Em and the Big Hoom

by Jerry Pinto

  Em had no recollections of being pregnant.

  ‘I don’t remember feeling much until I couldn’t get into a rather nice pink skirt I had. Then I thought, “Oh, that’s the baby,” and wondered if I should give up working and all that. One cigarette later, everything was fine.’

  ‘You were smoking when you were pregnant?’

  ‘And did it harm you? Or Lao-Tsu? Not as far as I can see. You were a big fat lump and my poor vagina was never the same, though Il Santo never complained.’

  ‘Em.’

  ‘It’s true. Natural birth was all the thing and the whole ward at St Elizabeth’s was filled with women in pain. “Nurse, give me another Miltown,” an Anglo-Indian lady would moan every ten minutes from the next bed.’

  ‘They gave her sedatives?’

  ‘Oh no, they didn’t, the dirty bitches. They thought you should suffer. I remember a priest coming in on Sunday and reading out of the Genesis. It had to do with Adam and Eve and their apple. Apparently, we were supposed to suffer. Birth was supposed to be painful and we were suffering in expiation of Eve’s sin. Adam got away, of course. Men do.’

  The Book of Genesis is quite clear on the subject. The Lord God himself weighs in with ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.’ When anaesthesia was invented, the Church ranged itself against the use of painkillers in the maternity ward. That would be going against the curse of God Himself. It took Queen Victoria’s insistence on a squirt of nitrous oxide, before doctors – and mothers too – decided that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to lessen the worst pain known to humankind.

  ‘My story sort of ends there,’ Em said. ‘What’s to tell about the rest? You came along and I became a Mudd-dha.’

  That word again. That venom. Maybe they should have thought about it, not just had a child because everyone did.

  ‘I didn’t think it was such a big deal. I don’t know if LOS felt the same way about becoming a Dad. Not that he wasn’t a complete seahorse. I don’t think a man could have been happier when he had his first child. And then when the second one came along . . .’

  Me.

  ‘ . . . he was over the moon. Then I slung my lasso at him and dropped him down to earth. But he took that in his stride as well. I told him, “Put me away.”’

  I remember one of the many days on which she had made the plea.

  There was an account in the dim grey bank down the road, the cheque book locked up in the Godrej cupboard which sang and creaked whenever anyone tried to open it – ‘Our built-in burglar alarm,’ Em called it. The account was operated by Em and The Big Hoom, and it was money to be used ‘in an emergency’. We knew without being told what ‘emergency’ meant: something happening to The Big Hoom. It was sacred money because, to Susan and me, at least, it carried the terror of being alone in the world. It was the worst possible nightmare we could conceive because we had no idea what we would do if we had to do it all on our own: monitor her pills, decide when she went to hospital, hold on to her life with a daily promise, pay her bills, take her raging or desperate calls, earn a living.

  And one day, the truth came out.

  From time to time, The Big Hoom would make Susan and me sit down and try to understand how the world of money worked. He would talk us through the notion of the stock market and the interim dividend, the public provident fund and the fixed deposit. He would make us fill out an application form for a bank loan or for the initial public offering of a company. It was his way of trying to prepare us for a world without him. The last step of this would be an explanation of the bank accounts: what was where and how it was to be used. He would explain about capital and running expenses and the need to forecast our expenses. He would show us how he did it, with a large heading called ‘Imelda’ under which he placed forty per cent of the annual income.

  ‘Forty per cent?’

  ‘It’s gone above that some years,’ he said briefly. I knew which years. The suicide years. ‘But mostly, it comes in a little less and allows for some flexibility.’

  And finally we would come to the bank down the road.

  ‘This is to be kept in reserve,’ he would say. ‘For emergencies.’

  At which point Em would say something like, ‘Over my dead body, please.’

  This time, she was silent.

  Then, as if girding herself up, she said, ‘There’s nothing left in that account.’

  There was a moment of silence.

  ‘What?’ His voice was ordinary, his everyday voice.

  ‘I took it all out.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He got up and went into the bedroom. In ten minutes, he came out dressed. He left without saying a word.

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Em.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I don’t have to answer to you,’ she said.

  This was true, of course. It wasn’t our money. But it was, in a way. In a terrible future way. It was difficult to point that out to her.

  ‘I hate this whole money shit,’ said Em. ‘Do you remember that Lawrence poem? You studied it in college. Something about a pound.’

  ‘The Madness of Money’ by D. H. Lawrence. I knew it well. We knew all our poems well. We learnt them by heart and we learnt the summaries by heart. We did not learn anything about poetry, but we could tell a metaphor from a metonymy. And I could quote at random:

  ‘I doubt if any man living hands out a pound note without a pang;/ and a real tremor, if he hands out a ten-pound note.’

  ‘So,’ said Em, as soon as I had finished, ‘what if I was testing myself? What if I thought, I shall write a cheque without a pang?’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘No. But I’m going to see my mother.’

  ‘I don’t think you should,’ said Susan.

