Em and the Big Hoom

by Jerry Pinto

  Susan answered the imperious knocking.

  ‘Your mother,’ said the old man.

  Susan went from bleary-eyed to alert. She woke me and I woke The Big Hoom and we ran down into the street. Em was lying in the street, a bottle of milk shattered close to her arm, which was awkwardly bent next to her.

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ she said and smiled before she passed out.

  We carried her home, The Big Hoom and I, and then we called Dr Saha.

  ‘Broken,’ said Dr Saha, who had learnt that words were not much use when diagnoses were needed.

  ‘Fracture?’ The Big Hoom asked.

  ‘Broken,’ said Dr Saha again. I had always thought it was the same thing. It wasn’t. A broken arm required surgery and a pin to be put in and another scar running down Em’s arm.

  ‘He came at me like a bat out of hell,’ she said later. ‘I always look left, look right, and all that. But then there he was –’ She stopped abruptly. ‘The milk bottle?’

  Milk bottles were precious things back then. You couldn’t get milk out of the rationing system if you didn’t produce your bottle, nicely washed.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Susan said.

  ‘Liar,’ said Em. ‘How could it have survived? I felt it fly out of my hand and then I was out like a light. Anyway, I appreciate the thought.’

  We all knew what that meant. She would remember that bottle for years. She would worry about the loss of it when she was depressed and it would translate into a new worry about what we would eat and who would cook it. Her mind was like that: a sponge for troubles. Events turned into omens; carelessly uttered phrases into mantras.

  But as she aged, the process of accretion, the rate of accretion slowed down.

  ‘It’s age,’ Dr Michael said. ‘The highs will get lower; the lows won’t be that bad.’

  We couldn’t see it but we clung to this hope; that things were getting better. And maybe they were, for three full years passed without her trying to kill herself. Then, suddenly, death turned around and claimed her.

  13.

  ‘The last great mystery’

  I was spending the night at a friend’s home when he called. We had gone to watch a film, we had had a nice meal. Em was going through a manic phase but with both Susan and The Big Hoom in attendance, I was allowed out of the house. I did not sleep that night; I never did in anyone else’s home. It was too much of a novelty and I wanted to savour every moment of it. I told this to Susan once and she said, ‘I go to sleep almost immediately at sleepovers. It’s so nice not to worry.’

  When the phone rang in another home, for some reason, I knew it was for me.

  ‘She’s gone,’ he said and his voice seemed to have no emotion in it, a dry shell where once a rich and milky grain had been.

  ‘Did she . . . ?’

  But I found I could not ask whether she had killed herself.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  It was too early to disturb my hosts. I left quietly, and when I stepped out of the building there was even a part of me that enjoyed the cool breath of the half-night upon my face. The taxi home sliced through the suburbs, over roads free of traffic. Here and there, the bodies of other Mumbaikars lay, in what looked like positions of death. And then I was in Mahim, so quickly, I hadn’t even thought about this. What did it mean? Em not around?

  ‘The last great mystery,’ she had called it, often.

  ‘If anyone should have some clues, it should be you,’ I had said, once.

  She had chuckled.

  ‘If only that were so. But at least it holds no fears for me. Bring it on, I say.’

  Here, then, it was.

  The door was wide open when I got into the flat, light pouring out, the universal sign of death. Inside, all was noise and commotion. I ducked into the bedroom where Em lay on the bed with Susan sitting by her side. Silent, unmoving, there was something very wrong about her. Very wrong. I still don’t know how else to describe it. From my reading of crime novels, I knew all about the changes in the body after death, how the muscles let go, how the tension goes out of the body, the pooling of body fluids, the tiny explosions within each cell.

  The Big Hoom came out and hugged me briefly. I could not remember this happening often. But she did not die often and things did not fall apart often. The centre did not stop holding often. Did it take death?

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was a heart attack,’ he said. I almost smiled. A heart attack? Those happened to other people. My mother could not have died of a heart attack.

