Em and the Big Hoom

by Jerry Pinto

on the balcony of our small flat in a city of small flats.

We’ll never make it to a heart-rending story you can read on your summer vacation.’

The pianos were a metaphor, a tribal way of expressing loss. It did not matter if the pianos were real or had never existed.

It expressed, also, their sense of being exiled home to Goa, to a poor present.

It could be filled with anything you wanted and a piano that was thrown overboard could express so much more than talking about how one lent money out at interest in the city.

‘Come back for me; it’s my best chance,’ because the lie allows everyone to believe that they are not abandoning him to die.

I lost my faith as an hourglass loses sand.

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.

rings.’ In real time, confronted by my grandmother’s much-loved, guilt-worn slow dissolve of a face,

‘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.’

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

we didn’t know what to do with the brief freedom because it was a tainted freedom.

And that meant you took the kind of picture that everyone else was taking.

Here, no decisions were to be made and no one expected you to be anything other than a survivor, lying on a somewhat grubby bed, waiting for the tide to rise again.