Em and the Big Hoom (2 page)

‘Is that why you're here?'

I wanted to bite my tongue. I wanted to whiz around the world, my red cape flying, and turn time back so that I could choose not to make that remark. But Em, being Em, was already replying.

‘I don't know, Baba, I don't know why. It's a tap somewhere. It opened when you were born.'

I was repaid in pain, a sharp thing.

‘I loved you. And before you I loved Susan, the warmth of her and the smiles and the tiny toes and the miracle of her fingernails and the way her scrapes would fade within the day as she healed and grew. I loved the way her face lit up when she saw me and the way she nursed. But after you came along . . .'

She turned to the window again. An ambulance turned in, lazily, in the way of the city's ambulances. Inured to traffic, unconcerned by mortality, unimpressed by anyone's urgency, the ambulance driver stopped to light a beedi before jumping out of the cab. We watched together as someone inside opened the doors and two young men leapt out and tried to wrest a stretcher from within.

‘Was it like that?' she asked. She had forgotten how she got to the hospital.

‘No,' I said. ‘You came in a taxi.'

‘What was I wearing?'

‘The green dress with the pockets.'

She looked puzzled.

I rooted about in the locker by the bed, a locker marked ‘Patient Belonging', and opened it. I pulled the dress out.

‘Oh that one,' she said. ‘Bring it here.'

She stroked it as if to rediscover a little more about it.

‘The tap?' I said.

‘Sorry. I must be going mad.'

We both smiled at this, but only a little. It was a tradition: the joke, the smile.

‘After you were born, someone turned on a tap. At first it was only a drip, a black drip, and I felt it as sadness. I had felt sad before . . . who hasn't? I knew what it was like. But I didn't know that it would come like that, for no reason. I lived with it for weeks.'

‘Was there a drain?'

‘No. There was no drain. There isn't one even now.'

She was quiet for a bit.

‘It's like oil. Like molasses, slow at first. Then one morning I woke up and it was flowing free and fast. I thought I would drown in it. I thought it would drown little you, and Susan. So I got up and got dressed and went out onto the road and tried to jump in front of a bus. I thought it would be a final thing, quick, like a bang. Only, it wasn't.'

Her hands twitched at the sheet.

‘I know.'

‘Yes, the scar's still there.'

We were silent. I didn't want to hear this. I wanted to hear it.

‘The bus stopped and the conductor had to take me to a hospital in a taxi. He sat in the front, lotus pose.'

‘Lotus?'

‘My blood was flowing across the floor of the taxi. There was no drain there either. I remember it all, as if rain had fallen. Have you ever noticed how rain clears the air? Everything stands out but it also looks a little thinner, as if the dust had been keeping things together. I felt as if . . .'

Her hands twitched at the sheet again. It slipped off her foot and both of us looked at the scar that ran from under the big toe to her ankle, a ridge of scar tissue.

‘It had to be dressed every day for months. Dr Saha came and did the honours.'

‘Don't wander,' I said.

‘Where was I?'

‘In the taxi. With the world outside clear.'

She looked a little confused.

‘You said the world was clear.'

‘Oh, not the world. Inside my head.'

Each time she had tried to kill herself she had opened her body and let her blood flow out. Was that the drain, then, I wondered, was that how it worked?

‘And this time?' I asked her. ‘Is it clear now?'

‘This time I heard a small voice inside my head, just as I was beginning to slip away. I heard it say, “Please save me.”'

‘That was you.'

‘No, I heard it.'

‘It was you,' I said again.

‘It must have been, no? I heard it as if it were someone else. And then you came. And Susan. I didn't want it that way. I didn't want the two of you to see anything like that in your lives.'

We had gone out together that afternoon, Susan and I, even though The Big Hoom was at work. It was a time of plenty. The stock market had worked in The Big Hoom's favour and he had sold some shares. A nurse had been hired and Em was, for once, someone else's responsibility.

