Jerry Pinto - Em and the Big Hoom

Sometimes it was possible to catch a glimpse of how Em’s mind worked. You saw a note somewhere or you saw the name of a book or a headline. But this was not one of those times. There were no red pens in the house. So she asked Em why she thought she was a standing red pen.

‘I don’t know,’ Em ground out. ‘I don’t know. I wish I knew but I don’t know.’

So trying to tell Em that no one was going to poison her tea was simply not going to work. I wanted to say to Granny, ‘You’ll only make her think you’re one of the people who want to poison her.’ I didn’t have to say it because by the time I brought the tea back for all of us, Em had independently arrived at the same conclusion.

‘Oh so they got to you too, huh?’

Then to me: ‘Roger, take over.’

Then she made a dismissive gesture.

‘You want me to go?’ Granny asked, her tone suggesting that no one could want such a thing.

Em laughed again.

‘No, the boy will take you out and shoot you through the head.’

Granny’s face collapsed.

‘Never mind,’ I said to her. ‘Just think of the king and his ring.’

Em sprayed us both with tea.

‘He got you in the gut, you old hound dog.’

I sympathized with Granny but I also felt a deep vexation. She loved Em and she thought that should be enough. It wasn’t. Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself. You can only stand outside it, as a woman might stand outside a prison in which her lover is locked up. From time to time, a well-loved face will peer out and love floods back. A scrap of cloth flutters and it becomes a sign and a code and a message and all that you want it to be. Then it vanishes and you are outside the dark tower again. 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 wanted to visit and even visiting meant nothing because you could always leave. You’re a tourist; she’s a resident.

• • •

And as all analogies must, this one breaks down too. You would never be able to visit her tower. You would only be able to visit another tower, a quite similar yet independent one. There were no shared towers, no room for more than one person. I heard this often enough in the shared spaces where Em and I waited for test results, new prescriptions, other doctors.

‘Nobody knows what I am going through.’

‘What I suffer only I know.’

And so on.

Then one day I was sitting next to two polycot-swathed ladies, both of whom had troubled children.

‘What days I have taken out, only I know,’ said one.

‘But Brian has some good days, no? With Terry, can’t say when he gets up whether he’ll be this way or that way. Got to be on your toes. One day, Dr Menezes came over for Molly, my small one. She had fever, cough-cold, wouldn’t go to the clinic, lying down and crying. So I called Dr Menezes for a home visit…’

‘Two hundred now?’

‘Gone to sleep or what? Three hundred now and without pills. Open mouth. Aaahn. Pull this lid, pull that lid, cough for me, ptack-ptack on the chest and write write write. Finished. Three hundred rupees in the pocket and “Send her to the clinic next time” he got the bupka to tell me. I told him, “Doctor, with all this on my hands I got time? Better to spend this than to listen pitti-pitti-pitti all day.” So he’s saying, “Must take a heavy toll. How come I never see you in the clinic?” And I said, “Doctor, you’ll see me when Terry is well. Because I got no time to be sick when he’s like that.”’

‘Brian is not less, let me tell you. One day, I went out, to novenas only, at Mahim church…’

‘All the way?’

‘Got to go, no?’

‘You’re lucky you got time. I say in the morning, nine times while I’m cooking. Praying, praying, nine times. “Muttering Matilda”, that Terry put name for me. I’m saying, “Storming heaven on your behalf on’y.”’

‘But I made promise. I got to go. I come back and he’s there, taken off everything and standing in the balcony, singing to the sun. What to say? No one comes forward. When there is something, death, sickness, marriage, whatever it is, I still put up my hand. Not much I can do but I’m always putting up my hand. But no one came forward.’

In all this, I saw no real pain, only a need to demonstrate one’s tolerance and generosity and deep Mother Courage-ousness. I saw a desperate desire not to affirm each other or to cling together but to establish a clear hierarchy of suffering. Brian does so-and-so. Well, Terry does such and such. You were up all night? I haven’t slept for a week. I’ll concede now that I was being unfair. I was guilty of hierarchy myself: I handle it better than them, I suffer with greater grace, I don’t show it. But at the time, I listened to the ladies and it filled me with anger and contempt.

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. In the days before the Internet, I put an ad in the papers. I didn’t get as many responses as I had thought I would. One woman would turn up, but only if the group were Jungian. Another thought that it was a place where she could leave her brother while she took a break. A third wanted us to petition the government to set up more mental hospitals. Yet another said the group should be anonymous and modelled on the Alcoholics Anonymous. No one could agree on the time and the place and the date. When we finally did agree, three people came. They wanted the names and numbers of institutions to which they could consign their relatives.

‘I need a place for my half-brother. I can’t look after him forever. There’s no blood tie,’ said a lady in a blue sari with a matching bag.

‘I think I might go mad and then what will happen to her?’ said a retired bank clerk of his wife.

‘You should fight this feeling,’ said the lady in the sari.

• • •

‘Fight your genes,’ The Big Hoom said to us once, to Susan and me. He did not explain. He did not know how to. But we knew what it meant. It meant that we were to march into the hall and take out our school books and reproduce the slipper-shaped animalcule whose pseudopodia power it through a world without feeling; to learn how to inscribe a hexagon into a circle without tearing the paper; to assimilate the causes and consequences of the battle of Panipat without ever identifying your own enemy because that would mean identifying yourself.

‘Fight your genes’. Focus. Be diligent. Concentrate. Do.

The Big Hoom and Susan are discussing historic battles for some reason. I decide to interrupt, feeling left out. Then we hear her.

‘I only remember two names of battles. Both have water in them for some reason: Waterloo and Panipat.’

She’s saying something of her own accord. She’s saying something that’s not ‘Oh God, Oh God’; something that’s not ‘Let me die, let me die’. Somewhere a helicopter is landing and the rescue team is beginning to attach straps to her body. She’s being airlifted from that Arctic floe; she’s being dragged free of the sucking earth. Summer is back.

There’s a memory I have from the year I was sixteen. At Christmas Mass, I remember a priest talking about Saint Joseph. The shadowy figure of the father of the incarnate Lord, he called him, and I lost him after that as he maundered on about the virtues of the Holy Family. It was obvious that no one thought much about fathers and fatherhood. Maternity was central.

It wasn’t. Not in my world. The Big Hoom was my rock and my refuge. He knew what to do, how to handle stuff. He knew when to let us off and take things over. I tried imagining my life without him and immediately grew cold with fear. I had no idea how one earned money. I knew that one went to work, but what kind of work could I do? When I was asked, I said I wanted to become a doctor but that was ambition by the numbers. Boys of my age, of my social class and academic success, said they wanted to be doctors or engineers. There were no other professions in the world, no other professions to which one might aspire. There was only the building of bridges and the repairing of bodies.