Em and the Big Hoom

by Jerry Pinto

  Em had suffered migration, displacement and the loss of a home when she was still a girl. After arriving in India, she and her mother had spent some tough months in Calcutta before shifting to Bombay. There they had awaited the arrival of the man of the house, who was still walking from Burma to India through jungles and swamps, surviving malaria and tigers. They had spent those anxious, long months living in a storefront room with no toilet – to use one, they had to walk to a relative’s house once a day. And when she grew up Em had had to give up her studies and work to support the family. She’d been doing it for over a dozen years. And yet marriage felt like growing up? It seemed odd to me.

  • • •

  There’s also Granny’s version. She confirmed that Em had been angry – ‘She was very thissing’ – but that it hadn’t lasted more than a few hours, as Granny had known it wouldn’t, because which girl wouldn’t want a man with perfect manners and a good salary and even better prospects? And a brahmin, too. Granny said she did not need to ask him about being a brahmin. She claimed that she knew.

  ‘A brahmin boy but a poor one,’ was how she described him, once we got past her elisions.

  ‘How could you know he was poor?’

  Here Granny squared her shoulders and jerked her chest out.

  ‘He had a good body?’

  ‘Worker’s body,’ she said. Then she spread out her hands and curved them so that they were slightly like claws.

  ‘Big hands?’ I ventured.

  She nodded.

  ‘And his eyes,’ she said, as if that set a seal on things.

  My mother’s eyes: amber.

  My father’s eyes: blue.

  I didn’t think it could be that easy. If blue eyes were a sign of aristocracy, it couldn’t have been a local aristocracy. Indian eyes are dark brown, shading sometimes to black. Blue eyes, green eyes, brown eyes were always suspicious, even if they are fetishized now. It was common in my childhood to call people who had them ‘cat-eyed’. It was also common to say that they could not be trusted, that they were ‘double-faced’. The suspicion clearly arises out of the belief that where there are signs of the European face, there must be strains of the European gene pool. In other words, a honky in the woodpile. But what would the honky find in the woodpile in Goa? Surely, not women of the privileged elite, of the compradors? Surely, those genes would have found their way into the lower castes where the men of the family were less empowered, where droit du seigneur might still be a practice? It was no use telling Granny this. She would have been horrified at the thought.

  ‘It was good we went,’ said Granny, ‘because otherwise they would still be this-thing and you two would not thissing.’ They would still have been visiting bookshops, she meant, and Susan and I would not have been born.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said The Big Hoom when we suggested that he had been coerced to the altar by two old ladies in silky frocks. ‘It was on my mind. I would have asked.’

  ‘Gosh,’ said Em when we told her this. ‘I wonder how I would have answered if I had been asked. The standard response was the Hollywood one. You know, you said you had no idea, this was such a surprise, you were very honoured, could you have some time to think about it? This meant ‘Yes’. But if you were going to say ‘No’, you had to say it immediately while not saying ‘No’. You had to say you had no idea, this had come as a surprise, could you have some time to think about it?’

  ‘That’s the same thing,’ I pointed out.

  ‘It is but a sensible man knows.’

  I thought this didn’t actually work but I didn’t say so.

  Em spotted it in my face.

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘I think,’ I said carefully, ‘that we can never be sure what we are communicating.’

  ‘Oh go on, wise boy. I think men know. Women certainly know.’

  I shrugged. ‘We were talking about your engagement. You were angry with them.’

  ‘I don’t know if opposition would have worked. It’s difficult to remember who I was, baba. You have no idea how odd it seems to read my diary now. Who was that girl? What a fey, frightened creature! What a frigging woodland nymph! Maybe I would have been happy that someone had forced the issue. I was twenty-eight going on frigid. I didn’t think much of the sex act . . .’

  ‘Oh God, here we go.’

  ‘No, really. It seemed very messy and painful. Audrey had told me all about her first night. So I was very happy to be kissed from time to time, to have my hand held on Marine Drive, to know there was someone to squire me about. I don’t think I wanted more. Or did I? I mean, I knew I wanted to marry him but not then. And then there was all the bother of children. We would have to have them once we married, of course. That kind of thing.’

  ‘Ambivalence,’ I said wisely.

  ‘Ambivalence? I love it. I was ambivalent. I think I am ambivalent right now. I think I am an ambivalence, toon taan toon taan toon taan, with a blue light on my forehead. So which side would have won? Would I have simpered off into a corner and said, “Whatever you want for me, Mum and Tia Madrinha” or would I have said “You go there and I’ll run away and join a convent”? I don’t know.’

  ‘They might have taken that very seriously.’

  ‘Of course they would. I wanted to be a nun, they knew that. Only, I didn’t want to sleep alone in a room. I would have been very lonely. No, I’m lying. I would have been scared. But Mother Catherine said that nuns had to sleep alone in their cells. I think they must be worried about lesbianism. She said that Jesus would be there to look after me. I didn’t believe her. I wasn’t taking risks with that fellow. I mean, “Thy will be done”? What if it was his will that I be terrified every night for the rest of my life? I much prefer his mother. She just says “Pray to me”, which I can understand. He’s far too demanding. What’s all this –“I surrender all, I surrender all”? Is that a hymn to sing? For a woman? I sang that once and he took away the hearing in my left ear. I thought, “Well, bloody hell, enough of you lot. I’m not surrendering anything.”’

