Em and the Big Hoom

by Jerry Pinto

It intrigues me, love. Especially theirs, which seems to have been full of codes and rituals, almost all of them devised by her.

I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to deal with the world. It seemed too big and demanding and there wasn’t a fixed syllabus.

I didn’t really know what we were as a family. I only knew that something was wrong with all of us and that it had something to do with my mother and her nerves.

‘Sorry. I must be going mad.’ We both smiled at this, but only a little. It was a tradition: the joke, the smile.

On one of these visits, she told me about the tap that opened at my birth and the black drip filling her up and it tore a hole in my heart. If that was what she could manage with a single sentence, what did thirty years of marriage do to The Big Hoom?

In her world, men went hunting and women waited to be hunted. But when a man began to circle, it was up to the prey to draw the hunter in.

Em’s mother spoke in code. She omitted almost all the important words in every sentence. She had had far too many languages drummed into her ears – first Konkani in Goa, then Burmese in Rangoon, then Bengali in wartime Calcutta, and now English, in which her child spoke and dreamed.

Spellings! I could never bear American spelling, not even when I took their dollars.

Conversations with Em could be like wandering in a town you had never seen before, where every path you took might change course midway and take you with it. You had to keep finding your way back to the main street in order to get anywhere.

I tried to believe Em in everything she said. It was my act of faith, because I could see how the outside world immediately discounted whatever she said.

The future sins of the son had been visited on the mother. How many times had I helped do this to a new teacher?

How to read those tears would always be a problem. For anyone else, they would be the outpourings of an eighteen-year-old forced out of a world she had grown to enjoy into a new one. But each time Em told me something about her life, I would examine it for signs, for early indications of the ‘nervous breakdown’. It was an obsession and might have something to do with my curiosity about her life.

Was this just how people remembered things, in patches and images, or was this the repression of a painful memory?

Sometimes it was exhausting to listen to her because she seemed to be throwing out clues faster than I could absorb them.

Even when we were a family, we weren’t quite the usual.

The wage earner was spared the housework. But this was how the money was apportioned: Imelda earned it and Mae doled out a weekly allowance.

I thought she wrote as she broadcast, without much effort, without much thought. I have discovered since that such effortlessness is not easy to achieve and its weightlessness is in direct proportion to the effort put in.

Why didn’t we see her as a writer? Her parents had an excuse; they needed money. Why didn’t we? But then there’s equally this: How could we have seen it when Em had not seen it herself?

But you knew that if they weren’t polite, they would be laughing at you. That’s where you’re embarrassed. Inside you.’

‘Do what your heart tells you. It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake. The only things we regret are the things we did not do.’

Em did not have the standard attitude towards motherhood. She often used the word with a certain venomousness, as if she were working hard to turn it into an insult.

A well-told lie can heal. Otherwise, what’s fiction?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think all those terrible women who destroy their children actually look at their babies and say, “Your life is mine. I’m going to maim it.”’

‘Marriage is all right. At least the person you’re having a go at is an adult. But motherhood . . . You’re given something totally dependent, totally in love with you and it doesn’t seem to come with a manual.

‘She’s grown up now. I must confront that. I must see her as men see her. But how can I? I’m hardly the expert on the subject. I only knew three men well – my father, your father and you. And two of you I didn’t fuck so that leaves me with your Big Hoom. I’m the world expert on him but who’s asking.’

‘You didn’t mean that.’ ‘Didn’t I though? I don’t know. It’s very difficult to know what I mean or what I don’t mean. Afterwards. At the time, I know.’

But of all these, I feared most the possibility that I might go mad too. If that happened, my only asset would be taken from me. Growing up, I knew I did not have many advantages. I had no social skills. I had no friends. I had no home – no home that was a refuge. I seemed to have no control over my body; my clumsiness was legendary. All I had was my mind and that was at peril from my genes.

Some part of you walks on and some part of you is frozen there, watching the spectacle. You want to stay but you must go. The imperium of the world’s timetable will allow you to break step and fall out for a while, but it will abandon you, too, if you linger too long by your mother, now a curled-up foetal ball, moaning in pain, breathing only because her body forces her to.

