Em and the Big Hoom

by Jerry Pinto

has been able to make us cringe viscerally at the sadness of the mind…

‘After you were born, someone turned on a tap. At first it was only a drip, a black drip, and I felt it as sadness. I had felt sad before . . . who hasn’t? I knew what it was like. But I didn’t know that it would come like that, for no reason. I lived with it for weeks.’ ‘Was there a drain?’ ‘No. There was no drain. There isn’t one even now.’ She was quiet for a bit. ‘It’s like oil. Like molasses, slow at first. Then one morning I woke up and it was flowing free and fast. I thought I would drown in it. I thought it would drown little you, and Susan. So I got up and got dressed and went out onto the road and tried to jump in front of a bus. I thought it would be a final thing, quick, like a bang. Only, it wasn’t.’

I remember it all, as if rain had fallen. Have you ever noticed how rain clears the air? Everything stands out but it also looks a little thinner, as if the dust had been keeping things together.

We began our hospital visits: one day Susan, one day me, every day The Big Hoom. 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?

I find it difficult to picture my father in these entries. To me, he seemed built for endurance, not speed. The thought of him ricocheting off walls is odd.

She chose her times carefully, never coming when Em wanted to meet her. She would come when Em was depressed and withdrawn. This meant Susan or I had to entertain her for the mandatory forty-five minutes which she thought constituted a visit to a sick friend. Then she could go away and pretend to be offended when Em really did want to see her. I could see that she thought this made her a friend in need. It was one of my first lessons in the self-deception people practise on themselves.

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. It had taken away most of her vocabulary. She communicated through gestures, facial expressions and the assumption that everyone knew what she was talking about. It doesn’t sound likely, but it worked.

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.

see, if you weren’t a messed up child, my messed up child, you would have made a nice long speech about how I was the perfect mother. But you can’t. So we’re all messed up by Reader’s Digest standards. We’ll never make it to a heart-rending story you can read on your summer vacation.’

‘And what happened to the women who got into the taxi? The ones from the bus stop?’ ‘Your father sold them into the flesh trade. I have no idea. I suppose they got out when they figured there was going to be no free ride. Why do you want to know?’

I like details—no, it’s more than that; I delight in details. I’m never sure where I am with people who may give me the large truths about themselves but not the everyday, even trivial details—the book a friend was reading in the airplane on the way to Chicago, the number of times someone sat for his degree examination, the names of the dogs a friend had when he lived with his grandfather. I’ve been told that I exhaust people with my curiosity. Once I was told that living with me would mean being trapped and slowly asphyxiated. Should I blame Em for this? Or would I have turned out just the way I am even if she had been whole and it had been possible to reach her?

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

‘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.’

I found it hard to reconcile the way that word felt to the state my mother was in when she was dragged down into the subterranean depths of her mind. Depression seemed to suggest a state that could be dealt with by ordinary means, by a comedy on the television or an extravagance at a nice shop. It suggested a dip in level ground where you might stumble, but from which you might scramble, a little embarrassed that it should have caught you unawares—a little red-faced from the exertion—but otherwise unharmed. Em’s depressions were not like that.

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. She went up. She came down. She went up again. We snatched at her during the intervals. There was no way to say when she would be up or when she would be down.

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.

I did not even realize at that moment that I had lost my faith. What I had left was a syrupy sentimentality and an aesthetic appreciation of the Gregorian chant, the form of the fasting Buddha, and a love of stories. 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.

The sophisticated arguments of all the wise men of faith—their talk about the sins of a past life, the attachment to desire, the lack of perfect submission— only convinced me that there was something capricious about God. 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.

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 one another? Good idea. Detach yourself? Good idea. Do your duty? Good idea. Submit to the will of God and go with the flow? Good idea. In a perfect world, you could even play with permutations and combinations of the above.

I have to connect to love. I am imperfect, my world is imperfect, I have no time for solutions premised on perfect persons seeing the perfection of solutions that work in a perfect world.

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.

I sympathized with Granny but I also felt a deep vexation. 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. From time to time, a well-loved face will peer out and love floods back. A scrap of cloth flutters and it becomes a sign and a code and a message and all that you want it to be. Then it vanishes and you are outside the dark tower again.

‘What happened to Pedru?’ ‘He came back once, very drunk. The doctor sent him away. “Both of us can’t be drunk, Pedru,” he said.’

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

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.’

If you are older, you can always play this one and sweep the board. Your wisdom has been ignored, your opinions have been spurned with contempt, and you accept this without demur. You know that you have no value in the world. That immediately puts your opposition in the terrible position of having to bring you back into the argument, of having to beg for any further advice; and as soon as an apology is issued, you can put it down for future use. You were slighted. If you were not, why apologize?

I simply tear up but only in one eye. Do you find that odd? Do you really want to marry a woman who cries with only one eye? I know I want to marry you. But I wish we were the first to ever get married. I cannot help feeling that the institution has been somewhat corrupted and corroded by the misuse of others. We could show them, by a beyootiful and myoochooal respect for each other, how things must be conducted.

‘I think,’ I said carefully, ‘that we can never be sure what we are communicating.’

You’re vulnerable to those you love and they acknowledge this by being gentle with you, but with Em you could never be sure whether she was going to handle you as if you were made of glass or take your innermost self into a headlock.

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