Jerry Pinto - Em and the Big Hoom

‘“I must freshen up,” I said and rose again. He made a grab for my hand. I pulled it away sharply and went to the loo. The singer was in the bathroom. I washed my face and saw that she was looking at me. “You have a nice voice,” I said. “Thank you,” she said. “And now you walk out of the bathroom and go straight home.” I told her I had ordered something. I felt I couldn’t leave if I had ordered something. “What did you order?” she asked. “A Coca Cola,” I said. “Forget it,” she said. “Anyone can drink it. Now you write a little note to him saying that you were ill and had to go home and give it to me.” I wrote it and put my name at the end. “Chhee, chhee, don’t sign it, silly. No, better still, I will write it.” Then I made such a mistake, I still remember it with shame. I asked, “Doesn’t he know your handwriting?” She looked at me for a long moment and then she said, “I sing here.” Before I could say anything, she added, “And I was trying to help you.” I could have wept. “I know,” I said, “I’m sorry.” I went outside and Andrade was there. He stepped up to me and asked, “What’s the matter?” but I couldn’t wait to talk. I just wanted to be alone. It was all too much. Audrey wanted to meet David but Audrey ran away. Then David started to act up and so I ran away. Now Andrade was waiting for me and I had to start running. And then Audrey popped out of nowhere and she looked at me. I couldn’t take it any more so I started crying. She didn’t say anything so I started running. She stopped Andrade from coming after me.’

‘But what was that all about?’ I asked, confused.

‘I asked Audrey the next day but she refused to tell me. It was only when she settled on that sweet-faced Marine who whisked her off to Wisconsin that I got the story out of her. You won’t believe this but Andrade wanted to try his chances with me. So he asked her to take me to meet David. He knew David would try something and then he would step in and save me and I would, I suppose, fall over myself in gratitude and fall in love with him.’

‘That’s…’

‘Wodehousian? Thought so. But that’s what Aud told me.’

‘And what was her role in all this?’

‘Andy knew I wouldn’t go alone so he got her to play along, to say that she wanted to meet David and to take me.’

‘But why would she play along?’

‘Oh, we all knew she was in love with Andy.’

‘She was in love with Andy and so she helped him to get you to try and fall in love with him.’

‘The heart has its reasons…’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘I know. I thought it was pretty stupid myself. But when I pushed her she said that she knew it wouldn’t work and I would get angry with him and then she would have helped him and she could get a chance.’

‘You thought it was a good enough reason for playing along with this kind of shit?’

‘I wish you wouldn’t use that word.’

‘Right, so speaks Miss Clean Mouth.’

‘The words I use are always clean.’

‘Sure, sure.’

‘There are lots of words you can use without evoking images that belong in the toilet and not on the tongue.’

‘I think that’s the first time I’ve heard the words toilet and tongue used in the same sentence.’

‘Oh? Nothing like that in the Olympia Press?’

‘Em!’

‘No offence, no offence…’

We were wandering again, like lost tourists. I tried bringing her back to the subject of her ambivalence about marriage, but we’d reached a dead end.

Some days later, she showed us a letter to Angel Ears. It filled in some details:

Ever since the day of the inquisition, I have been converted, as if by some alchemy only known to the engaged, the spoken for, into a watering pot. I cry at the least provocation but I am glad to say I do not blub. I simply tear up but only in one eye . Do you find that odd? Do you really want to marry a woman who cries with only one eye?

I know I want to marry you. But I wish we were the first to ever get married. I cannot help feeling that the institution has been somewhat corrupted and corroded by the misuse of others. We could show them, by a beyootiful and myoochooal respect for each other, how things must be conducted.

Have I ever told you how much I love you? Well, darling, I am telling you now, she said and began to drip like a spout.

‘You cried a lot when he popped the question?’ Susan asked her one day.

‘I don’t know why I kept crying. Mad things would set me off. Someone would ask me whether I wanted to be a June bride and I would find my face wet. Inside, I was like a monsoon, I was always moist so I didn’t know I was crying when I was crying. Once I was sitting in a bus thinking I’d like him to have an engagement ring with a stone the colour of his eyes and I began to cry. A sweet old Muslim woman was sitting next to me. She took my hand and held it for a while. Then she said, “ Duaa kar, beti. Duaa mein badi taaqat hai .” I told her why I was crying, that I was getting married. I must have got the tenses right this time so she asked, “ Nahin karni shaadi ?” I told her I wanted to. “ Bachpan ke liye ro rahi ho ,” she said, smiling. Maybe she was right; maybe I was crying for my childhood. My innocence, if you will.’

Em had suffered migration, displacement and the loss of a home when she was still a girl. After arriving in India, she and her mother had spent some tough months in Calcutta before shifting to Bombay. There they had awaited the arrival of the man of the house, who was still walking from Burma to India through jungles and swamps, surviving malaria and tigers. They had spent those anxious, long months living in a storefront room with no toilet — to use one, they had to walk to a relative’s house once a day. And when she grew up Em had had to give up her studies and work to support the family. She’d been doing it for over a dozen years. And yet marriage felt like growing up? It seemed odd to me.

• • •

There’s also Granny’s version. She confirmed that Em had been angry — ‘She was very thissing’ — but that it hadn’t lasted more than a few hours, as Granny had known it wouldn’t, because which girl wouldn’t want a man with perfect manners and a good salary and even better prospects? And a brahmin, too. Granny said she did not need to ask him about being a brahmin. She claimed that she knew.

‘A brahmin boy but a poor one,’ was how she described him, once we got past her elisions.

‘How could you know he was poor?’

Here Granny squared her shoulders and jerked her chest out.

‘He had a good body?’

‘Worker’s body,’ she said. Then she spread out her hands and curved them so that they were slightly like claws.

‘Big hands?’ I ventured.

She nodded.

‘And his eyes,’ she said, as if that set a seal on things.

My mother’s eyes: amber.

My father’s eyes: blue.

I didn’t think it could be that easy. If blue eyes were a sign of aristocracy, it couldn’t have been a local aristocracy. Indian eyes are dark brown, shading sometimes to black. Blue eyes, green eyes, brown eyes were always suspicious, even if they are fetishized now. It was common in my childhood to call people who had them ‘cat-eyed’. It was also common to say that they could not be trusted, that they were ‘double-faced’. The suspicion clearly arises out of the belief that where there are signs of the European face, there must be strains of the European gene pool. In other words, a honky in the woodpile. But what would the honky find in the woodpile in Goa? Surely, not women of the privileged elite, of the compradors? Surely, those genes would have found their way into the lower castes where the men of the family were less empowered, where droit du seigneur might still be a practice? It was no use telling Granny this. She would have been horrified at the thought.