Em and the Big Hoom

by Jerry Pinto

  My salary is my dowry. And I can’t see how there can be anything wrong with that – except that nothing should be anyone’s dowry. No one thinks much if one asks the boy what his prospects are. If money is not important on the girl’s side then money should not be important on the boy’s side either, not in this day and age at least.

  Asked Mae.

  Came right out and asked her the question: How will you manage when I am married and living in his house?

  She said, We will see. This means nothing. I wish I could get her to see that this means nothing but there was no getting anything else out of her. It was ever so. I must live with uncertainty and I don’t think I can handle it.

  Until the time she married, Imelda had suffered the deprivations of never having enough money. She also never had to worry about how to spend it. That was someone else’s department. She earned it and handed it over, every last paisa of it, to her mother. Augustine had never been able to understand how Imelda could do that.

  ‘But don’t you want to keep some of it?’

  ‘No,’ said Imelda simply.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  It was a simple, uninflected response.

  ‘Aren’t there things you want to buy?’

  ‘Yes,’ Imelda said. ‘But most of the things I want to buy, I’d never get from my salary so there’s no point thinking about them. I want a boat, for instance. I’m not going to get a boat on my salary.’

  ‘So dates.’

  ‘Yes. I can buy dates.’

  ‘But only if you walk home.’

  ‘I like walking home.’

  ‘You sound like some kind of saint,’ Augustine said, exasperated.

  ‘Do saints want boats? Maybe St Christopher. And maybe St John would have wanted a date or two when he was eating locusts and wild honey.’

  ‘You sound as if you’ve worked it all out.’

  ‘I haven’t,’ she replied. ‘I don’t understand money.’

  ‘Means? What’s there to understand?’

  ‘I don’t know how to run a house. I don’t know how to budget. I don’t know whether one should buy five kilos of rice and one kilo of daal or one kilo of rice and five kilos of daal. I don’t know what a good price for pomfret is. I don’t know whether we pay the methrani too much or too little or what we tip her for Christmas. I know we don’t tip for Diwali, which is something, I suppose. I don’t know if I get a good salary or not. See? There’s lots you have to know to understand money.’

  ‘And so you just ignore it?’

  ‘I’m like Sherlock Holmes. I won’t crowd my attic with that which does not concern me.’

  ‘Even if it means refusing to grow up?’

  ‘Is that what I seem like to you?’

  ‘I think you can’t be grown up if you don’t take charge of your economic life.’

  ‘Yes, that might be one way of looking at it,’ Imelda conceded. ‘But I think of my way as The Way of Water.’

  Augustine shook his head. ‘I should never have given you that Watts book.’

  ‘This isn’t about Zen,’ said Imelda. ‘I didn’t even read that book. Honestly. I don’t understand Zen. It seems if you don’t answer properly, or you’re rude, people get enlightened.’

  ‘Why are we talking about Zen? We were talking about you.’

  ‘Couldn’t be. I wouldn’t have been distracted from such a delightful topic.’

  ‘We were talking about your problem with money.’

  ‘No, we were talking about your problem with my money.’

  ‘And you said you were like water.’

  ‘I am like water. I flow past money.’

  ‘The lady doth protest . . .’

  ‘If you say that, I’ll get up and leave in a pale pink huff,’ said Imelda.

  But Augustine was right. If this was how their conversation about money went – and this was how Em recalled it to me – then she was indeed protesting too much. Because there were times when her mother’s inability to handle a budget could irk her:

  Once again, I must do without. I don’t understand why. We got you a dress in November, is all Mae will say. November will be my birthday until I die. Christmas will also fall in December until I die. (Unless there’s a cataclysm in the Holy Roman Catholic Church or the Gregorian calendar or both. God forbid. Though they might make it easier and turn all the months into thirty-day months and declare a five-day holiday with no dates at the end of each year. I wish I knew mathematics. Then I would know if I would still be a Sagittarian. Or has that something to do with the stars and where the sun is? Must ask Angel Ears.)