  ‘Did it leave a God-sized hole in your life?’

  ‘That sounds suspiciously like a quotation,’ she said. ‘I wish you wouldn’t. I never feel like I’m having a conversation with someone who quotes.’

  She looked at me, a cold, hard stare.

  ‘It is a quote, isn’t it?’

  ‘It feels like one.’

  ‘I hate quotes,’ she said fiercely. ‘I feel like I’m talking to a book. I feel like I’m talking to history. I feel like I’m being practised upon.’

  ‘Practised upon?’

  ‘For a public performance. For a debate club. For some schoolboy shit like that.’

  She refused to be drawn any further and stomped off for a beedi.

  The next time she talked about the courtship and engagement, some of the details had changed a little. I could spot some contradictions. But the script was the same, and she insisted that she had wanted to be a nun. She had wanted ‘none of this’.

  ‘You didn’t want to get married?’ I asked.

  ‘Who wants to get married?’ Em asked rhetorically. ‘Only those who want children.’

  ‘You didn’t want children?’ I don’t remember who said this, Susan or I or both of us together.

  ‘Oh God, no. I saw what children do. They turn a good respectable woman into a mudd-dha. I didn’t want to be a mudh-dha. I didn’t want to be turned inside out. I didn’t want to have my world shifted so that I was no longer the centre of it. This is what you have to be careful about, Lao-Tsu. It never happens to men. They just sow the seed and hand out the cigars when you’ve pushed a football through your vadge. For the next hundred years of your life, you’re stuck with being someone whose definition isn’t even herself. You’re now someone’s mudd-dha!’

  She suddenly realized who she was talking to.

&n
bsp; ‘Of course, when it happens, you don’t regret it and all that shit, okay?’

  She grinned, a silty grin. ‘You were my two dividends, yes? Don’t you forget that.’

  Then she sighed, took a deep breath, and said, ‘But what an investment. My life.’

  We didn’t say much. We weren’t allowed. We held our peace and tried to work with what we’d been given. We tried to reassure ourselves that honesty was the best policy in the long run and that we would be glad, eventually, that we knew what Em thought.

  Or that’s what I tell myself.

  7.

  ‘The Disgusting Bitch’

  We never knew when the weather would change dramatically with Em. You’re vulnerable to those you love and they acknowledge this by being gentle with you, but with Em you could never be sure whether she was going to handle you as if you were made of glass or take your innermost self into a headlock. Sometimes it seemed part of her mental problem. Sometimes it seemed part of her personality. ‘That’s not her, it’s her problem,’ Susan once said to me, when she found me weeping because of something Em had said. It became a way of escaping the sharpness of her tongue. But it also became a way of escaping her as a person. We could always dismiss what she was saying as an emanation of the madness, not an insult or a hurt or a real critique to be taken seriously. We often did dismiss what she said, but more often than not, it was self-defence.

  And there were times when all defences failed.

  I come home from a bad day at my first job. I’m twenty and I’ve been assigned a story. At my position on the totem pole, the story is not about what I think of the issues involved, it is about what other people think. My job is to make them think aloud and put it all down on paper, and to that end, I must call and ask them for their time. But no one is available. One is out of town and nobody knows how he can be reached. The next is not at home and when I call his office he’s ‘not on his seat’. The secretary of a third appears to have put his phone permanently off the hook. I call and call and all the time I’m aware that there’s a whole beast of a machine waiting for copy. The desk, the designers, the editor, all looking at you as if you’re shirking if you stop calling even for a minute. I need quotes and the only quote I’ve managed to get is from the B-List, an add-on remark which is not without value but only when the experts from the A-List, the politicians, the CEOs, the film stars, have spoken. And none of them have.

  When I’m home, I’m hoping to set it all down, though I know failure is never shed so easily. Victories evanesce quickly enough. Failure hangs around you like a cloak and everyone is kind and pretends not to see it.

  Not Em.

  She wades into the thick of it.

  ‘Bad day at the office? I can smell it on you. Now there’s a man beaten by the system I would say to the bishop, if there were a bishop sitting next to me. But this ain’t no bishop, this is my son and he’s no great big ball of gas today. Give us a hug.’

  I give her a hug. She reeks of beedi smoke and hair oil and Iodex.

  ‘You in pain?’

  ‘Pain pain go away, come again some other day. Little Johnny wants to play with himself.’

  I don’t want a nasty riff on nursery rhyme. I want tea and sympathy.

  ‘I asked you a question.’

  ‘No, you did not. You made a statement.’

  ‘Okay, let’s go back a bit. Are you in pain?’

  She strikes a pose, her wrist to her forehead. ‘You cannot imagine the torment.’

  Then she peers at me.

  ‘No pain, no. I just ate some Iodex.’

  I don’t know how to respond. She could be joking.

