Jerry Pinto - Em and the Big Hoom

‘I don’t know you well so I can’t tell. How much of you has come back?’ he asked Em.

‘How much do you think has come back?’

‘I think you’re one hundred per cent now.’

‘I am one hundred per cent, doc.’

‘So what’s all this about, this “so little was left”?’

‘Oh, he’s a smart one,’ said Em. ‘But doc, we need to get this clear. Whose side are you on?’

‘Yours.’

‘I bet you say that to all your patients.’

‘I do,’ he said.

‘Really? I thought you would have only said it to your wife.’

He laughed and then looked at her. It seemed as if he were taking stock of her again. Perhaps he did see something behind the woman in the cotton frock. But wasn’t that his job? Or was it? A diagnosis helps cure. But it also pigeonholes the patient. She’s manic depressive; he’s schizophrenic. Into your box.

‘I only say it to those who ask.’

‘Then they should all ask.’

‘Maybe if they didn’t have problems, they would ask.’

‘Because there’s no point if you’re not on my side.’

‘I’m on your side.’

‘Glad to hear that, Mike. Put it there, pal.’

She stretched out a hand, he shook it and Em settled into a trusting relationship with a psychiatrist. In doing so, she was exercising her right to hurt us. Dr Michael, on his part, never sent her to hospital except on one occasion and even then, she came back with the skin on her face intact. No shocks. It helped that as a Roman Catholic, he understood what she was talking about when she tried to explain how she had given up going to confession out of boredom.

‘I told him about the twenty-six,’ she said to me once. ‘He said, “That’s all old-fashioned now.”’

Most of the time, the myth about the twenty-six transplanted foetuses worked. But that it was a story she told often revealed something else, I thought: the guilt she felt over using contraception and the guilt she felt about those strange leaps down the stairs, six times six, each of twenty-six times. This guilt had accompanied her for years and it was faintly galling that she seemed to be relieved of it just because Dr Michael had said that it was old-fashioned. I had been telling her pretty much the same thing. Susan had explained the patriarchy’s claim on the body of women and how men always wanted to control the way women reproduced. The Big Hoom had said that it was nobody’s business but hers and his. She had agreed with all of us. She nodded and smiled but we knew she was just being polite. Underneath, nothing changed. Then Dr Michael sorted that one out. Just by saying it was old-fashioned.

I was old enough to know that my resentment of this bond was shading into jealousy. I had always been the person she had trusted. She would only take her tablets from me. On the rare occasions that I was not around, she would take them, on instruction, from Susan. Now Michael was the new mantra. Susan called him the archangel.

‘Dr Michael says…’ became one of Em’s favourite opening lines. It was also the most efficient way to close an argument with her. So although I hated him in a mild, milky way, I also respected something about him. He seemed, like The Big Hoom, to be made of some solid substance that could not be compromised. It might have been masculinity of the full-fledged, hair-in-the-ears, built-for-endurance, thick-around-the-middle sort.

That was why I called his clinic and made an appointment.

‘When do you want to bring her?’ he asked.

‘This isn’t about her,’ I said. ‘I want to meet you.’

I had read about pregnant pauses and I had always wondered if I could recognize one. I did.

‘Is it urgent?’ he asked after a while.

I assured him that it wasn’t.

We met a week later in a generic room in a generic polyclinic. Doctors played musical chairs with these rooms all over the space-starved city.

He looked at me quizzically.

‘What’s your problem, then?’

I didn’t know how to say it so I said it straight.

‘I want to know. Will I go mad?’

He considered me for a moment. He said nothing.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I know you don’t have a crystal ball. I’m asking what the chances are.’

‘You can only watch and wait,’ Dr Michael said. ‘There’s definitely a genetic component to bipolar disorders but no one can tell you whether you’re going to get it or not.’

‘Not a dominant/recessive thing, then?’

‘No. Right now we talk about triggers, stress, lack of love, failure at work, that kind of thing. But I’ve seen people take some awful knocks and nothing happens. There’s one thing though…’

I urged him on with my eyes and chin.

‘If you get past your thirties, you’re generally safe. If it hasn’t happened by then, it won’t happen at all. Or at least it becomes statistically improbable that it will.’

‘Statistically improbable’ was not enough. I wanted real assurance, or a diagnosis. When you’re a child, cast the runes. When you’re an adult, ask an expert. I had. The expert had no answer.

Wait. Watch.

Dr Michael came into our lives shortly after the Staywell Clinic (to which Em never returned), and soon we were depending on him more than we had on any other psychiatrist. He took to Em, or maybe he was like that with all his patients. ‘Only a phone call away,’ he told us, and he was. Em’s dosages could now be fine-tuned almost from day to day, instead of from week to week.

Did it help?

It helped us to know that we were doing everything in our power. But it seemed as if all psychiatric medicine was aimed only at the symptoms. Mute the paranoia. Calm the rage. Raise the endorphins. Underneath, the mysteries continued, unchanged. Underneath, somewhere in the chemistry of her brain, there was something that could not be reached. I was always aware of this. I could not answer the question ‘How’s mum?’ so I learnt a complicit smile. It worked because it drew the questioner into the penumbra of brave suffering that I manufactured for the world.

Physically, she seemed fine. We had almost never worried about her body. ‘I’m as strong as a mule and twice as ornery,’ she would often say when someone asked how she was. Her preferred diet was bhajiyas and sweet fizzy drinks for what ‘they do to my tongue’. But even those paled when the beedis ran out. There were only two moments of fright. The time when the cauliflower appeared in the middle of her tongue. And then three years later, when she seemed to have a growth in her uterus.

After she turned fifty, Em suddenly began to look a lot fatter than she had ever been. We all put it down to something in her metabolism, something to do with the amount of sugar she could consume when she was high, six spoons in a single cup of tea, a handful just for fun if she were passing the sugar tin, any amount of chocolate or jalebis or sweets from Brijwasi. In times of shortage, this could be a problem since we would be forced to hide the sugar, but most of the time it was a matter of casual teasing and no one seemed to be bothered, least of all Em herself.

But one day, she went off on one of her missions of mercy, to see Sarah-Mae, the nurse. We were related to her in some distant complicated way that everyone in the family understood as a responsibility. Sarah-Mae had lost everything when her younger boyfriend Christopher had disappeared into Canada on what he called a ‘recce mission’. Em would go see her twice a year at Saint Joseph’s Home for the Aged in Bandra, when she could, to ‘make her feel a little less lonely, the silly hag’.

This time, when she returned, she was looking all hot and bothered.

‘I have to go to the hospital,’ she said to me and Susan.