The only way to deal with such pain is to blot it out. My mother is now in a state where her mind tortures her. It will not even let her sag into apathy. Sometimes I see her body twitching a little in pain. Sometimes I see her forcing herself into a rigid stillness. Nothing will help her answer whatever savage questions her mind is asking.

I don’t know how to describe her depression except to say that it seemed like it was engrossing her. No, even that sounds like she had some choice in the matter. It was another reality from which she had no escape. It took up every inch of her. She had no time for love or hate, fatigue or hunger. She slept ravenously but it was drugged sleep, probably dreamless sleep, sleep that gives back nothing.

Those who suffer from mental illness and those who suffer from the mental illness of someone they love grow accustomed to such invasions of their privacy.

This is the standard equipment of the neo-atheist: eager to allow other people to believe, unwilling to proselytize to his own world which seems bleaker without God but easier to accept.

How could one demand perfect submission from those who are imperfect? How could one create desire and then expect everyone to pull the plug on it? And if God were capricious, then God was imperfect. If God were imperfect, God was not God.

But being an atheist offers a terrible problem. There is nothing you can do with the feeling that the world has done you wrong or that you, in turn, have hurt someone. I wavered and struggled for a long time before I exiled myself from God’s mansion.

The only change I made was in my recitation of the creed which I boiled down to four words: I believe in Jesus Christ. Because I did. I believed in him and the Buddha and Krishna and Allah because you can believe in anything if you look straight at the message.

Love is a hollow word which seems at home in song lyrics and greeting cards, until you fall in love and discover its disconcerting power.

She loved Em and she thought that should be enough. It wasn’t. Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself. You can only stand outside it, as a woman might stand outside a prison in which her lover is locked up.

At times, when I was young, I wanted to be inside the tower so I could understand what it was like. But I knew, even then, that I did not want to be a permanent resident of the tower. I wanted to visit and even visiting meant nothing because you could always leave. You’re a tourist; she’s a resident.

But what was the way for the son of a mad woman, a ‘vedi’ in the schoolboy argot of the playground? Anger didn’t show the way. Nor hurt.

This made me slightly uncomfortable. I had discovered The Big Hoom’s hero. I did not want my hero to have a hero.

‘I suppose,’ my father said. ‘I could have. But I didn’t. Why didn’t I? I don’t think anyone has ever asked me that before. No, I don’t think I’ve asked myself that question before. That’s a good question, then. I didn’t go home. I stayed.’

‘That’s where pride comes in, and stubbornness. The city is a challenge but it’s a challenge that doesn’t care either way. If you go home, it won’t jeer, it just won’t notice. You can stay and work hard and make something of yourself and it still won’t notice. But you will know. I would have known that I had failed. So I stayed.’

‘If anyone ever does you a favour, you cannot forget it. You must always credit them, especially in public, especially to those they love and those who love them. You must pay your debts, even those that you can never fully repay. Anything less makes you less.’

Sometimes I would see myself as a book with bad binding. You know, like one more reader, one more face-down on the bed and I was going to spill everything, lose control.’

‘He always looked like he was in a hurry. Not that he ran, but he seemed to move very fast, like Mercury. So when he slowed down and took his time to chat to you, the effect was devastating.’

There weren’t many bookshops in the days when Imelda and Augustine were young. And in the bookshops, there weren’t many buyers. Just lovers, long-distance lovers.

(‘Mad people are telepathic, clairvoyant and everything that should frighten you. Be afraid of me,’ she had once joked.)

By the time we were prying teenagers, The Big Hoom had become one of those solid-as-a-rock men of the world who rarely give the impression that they have a past or a private life.

(Augustine was not a believer in a personal god who would listen to your prayers. Even less did he believe that you could pray for someone else. And to have a third party, a disinterested third party, offering intercessory prayers on behalf of people they did not know, seemed outrageous to him.

‘He was a natural Protestant when I met him,’ Em would say. ‘He protested everything.’)