Em and the Big Hoom

by Jerry Pinto

  But from what I have read – and I must say that Three to Get Married was not very explicit on the subject and, despite all the fierce warnings from the pulpit, nor was Alberto Moravia – it seems as if the whole penetration thing might be more fun for you than for me.

  Please read this letter seriously. I can almost imagine you smiling here. I feel warm thinking about your smile, but you must not imagine me smiling. You must imagine that my eyes are meeting yours directly and I am refusing to smile. (I am the greatest hypocri-sissy in the world.)

  So: what if I don’t take to the thing? How often will you expect it? Will I be within my rights to refuse? I asked Father Fabregad but he said, ‘That will settle itself by and by,’ and went all twinkly and rosy and Portugoosey on me. Though why I should ask a celibate man what a woman’s rights are, beats even me. But who else, I wondered, and that’s when I thought, well, there’s him to whom . . . He’s the most concerned in this affair, after all.

  I will never speak to you again if you mention this letter to me or if you do not reply in full and with frankness.

  With all that my mind and spirit can muster,

  Imelda

  Only recently, after some years of an on-again-off-again search, I found a second-hand copy of Three to Get Married. It’s a book by Fulton Sheen, now Servant of God. Written in the beautifully expressive prose of the pulpit, it is quite clear about certain things:

  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.

  It’s easy to mock. No organic functions isolated from the soul? You fart and your soul knows what you ate at the last meal? Your hair falls and your soul clucks its tongue over your failure to use conditioner after a shampoo? And the book never mentions the genitals at all. Nor does it mention the word orgasm. It is an abstract work as befits the idea of a man, a woman and a god getting married; it is full of paradoxes which stop short of the Chestertonian. Yet, it was the book that was given to almost every affianced couple of the Roman Catholic persuasion, and it had a lasting effect on many.

  Thirty years after Em was a teenager, we were being told the story of the Pieta in school by the Father Henrys and the Sister Marias: Michelangelo was asked why his Virgin was so young and beautiful even as she held the broken body of her thirty-three-year-old son in her arms. And he is supposed to have said: ‘Do you not know that chaste women stay fresh much more than those who are not chaste? How much more in the case of the Virgin, who had never experienced the least lascivious desire that might change her body?’ Even in the 1980s, when I entered the ‘dangerous’ period in which I might violate the temple of the Lord, Sin was about sex; Sanctity was about chastity. Imelda must have been prey to far greater fears and shame in her youth. It is a small miracle that she wrote Augustine the kind of letter she did.

  But the reply she received had all the hallmarks of the man who became The Big Hoom. He got straight to the point and got past it.

  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.

  I showed Em the letters. She read them both and began to cry, but only out of one eye. (‘I gave up crying from both eyes after Vietnam,’ she said, and meant it.)

  ‘It was the first time,’ she said after a bit, ‘that I knew there was an alternative. And only after that, I knew how scared I was of the whole sex thing. We had been told it was the gateway to hell, that we would lose everything if we went all the way. We were told that men were dangerous. Unpredictable. Violent. You could never be sure what would happen if you were alone with them. They could not be relied on if they had had something to drink. A girl had to be ready for anything. Then, as soon as you were all ready to get married, the same people told you: close the door and be his wife.’

  ‘Have sex with him, you mean.’

  ‘That was only one part of it. In those days, it wasn’t even a problem if he gave you a slap or two. Everyone gets a couple, they’d say. They don’t know their own strength, that’s why he broke your jaw, how else is he to make sure you respect him, what else can a man do . . .’

  She stopped. Perhaps she saw something on my face.

  ‘No, no, not him. He never did. Though God knows I gave him enough cause. Do you remember Black Pants?’

  9.

  ‘You won’t do anything silly?’

  ‘Black Pants?’

  ‘You should remember. You were there.’

  ‘I was where?’

  ‘No, maybe you were too little. It was the time that the fan was sending messages.’

  The fan had been sending messages for a while. Often, these were innocuous messages that had very little impact on the family. The fan – or the people in the fan, we were never sure since the singular and the plural were both used – might dictate a jam sandwich to be consumed at three o’clock in the morning or the washing of the curtains a few days after they had been hung. But this time, the message was clear. Take your son and leave the house.

  She did.

  ‘I think it was some time in the afternoon. You didn’t want to go but you came anyway because in those days you followed me around with a sad look in your eyes. Did I ever tell you that you broke my heart?’

  ‘Repeatedly.’

  ‘I hope you carry some guilt around.’

