Jerry Pinto - Em and the Big Hoom

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He was slowly packing it away.

‘You’re shutting me out.’

‘Am I?’ his voice was pleasant now. Almost. ‘And since you cannot tell me why you needed the money, what are you doing?’

‘I don’t know. That’s different. I think it’s a matter of honour.’

‘Is it? And does your code of honour allow you to steal from your children?’

‘For the love of Mike,’ Em snarled. ‘It’s not as if they’re likely to starve.’

After that, The Big Hoom would not be drawn. Finally, Em decided that she had had enough. She walked out of the house and went to her mother.

We watched, almost without breathing, until he followed soon after.

They were back an hour later. They seemed to have resolved the money thing.

I had always been puzzled by how completely uninterested Imelda’s parents seemed to have been in getting her married. But of course there had been a sound economic reason. She was the only earning member of the family.

Money had always been a problem, even when it was not supposed to be:

Finally had it out with them. What am I supposed to take with me? I mean, I know dowry is wrong and all that, but what happens to me if I go with empty hands? Surely, there is some money left over from ten-twelve years of working. But there isn’t. Mae simply burst into tears and Daddy went to bed and turned his face to the wall. At five o’clock. Finally, as if by magic, as if summoned, Tia Madrinha turned up and said that Agostinho was a good man and had not asked so we should all say a decade of the rosary in thanks.

What power there is in a decade of the rosary! (Oddly, we had to say it to a sorrowful mystery because it is a Friday — although we were saying it in rejoicementation, which should be the opposite of lamentation.) Daddy woke up. Mae agreed to let me make a cup of tea to cheer her up and Tia Madrinha took off her own gold chain and put it around my neck.

‘You are my god-daughter,’ she said sternly. ‘I should not wear a gold chain if I have not given you one.’

But she looked bereaved almost as soon as she had done this and an imp of mischief made me want to take her gift seriously. But there had been enough tears and drama for several lifetimes so in the spirit of the thing, I took it off and put it back on her neck and said something about how the thought was gift enough. That settled that and I said I wanted to go to church and make my confession which was of course a way to simply rush off and be alone for a bit.

Took myself to Byculla. The area around the elephants is very soothing. I wish I were an elephant. I would be so composed.

But of course a walk in the maidan outside the zoological gardens in Byculla can only take you so far. After a while, she stopped walking. ‘Almost fell into the arms of some young men,’ she said.

‘They might have enjoyed that,’ I suggested.

‘You think?’ she said. ‘They were kissing. Homos, I think.’

She took the bus to Dadar.

‘Jovial Cottage. What a terrible name. I couldn’t bear it. I kept thinking of back-slapping drunken men and false smiles. I don’t even know why they would bring Jupiter into it.’

‘You’re losing me.’

‘Jovial? Jovial. Jove. Jove is Jupiter. Would you name your home for Jupiter? He seems to have been a thoroughly terrible fellow. Kept sleeping with his sisters and then cut off his father’s balls and threw them into the sea. Can you imagine?’

Somewhat startled by the arrival of his fiancée in a state close to despair, Augustine rose to the occasion.

‘He didn’t even allow me to come in. Bad for my reputation, he told me. Instead, we went off to have tea. I don’t remember where we went but I remember thinking that it was as bad for my reputation. After all, you didn’t sit in an Irani restaurant with a man.’

‘Not even a fiancé?’

‘Not even. The rule was pretty clear. If you were a woman, you had better be with your father or your husband in an Irani.’

It was here that Augustine made one of those incidental remarks that would take root in his wife’s head.

‘I don’t have a dowry,’ she said baldly when they were served.

‘I don’t care,’ he said.

‘Your family will.’

‘They won’t.’

‘How can you say that?’

‘Because I’ll tell them that you’ll bring your dowry every month.’

This was true. At that point in their lives, Imelda — employed at the American Consulate — was earning more than Augustine. His pay was linked to the sales of heavy machinery and the industry was in a slump. It would recover soon enough — India’s tryst with gigantism meant that someone somewhere always needed another large chunk of metal — but till it did, she was outperforming him.

He didn’t know it but Imelda was equally reassured and horrified by what he had said. She worked because she had to. There was no question about that in her mind. The family relied on her salary. If she did not earn, they would not eat, not eat well at any rate. So she earned. But she had not considered what work meant after marriage. In her diary, she wrote:

He said it as if he thought I was going to work for the rest of my life. I suppose I will but it gives me the megrims, as someone in a G[eorgette] H[eyer] novel would say. Not the work, actually, I don’t mind that. Not even those darned reports with their pages and pages of numbers and the carbon copies and all the rest of that. Not even those confidential reports. I will never forgive William Turtle Turner for that stupid remark, ‘She does not keep her desk very clean.’ As if I were a slattern and my desk a pigsty. (Is that a mixed metaphor?)

It’s just the…

She seems to have cut herself off there. But the problem was not really about working. It was about what would happen to her salary. She had assumed that it would continue to go to her mother. Augustine had assumed that it would go into the common kitty of their marriage. The next entry in the diary says as much:

My salary is my dowry. And I can’t see how there can be anything wrong with that — except that nothing should be anyone’s dowry. No one thinks much if one asks the boy what his prospects are. If money is not important on the girl’s side then money should not be important on the boy’s side either, not in this day and age at least.

Asked Mae.

Came right out and asked her the question: How will you manage when I am married and living in his house?

She said, We will see. This means nothing. I wish I could get her to see that this means nothing but there was no getting anything else out of her. It was ever so. I must live with uncertainty and I don’t think I can handle it.

Until the time she married, Imelda had suffered the deprivations of never having enough money. She also never had to worry about how to spend it. That was someone else’s department. She earned it and handed it over, every last paisa of it, to her mother. Augustine had never been able to understand how Imelda could do that.

‘But don’t you want to keep some of it?’

‘No,’ said Imelda simply.

‘No?’

‘No.’

It was a simple, uninflected response.

‘Aren’t there things you want to buy?’

‘Yes,’ Imelda said. ‘But most of the things I want to buy, I’d never get from my salary so there’s no point thinking about them. I want a boat, for instance. I’m not going to get a boat on my salary.’

‘So dates.’

‘Yes. I can buy dates.’

‘But only if you walk home.’

‘I like walking home.’

‘You sound like some kind of saint,’ Augustine said, exasperated.

‘Do saints want boats? Maybe St Christopher. And maybe St John would have wanted a date or two when he was eating locusts and wild honey.’