  Susan seemed to read my thoughts.

  ‘It’s true. He woke up and found her curled up beside him.’

  I sat down beside her. I wanted to hug her but I couldn’t. We didn’t hug. Em did the hugging. She ambushed people with hugs and kisses. Potchie kisses she called them when she left a bit of saliva behind.

  ‘Odd,’ I said.

  ‘Not with a bang but not even a whimper.’

  There had been both, bangs and whimpers. But she had left in silence, in sleep.

  The world came back in. Other people, their voices, their curious faces, their odd movements. We were not used to other people. We went to see them; they did not come to see us. They did not want to see her and she was uneasy with them until she was comfortable. A stray comment could bring with it repercussions that could last for days. Where the visitor sat and what he said and what he did provided rich mulch in which strange fantasies, ribaldries, fears and scenarios could grow. Visitors were not encouraged. No, we didn’t have visitors. Now we could. Did we want them? Did we know what to do with them?

  I could not believe that I was already . . .

  ‘Have you bathed?’ Susan asked.

  I had not.

  ‘You should bathe,’ Susan said, a trace of elder-sister irritation showing at the edges of her concern. Was I concerned about her? I couldn’t tell. I didn’t seem to be feeling anything.

  I went to shower. The water triggered tears and I wept. When I assumed I had finished, I washed my face again and waited. From time to time, I was startled by a sob rising in me. These did not seem to be linked to the pain I was feeling. They seemed organic, like marsh gas, like breathing.

  What was this to be like? How were we to be? There were all kinds of questions to be dealt with and a host of people to deal with them. Did we have a nice dress? (Susan was choosing one.) Would I call the parish priest? (This had already been done.) Who had signed the death certificate? (Dr Saha had asked for someone to come to his house by nine o’clock.) And what kind of coffin would we like? (Like?)

  There seemed to be many young men in the room. One of them returned with ice, a huge block of it.

  ‘Where shall I put this?’ he asked me, a hunter-gatherer triumphant at having returned with his kill.

  ‘He’s the son,’ hissed another young man. I did not recognize either one but they both seemed to feel they had the right to be there and to be helpful. It was the badge of their tribe.

  ‘Sorry, aahn?’ he said. Obviously the son of the deceased was not expected to be able to answer questions. He took the ice into the kitchen and began to divide it up into blocks.

  A series of women came by and kissed me. Granny surfaced suddenly among them, her face tear-streaked and the women changed direction and began to kiss her.

  ‘Rose dress,’ said Granny. ‘Her rose dress. She thissing.’

  Susan got up to find the dress in which Em had said she wanted to be buried. I sat down next to The Big Hoom.

  ‘I thought it would be me,’ he said. ‘I thought I would go first.’

  ‘I thought so too,’ I said. It seemed thoughtless but he didn’t seem hurt. I didn’t know why I had said such a thing. Perhaps it was only because men die first in Goan Roman Catholic families and their women don black and courage in equal measure and make p
ickles until their sons become bishops and can give sermons about them. He didn’t seem to be paying attention. The air was filling with the smell of lilies as wreaths began to come in. Who was sending these flowers? I couldn’t stand the smell of lilies.

  ‘I’m going to the undertaker,’ I said.

  ‘Only if your mind is quiet,’ he said.

  My mind wasn’t, but I did remember that Em had declared that she would like to be buried as simply as possible. And that she had wanted to be useful. I went back into the house and intercepted Susan.

  ‘She wanted to donate her eyes.’

  ‘They came and went,’ she said.

  They took her eyes? Yes, sure, that was what she wanted. I suddenly wanted to see her eyes but I knew that would no longer be possible. It would have to be memory now.

  You have your mother’s eyes, I had been told often.

