Em and the Big Hoom

by Jerry Pinto

I had never thought of my father’s ears. But later that evening, as he stood in the kitchen and cooked for me and my sister, scraping at a fry-up of potatoes, I saw that his ears were indeed unusual. When was the first time that she noticed his ears? Was it part of her falling in love with him, or did it happen in the hypersensitive moments that follow? And when she called him by that name the first time, did he respond immediately? He probably did, without asking why. They could be like that together.

I felt, instinctively, that when you had enough words like hypothesis, you would be able to deal with the world.

I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to deal with the world. It seemed too big and demanding and there wasn’t a fixed syllabus.

I find it difficult to picture my father in these entries. To me, he seemed built for endurance, not speed. The thought of him ricocheting off walls is odd.

hated talking to Gertrude for this reason. But I loved talking to her because she had known Em when she was whole. I loved it also because talking to anyone normal was an invitation to the world of ordinary people who had ordinary woes and worries: money, sex, sin and real estate, for instance. They were not, or so I imagined, people with ambivalences about their mothers or fears about their own acceptability.

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.

Or I’d have to be a muddha-figure and for that I’ve got the two of you and God knows I messed that up as well.’ ‘Oh come on.’ ‘That’s sweet of you. But see, if you weren’t a messed up child, my messed up child, you would have made a nice long speech about how I was the perfect mother. But you can’t. So we’re all messed up by Reader’s Digest standards. We’ll never make it to a heart-rending story you can read on your summer vacation.’

Was this just how people remembered things, in patches and images, or was this the repression of a painful memory?

I like details—no, it’s more than that; I delight in details.

I have discovered since that such 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.’

‘Marriage is all right. At least the person you’re having a go at is an adult. But motherhood . . . You’re given something totally dependent, totally in love with you and it doesn’t seem to come with a manual.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.’

‘I didn’t go to bookshops to buy. That’s a little bourgeois. I 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.’

“Bachpan ke liye ro rahi ho,” she said, smiling. Maybe she was right; maybe I was crying for my childhood. My innocence, if you will.’

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

For a whole six hours one morning, I felt the glow of a benign blue Hinduism pouring down upon me.

‘You have to live through what I’ve lived. You’d think it good grace too. So I said, take five years. Obviously, someone was listening. Lady in blue, I love you. That’s why I told you, I can’t take too much more male will in my life. No thy-will-be-done for me. I surrender nothing. I surrender nothing. I’ll take my chances with a woman’s kindness.’

It occurred to me then that the mad in India are not the mentally ill, they are, simply, mad.

Perhaps the rhythm of hospital life soothed her, suited her. 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.

I began to cry again but I managed not to sob. You can cry in public as long as you do not sob. Tears are transparent. If you’re walking fast, if the sun’s too strong, no one notices. Sobs intrude. They push their way into people’s consciousness. They feel duty-bound to ask what has happened. I cried silently all the way to the undertaker.

When it became clear that the last of the whiskey had been served and no more was forthcoming, the wake began to fall asleep.

And now the world expanded as people left the flat. As we opened the door together, I discovered that departures make the world smaller, slighter, less significant.