Em and the Big Hoom

Author: Pinto, Jerry

• ‘That’s why Indian women fall ill,’ Em said. ‘So that their husbands will hold their hands.’

• Then I went to make tea with lots of sugar. I had read somewhere that sugar helps with shock.

• Conversations with Em could be like wandering in a town you had never seen before, where every path you took might change course midway and take you with it. You had to keep finding your way back to the main street in order to get anywhere

• Schoolchildren can smell a nervous teacher. They see it in her gait as she enters the room, uncertain of her ability to command and instruct. They hear it in her voice as she clears her throat before she begins to speak.

• I like details—no, it’s more than that; I delight in details.

• She was suggesting to the world that she be taken seriously as a writer. No one did. I didn’t. I didn’t even see

• She was suggesting to the world that she be taken seriously as a writer. No one did.

• I have discovered since that such effortlessness is not easy to achieve and its weightlessness is in direct proportion to the effort put in.

• ‘The Americans I met were always polite. They would never laugh. But you knew that if they weren’t polite, they would be laughing at you. That’s where you’re embarrassed. Inside you.’

• ‘Is that you? You look charming,’ said Em and took her beedi out of her mouth. Susan looked startled. Compliments were rare at any time.

• ‘Do what your heart tells you. It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake. The only things we regret are the things we did not

• ‘Do what your heart tells you. It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake. The only things we regret are the things we did not do.’

• A well-told lie can heal. Otherwise, what’s fiction?’

• the doctor showed me how to carry her, to feed her, and I thought, “I should know this stuff, shouldn’t I?” I mean, all those dolls. They were about learning the ropes, no?’

• Em lit another beedi. She contemplated the floor.

• ‘That sounds …’ ‘Like I’m thinking up what he thought when he did it? I think we all do that. All women do, at any rate.

• My mother lives through the long black night of the mind. She longs for death.

• She slept ravenously but it was drugged sleep, probably dreamless sleep, sleep that gives back nothing.

• Those who suffer from mental illness and those who suffer from the mental illness of someone they love grow accustomed to such invasions of their privacy.

• I had always hated the Gospels because they had unhappy endings, all four of them.

• I did not even realize at that moment that I had lost my faith.

• This is the standard equipment of the neo-atheist: eager to allow other people to believe, unwilling to proselytise to his own world which seems bleaker without God but easier to accept.

• The sophisticated arguments of all the wise men of faith—their talk about the sins of a past life, the attachment to desire, the lack of perfect submission— only convinced me that there was something capricious about God.

• How could one demand perfect submission from those who are imperfect? How could one create desire and then expect everyone to pull the plug on it? And if God were capricious, then God was imperfect. If God were imperfect, God was not God.

• But being an atheist offers a terrible problem. There is nothing you can do with the feeling that the world has done you wrong or that you, in turn, have hurt someone.

• It is difficult to see how detachment and love might fit together but the Greeks had a go with agape. Only, they didn’t use it much, just coined the term and left others to bother about the repercussions of loving someone else with benevolent detachment.

• None of my friends would have been surprised by my loss of faith. Most of them were atheists via Marx or Freud and others were agnostic.

• The coyness with which Victorians had approached the sexual was translated into the discomfort with which we approached God.

• These words were the equivalent of the frilly pantalettes with which the Victorian bourgeoisie covered the legs of their pianos. The mess of faith, the joylessness of disbelief, all these were covered up.

• All the words about the really important things become chiffon representations of themselves soon enough.

• Love is a hollow word which seems at home in song lyrics and greeting cards, until you fall in love and discover its disconcerting power.

• Depression means nothing more than the blues, commercially-packaged angst, a hole in the ground; until you find its black weight settling inside your mother’s chest, disrupting her breathing, leaching her days, and yours, of colour and the nights of rest.

• said in my heart, ‘Fuck off, you stupid old shit with your chutiya clichés and your kings with rings.’ In real time, confronted by my grandmother’s much-loved, guilt-worn slow dissolve of a face, I said, ‘I’ll make tea.’

• ‘Fuck off, you stupid old shit with your chutiya clichés and your kings with rings.’

• Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself.

