Em and the Big Hoom

by Jerry Pinto

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.

I’m never sure where I am with people who may give me the large truths about themselves but not the everyday, even trivial details

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.

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. 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. At times, when I was young, I wanted to be inside the tower so I could understand what it was like. But I knew, even then, that I did not want to be a permanent resident of the tower. I wanted to visit and even visiting meant nothing because you could always leave. You’re a tourist; she’s a resident.

When I was asked, I said I wanted to become a doctor but that was ambition by the numbers. Boys of my age, of my social class and academic success, said they wanted to be doctors or engineers. There were no other professions in the world, no other professions to which one might aspire. There was only the building of bridges and the repairing of bodies.

I realized later that I was dressing her with the contempt of my class and the notions of my time.

Perhaps the truth is not that Em extinguished all curiosity about The Big Hoom, but that I, at least, couldn’t ask because I was afraid. I thought he might no longer be able to do what he did if he realized he was doing it.

(Augustine was not a believer in a personal god who would listen to your prayers. Even less did he believe that you could pray for someone else. And to have a third party, a disinterested third party, offering intercessory prayers on behalf of people they did not know, seemed outrageous to him.

Both sisters knew that demands were almost inevitable since no Indian wedding was an affair that concerned two people. It took in the family and the family would speak where love would prefer silence.

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

In this city, every deserted street corner conceals a crowd. It appears in a minute when something disrupts the way in which the world is wont to work.

But Em had an answer: ‘I plead the fifth amendment.’ ‘The fifth amendment to the Indian Constitution concerns the relationship between the Centre and the states,’ I said. ‘Save me from this pedantic brute,’ Em said.

What is a cure when you’re dealing with the human mind? What is normal?

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.

As we opened the door together, I discovered that departures make the world smaller, slighter, less significant.