We were teens on an adventure, watching
Coolie
, the biggest Amitabh Bachchan hit of
1983
. The Big Hoom wouldn't have approved, and Em would have mocked, but they would never find out. We had laughed a lot, happy that we could go out and laugh, like all the others we knew who were our age. And it was a warm afternoon, the kind made for laughing. When the show was over and we came home, the nurse was asleep. She had no idea where Em was – this, in a house with a single bedroom, one living room, one small kitchen, two narrow corridors, one four-by-two balcony. Susan knew. She headed straight for the bathroom. There was no reply. She called, ‘Em, Em,' panic streaking her voice. I knocked and called too. Finally, we heard something wet and slithery inside, and the door opened.

‘I tried it again,' Em said. She was drenched in blood. It was in her hair. It was on her hands. It was dripping from her clothes.

I pulled out the immersion rod to warm some water. Susan went for the nurse, but she, wily lady, had taken one look over our shoulders and vanished into the still-warm afternoon. Susan called The Big Hoom. I heard her in some other way, not the normal way you hear things. It was thin and distant but it was also clear. I can still hear it if I try. I don't. Em was leaning against the wall next to the bathroom door and shivering. I guided her to the low metal stool and she sat down. Her arms dangled between her knees. I picked up one of her arms and turned it over to look. The cut was a single line, dark red. It said nothing.

‘Em tried to kill herself,' I heard Susan say.

Then she was back.

‘What did he say?' I asked.

‘What do you think?' she was impatient as she tested the water with her finger. ‘He says he's coming.'

I poured warm water over Em, from her head downwards. The water ran red. Susan reached down in front of Em and began to raise her dress and petticoat. I excused myself. My mother was going to be stripped naked.

I went out and made the next call. To Granny, Em's mother, solid woman, cloth and sawdust solid.

‘Coming,' said Granny.

‘Take a taxi,' I said.

‘Taking,' said Granny.

I stood in the balcony for a while. The traffic flowed outside. A sparrow dropped onto the balcony. A crow followed. The sparrow fluttered away. The crow preened cockily. A chickoo seller announced that his wares came from Gholvad. Then I went to make tea with lots of sugar. I had read somewhere that sugar helps with shock. Who was shocked?

When Em and Susan came out, I brought them tea. Susan sat Em down and held the tea cup to her lips. I went into the bathroom and turned on all the taps. I let the water flood out onto the floor. The stick broom, which had a tendency to fall on its side after it was used, was saturated in blood. There were clots that looked like hairballs – I still don't know what they were – and they kept clogging the drain. I gathered them with my foot in one corner where they could not impede the flow of the water, the draining of the blood. I smelt the odour that trains leave on your fingers: iron. In some odd part of my brain, something about the link between iron and anaemia and haemoglobin and blood clicked into place. I went down and bought a bottle of iron tonic.

When I returned, Granny and The Big Hoom had arrived. He was already in the bathroom, cleaning up. Granny was in the bedroom, talking to Em and drinking tea.

I don't remember what we did that evening. I don't remember going to sleep or waking up the next morning. I only remember the moment Dr Saha, the family
GP
, came. He clicked his tongue and bandaged Em – her wrists this time. The Big Hoom was not a fan of bandages; he believed that sunlight and air did more good if you kept things clean, but he didn't object.

‘Should she go to the hospital?' he asked.

‘See how she sleeps,' Dr Saha said.

We slept that night, so Granny and The Big Hoom must have kept watch over Em. And something must have changed in the night because she was not there the next morning. We began our hospital visits: one day Susan, one day me, every day The Big Hoom. On one of these visits, she told me about the tap that opened at my birth and the black drip filling her up and it tore a hole in my heart. If that was what she could manage with a single sentence, what did thirty years of marriage do to The Big Hoom?

Imelda saw Augustine in the office. Her diary reads:

I finally located the source of the booming voice. I asked Andrade, who is the registered office flirt, about the noise and he said, ‘Oh, that's
AGM
.' I looked a bit puzzled and he looked a bit puzzled. ‘I don't know his name. We all call him
AGM
. His initials, I think.'

‘Don't you like him?' I asked.

‘Oh, he's a great guy. You'll see.'

‘And you don't know his name?'

‘I do. It's
AGM
,' he said.