  ‘Open your mouth.’

  ‘Ha ha ha,’ she mocks. But her mouth is open and at the back, I can see a black smear. I reach in with a finger and dab at it. I sniff. Iodex.

  ‘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.’

  There were times when I could see a lot of my mother in the body whom I met at home. There were times when there was very little of her. This was one of those times. She was a parody of herself. The mania had taken over but it was a sly episode. She was sitting there, smoking as if she were ordinarily manic. Whatever that means. But she wasn’t. She was into pica, the desire to eat extraordinary stuff, and that was unprecedented. She was suggesting my death and that was also something she wouldn’t normally do. I wanted to reach out to her, even though I knew from previous experience that this was futile. I wanted to understand her and her predicament because I was her son and I loved her with a helpless corroded love. I wanted to but I could only shout.

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about? Why can’t you answer straight, you piece of shit?’

  Em opened her eyes wide. I looked into my own eyes.

  ‘You’re angry. Ooh, my little p’ecious boy is angry. He’s angry. I’m frightened.’

  The mockery was apparent and hideous – she mimed trembling – but it reminded me that this was part of her illness. I tried to calm down.

  ‘I’ve had a tough day at work . . .’

  ‘Ooh, he’s had a tough day at work. And for what? For some three thousand rupees. Can’t buy much with three thousand rupees. Can’t go far with three thousand rupees. Can’t even live on his own with three thousand rupees.’

  I could not remember ever feeling so violated and hurt.

  ‘Shut up,’ I said and I could hear my voice beginning to tremble with tears. ‘Shut up, you disgusting bitch.’

  ‘Do you want a cuppa?’ she asked, suddenly herself.

  ‘Are you fucking mad?’ I was almost beside myself.

  ‘Shhh,’ she said and suddenly picked up the book in which she wrote letters to people, letters that never got posted unless Susan read them and decided that they would not hurt the recipients.

  ‘They’re listening.’

  ‘Who?’

  She rolled her eyes and looked desperate.

  ‘Who?’ I asked again. ‘Who’s listening?’

  Now her expression suggested that she had transcended despair. Now she was willing to play some mad endgame which she thought I had inaugurated.

  ‘It began when you were a baby. You pointed to the fan and I knew that they were there, that they were listening. You found them first.’

  ‘Are they listening now?’

  She rolled her eyes again and then, as if she couldn’t bear the whole thing, the stupidity of her son, the pressure of the performance, she shouted, ‘Go, then. Go. Do your damnedest. But if you touch one hair on my family’s head, you’ll regret it.’

  Then she smiled and said, ‘Can the disgusting bitch make you some tea? You must be tired.’

  The next morning I found a note under my pillow.

  I have to get you all out of here. If they come for us, they must not get us all. I have to drive you out. You have to go. That’s why I said what I said. I’m very proud of you but they must not know. If they think I hate you, they may spare you. Go. Go away. Himself and I can manage. We’ll go down together, in flames. We can take it. We’ve lived and loved. You haven’t. I want you to live and love but when you do, they can get you. Susan, they can’t touch, she’s pure of heart. She can stay. But you must go. Soon. But wait for my birthday. And get me a Cadbury’s chocolate. Cad equals Catholic. Bury all the Catholics. Don’t tell anyone.

  The note was signed ‘The Disgusting Bitch’.

  I didn’t know what to make of it. Em was asleep and so we were all very quiet that morning. I went to work and tried hard not to consider all the issues that were unresolved. When I got home, Em was gone. She had been hospitalized again, at her own suggestion. Susan was with her and The Big Hoom was taking a nap, probably
worn out by the hospital thing. When we had dinner together, I suggested to The Big Hoom that I move out. He continued eating quietly as he thought about it. Then he looked at me carefully.

  ‘It might be a good idea,’ he said. ‘Can you afford it?’

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  He smiled, but it was brief and as much grimace as smile. Then he said, ‘Then the question doesn’t arise, does it?’

  ‘But you’re not opposed to the idea?’

  He put down his spoon and looked at me steadily. He said, ‘You will always be welcome to live here. It is your home as much as it is anyone else’s. But if you want to move, do it when you can, not when you want to.’

  As a prescription, that wasn’t a bad one: when you can, not when you want to.

  When I went to visit Em in hospital, her eyes were aquaria, full of strange living forms and artificial additions. She had finished cleaning the lady in the next bed who kept spitting up her food. But she was not yet completely there.

  ‘I hear the words of a song and the music of another. They play together like children. Like children entering the kingdom of heaven. How much chocolate can there be in heaven? The food of the Gods and the shit of the Gods. For me, the food. For Mae, the shit. She wants her gold back, poor darling. I wonder when it went. Where it went. How it went. Why it went, we know. Why, Sister Sarah, why? What it went does not work. Do you follow me?’

  She was free associating, gliding through language.

  ‘I follow.’

  ‘Oh no, you don’t. Following me will bring you here and here is where the mad people are. You don’t have to be mad. I went mad so that you don’t have to be. You don’t have to do anything now that I am the disgusting bitch.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’