Jerry Pinto - Em and the Big Hoom

‘You sound as if you’ve worked it all out.’

‘I haven’t,’ she replied. ‘I don’t understand money.’

‘Means? What’s there to understand?’

‘I don’t know how to run a house. I don’t know how to budget. I don’t know whether one should buy five kilos of rice and one kilo of daal or one kilo of rice and five kilos of daal. I don’t know what a good price for pomfret is. I don’t know whether we pay the methrani too much or too little or what we tip her for Christmas. I know we don’t tip for Diwali, which is something, I suppose. I don’t know if I get a good salary or not. See? There’s lots you have to know to understand money.’

‘And so you just ignore it?’

‘I’m like Sherlock Holmes. I won’t crowd my attic with that which does not concern me.’

‘Even if it means refusing to grow up?’

‘Is that what I seem like to you?’

‘I think you can’t be grown up if you don’t take charge of your economic life.’

‘Yes, that might be one way of looking at it,’ Imelda conceded. ‘But I think of my way as The Way of Water .’

Augustine shook his head. ‘I should never have given you that Watts book.’

‘This isn’t about Zen,’ said Imelda. ‘I didn’t even read that book. Honestly. I don’t understand Zen. It seems if you don’t answer properly, or you’re rude, people get enlightened.’

‘Why are we talking about Zen? We were talking about you.’

‘Couldn’t be. I wouldn’t have been distracted from such a delightful topic.’

‘We were talking about your problem with money.’

‘No, we were talking about your problem with my money.’

‘And you said you were like water.’

‘I am like water. I flow past money.’

‘The lady doth protest…’

‘If you say that, I’ll get up and leave in a pale pink huff,’ said Imelda.

But Augustine was right. If this was how their conversation about money went — and this was how Em recalled it to me — then she was indeed protesting too much. Because there were times when her mother’s inability to handle a budget could irk her:

Once again, I must do without. I don’t understand why. We got you a dress in November, is all Mae will say. November will be my birthday until I die. Christmas will also fall in December until I die. (Unless there’s a cataclysm in the Holy Roman Catholic Church or the Gregorian calendar or both. God forbid. Though they might make it easier and turn all the months into thirty-day months and declare a five-day holiday with no dates at the end of each year. I wish I knew mathematics. Then I would know if I would still be a Sagittarian. Or has that something to do with the stars and where the sun is? Must ask Angel Ears.)

But when I said I had spotted a really nice piece of silk which I thought would do well for an Xmas festivity thingy, I was told in no uncertain terms that I must do without. I feel like the March sisters: Christmas isn’t Christmas without any new clothes.

What does she do with my money?

I feel mean asking. Like a man in a melodrama. I can’t bring myself to ask. Angel Ears says I earn a handsome salary and that should keep us nicely. But he doesn’t know that I have to darn my underwear in the most alarming places and wear the same shoes for months after I can feel the road beneath my feet. But I feel if I do ask, she might well say, ‘I spend it on all of us. Why can’t you earn some more?’ How would I do that? None of the AmConGen girls seem to need more than one job and they spend like sailors on shore leave. In ASL, it was different. Liddy, poor duck, gave tuitions to some Marwari kids. English? Or English and History, I think. And there was Gertie who stitched her own clothes and wore them with such an air that you felt you should ask her to make you up something, even if you knew that she wasn’t very good. I gave her that lovely floral cotton thing and she made it so deedy, I never had the heart to wear it, even after I took off a whole cartload of satin bows and ornamental buttons. I just told her I had got fat and I needed to slim down. I will get fat at this rate. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Acting on his idea that she was protesting too much, Augustine handed Imelda his first pay after their marriage. Only, she had got her first salary too and had planned on handing it over to him.

I remember The Big Hoom telling us, ‘She looked like I’d dropped a snake into her lap.’

‘It was all too much money,’ said Em. ‘My only impulse was to go out and spend all of it.’

But she didn’t. For years, she handed over everything she earned to her mother and then to her husband. When she started giving all her money to Augustine, she found she had to steal it back. And she did so, with his knowledge and unwilling consent, until she broke down and could no longer go to work.

‘He made me resign,’ she would say angrily. ‘Or I might still have had my job to fall back on.’

‘Stop talking rot,’ Susan or I would say. For The Big Hoom said nothing. He knew what we realized much later: the Consulate had allowed her to resign when she started adding her own, and very alarming, comments to diplomatic reports. ‘Personal interpolations’, they called them. I loved that phrase and when I used it, aged eight or thereabouts, Em could still laugh though the joke was on her.

• • •

Even on the single salary that The Big Hoom brought home, we should have had a better life, materially, than we did. I think The Big Hoom, before he was The Big Hoom, had plans for all of us. Em’s illness forced him to rewrite them. We ate well and we had as many books as we wanted. But nothing else was given. No servants. No refrigerator. A television, in any case, was a luxury for the middle classes.

From time to time, we would petition for a fridge, especially when we returned from the home of someone who had one. How effortlessly cold things were served. How easily a meal could be put together from this and that and these and those, all on separate levels, all in separate containers, all sealed away for the future.

‘Why do we need a fridge?’ The Big Hoom would ask rhetorically. ‘We have the city’s best market next to us. We eat our food fresh.’

‘But what about keeping things in the fridge?’ Susan said.

‘Like pedas,’ I said. ‘Remember how your office sent us that huge box?’

‘And do you remember how long it lasted?’ he asked. Susan laughed ruefully. Em chuckled too.

‘Gosh, I had a leaky bum for days after that.’

‘Chhee,’ I said and Susan said and even The Big Hoom made a sound of displeasure. But we knew that the phrase was now enshrined in Em’s vocabulary. She would use it whenever diarrhoea surfaced in anyone’s life.

So we had the market, we had fresh food, and for everything that was left over, there was Em.

‘Except for doodhi,’ she reminded me, the friendly spectre at my shoulder. ‘And elaichi-flavoured Horlicks. I couldn’t stand that. But if we’re talking about food and eating, you must never forget the tale of the sweet fugya.’

Of course. It isn’t easily forgotten. There was a time when Em hadn’t slept for three days, except for short catnaps, during which she would drop half-smoked beedis on the floor. The flat swelled and trembled with the fever of her restless energy and unending chatter. Then one afternoon, halfway through lunch, it all caught up with her.

‘I’m going to take a nap,’ she said and we heaved a sigh of relief. She went off to sleep, and her body took its revenge. She slept for sixteen hours, straight, during which one of us would drip some water on her lips every four hours or so.

Then she woke up, much refreshed and ready to roister again. And began chewing.