  I began to cry again but I managed not to sob. You can cry in public as long as you do not sob. Tears are transparent. If you’re walking fast, if the sun’s too strong, no one notices. Sobs intrude. They push their way into people’s consciousness. They feel duty-bound to ask what has happened. I cried silently all the way to the undertaker.

  Outside his storefront, the undertaker had a sign: ‘We can take your dead body, anywhere, anytime, anyplace.’ Visually, this was represented by an aeroplane with a coffin dangling from it. Later, the undertaker would become something of a minor celebrity for his signboards. ‘When you drop dead, drop in,’ one would say. The next one said, ‘Mr Smoker, you’re the next one to come coffin in.’ This was followed by ‘We’re the last to let you down.’ And then would come the strange ‘Grave problems resurrected here.’

  But at the time, there was only a coffin dangling from a plane and three albums full of images of coffins. Some were white (‘For nuns, priests, and unmarried people,’ said the attendant), but most were wood-brown or purple. There was a bewildering variety of images, and a range of designs. The man kept up a steady litany, ‘ . . . lace pillow with real silk, or you can have satin pillow, handmade fittings on the side, brass or you can go for this one which has silver, but first you want to decide what you want, teak or plain. But do you have a permanent grave?’

  I had no idea but I was guessing we didn’t.

  ‘No good. Got to know.’

  I called home. We didn’t.

  ‘Ah good. Sometimes problem like that comes. You done the booking?’

  I had no idea what we were supposed to book.

  ‘You go tell the faaders. Or we can tell. But you made up your mind?’

  When it became apparent that I did not want a slow-moving hearse or a teak coffin lined with real silk, the undertaker lost interest in the proceedings. He told me what I had to do and left me to do it.

  At home, the women of the family had finished washing the body. They had dressed her up and put cheerful pink shoes on her feet.

  A priest arrived, looking a bit bedraggled. He was served tea and began a rosary. Afterwards, he blessed the body and came and asked me if I wanted to speak. I had no idea what to say. I could have put the words together but then I had no idea whether I would be able to get through them. And I knew that if they were glib and born out of a need to impress, they would come back to haunt me. So we opted for a service that would in no way suggest how unique Em had been or how powerful a force she had been in our lives. The ordinary words would cloak her remains in the normal. There would be no reminders of who she was and how different her life had been or how strange our grief was.

  After the funeral, we went home.

  Susan went off to take a nap. The Big Hoom continued to behave as he had all day, as if a large part of his personality was dissolving and he was unable to stop it. The wake was an ordinary one. After the initial moments of silence and unease, a ten-minute grace period during which the quietness admitted the presence of death, human nature reasserted itself: conversations began, jokes were exchanged, food was eaten and commented upon, generally unfavourably. The Big Hoom rose, somewhere around an hour into the proceedings, and went into the bedroom. I followed him in. He sat down on the edge of the bed. I helped him off with his coat. He smiled briefly and then lay down.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘Go.’

  His voice sounded odd, as if it were coming through something thick and viscous. I left him alone to grieve. Susan moved through people with an assurance that seemed new and somewhat overweening, as if she were preparing for the role of family matriarch already. In her hands, and it seemed as if she had an unending supply of them, trays of sandwiches appeared, and individual cups of tea – no sugar, touch of milk; two sugars and generous milk – found their way to the small islands of teetotallers among the bibulous crowd. Granny was surrounded by dowagers, all of whom looked mildly envious of her state. They didn’t seem to be saying much, just sighing at each other and letting clichés drop into the silence.

  ‘She’s at peace now, poor dear.’

  ‘Who can understand God’s will?’

  ‘Whatever it is, she had a heart of gold.’

  Cigarette smoke began to cloud the room. And slowly death, the notion of death, departed. The sounds began to take the shape of a party.

  For a moment, I felt a huge panic, a suffocating hatred for my own kind, a need to remind all those present that they too would die. In other words, I felt like making a scene or running away or both. Of course, I stayed on and said nothing. I dipped my head and let various women leave traces of talcum powder, liquid foundation and lipstick on my cheek. I shook hands and hugged a series of men, each leaving behind a signature odour. When it became clear that the last of the whiskey had been served and no more was forthcoming, the wake began to fall asleep.

