Em and the Big Hoom

PENGUIN BOOKS

EM AND THE BIG HOOM

Jerry Pinto is a writer of prose, poetry, and children's fiction, as well as being a journalist.
Em and the Big Hoom,
winner of the 2013 Crossword Book Award and the Hindu Literary Award, is his first novel. He lives in Mumbai, India.

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First published in India by Aleph Book Company 2012

First published in Great Britain by Viking 2014

Published in Penguin Books (USA) 2014

Copyright © 2012 by Jerry Pinto

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Pinto, Jerry.

Em and the Big Hoom : a novel / Jerry Pinto.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-101-63785-2 (eBook)

1. Women--Fiction. 2. Manic-depressive illness—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

PR9499.4.P56E43 2014

823'.92—dc23 2014005738

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

One day I came home and my mother
was on the phone to a friend. The friend
must have asked what I was doing
because my mother said, ‘Baba?
Oh he's trying to write.'
Still trying, Meem.

And so this one is for Meedhad,
MacDougall, The Mobster, Meddlesome
Matty, also known as Imelda
Philomena Perpetua
Pinto née Tellis.

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.

‘Me?'

‘Yes, you. Not that you're going to get pregnant any which way you turn out. But if you do put a loaf in some poor girl's oven, you will take her to a government place, you will announce that you are Mr and Mrs D'Souza –'

‘Why D'Souza?'

‘I don't know. Some name. Any name. Not hers. And after it's done you will take her somewhere to rest and relax and weep and you will stay with her until she can go home.'

‘You mean I'm not to tell her to jump down six stairs and give the baby to Our Lady?'

‘You are a wicked young man to laugh at an old lady's guilt,' said Em. But she was smiling too.

 • • • 

She was always Em to us. There may have been a time when we called her something ordinary like Mummy, or Ma, but I don't remember. She was Em, and our father, sometimes, was The Big Hoom. Neither Susan nor I, the only persons who might ever care to investigate the matter, can decide how those names came about, though we've tried (‘Em must mean M for Mother' and ‘Maybe it's because he made “hoom” sounds when we asked him something'). On certain days we called her Doogles, or The Horse, or other such names that sprang from some subterranean source and vanished equally quickly. Otherwise, she was Em, and most of the time she was Em with an exclamation mark.

Once, by mistake, I called her Mater. I got it out of a Richie Rich comic. The very rich, very snobby Mayda Munny used the word to address her mother. I should have known that I would not get away with something so precious, but I was nine or ten years old and did not know what precious meant. Em peered at me for a moment, pulling deeply on her beedi. (She smoked beedis because they were cheap, she said, and because once you'd started down the beedi road, you could never find your way back to the mild taste of cigarettes. The Big Hoom rarely came home from work in the evenings with sweets for us when we were children, but he never forgot the two bundles of Ganesh Chhaap Beedi.)

‘Mater,' she said, and her eyes shone behind the curls of smoke. ‘Yes, I suppose I am. I did do it, didn't I? And here you stand, living proof.'

I think I blushed. She roared, a happy manic laugh.

‘I thought you boys knew everything about the cock and cunt business!'

‘We do,' I said, lamely, terrified of where the conversation was going.

‘So what did you think, both of you were products of the Immaculate Conception? Gosh, you couldn't keep us out of bed in those first years.'

‘Em!'

‘What? Are you feeling all Oedipal-Shmeedipal then?'

‘What's Oedipal?'

Em loved a good story. She was off.

‘Ick,' I said when Oedipus wandered off, his eyes bleeding and his future uncertain, escorted by his daughter who was also his sister.

‘Well you may say “Ick”,' said Em. ‘But that's what Freud says every boy wants to do to his mother. Ick, I say to Mr Freud. He must have been odd, even for an Austrian. Not that I'm racist, but why would they have a navy when they're landlocked?'

‘Mr Freud was in the navy?' I asked, confused.

‘No, silly, I'm talking about
The Sound of Music
.'

The Big Hoom came into the bedroom.

‘You're telling the boy about?'

‘The psychoanalytic movement,' said Em, her voice slightly defiant.

‘Have you got past the id, the ego and the superego?' he asked pleasantly.

‘I should have started at that end, shouldn't I?'

‘At what end did you start?'

‘Oh, I was telling him about the Oedipus Complex.'

The Big Hoom said nothing. He did nothing. He looked at her. She went into a tizzy.

‘It's knowledge, knowledge is good, it will help, knowledge
always
helps,' she said. She was attempting logic. But she was miserable. It was only later that I came to understand why she never used her condition as a refuge: it would have violated her sense of fair play. The Big Hoom let her stew for a bit and then he nodded. He opened
The Hamlyn Children's Encyclopaedia
, a book that I refused to read because it had been given to Susan as a birthday present, and slowly led me through the facts of life.

This might have been enough, but my mind was already locked on to what Em had told me. ‘Why do boys want to do that with their mothers?' I asked.

A lesser man might have run shrieking from the question, or told his son to shut up. The Big Hoom taught me the word hypothesis, instead, and explained a little bit about Freud and tried to clear things up. Finally, he set me to making words out of ‘hypothesis' and promised me ten paise for every word after the twentieth.

I loved the word hypothesis. It sounded adult and beautifully alien. I had never heard anything like it before. I wanted more words like it. I felt, instinctively, that when you had enough words like hypothesis, you would be able to deal with the world. I wasn't sure I would ever be able to deal with the world. It seemed too big and demanding and there wasn't a fixed syllabus.

I didn't know how to deal with what we were as a family, either. I didn't really know
what
we were as a family. I only knew that something was wrong with all of us and that it had something to do with my mother and her nerves.

‘What are nerves?' I had asked The Big Hoom once. I didn't really want to know but a question was a good way to get him to pay attention to me. He put down his newspaper and took me into the gallery. Outside, wires snaked and writhed between the buildings of our housing colony. He pointed to them.

‘What are those?'

I hated these moments. I wanted to be told, I did not want to be asked.

‘Wires,' I said.

‘What do wires do?'

‘Electricity?'

‘Yes, they carry electric current,' he said. ‘Nerves do that inside the body.'

Thoughts, like electric currents, and inside my mother's head they ran uncontrolled – flashing and sizzling. I carried that image with me through my childhood for what ailed my mother and took her to hospital, sometimes every few months. Then she gave me another.

 • • • 

She was in Ward
33
again, lying in bed, a bed with a dark green sheet and a view of the outside. We could both see a man and a woman getting out of a taxi. They were young and stood for a while, as if hesitating, in front of the hospital. Then the man took the woman's hand in his and they walked into the hospital and we lost them.

‘That's why Indian women fall ill,' Em said. ‘So that their husbands will hold their hands.'