  ‘I think I should. Suppose he kills me?’ and here she gave a delicate stage shudder. We could see how worried she was, not because she really thought he would kill her, but because she had done something very wrong. Yet she was making it a performance, which was annoying.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Susan. ‘I’ll make a cup of tea.’

  ‘I love you forever,’ said Em. ‘But this is not the time for tea. It is time to write notes that say, “All is Discovered. Let us Flee.”’

  ‘Who to?’ I asked.

  ‘To Mae, who else?’

  ‘You gave her the money?’

  ‘I will not endure this interrogation from my own children,’ she said. ‘Oh where are my beedis?’

  Susan pointed out that Em had them, as she always did, in the pocket of her housecoat. Em lit one and tried to hold on to being aggrieved but the pose cracked.

  Finally, she said: ‘Should I run or should I stay?’

  ‘Where would you run to?’ asked Susan logically.

  ‘To my mother,’ Em replied.

  ‘Don’t be childish. That’s not even running.’

  ‘What would Angela Brazil have you do?’ I asked.

  It was a stupid question but the Anglophile in my mother brightened.

  ‘Well, I think I should Stay the Course,’ she said. ‘And I should Face up to the Consequences. Then maybe I should put a gun in my mouth and shoot myself before I am blackballed at the club. But I don’t even have much luck at that.’

  The wait wore us down, but in the end, she did not run. The Big Hoom came back and said nothing. Em tried to match his silence but could not. She kept breaking down and asking his forgiveness.

  ‘There’s nothing to forgive,’ he said each time and his voice was normal and terrifying.

  After a little while when the pressure got to her, she changed around and started saying that it was her money too because the account had been in her name.

  ‘If you see it that way,’ he sa
id.

  Time inched along. I remember trying to read and failing. Susan was working on a crossword. Only The Big Hoom seemed to be going about as if nothing had happened. When you live in a small house, your lives intersect all the time. There’s no privacy, no way to conceal what is happening. Neither Susan nor I ever stormed off to our rooms and slammed the door and locked the world out, because neither of us had a room. Our lives were contained in a single bedroom and a single living room. There was a kitchen too and a toilet separated from the bathroom – which was an inordinate luxury – and four lives had to be managed within those walls. We had to live and love and deceive within earshot of each other.

  ‘I can’t tell you where the money went,’ said Em defiantly.

  ‘I can’t remember asking,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be sarky,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ she said. She even meant it but it broke the storm.

  ‘You’re sorry? You’re sorry? Is that all you can say? You break the faith and you say you’re sorry?’

  ‘What faith?’

  ‘The faith I have in you as a mother. The faith I have in you as a wife. The faith I have in you that you might have shifted some of your allegiance to this family.’

  ‘I have. I have. Oh why didn’t you listen to me and put me away when I told you to?’

  It seemed like we were listening to an argument that was old and worn, being dragged out into the open. But I could not remember hearing this argument before. Could they have had it when we were asleep? I didn’t think so. Both Susan and I were light sleepers, attuned to Em’s emotional changes. If she started walking about too much, we woke up. When she spoke, we woke up. When she was lonely in the late night or in the early watches of the morning, all she had to do was start talking ‘to herself’ and one of us would be up sooner or later, crabby and irritable. ‘Why did you get up?’ she would ask disingenuously. ‘You need your sleep.’ ‘Shut up,’ Susan or I would say. ‘Make tea.’ And she would and we would begin to wake up and begin to talk. Sometimes, if we were very tired, she would send us back to bed and pretend to sleep herself.

  During exam time, it was the unwritten rule that The Big Hoom would do the honours. Perhaps that was when they had discussed money?

  Now The Big Hoom was looking at her in a way we had never seen. Not indulgently, not as a responsible brother looking at a younger sibling, not as the lover who seemed to ask for nothing in return, but as a trusting man injured in friendship, and surprised by the hurt.

  ‘You have?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘In what way have I not?’ demanded Em, though she sounded uncertain.

  ‘If I had fallen down dead and you had needed some money, what would you have done?’

  ‘I’d have asked Gunwantiben.’

  There was a moment of silence. It was chilling.

  ‘You would? You would go out and beg?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be begging. It would be a loan.’

  ‘A loan? A loan like the ones your family has taken? It has a history of loans. And everyone plays along when they actually know that you people are begging.’

  ‘Begging?’

  ‘What do you think it is when you take a loan, then you take another loan, and you pay some of the first loan with the second? What do you think it is when someone gives you money and then writes it off? It’s called begging.’

  ‘Gunwantiben would not . . .’

  ‘I am not talking about Gunwantiben. I am talking about you. I am talking about you turning your children into beggars. I am talking about how you cannot be trusted to keep even a single account inviolate.’

  ‘I needed the money.’

  ‘You needed the money?’

  And then he suddenly looked across at the two of us transfixed by this discussion and seemed to decide that it was not worth it.

  ‘I am sure you needed the money,’ he said, without expression.

  ‘Don’t act like that.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He was slowly packing it away.

  ‘You’re shutting me out.’

