Jerry Pinto - Em and the Big Hoom

Bertha: He was quite this-thing but now this-thing.

Augustine: He made his mark.

Louisa: Do you speak Konkani?

Augustine (switching to Konkani): I speak Konkani.

He knows there is a slippery patch coming along. (In those days, and among the kind of women who were sitting in front of him, there were those who maintained that Konkani was the language of the tiller of the soil and the bearer of the load. They maintained as well that Portuguese was the language through which Goans could dream of some success in Lisbon where everyone always told them how beautifully they spoke the language. And then there were those who believed that Portuguese was a foreign import that belonged only to a certain community and that Konkani was the fertile red mud of their inheritance.)

Augustine waits for judgement. Then Louisa puts him out of his misery: ‘That is good. Too many young people do not speak their mother tongues.’

Bertha: Your parents?

Augustine: My father is dead.

Louisa: Please accept our sincere condolences.

Augustine: It happened a while ago.

Louisa: We always regret the loss of a departed parent.

Augustine: Indeed we do.

Louisa: Do you have perpetual Masses sung in his honour?

Augustine: No.

(Augustine was not a believer in a personal god who would listen to your prayers. Even less did he believe that you could pray for someone else. And to have a third party, a disinterested third party, offering intercessory prayers on behalf of people they did not know, seemed outrageous to him. After all, these Masses were subdivided into thousands, since perpetual Mass cards were sold at almost every church in the world and by the minute. There would never be enough priests for even a hundredth of a Mass per soul, and the idea of asking the powers that be to consider minuscule fractions of benefit accruing to the dead seemed far more ridiculous than any other dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. ‘He was a natural Protestant when I met him,’ Em would say. ‘He protested everything.’)

Louisa: Then we shall organize it for you.

Bertha: What’s your this-thing?

Augustine: I beg your pardon?

Bertha (impatient): Where do you thissing?

Augustine takes a wild guess and names his parish: Our Lady of Victories.

Bertha nods. Augustine is relieved. He’s catching on.

Bertha: You go?

Augustine: I go whenever I am in need of spiritual sustenance.

Louisa would probably have let it go at that. She was a wise woman and she knew that religion was best in small doses. Too much and the boy was no good. There was disquieting evidence in the family itself; their own Cousin Letitia had demonstrated that. Letitia had been the God-fearing woman who went to church every Sunday but she had chosen to live in sin with her Francis. Francis had been willing to marry her in church but it was she who had not wanted marriage. The world knew how often he had asked. The world knew how often they had sex because that was when Letitia would be in the line for confession. The world knew that their first child had been born a bastard. The world knew but did not understand that an atheist-communist-unionist like Francis wanted marriage and a good Catholic girl like Letitia did not. And then they had a son who was a bastard and a son who wasn’t. Very often, Louisa’s aunt Matilde, Letitia’s mother, had said that she would prefer a communist-atheist-unionist like Francis as a child and wondered how her God-fertile womb — a nun and a priest and three angels sent to heaven apart from the five other children — could have borne something as vile and frightening as her last-born with the gentle hands that nursed her in old age and illness. It could get very complicated, this God thing, this love thing.

Bertha knew this too but she did not apply Letitia and her story to their lives. She did not believe in application, so she persisted:

Bertha: How often?

Augustine: Once a year.

Louisa decides that she would have to step in or lose the boy on a technicality.

Louisa: Well, that is between you and your confessor.

Augustine: No, it is between me and God.

On the way home, Louisa was not kind.

‘If you do not want your daughter to marry, you should have let me know,’ she told Bertha in her most stately Portuguese.

‘How can you say that?’ Bertha asked.

‘Because you were quizzing him on his religion. In these days!’

Bertha protested that she had the right to ask whether her daughter was going to a God-fearing man.

‘And how much will you put into your daughter’s hands?’ Louisa asked savagely. For the matter of dowry had not been discussed. Both sisters had hoped that since this was a love match, there would be no demand made. Both sisters knew that demands were almost inevitable since no Indian wedding was an affair that concerned two people. It took in the family and the family would speak where love would prefer silence. And if a woman did not have any money coming to her, if she was in her late twenties, if she was known to have been ‘moving around’ with a young man for several years, she had very little bargaining power.

‘Here you have a brahmin boy — okay, maybe not a first-class brahmin family, but brahmin, from a good village, with a good job, who wants to marry your daughter…’

‘Then why…’

‘He may not have asked. He may need a push or two. Which man doesn’t? He earns well. Andrade says he’s going to do even better. And you are worried how many times he goes to church? Enough if he goes one more time, at the time of nuptials, that’s what I say. But don’t ask me, who am I? You know more than I do.’

It was a classic move in the game. If you are older, you can always play this one and sweep the board. Your wisdom has been ignored, your opinions have been spurned with contempt, and you accept this without demur. You know that you have no value in the world. That immediately puts your opposition in the terrible position of having to bring you back into the argument, of having to beg for any further advice; and as soon as an apology is issued, you can put it down for future use. You were slighted. If you were not, why apologize?

After the ladies had left, Augustine simply got on with his work. Perhaps his hand reached for the telephone once. Perhaps he didn’t even go so far. He had always had the admirable ability to cut out anything that did not pertain to the problem at hand.

‘Can you imagine?’ Em said. ‘We met that evening and went out for a Coke float and to the pictures, and he didn’t say a word. Though I thought there was a naughty flicker in his eyes and I got ready to ask for his Wassermann report.’

‘His what?’

‘I didn’t even know what it was but Gertie said I should ask for it if he ever asked me to go to a hotel.’

I looked it up; it was a venereal disease test and not even a reliable one at that. It could show that you were carrying syphilis when you were actually suffering from cholera or tuberculosis.

Imelda did not, finally, ask Augustine for his syphilis certificate. But she did continue to be puzzled and a little unnerved by the mischief in his eyes.

She discovered the cause of it later that evening.

I got home and Mae was crying and Tia Madrinha was looking stern and Daddy was reading more intently than usual. When I kissed him, he said, ‘Congratulations.’ I didn’t know what he meant. Then Tia Madrinha said, ‘You may ask your young man to ask your father’s permission.’ Daddy said, with a rare spark, ‘Ask my permission when you two went and sought his hand in marriage for my daughter?’

I couldn’t believe it. For a moment, I felt such rage, I could have horsewhipped the fatty and her sister.

‘How could you do this to me?’ I asked. (All right, all right, I screamed.)