Em and the Big Hoom

by Jerry Pinto

I smelt the odour that trains leave on your fingers: iron.

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 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.

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.’

As if you can ever stop people’s minds.’

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

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.

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.

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 coyness with which Victorians had approached the sexual was translated into the discomfort with which we approached God. These words were the equivalent of the frilly pantalettes with which the Victorian bourgeoisie covered the legs of their pianos. The mess of faith, the joylessness of disbelief, all these were covered up.

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. 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. And

savings in a risky business that failed? At that point I realized what it meant to be a man in India. It meant knowing what one could do and what one could only get done. It meant being able to hold on to two patterns simultaneously. One was methodical, hierarchical, regulated and the outcomes depended on fate, chance, kings and desperate men. The other was intuitive, illicit and guaranteed. The trick was to know when to shift between the patterns, to peel the file off a table and give it to a peon, to speak easily of one’s cousin the minister or the archbishop.

his dense silences that could leave you bleeding for a word in either direction.

‘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.’

thought he might no longer be able to do what he did if he realized he was doing it.

And in the bookshops, there weren’t many buyers. Just lovers, long-distance lovers.

‘I wonder. How can anyone go window-shopping when people actually buy glass toffees? How does one say “That’s what I’m going to buy when my boat comes home” when you’re already buying whatever you want?’ ‘I think your budget would constrain you still.’ ‘It would, I suppose. But window-shopping was tourism once upon a time. You never thought you would take any of that stuff home. You didn’t think it would belong to you. Like the Taj Mahal. You went to look at it and then you got a good shot of it running in your veins. You now had some beauty under your eyelids.’

Her conversation had a way of reducing me to exclamations. I think she enjoyed that and worked out exactly how she was going to do it.

This was the lazy way. It was also a way of getting cheap relief. For a few moments, everything was located squarely within the range of ordinary human emotions and motives. Em was not mad. She was simply another malingerer. Like any other malingerer, she wanted to evade her ordinary responsibilities. Like any other malingerer, she wanted to be served hand and foot. We had all been taken for a ride. We were fools. I don’t remember thinking this when she was depressed, for there was no way she could have been faking her depression.

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

I have been truly rich in friends.