• At times, when I was young, I wanted to be inside the tower so I could understand what it was like. But I knew, even then, that I did not want to be a permanent resident of the tower.

• I had thought once of starting a support group for carers, for those who lived with the mentally ill, but this kind of conversation unnerved me.

• At that point I realized what it meant to be a man in India. It meant knowing what one could do and what one could only get done.

• Or, and a goose walked over my grave, I would only grow up when The Big Hoom died.

• had discovered The Big Hoom’s hero. I did not want my hero to have a hero.

• I had discovered The Big Hoom’s hero. I did not want my hero to have a hero.

• ‘One thing,’ he said. ‘If you want to get people to talk to you, you should never interrupt.’ ‘Never? Even if I think something is wrong or missing?’ ‘Especially if you think something is wrong or missing.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Stops them. Gives them time to think. Interrupts the flow. If you want to get more, you shut up and wait.’

• ‘No, his name was Dr da Gama Rosa. Names are important. Isn’t yours important to you?’ My second lesson.

• ‘If anyone ever does you a favour, you cannot forget it. You must always credit them, especially in public, especially to those they love and those who love them. You must pay your debts, even those that you can never fully repay. Anything less makes you less.’

• What control do mad people have? I don’t know myself. I only know there is some control. Some things you can choose not to say. Some things you can choose not to do. It’s such a mess, that’s why it’s madness.

• Not that he ran, but he seemed to move very fast, like Mercury.

• he was a salesman and could talk the milk into butter,

• ‘He was a natural Protestant when I met him,’ Em would say. ‘He protested everything.’)

• Victories evanesce quickly enough. Failure hangs around you like a cloak and everyone is kind and pretends not to see

• they’ll string you high.’ There were times when I could see a lot of my mother

• There were times when I could see a lot of my mother in the body whom I met at home. There were

• 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.

• 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.’

• First, Plato, an omnibus edition with forty-eight of the fifty-five dialogues, which left me annoyed and exhausted because I did not believe that beauty had much to do with truth or vice versa.

• Perhaps it was the silence that had disturbed me and broken the spell of the Blue God’s arguments.

• I could hold on to my karma defence for a little longer but it was already seeming thin. How could you do your duty when love beckoned you to do something else?

• Suicide was a crime, the only one where you could be punished for failing.

• This fragile thing, the word of a woman who was mentally ill, was what kept the family going.

• 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.

• 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.

• Those pictures tell a story. Imelda and Augustine were part of the dosa-thin middle class of the 1960s.

• Birth was supposed to be painful and we were suffering in expiation of Eve’s sin. Adam got away, of course. Men do.’

• 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.

• 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.

• We did not learn anything about poetry, but we could tell a metaphor from a metonymy.

• ‘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.

• ‘The fifth amendment to the Indian Constitution concerns the relationship between the Centre and the states,’ I said.

• 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.

• Had Alfred Hitchcock been born Indian, he would have looked like Dr Alberto.

• And then we discovered that love was about memory and something had disrupted her store of our collective memories.

• It can be everything you choose it to be: a mad whirl, a mad idea, a mad March day, a mad heiress, a mad mad mad mad world, a mad passion, a mad hatter, a mad dog. But it is different when you have a mad mother.

• But only sometimes, for we used the word casually ourselves, children of a mad mother.

• This is a hospital but it is also used as a dumping ground, a human dumping ground.’

• On her first meeting with him, she had asked him in her forthright way: ‘No more shocks?’ ‘Shocks?’ he asked. ‘Who gives shocks these days?’ ‘My children,’ said Em. ‘Mine too,’ he said.

• I could not answer the question ‘How’s mum?’ so I learnt a complicit smile.

• Her mind was like that: a sponge for troubles.

• Her mind was like that: a sponge for troubles. Events turned into omens; carelessly uttered phrases into mantras.

• 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.

• They did not want to see her and she was uneasy with them until she was comfortable.

• ‘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.

• 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.

• 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.

• His voice sounded odd, as if it were coming through something thick and viscous.

• 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.

• I dipped my head and let various women leave traces of talcum powder, liquid foundation and lipstick on my cheek.

• 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 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.

• ‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ I said. ‘Did a beggar coin that phrase?’ The Big Hoom asked.