Em and the Big Hoom

by Jerry Pinto

She was a wise woman and she knew that religion was best in small doses.

The world knew but did not understand that an atheist-communist-unionist like Francis wanted marriage and a good Catholic girl like Letitia did not.

Both sisters knew that demands were almost inevitable since no Indian wedding was an affair that concerned two people. It took in the family and the family would speak where love would prefer silence.

We walked for a bit and then he took my hand and he stopped me and we stood there in the middle of the rush and the push and the chanawallah and the hijras and the laughing babies and gossiping ayahs and the balloons and the clouds and the glitter on the waves turning it all to metal. And then he said, ‘Do you want to do this?’

‘You didn’t want children?’ I don’t remember who said this, Susan or I or both of us together. ‘Oh God, no. I saw what children do. They turn a good respectable woman into a mudd-dha. I didn’t want to be a mudh-dha.

it. This is what you have to be careful about, Lao-Tsu. It never happens to men. They just sow the seed and hand out the cigars when you’ve pushed a football through your vadge. For the next hundred years of your life, you’re stuck with being someone whose definition isn’t even herself. You’re now someone’s mudd-dha!’

We never knew when the weather would change dramatically with Em.

‘You’re angry. Ooh, my little p’ecious boy is angry. He’s angry. I’m frightened.’ The mockery was apparent and hideous

I went mad so that you don’t have to be.

Lord Krishna had dealt with that: you ignored love.

Home was where others had to gather grace. Home was what I wanted to flee.

I would call her soon after and ask, ‘Everything okay?’ This was code for ‘Is she all right?’ Her reply would always be, ‘About the same,’ but this was as false as it was true.

It puzzled me, this ability to fight over things that had happened years ago until I realized that Em and Granny could only fight over things that had happened years ago. They used them as placeholders for the slights and hurts of the present.

So you could be miserable enough to kill yourself but the law will pay no heed to misery. It’s an old law, a colonizer’s law for the colonized, and it’s not such a stupid law as it looks. How else to throw a troublemaker, fasting unto death, into jail? How else to deal with the likes of Gandhi? But then, what of the Jain monks who simply stop eating and drinking? What of Vinobha Bhave, who decided it was time and went peaceably? The law could turn a blind eye if it wanted.

This fragile thing, the word of a woman who was mentally ill, was what kept the family going.

Film was rare and often had to be bought on the black market. You didn’t just take a picture. You composed it with care.

Those pictures tell a story. Imelda and Augustine were part of the dosa-thin middle class of the 1960s. They dressed like other young middle-class Indians of their background, they went to work in respectable, stable establishments and socialized in respectable, stable places. They also did their duties. They opened postal savings accounts and recurring deposits, put aside money for medical emergencies, bought units from the Unit Trust, had babies.

They thought you should suffer. I remember a priest coming in on Sunday and reading out of the Genesis. It had to do with Adam and Eve and their apple. Apparently, we were supposed to suffer. Birth was supposed to be painful and we were suffering in expiation of Eve’s sin. Adam got away, of course. Men do.’

When anaesthesia was invented, the Church ranged itself against the use of painkillers in the maternity ward. That would be going against the curse of God Himself. It took Queen Victoria’s insistence on a squirt of nitrous oxide, before doctors – and mothers too – decided that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to lessen the worst pain known to humankind.

When you live in a small house, your lives intersect all the time. There’s no privacy, no way to conceal what is happening.

There was a kitchen too and a toilet separated from the bathroom – which was an inordinate luxury – and four lives had to be managed within those walls. We had to live and love and deceive within earshot of each other.

Money had always been a problem, even when it was not supposed to be:

‘I’m like Sherlock Holmes. I won’t crowd my attic with that which does not concern me.’

Lady in blue, I love you. That’s why I told you, I can’t take too much more male will in my life. No thy-will-be-done for me. I surrender nothing. I surrender nothing. I’ll take my chances with a woman’s kindness.’

But a question stayed with me. What is a cure when you’re dealing with the human mind? What is normal?

And then we discovered that love was about memory and something had disrupted her store of our collective memories.

Mad is an everyday, ordinary word. It is compact. It fits into songs. As the old Hindi film song has it, M-A-D, mad mane paagal. It can become a phrase – ‘Maddaw-what?’ which began life as ‘Are you mad or what?’. It can be everything you choose it to be: a mad whirl, a mad idea, a mad March day, a mad heiress, a mad mad mad mad world, a mad passion, a mad hatter, a mad dog. But it is different when you have a mad mother.

it seemed as if all psychiatric medicine was aimed only at the symptoms. Mute the paranoia. Calm the rage. Raise the endorphins. Underneath, the mysteries continued, unchanged. Underneath, somewhere in the chemistry of her brain, there was something that could not be reached.

Her mind was like that: a sponge for troubles. Events turned into omens; carelessly uttered phrases into mantras.

The world came back in. Other people, their voices, their curious faces, their odd movements. We were not used to other people. We went to see them; they did not come to see us.

Outside his storefront, the undertaker had a sign: ‘We can take your dead body, anywhere, anytime, anyplace.’ Visually, this was represented by an aeroplane with a coffin dangling from it. Later, the undertaker would become something of a minor celebrity for his signboards. ‘When you drop dead, drop in,’ one would say. The next one said, ‘Mr Smoker, you’re the next one to come coffin in.’ This was followed by ‘We’re the last to let you down.’ And then would come the strange ‘Grave problems resurrected here.’

This was The City, India’s biggest, a huge city, but people heard and responded to what was happening in your life. Sometimes, this much was enough.

‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ I said. ‘Did a beggar coin that phrase?’ The Big Hoom asked. ‘Probably not.’ ‘Then let’s assume that some choices are left, even to beggars.’