Jerry Pinto - Em and the Big Hoom

‘What was I wearing?’

‘The green dress with the pockets.’

She looked puzzled.

I rooted about in the locker by the bed, a locker marked ‘Patient Belonging’, and opened it. I pulled the dress out.

‘Oh that one,’ she said. ‘Bring it here.’

She stroked it as if to rediscover a little more about it.

‘The tap?’ I said.

‘Sorry. I must be going mad.’

We both smiled at this, but only a little. It was a tradition: the joke, the smile.

‘After you were born, someone turned on a tap. At first it was only a drip, a black drip, and I felt it as sadness. I had felt sad before… who hasn’t? I knew what it was like. But I didn’t know that it would come like that, for no reason. I lived with it for weeks.’

‘Was there a drain?’

‘No. There was no drain. There isn’t one even now.’

She was quiet for a bit.

‘It’s like oil. Like molasses, slow at first. Then one morning I woke up and it was flowing free and fast. I thought I would drown in it. I thought it would drown little you, and Susan. So I got up and got dressed and went out onto the road and tried to jump in front of a bus. I thought it would be a final thing, quick, like a bang. Only, it wasn’t.’

Her hands twitched at the sheet.

‘I know.’

‘Yes, the scar’s still there.’

We were silent. I didn’t want to hear this. I wanted to hear it.

‘The bus stopped and the conductor had to take me to a hospital in a taxi. He sat in the front, lotus pose.’

‘Lotus?’

‘My blood was flowing across the floor of the taxi. There was no drain there either. I remember it all, as if rain had fallen. Have you ever noticed how rain clears the air? Everything stands out but it also looks a little thinner, as if the dust had been keeping things together. I felt as if…’

Her hands twitched at the sheet again. It slipped off her foot and both of us looked at the scar that ran from under the big toe to her ankle, a ridge of scar tissue.

‘It had to be dressed every day for months. Dr Saha came and did the honours.’

‘Don’t wander,’ I said.

‘Where was I?’

‘In the taxi. With the world outside clear.’

She looked a little confused.

‘You said the world was clear.’

‘Oh, not the world. Inside my head.’

Each time she had tried to kill herself she had opened her body and let her blood flow out. Was that the drain, then, I wondered, was that how it worked?

‘And this time?’ I asked her. ‘Is it clear now?’

‘This time I heard a small voice inside my head, just as I was beginning to slip away. I heard it say, “Please save me.”’

‘That was you.’

‘No, I heard it.’

‘It was you,’ I said again.

‘It must have been, no? I heard it as if it were someone else. And then you came. And Susan. I didn’t want it that way. I didn’t want the two of you to see anything like that in your lives.’

We had gone out together that afternoon, Susan and I, even though The Big Hoom was at work. It was a time of plenty. The stock market had worked in The Big Hoom’s favour and he had sold some shares. A nurse had been hired and Em was, for once, someone else’s responsibility.

We were teens on an adventure, watching Coolie , the biggest Amitabh Bachchan hit of 1983. The Big Hoom wouldn’t have approved, and Em would have mocked, but they would never find out. We had laughed a lot, happy that we could go out and laugh, like all the others we knew who were our age. And it was a warm afternoon, the kind made for laughing. When the show was over and we came home, the nurse was asleep. She had no idea where Em was — this, in a house with a single bedroom, one living room, one small kitchen, two narrow corridors, one four-by-two balcony. Susan knew. She headed straight for the bathroom. There was no reply. She called, ‘Em, Em,’ panic streaking her voice. I knocked and called too. Finally, we heard something wet and slithery inside, and the door opened.

‘I tried it again,’ Em said. She was drenched in blood. It was in her hair. It was on her hands. It was dripping from her clothes.

I pulled out the immersion rod to warm some water. Susan went for the nurse, but she, wily lady, had taken one look over our shoulders and vanished into the still-warm afternoon. Susan called The Big Hoom. I heard her in some other way, not the normal way you hear things. It was thin and distant but it was also clear. I can still hear it if I try. I don’t. Em was leaning against the wall next to the bathroom door and shivering. I guided her to the low metal stool and she sat down. Her arms dangled between her knees. I picked up one of her arms and turned it over to look. The cut was a single line, dark red. It said nothing.

‘Em tried to kill herself,’ I heard Susan say.

Then she was back.

‘What did he say?’ I asked.

‘What do you think?’ she was impatient as she tested the water with her finger. ‘He says he’s coming.’

I poured warm water over Em, from her head downwards. The water ran red. Susan reached down in front of Em and began to raise her dress and petticoat. I excused myself. My mother was going to be stripped naked.

I went out and made the next call. To Granny, Em’s mother, solid woman, cloth and sawdust solid.

‘Coming,’ said Granny.

‘Take a taxi,’ I said.

‘Taking,’ said Granny.

I stood in the balcony for a while. The traffic flowed outside. A sparrow dropped onto the balcony. A crow followed. The sparrow fluttered away. The crow preened cockily. A chickoo seller announced that his wares came from Gholvad. Then I went to make tea with lots of sugar. I had read somewhere that sugar helps with shock. Who was shocked?

When Em and Susan came out, I brought them tea. Susan sat Em down and held the tea cup to her lips. I went into the bathroom and turned on all the taps. I let the water flood out onto the floor. The stick broom, which had a tendency to fall on its side after it was used, was saturated in blood. There were clots that looked like hairballs — I still don’t know what they were — and they kept clogging the drain. I gathered them with my foot in one corner where they could not impede the flow of the water, the draining of the blood. I smelt the odour that trains leave on your fingers: iron. In some odd part of my brain, something about the link between iron and anaemia and haemoglobin and blood clicked into place. I went down and bought a bottle of iron tonic.

When I returned, Granny and The Big Hoom had arrived. He was already in the bathroom, cleaning up. Granny was in the bedroom, talking to Em and drinking tea.

I don’t remember what we did that evening. I don’t remember going to sleep or waking up the next morning. I only remember the moment Dr Saha, the family GP, came. He clicked his tongue and bandaged Em — her wrists this time. The Big Hoom was not a fan of bandages; he believed that sunlight and air did more good if you kept things clean, but he didn’t object.

‘Should she go to the hospital?’ he asked.

‘See how she sleeps,’ Dr Saha said.

We slept that night, so Granny and The Big Hoom must have kept watch over Em. And something must have changed in the night because she was not there the next morning. We began our hospital visits: one day Susan, one day me, every day The Big Hoom. On one of these visits, she told me about the tap that opened at my birth and the black drip filling her up and it tore a hole in my heart. If that was what she could manage with a single sentence, what did thirty years of marriage do to The Big Hoom?

Imelda saw Augustine in the office. Her diary reads:

I finally located the source of the booming voice. I asked Andrade, who is the registered office flirt, about the noise and he said, ‘Oh, that’s AGM.’ I looked a bit puzzled and he looked a bit puzzled. ‘I don’t know his name. We all call him AGM. His initials, I think.’