Em and the Big Hoom

by Jerry Pinto

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

‘Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,

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 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.

It is difficult to see how detachment and love might fit together but the Greeks had a go with agape.

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.

She tried to tell me the story of the king who looked at his ring in good times and in bad. On his ring there was inscribed, ‘This too shall pass away.’

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.

‘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.’