  But when I said I had spotted a really nice piece of silk which I thought would do well for an Xmas festivity thingy, I was told in no uncertain terms that I must do without. I feel like the March sisters: Christmas isn’t Christmas without any new clothes.

  What does she do with my money?

  I feel mean asking. Like a man in a melodrama. I can’t bring myself to ask. Angel Ears says I earn a handsome salary and that should keep us nicely. But he doesn’t know that I have to darn my underwear in the most alarming places and wear the same shoes for months after I can feel the road beneath my feet. But I feel if I do ask, she might well say, ‘I spend it on all of us. Why can’t you earn some more?’ How would I do that? None of the AmConGen girls seem to need more than one job and they spend like sailors on shore leave. In ASL, it was different. Liddy, poor duck, gave tuitions to some Marwari kids. English? Or English and History, I think. And there was Gertie who stitched her own clothes and wore them with such an air that you felt you should ask her to make you up something, even if you knew that she wasn’t very good. I gave her that lovely floral cotton thing and she made it so deedy, I never had the heart to wear it, even after I took off a whole cartload of satin bows and ornamental buttons. I just told her I had got fat and I needed to slim down. I will get fat at this rate. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

  Acting on his idea that she was protesting too much, Augustine handed Imelda his first pay after their marriage. Only, she had got her first salary too and had planned on handing it over to him.

  I remember The Big Hoom telling us, ‘She looked like I’d dropped a snake into her lap.’

  ‘It was all too much money,’ said Em. ‘My only impulse was to go out and spend all of it.’

  But she didn’t. For years, she handed over everything she earned to her mother and then to her husband. When she started giving all her money to Augustine, she found she had to steal it back. And she did so, with his knowledge and unwilling consent, until she broke down and could no longer go to work.

  ‘He made me resign,’ she would say angrily. ‘Or I might still have had my job to fall back on.’

  ‘Stop talking rot,’ Susan or I would say. For The Big Hoom said nothing. He knew what we realized much later: the Consulate had allowed her to resign when she started adding her own, and very alarming, comments to diplomatic reports. ‘Personal interpolations’, they called them. I loved that phrase and when I used it, aged eight or thereabouts, Em could still laugh though the joke was on her.

  • • •

  Even on the single salary that The Big Hoom brought home, we should have had a better life, materially, than we did. I think The Big Hoom, before he was The Big Hoom, had plans for all of us. Em’s illness forced him to rewrite them. We ate well and we had as many books as we wanted. But nothing else was given. No servants. No refrigerator. A television, in any case, was a luxury for the middle classes.

  From time to time, we would petition for a fridge, especially when we returned from the home of someone who had one. How effortlessly cold things were served. How easily a meal could be put together from this and that and these and those, all on separate levels, all in separate containers, all sealed away for the future.

  ‘Why
do we need a fridge?’ The Big Hoom would ask rhetorically. ‘We have the city’s best market next to us. We eat our food fresh.’

  ‘But what about keeping things in the fridge?’ Susan said.

  ‘Like pedas,’ I said. ‘Remember how your office sent us that huge box?’

  ‘And do you remember how long it lasted?’ he asked. Susan laughed ruefully. Em chuckled too.

  ‘Gosh, I had a leaky bum for days after that.’

  ‘Chhee,’ I said and Susan said and even The Big Hoom made a sound of displeasure. But we knew that the phrase was now enshrined in Em’s vocabulary. She would use it whenever diarrhoea surfaced in anyone’s life.

  So we had the market, we had fresh food, and for everything that was left over, there was Em.

  ‘Except for doodhi,’ she reminded me, the friendly spectre at my shoulder. ‘And elaichi-flavoured Horlicks. I couldn’t stand that. But if we’re talking about food and eating, you must never forget the tale of the sweet fugya.’

