importantly, our papers. One by one, I dropped off our essentials at my friend’s house in the building, where they packed our suitcase for us. Once everything was ready and my brother booked us a flight out, I told my mother-in-law that I was taking my daughter for a movie, and left for the airport instead. My friends met me there with our things, and we left the city and headed home to Ludhiana.

I only texted my husband once we were home safe with my family, telling him I was leaving him. I filed for a divorce from Ludhiana.

It’s been five years since. I currently work from home in Ludhiana for a Mumbai company, as a part of their digital media team. My seniors at work are aware of my divorce and have been very supportive. Today I’m happily raising my daughter who just turned 16. She doesn’t keep in touch with her father, and he doesn’t try either.

I feel like I started a brand new life and it wouldn’t have been possible without my daughter’s love and intelligence, nor the support of my family and friends. Sometimes, I still think about what she told me when I was still in the marriage and she was much younger, “Mumma, you’re [already] my role model, my hero. So if you’re staying in this marriage for me, please don’t.” Turns out, she was the hero all along.

As told to Jhanvi Adatia