  ‘You must stop reading those American magazines.’

  ‘Who brings them home in the first place?’

  Mother and son wander out on to the road. For a moment, Em seems uncertain about which way she should turn but she knows she will have to move quickly or the friendly neighbourhood watch that keeps an eye on her, an informal eye out for her or for her children, will be alerted. When she begins to walk, she’s sure. This is the path they intend her to take. She knows almost every time she takes a wrong turn that she’s going the wrong way. The boy tires quickly since he has been promised nothing. There is no treat, no film, no circus, no cream cake, no friendly aunt, nothing at the end of this endless walk in the sun.

  And he is barefoot.

  ‘Black Pants pointed it out to me.’

  Black Pants stops the woman and the child and asks, ‘Where are his shoes?’

  ‘Shoes?’ Em asks.

  ‘The boy. He will get blisters.’

  Em looks down. The boy is accustomed to being barefoot. His mother has never seen the point of footwear and has let him run around rough. But it is hot today and the ground beneath his feet has begun to sear through his tough soles, and he is hopping from foot to foot.

  ‘I will carry him,’ says Black Pants and picks the boy up. The boy whines and squirms and twists and pulls at his own hair and knuckles his eyes. He is accustomed to this being enough. He gets his way with this much.

  ‘I took you from him though you were too big for anyone to carry. But the voices were still there. They were shouting now. I could not make out what they were saying. It was all very confusing and in the middle of it, I found us in a restaurant and Black Pants was having tea and you were crying, a-haan, a-haan, a-haan. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to go home. But I
had ordered something. I don’t know what. I didn’t have money. An ice cream came for you. You refused it. I knew then that it was poisoned and they had come for you.’

  The woman is now thoroughly confused. The voices are not so loud now but they have decided that she must pay for not listening attentively enough. Now, they speak in one voice but they speak in code. ‘Fate is a sea without shore,’ they say. ‘Love and Death have dealt shocks,’ they say. ‘How did you come to eat your ring finger in a sandwich?’ they ask. Sometimes they sing. They sing fragments of hymns and Hindi film songs. She knows they are Hindi film songs because she knows the tunes; she does not know the words. There are times when she believes that she might be able to help everyone if she knew the words.

  ‘Yes, I know Hindi,’ the man is saying.

  ‘I can teach you Hindi in one hour,’ the man says.

  ‘But I am leaving town tomorrow,’ the man says.

  ‘He can play as we learn,’ the man says.

  ‘I have a room nearby,’ the man says.

  She does not want to go. The voices are very quiet now. They are watching her very carefully. This will decide what will happen next. They have never done this before. They have always been clear about what they thought, who should be in the papers the next morning, what she can no longer say. The terrifying thing about them is that, today, she can’t tell what mood they are in. She can’t tell anything except that she knows now that Black Pants wants to have sex with her. As they walk, he is touching her wherever he can.

  ‘Is this what you want?’ she asks them aloud. ‘Is this what it will take?’

  There is no answer. Just a whispering. No, not even whispering; they’re rustling, like satin handkerchiefs left too long in a box.

  Black Pants is urging her on faster as if he has caught some of her anxieties, her ambivalences.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she says to her husband, in her head. She thinks of him and something warm breaks through her eyelids. She is crying, from both eyes. Her son notices. He screams now, screams and vomits. This is not an ordinary child’s crying but the sound of a child in despair. She sets him down to speak to him but immediately a crowd has gathered. The boy is struggling with her, trying to hit her because he is now on the verge of hysterics. The man tries to intervene. The boy’s screams become shrieks. 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. It can disappear almost as instantaneously.

  The crowd sizes up the situation immediately. Kidnapping, the crowd thinks. The woman has kidnapped the boy. She looks respectable but the boy is barefoot. He must have been playing around the house. She must have taken advantage of him, lured him away with some sweets or a poison. That’s why he has vomited. They do not know her here, not her or the boy. One of the women pulls her hair. Another slaps her face. The boy goes berserk with grief. He tries to throw himself at the women who would be his avenging angels. They think he is seeking protection. One of them sweeps him up in her arms. He begins to wail in earnest, sure that he is going to be separated from his mother. Black Pants slips away through the crowd.

  ‘How old was I?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe two or three.’

  The women take her to the police station.

  ‘Didn’t you explain?’

  ‘I was trying to tell them about the voices.’

  ‘Why not tell them I was your son?’

  ‘I didn’t think of that.’

  At the police station, Em gives the inspector-in-charge a number to call. An hour or so later, The Big Hoom is in the police station.