  Of course. It isn’t easily forgotten. There was a time when Em hadn’t slept for three days, except for short catnaps, during which she would drop half-smoked beedis on the floor. The flat swelled and trembled with the fever of her restless energy and unending chatter. Then one afternoon, halfway through lunch, it all caught up with her.

  ‘I’m going to take a nap,’ she said and we heaved a sigh of relief. She went off to sleep, and her body took its revenge. She slept for sixteen hours, straight, during which one of us would drip some water on her lips every four hours or so.

  Then she woke up, much refreshed and ready to roister again. And began chewing.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘this is a very sweet fugya’

  Everyone stopped what they were doing. We had been eating fugyas – bread balls, slightly sweet, to be consumed with fiery hot sorpotel – at the meal from which Em had risen to take a nap.

  ‘No wonder it’s sweet,’ said The Big Hoom. ‘The saliva in your mouth has been working on it for sixteen hours.’

  She had walked away from the table with a fugya in her mouth. Felled by the lack of sleep, she had succumbed with it still in her mouth. It was only some miracle that had prevented it from slipping down the wrong passage and killing her.

  But then, she lived under some magic star as far as her body was concerned. She smoked for the greater part of her life and for most of it she suffered from a terrible hacking cough.

  One day, things turned serious. She mentioned in passing, to Susan, ‘my cauliflower’. Susan told me when I got home from college.

  ‘You know, I didn’t know what she was talking about. It could have been any part of her body but somehow, it made me stop. I said, “What cauliflower?” She said, “The one growing on my tongue.” I said, “Show it to me,” and she did.’

  We both went back to peer into her mouth. Her tongue had a deep fissure on it, and in the middle of the fissure was a whitish growth, very like a cauliflower.

  We freaked.

  ‘Should we call him now?’ I asked.

  ‘I think not,’ said Susan. ‘It doesn’t look like an emergency.’

  I thought about it.

  ‘Yeah, I don’t think it’s going anywhere right now.’

  ‘You will not tell him,’ said Em.

  ‘Are you nuts?’

  ‘I’ll make you a deal. Let’s wait until my birthday. If it’s still there, you can tell him.’

  Her birthday was two weeks away.

  ‘What do you think is going to happen?’

  ‘It’s going to vanish.’

  ‘You’re mad or what?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re mad or what?’ Susan asked me.

  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.

  Susan started in: ‘Shut up. She has can –’

  ‘Don’t say it,’ shouted Em. We couldn’t tell whether this was common-or-garden superstition, or one more symptom: ‘They’ might hear.

  ‘Okay, you have a cauliflower in the middle of your tongue . . .’

  ‘Much nicer. I like cauliflower. I don’t want a crab in the middle of my mouth.’

  ‘Well, if you don’t, you should stop smoking.’

  ‘I am not going to stop anything.’

  There was to be no discussion.

  ‘May I see it again?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Em and stuck her tongue out.

  ‘Bejasus. That certainly looks like . . .’

  ‘Don’t say it.’

  ‘Okay, but we’re going to have to tell The Big Hoom.’

  ‘You are not. I told you. It won’t be there on my birthday. If it is, well, shoot me.’

  ‘The point is not to have you die,’ Susan pointed out.

  Thinking about it now, I cannot believe that we did not rush her to an oncologist right there. But we didn’t. Because we were used to the idea of Em being in a medical emergency of some kind or the other.

  And on her birthday, we checked her tongue, Susan and I.

  No cauliflower.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I told Our Lady, I am not going like this. So she took it away.’

  I didn’t know what to make of this miracle.

  ‘What happened?’ Susan asked. Her tone was different. She wasn’t taking any of that.

  ‘It detached itself and I swallowed it,’ said Em.

  ‘Ick,’ said Susan but she seemed satisfied with that.

  ‘Can we tell him now?’

  ‘Tell him about what?’

  ‘Your cauliflower.’

