Em and the Big Hoom

by Jerry Pinto

So you could be miserable enough to kill yourself but the law will pay no heed to misery. It’s an old law, a colonizer’s law for the colonized, and it’s not such a stupid law as it looks. How else to throw a troublemaker, fasting unto death, into jail? How else to deal with the likes of Gandhi?

‘No, we should have taken her to a doctor ourselves.’ ‘You and whose army?’ asked Em, truculent. It was one of her favourite phrases. The marines posted at the AmConGen had used it a lot.