Jerry Pinto - Em and the Big Hoom

‘There’s something brave about a piece of glass that is fated to live its life as a toffee when it could have been a bulb or a thermometer,’ she said. ‘But I can’t imagine anyone window-shopping these days.’

‘They do. People say they do it all the time,’ Susan assured her.

‘I wonder. How can anyone go window-shopping when people actually buy glass toffees? How does one say “That’s what I’m going to buy when my boat comes home” when you’re already buying whatever you want?’

‘I think your budget would constrain you still.’

‘It would, I suppose. But window-shopping was tourism once upon a time. You never thought you would take any of that stuff home. You didn’t think it would belong to you. Like the Taj Mahal. You went to look at it and then you got a good shot of it running in your veins. You now had some beauty under your eyelids.’

‘It was enough?’

‘It was enough. You could live with the street on which you lived. I remember I cried when I saw my first vacuum cleaner.’

‘Why?’

‘I was so glad someone had thought to make something like that. I felt it was a kindness to women everywhere. But I certainly didn’t think we could afford one. I don’t even think I asked.’

‘So you and The Big Hoom just stood in bookshops and read?’ I asked to bring her back to where we’d started.

‘No. I don’t think that was allowed, or even encouraged. Not at Lalvani’s or at Thacker’s. You could read the back of the book and maybe sniff a few pages, but I remember Mr Lalvani once bearing down on a customer, hissing, “Do you want to damage the spine?” I thought he was going to damage that man’s spine instead.’

Augustine and Imelda did not start dating at any real point in time. It simply became clear that they were dating. As if by an unspoken agreement, without anyone admitting it, they began to go around.

‘Going around? Is that what you call it these days? It makes me dizzy.’

‘What did you call it?’

‘Dating, I suppose.’

‘That’s better or what?’

‘No, it’s stupid. Half dry fruit and half almanac. But I think if The Big Hoom had asked me out on a date, I would have refused.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. I was prudish, I think. We all were. We thought no one would marry us if we weren’t virgins. I remember listening to stories about women putting lemon juice there or cutting themselves to bleed and I remember thinking, “What a lot of fuss. So much easier not to do anything at all so you don’t have to fake it.”’

‘But a date was hardly going to end in…’

‘Yes, yes, I know that now,’ she said a little testily. ‘But then? In the American magazines, it seemed like there was a strict calendar. You didn’t kiss on the first date or you would be seen as cheap and he wouldn’t respect you. If you went on a second date and didn’t let him kiss you, you were a tease. I thought: “What happens if you meet a man you like to talk to but don’t want to kiss?” But you couldn’t be like that. You had to let him kiss you and then you could do some necking after that but no petting…’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘I think, but don’t quote me, necking was above the shoulders and petting was below it.’

‘But when did you know?’ Susan wanted to know. ‘When did you know that he was the one?’

‘I don’t know. Is there a moment? Like that?’ Em asked, snapping her fingers. ‘Maybe there is. Let me see. How about a cuppa while I rack my brains?’

Susan obliged, but when she was back, the conversation had wandered somewhere else — to the story of the priest who had fathered six boys and baptized them all because they were his nephews.

• • •

It was many years later that I discovered how Imelda knew that Augustine was the one. I discovered it from an old letter she had written a friend, a letter she had forgotten to post but remembered to preserve.

… he breezed into the office with chocolate for one and all. He had a whole bunch of them he had swiped from some swanky do to which he had been invited. Though Gertie says no one says ‘do’ any more because it’s common. It’s common? Well, so be it. If I had had the good sense to write in pencil, I might have made myself uncommon and corrected that to ‘party’, but ‘party’ sounds like something with cake and cold drink. And ‘function’ sounds like a bunch of local yokels making speeches. Well, whatever. I shall say ‘do’ if I want. Begone, Gertie.

Where was I? Ahn? (Anh? Aahn? Nothing looks right.) The chocolate mints. I’m writing this letter in fits and spurts because Mae is fluttering around looking like she’s about to rearrange the furniture, while I’m trying my best to be the immovable object against which the irresistible force must expend itself. Or must it? I don’t know. Will ask Him Who Knows All About Engineering. And promptly forget.

Oh stop it! I’m doing it again.

And now Mae’s saying it is time for my bath, which is a sure way of making me plant myself…

She won. She always does. She said I was beginning to smell. So I went and had a bath that was a lick and a promise, but when I came back All Was Lost and I had no Alternative But to Flee and am writing to you now in the Irani café at the end of the lane with the beady eye of Mr Ghobadi on me. He knows me too well to uproot me when my tea is done and the last crumb of mawa cake wiped from my plate, but he resents the occupation of his space without the earning of some pounds and pence and pice.

As I was saying.

The mints went down nicely with all the girls. (I did mention that the chocolates had mints in them, non?) But Audrey was not among those accounted for. She had stepped out to buy some feminine sanitary products. I wish there was a nice word for them things. Pads? I suppose. Okay, she went out to buy some pads and did not get her share of the goodies. Of course, Gertie had to rub it in. Gertie has had it in for her ever since Audrey announced the nuptials. She can’t bear it. When Audrey asks us whether we prefer mauve gauze or pink tulle for the bridesmaids, her joy turns to ashes in her mouth.

So Gertie rubs it in: ‘None for you, poor dear?’ And then he fetches up at my desk and says, ‘We have a problem.’

I handed over my chocolate because I knew what the problem was. And anyway, couldn’t tell him, but those chocolates with mint in them taste like toothpaste. He grinned and winked and bounced off to make Aud feel less like the odd one out. (I worked out that pun. I know one is supposed to say, ‘Forgive the pun,’ but I worked it out so why should I ask forgiveness? The English language is very complicated, hein?) And when I was on my way home that evening — he was off on another client meeting — I realized that I had plighted my troth over a chocolate mint. I am no I. I am now part of a we. Wee wee wee, I wanted to weep and run all the way home and bury my head in my mother’s lap.

Not that…

The fragment ended there.

• • •

Most of what I know about their love came from Em in her garrulous phases, and the occasional letter or scrawl in one of her diaries that she showed me. Little of it came from The Big Hoom. Not because he was a man of few words — he was a salesman and could talk the milk into butter, as they said in Moira — but he does not seem to have wasted too many on his Beloved. His letters to her are classic ‘male’ letters. This one was written before they were married; he was away on a buying trip to France.

Beloved,

Arrived in Paris to weather that to my subtropical body seemed intolerably cold. Yet the young lady waiting at the airport to receive her boyfriend was wearing a mini skirt. I took pains not to notice this, but it did rather obtrude upon the consciousness.