  ‘What cauliflower?’ she said, her eyes wide open. But The Big Hoom entered the room carrying a tray of bacon and eggs and toast, her favourite breakfast. He heard too.

  ‘What cauliflower?’ he repeated. He had a way of scenting the important. I told him. He looked at both of us. Then he looked at her. All of us wilted a bit. We ate our breakfast in silence. Finally, Em broke the silence.

  ‘It’s gone,’ she said.

  He said nothing.

  ‘She made us promise,’ I said.

  He said nothing. When breakfast was over, he made a phone call. Em was to go with him to the doctor. When it was all fixed, he said to both of us: ‘Sometimes, I wonder whether education really matters.’

  Then he left for work.

  Em tried to cheer us up.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong with me.’

  ‘This isn’t about you,’ said Susan.

  ‘We should have told him,’ I said.

  ‘No, we should have taken her to a doctor ourselves.’

  ‘You and whose army?’ asked Em, truculent. It was one of her favourite phrases. The marines posted at the AmConGen had used it a lot.

  But the miracle continued. She was examined thoroughly, pinched and prodded, scanned and sounded and even had ‘a finger put up my bum after due warning from a sweet Malayali girl’. But nothing was found.

  ‘Lungs like bags of phlegm. Voice like a pross on the prowl. Cough like a lion in the Serengeti. But no crabs in the body, no crabs in the crotch. I beat the odds. How’s that? I would like to donate my body to science, you bounders, so that they can find out what exactly made me immune. Break out the bids, folks,’ she chortled.

  ‘So what was the cauliflower?’

  ‘You silly berks can’t tell a ruddy miracle when you see one?”

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh ye of little faith. How shall ye be ducks in the gardens of paradise were I not there to wish it for ye?’

  ‘I don’t recognize that from any version of the Bible,’ I said.
r />   ‘It’s my version,’ said Em, bubbling. ‘I shall be swanning about in the promised land and you two will get a good ducking.’

  ‘Stop it,’ I snarled.

  ‘Em,’ said Sue.

  ‘I told Our Lady . . .’ she trailed off. ‘Okay, I said to her: take five years from my score but let me go eating and drinking and smoking. You gave me this stuff . . .’ she tapped her forehead, ‘and I took it with good grace.’

  ‘Good grace?’

  ‘You have to live through what I’ve lived. You’d think it good grace too. So I said, take five years. Obviously, someone was listening. Lady in blue, I love you. That’s why I told you, I can’t take too much more male will in my life. No thy-will-be-done for me. I surrender nothing. I surrender nothing. I’ll take my chances with a woman’s kindness.’

  11.

  ‘Electro-Convulsive Throppy’

  On a college trip to the Thane Mental Hospital, I had seen what I thought was the worst of India’s mental health care system. Thirty or so third-year students with an interest in psychology, we were shepherded there by Arpana Shetty, a junior lecturer, so junior that she had just finished her masters and was seen as a suitable object for lechery. We were introduced to Sunil, a drug addict who was in recovery – or so the hospital claimed. He was obviously a young man from the middle class or above. He spoke English well and without self-consciousness, as to the manor born.

  ‘You can get anything here,’ Sunil said peaceably. ‘It’s all part of the way India works.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Arpana.

  ‘Free your mind, Ms Shetty,’ said Sunil. ‘This is a poor country with good topsoil. A poor country pays its people poorly. They can be bought and sold easily enough.’

  ‘Sunil . . .’ said a voice behind us. It was someone who looked like a bureaucrat. Arpana Shetty presented her credentials. As the bureaucrat examined them and introduced himself, Sunil continued to address us, his gaze abstracted, his manner gentle.

  ‘I am only saying that if you give a poor man a poor man’s pay and good topsoil, he will sow some seeds and grow some greens and sell them to the first bidder,’ said Sunil.

  ‘Sunil, what lies are these?’ asked Mr Shinde, the psychiatric social worker of the hospital, for that was who the bureaucrat was. Sunil smiled at him gently.