Jerry Pinto - Em and the Big Hoom

‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘this is a very sweet fugya’

Everyone stopped what they were doing. We had been eating fugyas — bread balls, slightly sweet, to be consumed with fiery hot sorpotel — at the meal from which Em had risen to take a nap.

‘No wonder it’s sweet,’ said The Big Hoom. ‘The saliva in your mouth has been working on it for sixteen hours.’

She had walked away from the table with a fugya in her mouth. Felled by the lack of sleep, she had succumbed with it still in her mouth. It was only some miracle that had prevented it from slipping down the wrong passage and killing her.

But then, she lived under some magic star as far as her body was concerned. She smoked for the greater part of her life and for most of it she suffered from a terrible hacking cough.

One day, things turned serious. She mentioned in passing, to Susan, ‘my cauliflower’. Susan told me when I got home from college.

‘You know, I didn’t know what she was talking about. It could have been any part of her body but somehow, it made me stop. I said, “What cauliflower?” She said, “The one growing on my tongue.” I said, “Show it to me,” and she did.’

We both went back to peer into her mouth. Her tongue had a deep fissure on it, and in the middle of the fissure was a whitish growth, very like a cauliflower.

We freaked.

‘Should we call him now?’ I asked.

‘I think not,’ said Susan. ‘It doesn’t look like an emergency.’

I thought about it.

‘Yeah, I don’t think it’s going anywhere right now.’

‘You will not tell him,’ said Em.

‘Are you nuts?’

‘I’ll make you a deal. Let’s wait until my birthday. If it’s still there, you can tell him.’

Her birthday was two weeks away.

‘What do you think is going to happen?’

‘It’s going to vanish.’

‘You’re mad or what?’ I asked.

‘ You’re mad or what?’ Susan asked me.

But Em had an answer: ‘I plead the fifth amendment.’

‘The fifth amendment to the Indian Constitution concerns the relationship between the Centre and the states,’ I said.

‘Save me from this pedantic brute,’ Em said.

Susan started in: ‘Shut up. She has can —’

‘Don’t say it,’ shouted Em. We couldn’t tell whether this was common-or-garden superstition, or one more symptom: ‘They’ might hear.

‘Okay, you have a cauliflower in the middle of your tongue…’

‘Much nicer. I like cauliflower. I don’t want a crab in the middle of my mouth.’

‘Well, if you don’t, you should stop smoking.’

‘I am not going to stop anything.’

There was to be no discussion.

‘May I see it again?’ I asked.

‘Certainly,’ said Em and stuck her tongue out.

‘Bejasus. That certainly looks like…’

‘Don’t say it.’

‘Okay, but we’re going to have to tell The Big Hoom.’

‘You are not. I told you. It won’t be there on my birthday. If it is, well, shoot me.’

‘The point is not to have you die,’ Susan pointed out.

Thinking about it now, I cannot believe that we did not rush her to an oncologist right there. But we didn’t. Because we were used to the idea of Em being in a medical emergency of some kind or the other.

And on her birthday, we checked her tongue, Susan and I.

No cauliflower.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I told Our Lady, I am not going like this. So she took it away.’

I didn’t know what to make of this miracle.

‘What happened?’ Susan asked. Her tone was different. She wasn’t taking any of that.

‘It detached itself and I swallowed it,’ said Em.

‘Ick,’ said Susan but she seemed satisfied with that.

‘Can we tell him now?’

‘Tell him about what?’

‘Your cauliflower.’

‘What cauliflower?’ she said, her eyes wide open. But The Big Hoom entered the room carrying a tray of bacon and eggs and toast, her favourite breakfast. He heard too.

‘What cauliflower?’ he repeated. He had a way of scenting the important. I told him. He looked at both of us. Then he looked at her. All of us wilted a bit. We ate our breakfast in silence. Finally, Em broke the silence.

‘It’s gone,’ she said.

He said nothing.

‘She made us promise,’ I said.

He said nothing. When breakfast was over, he made a phone call. Em was to go with him to the doctor. When it was all fixed, he said to both of us: ‘Sometimes, I wonder whether education really matters.’

Then he left for work.

Em tried to cheer us up.

‘Nothing’s wrong with me.’

‘This isn’t about you,’ said Susan.

‘We should have told him,’ I said.

‘No, we should have taken her to a doctor ourselves.’

‘You and whose army?’ asked Em, truculent. It was one of her favourite phrases. The marines posted at the AmConGen had used it a lot.

But the miracle continued. She was examined thoroughly, pinched and prodded, scanned and sounded and even had ‘a finger put up my bum after due warning from a sweet Malayali girl’. But nothing was found.

‘Lungs like bags of phlegm. Voice like a pross on the prowl. Cough like a lion in the Serengeti. But no crabs in the body, no crabs in the crotch. I beat the odds. How’s that? I would like to donate my body to science, you bounders, so that they can find out what exactly made me immune. Break out the bids, folks,’ she chortled.

‘So what was the cauliflower?’

‘You silly berks can’t tell a ruddy miracle when you see one?”

‘No.’

‘Oh ye of little faith. How shall ye be ducks in the gardens of paradise were I not there to wish it for ye?’

‘I don’t recognize that from any version of the Bible,’ I said.

‘It’s my version,’ said Em, bubbling. ‘I shall be swanning about in the promised land and you two will get a good ducking.’

‘Stop it,’ I snarled.

‘Em,’ said Sue.

‘I told Our Lady…’ she trailed off. ‘Okay, I said to her: take five years from my score but let me go eating and drinking and smoking. You gave me this stuff…’ she tapped her forehead, ‘and I took it with good grace.’

‘Good grace?’

‘You have to live through what I’ve lived. You’d think it good grace too. So I said, take five years. Obviously, someone was listening. Lady in blue, I love you. That’s why I told you, I can’t take too much more male will in my life. No thy-will-be-done for me. I surrender nothing. I surrender nothing. I’ll take my chances with a woman’s kindness.’

On a college trip to the Thane Mental Hospital, I had seen what I thought was the worst of India’s mental health care system. Thirty or so third-year students with an interest in psychology, we were shepherded there by Arpana Shetty, a junior lecturer, so junior that she had just finished her masters and was seen as a suitable object for lechery. We were introduced to Sunil, a drug addict who was in recovery — or so the hospital claimed. He was obviously a young man from the middle class or above. He spoke English well and without self-consciousness, as to the manor born.

‘You can get anything here,’ Sunil said peaceably. ‘It’s all part of the way India works.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Arpana.

‘Free your mind, Ms Shetty,’ said Sunil. ‘This is a poor country with good topsoil. A poor country pays its people poorly. They can be bought and sold easily enough.’

‘Sunil…’ said a voice behind us. It was someone who looked like a bureaucrat. Arpana Shetty presented her credentials. As the bureaucrat examined them and introduced himself, Sunil continued to address us, his gaze abstracted, his manner gentle.