  ‘Am I?’ his voice was pleasant now. Almost. ‘And since you cannot tell me why you needed the money, what are you doing?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s different. I think it’s a matter of honour.’

  ‘Is it? And does your code of honour allow you to steal from your children?’

  ‘For the love of Mike,’ Em snarled. ‘It’s not as if they’re likely to starve.’

  After that, The Big Hoom would not be drawn. Finally, Em decided that she had had enough. She walked out of the house and went to her mother.

  We watched, almost without breathing, until he followed soon after.

  They were back an hour later. They seemed to have resolved the money thing.

  I had always been puzzled by how completely uninterested Imelda’s parents seemed to have been in getting her married. But of course there had been a sound economic reason. She was the only earning member of the family.

  Money had always been a problem, even when it was not supposed to be:

  Finally had it out with them. What am I supposed to take with me? I mean, I know dowry is wrong and all that, but what happens to me if I go with empty hands? Surely, there is some money left over from ten-twelve years of working. But there isn’t. Mae simply burst into tears and Daddy went to bed and turned his face to the wall. At five o’clock. Finally, as if by magic, as if summoned, Tia Madrinha turned up and said that Agostinho was a good man and had not asked so we should all say a decade of the rosary in thanks.

  What power there is in a decade of the rosary! (Oddly, we had to say it to a sorrowful mystery because it is a Friday – although we were saying it in rejoicementation, which should be the opposite of lamentation.) Daddy woke up. Mae agreed to let me make a cup of tea to cheer her up and Tia Madrinha took off her own gold chain and put it around my neck.

  ‘You are my god-daughter,’ she said sternly. ‘I should not wear a gold chain if I have not given you one.’

  But she looked bereaved almost as soon as she had done this and an imp of mischief made me want to take her gift seriously. But there had been enough tears and drama for several lifetimes so in the spirit of the thing, I took it off and put it back on her neck and said something about how the thought was gift enough. That settled that and I said I wanted to go to church and make my confession which was of course a way to simply rush off and be alone for a bit.

  Took myself to Byculla. The area around the elephants is very soothing. I wish I were an elephant. I would be so composed.

  But of course a walk in the maidan outside the zoological gardens in Byculla can only take you so far. After a while, she stopped walking. ‘Almost fell into the arms of some young men,’ she said.

  ‘They might have enjoyed that,’ I suggested.

  ‘You think?’ she said. ‘They were kissing. Homos, I think.’

  She took the bus to Dadar.

  ‘Jovial Cottage. What a terrible name. I couldn’t bear it. I kept thinking of back-slapping drunken men and false smiles. I don’t even know why they would bring Jupiter into it.’

  ‘You’re losing me.’

  ‘Jovial? Jovial. Jove. Jove is Jupiter. Would you name your home for Jupiter? He seems to have been a thoroughly terrible fellow. Kept sleeping with his sisters and then cut off his father’s balls and threw them into the sea. Can you imagine?’

  Somewhat startled by the arrival of his fiancée in a state close to despair, Augustine rose to the occasion.

  ‘He didn’t even allow me to come in. Bad for my reputation, he told me. Instead, we went off to have tea. I don’t remember where we went but I remember thinking that it was as bad for my reputation. After all, you didn’t sit in an Irani restaurant with a man.’

  ‘Not even a
fiancé?’

  ‘Not even. The rule was pretty clear. If you were a woman, you had better be with your father or your husband in an Irani.’

  It was here that Augustine made one of those incidental remarks that would take root in his wife’s head.

  ‘I don’t have a dowry,’ she said baldly when they were served.

  ‘I don’t care,’ he said.

  ‘Your family will.’

  ‘They won’t.’

  ‘How can you say that?’

  ‘Because I’ll tell them that you’ll bring your dowry every month.’

  This was true. At that point in their lives, Imelda – employed at the American Consulate – was earning more than Augustine. His pay was linked to the sales of heavy machinery and the industry was in a slump. It would recover soon enough – India’s tryst with gigantism meant that someone somewhere always needed another large chunk of metal – but till it did, she was outperforming him.

  He didn’t know it but Imelda was equally reassured and horrified by what he had said. She worked because she had to. There was no question about that in her mind. The family relied on her salary. If she did not earn, they would not eat, not eat well at any rate. So she earned. But she had not considered what work meant after marriage. In her diary, she wrote:

  He said it as if he thought I was going to work for the rest of my life. I suppose I will but it gives me the megrims, as someone in a G[eorgette] H[eyer] novel would say. Not the work, actually, I don’t mind that. Not even those darned reports with their pages and pages of numbers and the carbon copies and all the rest of that. Not even those confidential reports. I will never forgive William Turtle Turner for that stupid remark, ‘She does not keep her desk very clean.’ As if I were a slattern and my desk a pigsty. (Is that a mixed metaphor?)

  It’s just the . . .

  She seems to have cut herself off there. But the problem was not really about working. It was about what would happen to her salary. She had assumed that it would continue to go to her mother. Augustine had assumed that it would go into the common kitty of their marriage. The next entry in the diary says as much: