Jerry Pinto: Em and the Big Hoom

Dear Angel Ears,

Outside the window, a Marathi manus is asking mournfully if anyone would like to buy salt. Or at least that’s what I think. Mee-ee-et, he wails, Me-eeetwallah, mee-eet. Other sounds: Mae mumbling about morning Mass; an impertinent sparrow demanding the last bit of my toast.

I miss you terribly. But if you are going to send me a postcard, I shall abstain. I think postcards are for acquaintances and now that we are friends, you should find some nice stationery and write me a proper letter. These scribbles will not do, they are meant for the common masses.

A butterfly is banging on the windowpane in the corridor and I must now rise to let it out. If your next letter is not to hand with heartwarming promptness, I shall declare you unfit for human consumption and throw you to the lions.

Love.

I

PS: The sparrow wins. Imelda: nil, Sparrow: one.

In her letters to him, she called him Angel Ears.

‘Why Angel Ears?’ I asked her, in Ward 33 (Psychiatric), Sir J. J. Hospital.

She turned her cool green eyes on me and smiled. For a while, her fingers stopped playing with the worn-out sheet that was covering her.

‘Haven’t you noticed? His ears are the sweetest thing about him. They look like bits of bacon curled up from too much frying.’

I had never thought of my father’s ears. But later that evening, as he stood in the kitchen and cooked for me and my sister, scraping at a fry-up of potatoes, I saw that his ears were indeed unusual. When was the first time that she noticed his ears? Was it part of her falling in love with him, or did it happen in the hypersensitive moments that follow? And when she called him by that name the first time, did he respond immediately? He probably did, without asking why. They could be like that together.

It intrigues me, love. Especially theirs, which seems to have been full of codes and rituals, almost all of them devised by her. She also called him Mambo, and Augie March, but almost never by his given name, Augustine.

He called her Imelda, which was her name, and, sometimes, Beloved.

• • •

She had another name for him: Limb of Satan. LOS. I asked her about that late one night, when the two of us were smoking together on the balcony of our small flat in a city of small flats. Behind us the one-bedroom-hall-kitchen, all 450 square feet of it, was quiet. In front of us, the side of a tenement rose like a cliff-face. Two trees were framed in between the buildings and in the foliage of one, a streetlight flickered erratically. She started laughing, a harsh scrape of sound that might belong in a brothel.

‘Because he was always tempting me to sin,’ she said.

‘Who was?’ Susan, my sister, was awake. She fitted herself into the balcony, waving a hand at the cloud of smoke we were producing.

‘Your father.’

‘It’s not a sin if you’re married, is it?’

‘It’s always a sin according to the Wholly Roaming Cat Licks.’

‘That can’t be true.’

‘Can it not? I think you’re only supposed to do it if you want babies. I wanted four but Hizzonner said, “Then you pay for the other two.” That, as they say, was that. And I had to give the twenty-six others away.’

‘What!’ Susan and I looked at each other. Were there hordes of siblings we knew nothing about?

‘I gave them straight out of my womb,’ she explained. ‘I could always tell when it had happened. I’d hear a click and I would know I was pregnant again, and I’d pray to Our Lady to take the poor wee thing and give it to someone else who wanted a child. Maybe one of those women who buy wax babies to offer the said Lady at Mahim.’

‘So you’d have…’ I ventured.

‘Abortions? No, what do you take me for? I’d just climb down five stairs and jump six.’

‘Jump down the stairs?’

‘Six steps and land with a thump, six times, to shake those little mites from their moorings.’

She turned to Susan.

‘But if you get knocked up, you come and tell me and I’ll come with you to the doctor. We’ll get you D’d and C’d before you can say Dick with a Thing and a Tongue.’

‘What is deed and seed?’

‘Dilation and curettage. I don’t know what exactly it is but it sounds like they open you up and put a young priest in there. Anyway, only doctors do it. So when you’re knocked up, you’ll get a proper doctor to fiddle with your middle, you hear? No back-street abortions for you.’

‘What about adoption?’ Susan asked.

‘What about it?’

‘Mother Teresa came to college and —’

‘She came to your college?’

‘Yes.’

‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘I didn’t?’

‘No. No one tells me anything. What did she say?’

‘She said that if we got pregnant we should carry the child to term and give it to her.’

‘She said that? Gosh.’

She frowned and was silent for a moment, considering this.

‘I suppose it comes from not having lived in the world for hundreds of years. She’s lived in a convent, it’s not her fault. But still. Suppose I got pregnant today. Suppose I got nice and big and everyone asked, “When is it due?” and “My, you’re carrying in the front, it must be a boy,” and “What do you want? Pink or blue?” — and after all that, there’s no baby at my breast. What do you think they’d think? What would I say? “Oh, I carried the baby to term and then I sent him off to Mother T because I couldn’t afford him and I didn’t want to have an abortion…?”’

‘Maybe you’re supposed to hide,’ I said.

‘Oh yes, go away for a vacation for six or seven months. Where?’

‘Goa?’

‘Goa!’ she said theatrically. ‘That’s worse than having it in Bombay. You might as well take an advert out in O Heraldo — “Fallen woman available for gawking and comments behind hankies. Holy Family parish church, Sunday Mass. For personal appointments and the full story, contact Father so and so.”’

She shook her head.

‘That’s what comes of all this celibacy business. We confess to men who’ve never had to worry about a family. Naturally, it’s a huge sin to them, this abortion business. What do they know? They probably think it’s fun and games. Let them try it. I remember poor Gertie. Once, she was sure that it had happened —’

‘An abortion?’

‘No, stupid, a pregnancy — she was late, and she was never late, so she knew. She took me out after work and we stood on the street near Chowpatty beach and she ate three platefuls of papaya. I thought she was constipated. But then we went to Bombelli’s and she had three gins as if they were cough syrup. That was when she told me what she was trying to do. “Bake the poor thing out of there,” she said. “It gets too hot inside, the bag squeezes and the baby pops out. I hope.” She came to the office the next day and she looked like death warmed over. Apparently, it had worked. “Baby, if something like that happens to you, you go and get it D’d and C’d. It’s not worth it,” she said to me. And now I say unto you, Sue, and to you too…’ she said, looking at me.