Em and the Big Hoom

by Jerry Pinto

Other sounds: Mae mumbling about morning Mass; an impertinent sparrow demanding the last bit of my toast.

I miss you terribly. But if you are going to send me a postcard, I shall abstain. I think postcards are for acquaintances and now that we are friends, you should find some nice stationery and write me a proper letter. These scribbles will not do, they are meant for the common masses.

‘So you’d have . . .’ I ventured. ‘Abortions? No, what do you take me for? I’d just climb down five stairs and jump six.’ ‘Jump down the stairs?’ ‘Six steps and land with a thump, six times, to shake those little mites from their moorings.’

Otherwise, she was Em, and most of the time she was Em with an exclamation mark.

‘That’s why Indian women fall ill,’ Em said. ‘So that their husbands will hold their hands.’

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 as if . . .’

‘You’ll have to step carefully, I told him. She wasn’t like one of us; she wouldn’t love’em and leave’em. And she seemed lost, I could tell.’

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.

She didn’t seem to remember much about that crossing except how she used orange sweets to quell her nausea and began menstruating on-board the ship. Was this just how people remembered things, in patches and images, or was this the repression of a painful memory?

‘To eat dates,’ I said. ‘Yes. Dates. Clever of you to remember. Is there a fruit anywhere in the world like the date? I mean, have you ever met a disappointing date? I’ve met apples that do not crunch and I’ve met pears that are too hard. I’ve met grapes that are sour . . .’ ‘Okay, but a date is always sweet. I got that.’

“Are you walking home?” “Yes,” I said. “Well, I’ll walk with you then.” And we began to walk.’

‘I saw her at the office. She was very frightened. I don’t think she was very much more than eighteen years old when she came to work at ASL. And then she had to deal with Brigitte.’

Em wrote. She wrote when she was with us. She wrote when no one was around. She wrote postcards, she wrote letters in books, she wrote in other people’s diaries, in telephone diaries, on the menus of takeaway places. Did she really want to be a teacher?

In some of the letters she wrote Augustine, she was obviously flaunting her ability to write. She was demonstrating her charm, her effortlessness, her skill. She was suggesting to the world that she be taken seriously as a writer. No one did. I didn’t. I didn’t even see it. I thought she wrote as she broadcast, without much effort, without much thought. I have discovered since that such effortlessness is not easy to achieve and its weightlessness is in direct proportion to the effort put in.

The Big Hoom’s version was that he had come right out and asked her. She looked frightened, he’d said, and I presume the vulnerability had attracted him.

‘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.’

‘How? How? A well-told lie can heal. Otherwise, what’s fiction?’

‘What a pity.’ ‘I don’t see why. I don’t think the goodnight kiss is such a hot idea anyway. I mean, why send the poor man off with a hard on? Unless you’re a tease.’

‘Did he at least try? To kiss you?’ ‘I was frightened to death that he would. I was frightened to death that he wouldn’t. But he did the next best thing.’ ‘What?’ ‘When we were on Marine Drive, he held my hand.’

‘That sounds . . .’ ‘Like I’m thinking up what he thought when he did it? I think we all do that. All women do, at any rate. If I kiss him on the nose, he’ll know I love him so I’ll kiss him on the nose. We hope he gets it, we fear he doesn’t but if he looks even vaguely gratified, we know he’s the one.’

If there was one thing I feared as I was growing up . . . No, that’s stupid. I feared hundreds of things: the dark, the death of my father, the possibility that I might rejoice at the death of my mother, sums involving vernier calipers, groups of schoolboys with nothing much to do, death by drowning.

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.

red oxide of iron on his forehead.

I lost my faith as an hourglass loses sand.

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.

In a perfect world, you could even play with permutations and combinations of the above. Submit to the will of God because he wants you to love everyone and do your duty. Or, alternatively, detach yourself from everyone as an act of duty to God’s will and you will experience perfect and equal love.

It wouldn’t work for me. I have to connect to love. I am imperfect, my world is imperfect, I have no time for solutions premised on perfect persons seeing the perfection of solutions that work in a perfect world.

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. Depression

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.

I am no I. I am now part of a we. Wee wee wee, I wanted to weep and run all the way home and bury my head in my mother’s lap. Not that . . .

I miss you very much but I need hardly say that. You would like Paris, I think. There’s a casual beauty about it, rather like yours. All my love, Augustine

Gertie says that if you say to yourself, ‘Every day in every way I get better and better,’ you end up getting better.

I feel bruised by the world.

Then he looks up and sees me and his face changes and he comes over and walks me out of the restaurant and to the sea. (NB: What is it about the sea? Is it because it’s there?)

We walked for a bit and then he took my hand and he stopped me and we stood there in the middle of the rush and the push and the chanawallah and the hijras and the laughing babies and gossiping ayahs and the balloons and the clouds and the glitter on the waves turning it all to metal. And then he said, ‘Do you want to do this?’ I didn’t know what to say. Then he said, ‘I do.’ I thought the girl was supposed to say that. So I did the only thing a fella could do. I nodded. And then he put his hand on the back of my neck. I thought he was going to kiss...

I know I want to marry you. But I wish we were the first to ever get married. I cannot help feeling that the institution has been somewhat corrupted and corroded by the misuse of others. We could show them, by a beyootiful and myoochooal respect for each other, how things must be conducted. Have I ever told you how much I love you? Well, darling, I am telling you now, she said and began to drip like a spout.

‘Ambivalence,’

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

‘Why?’ ‘Because the sky is so high and the crow shat in your left eye. I could tell you a lie but I don’t see why. The world is a game and the game is a tie. The tie is around your neck and they’ll string you high.’

when you can, not when you want to.

How could you do your duty when love beckoned you to do something else? No, that was easy enough. Lord Krishna had dealt with that: you ignored love.

malevolent

stoic;

‘I liked the ring.’ ‘You wore it on the wrong side, with the flake pointing inwards,’ Em said. ‘I didn’t say I thought it was a good-looking ring. I said I liked it.’ ‘How can you like an ugly ring?’ He put down the paper and focused his attention on her. ‘It came from you.’

If love does not climb, it falls. If, like the flame, it does not burn upward to the sun, it burns downward to destroy. If sex does not mount to heaven, it descends into hell. There is no such thing as giving the body without giving the soul. Those who think they can be faithful in soul to one another, but unfaithful in body, forget that the two are inseparable. Sex in isolation from personality does not exist! An arm living and gesticulating apart from the living organism is an impossibility. Man has no organic functions isolated from his soul.

Dear Imelda, In accordance with your wishes, I did not imagine you smiling. I did not smile myself. But I am willing to take my chances. Your body is yours to give or not. Should you decide not, I will respect that, although I must warn you that I will work hard to reverse your decision. Let me say, though, that I find all the signs most encouraging. Shall we go forward then? Love, Augustine.

So all we had was Em’s word. ‘You won’t do anything silly?’ The Big Hoom would ask her before he left in the morning. ‘No,’ she would say and her voice would sometimes be a sick moan. ‘No.’

Held by a single ‘No’ and by those beedis, she would wait for him to return. When he did, she would immediately ask for release. ‘Kill me.’ ‘I might go to jail,’ he would say patiently. ‘Do you want that?’ ‘No,’ she would say, but her voice would hold no real belief. She did not care one way or another. I remember the hurt I felt when he tried another tack once. ‘I might go to jail,’ he said, ‘and who would look after the children?’ ‘I don’t know,’ she said and she didn’t have to add, ‘I don’t care’. Both Susan and I knew it was the subtext. 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. But how did The Big Hoom forgive? How did he hold on?