Em and the Big Hoom

by Jerry Pinto

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.

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

I have discovered since that such effortlessness is not easy to achieve and its weightlessness is in direct proportion to the effort put in.

‘Laugh in the beginning, cry at the end. Cry in the beginning, laugh at the end.’

‘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.’

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 proselytise 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.

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.

Depression means nothing more than the blues, commercially-packaged angst, a hole in the ground; until you find its black weight settling inside your mother’s chest, disrupting her breathing, leaching her days, and yours, of colour and the nights of rest.

Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself.

‘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.’

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.

Victories evanesce quickly enough. Failure hangs around you like a cloak and everyone is kind and pretends not to see it.

I discovered that departures make the world smaller, slighter, less significant. For