  ‘He must have been in a great mood.’

  ‘Oh don’t. He was. But he couldn’t say a word to them.’

  I knew why he couldn’t. Somewhere, there was a file. Somewhere, there was a file with a bus conductor in lotus pose, perhaps. Money had changed hands and the police had promised that the file had been wiped clean but no one could be sure. Suicide was a crime, the only one where you could be punished for failing. The Indian Penal Code lays it down clearly under Section 309: ‘Whoever attempts to commit suicide and does any act towards the commission of such offence, shall be punished with simple imprisonment for term which may extend to one year (or with fine, or with both).’

  So you could be miserable enough to kill yourself but the law will pay no heed to misery. It’s an old law, a colonizer’s law for the colonized, and it’s not such a stupid law as it looks. How else to throw a troublemaker, fasting unto death, into jail? How else to deal with the likes of Gandhi?

  But then, what of the Jain monks who simply stop eating and drinking? What of Vinobha Bhave, who decided it was time and went peaceably? The law could turn a blind eye if it wanted.

  In Em’s case, it had done that, helped by a little of The Big Hoom’s hard-earned money.

  But it might change its mind this time. We simply went home.

  • • •

  A few days later, we got a telephone. This in itself was a magnificent feat. A telephone line was not an easy thing to acquire. It required intervention at the ministerial level, even if you had a valid reason, such as a ‘heart patient’ in the house. Few people had phones and those who did often found themselves with a dead instrument. This gave rise to some dramatic protests such as the instrument being carried in a funeral procession through the streets.

  ‘He made me swear to call him the next time the voices spoke to me,’ Em said.

  This fragile thing, the word of a woman who was mentally ill, was what kept the family going. We could not afford full-time nursing. And even when we could and did have a nurse, things still went very badly wrong. A nurse had been present when Em had slit her wrists, a nurse who had fallen asleep on the one afternoon when she should not have been sleeping.

  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.’

  He would hug her and for a moment, her brow would clear, but soon he had to be gone and she would be shivering and hugging herself and asking for another Depsonil or death or a beedi. Even smoking was not a pleasure on her bad days. She would inhale deeply as if looking for something in the first fumes and when she did not find it, the despair would be back. The surcease was for a second only and after a couple of puffs, she would drop the beedi, literally drop it, sometimes burning her clothes, often letting it extinguish on the floor. The good thing about beedis is that they go out almost immediately.

  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?

  10.

  ‘All is Discovered. Let us Flee.’

  When Em and The Big Hoom set forth on their new conjoined life, the Republic was relatively young and its coffers were empty. Salaries were low, prices were high and the middle class was expected to do its bit by saving as much as it could. Taxes were high and given the foreign exchange regulations and the exchange rate, no one thought of going abroad.

  And yet, from all that I could gather, they had been hap
py. Improbably happy. Their world was clearly vulnerable, as if everyone was walking a tightrope over a smoking volcano. The ship of state could have foundered anytime, and repeatedly, plunging them into an abyss of debt. But none of that seems to reflect in their small black-and-white pictures of the time. Most of the pictures are pretty standard, taken at office parties, the occasional picnic and church weddings. Some, however, are odd: Em trying to smile in a silk sari; The Big Hoom at his desk in the office.

  Who could have thought of taking that latter picture? It wasn’t as if there were instamatic cameras in every purse or pocket. Film was rare and often had to be bought on the black market. You didn’t just take a picture. You composed it with care. And that meant you took the kind of picture that everyone else was taking. This kind of picture, man at desk in office, isn’t the kind I have seen in many other people’s albums. Perhaps it has something to do with my father being the first generation of office workers in a family of peasants. It might well have been taken as a way of proving something to the village.

  Those pictures tell a story. Imelda and Augustine were part of the dosa-thin middle class of the 1960s. They dressed like other young middle-class Indians of their background, they went to work in respectable, stable establishments and socialized in respectable, stable places. They also did their duties. They opened postal savings accounts and recurring deposits, put aside money for medical emergencies, bought units from the Unit Trust, had babies.

  Susan was born two years into the marriage. I could not believe they had had the courage.

  ‘Why would it take courage? I wasn’t mad then,’ said Em.

  ‘Not that. Just the expense.’

  ‘It wasn’t expensive, because it wasn’t a luxury. You got married. You had children. This was assumed. This was what people did. If you didn’t do it, it was because you had a problem and people began to suggest adoption. We didn’t buy a car because that would have been very expensive.’