  Then the last straggler departed and we were alone. Home was already a thinner, lighter space. There had been days when I had felt suffocated by the life we lived in that flat. I had imagined then that the time would come when I would be the sole owner of these four hundred and twenty square feet of real estate. I remember planning how it would happen. First Susan would get married. Then The Big Hoom would die. And an ugly thrill would run through me at the thought. It was composed of real fear at the thought of his death, of horror at myself at imagining such things, of amazement at the sheer perversity of realizing that this was the only way I would get what I wanted. Then it would be down to me and Em. She would be a problem, but I would manage it so well that everyone – a mythic multi-tongued million-eyed all-knowing Everyone – would praise my handling of my responsibilities while tut-tutting at my reputation as a ladies’ man but admitting tight-lipped that I was a genius at my profession, whatever that should be.

  And then Em too would die and I would be alone and the whole world would be different. I had no idea how, but it would be, because I would finally have space to myself and then I could exercise the choice to do as I pleased and when I pleased instead of waiting for a stolen moment in the busy life of this 1BHK.

  And now the world expanded as people left the flat. As we opened the door together, I discovered that departures make the world smaller, slighter, less significant. For a moment, my father and I and Susan looked at each other.

  Survivors, I thought. Shipwreck survivors.

  ‘Tea?’ I asked.

  He nodded wordlessly and I followed Susan into the kitchen. She set out four cups. I put one away. She began to weep silently. She had always wept silently. And she had always wanted to be alone to weep, so I left the kitchen.

  When I returned to the hall, The Big Hoom was sitting in the single armchair and crying too.

  My first thought was, ‘Oh God.’ My second thought was, ‘Susan should deal with this.’ But neither God nor Susan would. I was on the spot and it was my call. So I knelt by his side and tried awkwardly to hug him. He tried to stop crying and failed. We stayed like that, with odd thoughts running through my head. ‘Sh
e was my mother too, damn it’ and ‘This would be easier on a sofa’ and ‘Where is that tea?’.

  Finally, the tea was ready and it lay there in front of us. I tried to remember if I liked tea or not. I just drank it. It was something we did. It was something Em did.

  The Big Hoom looked at his cup and said, ‘I think we need something stronger.’

  I was not trying to be funny but since we had never kept alcohol in the house, I asked, ‘Coffee?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I want a drink. Go and get us a bottle of Old Monk.’

  He began to dig in his pockets for money as if he had forgotten I was now earning money of my own and could buy us a bottle. But something told me to wait and finally he found the small, neat wad of notes and papers secured by a rubber band that served as his wallet. From it, he drew out a couple of notes. He looked at them slightly puzzled. ‘Will this be enough, do you think?’ he asked.

  I grinned at him.

  ‘I think,’ I said.

  The city continued on its way. Boys tried to sell me drumsticks, girls played hopscotch, the Bihari badli worker carried his gathri of ironed clothes to the homes from which they had come, and the buses honked at suicidal cyclists. At one level this was vaguely confusing. Surely, something should acknowledge how much things had changed? At another level, it was oddly comforting.

  When I got back, The Big Hoom was boiling peanuts in brine.

  ‘To go with the rum,’ he said. Susan was looking slightly suspicious.

  I ordered a garlic chicken dry from the Chinese thela down the road and found it had gone all swanky. The dish came wrapped in foil instead of the usual thin plastic packet. When I held out the money, the boy looked abashed.

  ‘Uncle ko bolo, free.’

  Then he dashed off. This was The City, India’s biggest, a huge city, but people heard and responded to what was happening in your life. Sometimes, this much was enough.

  Susan was annoyed when I dumped the parcel on the counter.

  ‘There’s loads of food already.’