Em and the Big Hoom

by Jerry Pinto

I loved the word hypothesis. It sounded adult and beautifully alien. I had never heard anything like it before. I wanted more words like it. I felt, instinctively, that when you had enough words like hypothesis, you would be able to deal with the world. I

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. I felt

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.

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

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. I wavered and struggled for a long time before I exiled myself from God’s mansion.

Perhaps that’s unfair. All the words about the really important things become chiffon representations of themselves soon enough. Some can be reinvented but others can only be discovered by a personal encounter.

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.

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

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.’

went because they were civilized places. It made me happy there were people who sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote and there were other people who devoted their lives to making those words into books. It was lovely. Like standing in the middle of civilization.’

It was easy to forgive; we could see how much pain she was in. It was not easy to forgive; her pain sealed her off from us.