Jerry Pinto - Em and the Big Hoom

‘It was good we went,’ said Granny, ‘because otherwise they would still be this-thing and you two would not thissing.’ They would still have been visiting bookshops, she meant, and Susan and I would not have been born.

‘Nonsense,’ said The Big Hoom when we suggested that he had been coerced to the altar by two old ladies in silky frocks. ‘It was on my mind. I would have asked.’

‘Gosh,’ said Em when we told her this. ‘I wonder how I would have answered if I had been asked. The standard response was the Hollywood one. You know, you said you had no idea, this was such a surprise, you were very honoured, could you have some time to think about it? This meant ‘Yes’. But if you were going to say ‘No’, you had to say it immediately while not saying ‘No’. You had to say you had no idea, this had come as a surprise, could you have some time to think about it?’

‘That’s the same thing,’ I pointed out.

‘It is but a sensible man knows.’

I thought this didn’t actually work but I didn’t say so.

Em spotted it in my face.

‘You don’t think so?’

‘I think,’ I said carefully, ‘that we can never be sure what we are communicating.’

‘Oh go on, wise boy. I think men know. Women certainly know.’

I shrugged. ‘We were talking about your engagement. You were angry with them.’

‘I don’t know if opposition would have worked. It’s difficult to remember who I was, baba. You have no idea how odd it seems to read my diary now. Who was that girl? What a fey, frightened creature! What a frigging woodland nymph! Maybe I would have been happy that someone had forced the issue. I was twenty-eight going on frigid. I didn’t think much of the sex act…’

‘Oh God, here we go.’

‘No, really. It seemed very messy and painful. Audrey had told me all about her first night. So I was very happy to be kissed from time to time, to have my hand held on Marine Drive, to know there was someone to squire me about. I don’t think I wanted more. Or did I? I mean, I knew I wanted to marry him but not then. And then there was all the bother of children. We would have to have them once we married, of course. That kind of thing.’

‘Ambivalence,’ I said wisely.

‘Ambivalence? I love it. I was ambivalent. I think I am ambivalent right now. I think I am an ambivalence, toon taan toon taan toon taan, with a blue light on my forehead. So which side would have won? Would I have simpered off into a corner and said, “Whatever you want for me, Mum and Tia Madrinha” or would I have said “You go there and I’ll run away and join a convent”? I don’t know.’

‘They might have taken that very seriously.’

‘Of course they would. I wanted to be a nun, they knew that. Only, I didn’t want to sleep alone in a room. I would have been very lonely. No, I’m lying. I would have been scared. But Mother Catherine said that nuns had to sleep alone in their cells. I think they must be worried about lesbianism. She said that Jesus would be there to look after me. I didn’t believe her. I wasn’t taking risks with that fellow. I mean, “Thy will be done”? What if it was his will that I be terrified every night for the rest of my life? I much prefer his mother. She just says “Pray to me”, which I can understand. He’s far too demanding. What’s all this — “I surrender all, I surrender all”? Is that a hymn to sing? For a woman? I sang that once and he took away the hearing in my left ear. I thought, “Well, bloody hell, enough of you lot. I’m not surrendering anything.”’

‘Did it leave a God-sized hole in your life?’

‘That sounds suspiciously like a quotation,’ she said. ‘I wish you wouldn’t. I never feel like I’m having a conversation with someone who quotes.’

She looked at me, a cold, hard stare.

‘It is a quote, isn’t it?’

‘It feels like one.’

‘I hate quotes,’ she said fiercely. ‘I feel like I’m talking to a book. I feel like I’m talking to history. I feel like I’m being practised upon.’

‘Practised upon?’

‘For a public performance. For a debate club. For some schoolboy shit like that.’

She refused to be drawn any further and stomped off for a beedi.

The next time she talked about the courtship and engagement, some of the details had changed a little. I could spot some contradictions. But the script was the same, and she insisted that she had wanted to be a nun. She had wanted ‘none of this’.

‘You didn’t want to get married?’ I asked.

‘Who wants to get married?’ Em asked rhetorically. ‘Only those who want children.’

‘You didn’t want children?’ I don’t remember who said this, Susan or I or both of us together.

‘Oh God, no. I saw what children do. They turn a good respectable woman into a mudd-dha. I didn’t want to be a mudh-dha. I didn’t want to be turned inside out. I didn’t want to have my world shifted so that I was no longer the centre of it. This is what you have to be careful about, Lao-Tsu. It never happens to men. They just sow the seed and hand out the cigars when you’ve pushed a football through your vadge. For the next hundred years of your life, you’re stuck with being someone whose definition isn’t even herself. You’re now someone’s mudd-dha !’

She suddenly realized who she was talking to.

‘Of course, when it happens, you don’t regret it and all that shit, okay?’

She grinned, a silty grin. ‘You were my two dividends, yes? Don’t you forget that.’

Then she sighed, took a deep breath, and said, ‘But what an investment. My life.’

We didn’t say much. We weren’t allowed. We held our peace and tried to work with what we’d been given. We tried to reassure ourselves that honesty was the best policy in the long run and that we would be glad, eventually, that we knew what Em thought.

Or that’s what I tell myself.

We never knew when the weather would change dramatically with Em. You’re vulnerable to those you love and they acknowledge this by being gentle with you, but with Em you could never be sure whether she was going to handle you as if you were made of glass or take your innermost self into a headlock. Sometimes it seemed part of her mental problem. Sometimes it seemed part of her personality. ‘That’s not her, it’s her problem,’ Susan once said to me, when she found me weeping because of something Em had said. It became a way of escaping the sharpness of her tongue. But it also became a way of escaping her as a person. We could always dismiss what she was saying as an emanation of the madness, not an insult or a hurt or a real critique to be taken seriously. We often did dismiss what she said, but more often than not, it was self-defence.

And there were times when all defences failed.

I come home from a bad day at my first job. I’m twenty and I’ve been assigned a story. At my position on the totem pole, the story is not about what I think of the issues involved, it is about what other people think. My job is to make them think aloud and put it all down on paper, and to that end, I must call and ask them for their time. But no one is available. One is out of town and nobody knows how he can be reached. The next is not at home and when I call his office he’s ‘not on his seat’. The secretary of a third appears to have put his phone permanently off the hook. I call and call and all the time I’m aware that there’s a whole beast of a machine waiting for copy. The desk, the designers, the editor, all looking at you as if you’re shirking if you stop calling even for a minute. I need quotes and the only quote I’ve managed to get is from the B-List, an add-on remark which is not without value but only when the experts from the A-List, the politicians, the CEOs, the film stars, have spoken. And none of them have.