Now what do you say to that?

I think I might like it here, as long as they don't give me too many numbers to type . . .

We had carte blanche to read Em's diaries and letters. Sometimes she read them out to us, her spectacles perched high on her nose, the black frame hiding her thick eyebrows. I never saw her tear up anything; every scrap and note written to her went into a series of cheerful cloth bags. On certain days, she would rummage around in the bags and pull out a note, a fragment, a whole letter. She would glance at some, read some in full, and dream.

While Em's letters were public documents in the family, neither Susan nor I read her diaries during her lifetime (Susan still won't). Perhaps we had understood very early that they would give us no clues to her illness, or ways to reach her on her worst days. Or – and this may be closer to the truth – we were afraid of what we might find there, and afraid of having to deal with it. Even now, I look in Em's notebooks not for my mother but for Augustine's Beloved.

It didn't take Augustine, aka
AGM
, long to spot the new girl in the office of
ASL
 – Ampersand Smith Limited – the engineering goods company at which Imelda was the new stenotypist and he was the junior manager, sales. Two days later, he spoke to her:

Booming Voice spoke to me. What nerve. He bounces past my desk, flashes his blue peepers at me and says, ‘Hello buttercup,' and ricochets off the opposite wall to do something else.

I find it difficult to picture my father in these entries. To me, he seemed built for endurance, not speed. The thought of him ricocheting off walls is odd. I have tried reconstructing him in my head, dressing him in what up-and-coming young men wore to the office at the time: white shirt, black trousers, black shoes and socks. Like all such men, he probably also kept another couple of shirts with him, and a tin of talcum powder, so that he could change when the humidity leached his shirt of its starch. He was a man who liked women. When he won
The Illustrated Weekly of India
's crossword contest, he bought every woman in his office a yellow rose with a little fern wrapped in white tissue and tied with a yellow satin ribbon. For that day, so Gertrude told Imelda, the office had felt like a garden. And for weeks the perfume of the roses had lingered, if not in reality, then at least in the imaginations of the young women of
ASL
. Gertrude had opened her bag and showed Imelda that the satin ribbon still lay at the bottom.

‘To remind me that all men aren't the same, dear,' she had said. Gertrude was a veteran of the love wars. She had been ‘carrying on' with a married man for so many years, she had lost count. ‘And to add insult to injury, dear, he's Muzzlim.'

Imelda was too young to understand that love could be an injury. She was too young to understand why Motasim's religion was an added insult.

She was also too young to respond to ‘Hello buttercup'. So she hadn't.

‘Why didn't you?' Gertrude was surprised.

‘I didn't know what to say.'

‘You could have said “Hello”?'

But in all the films Imelda had seen, the suave young man would say ‘Hello buttercup' and the heroine would answer such impudence with the kind of remark that would stop his airy advance through fields of irises and daisies and tansies. Such a crisp response marked her as someone different from the rest, a fitting sparring partner, someone to love.

That day, ‘Hello, buttercup' had seemed unanswerable, and Imelda had only managed a weak roll of the eyes – ‘not even with the panache of Anna Magnani,' she recalled. Gertrude did not know all this. In her world, men went hunting and women waited to be hunted. But when a man began to circle, it was up to the prey to draw the hunter in.

‘Unless you're a fool for love, my dear,' she said, over a Coke float at Bombelli's. ‘Unless you throw your cap over a windmill.'

Gertrude became Imelda's closest friend at
ASL
, and would have been her guide in matters of the heart, had her own love life not been so pitted with compromise. At first, Gertrude's allusions to her secret sorrow over Motasim caused Imelda deep distress. But over a couple of weeks she began to see that the references were mechanical. Gertrude had settled into a comfortable pattern in which she had love and tragedy in equal measure, and a male presence in her life to warm her bed and take her to dak bungalows in hill stations, but never to get in the way of her decisions.

‘Buy your own house, I say to all the girls. I can see them thinking, “Who's this soiled dove to give us advice?” But my heart is good and I know what's what and God is my judge. If it's your home, you can do what you want there. If it's your home, no one is going to tell you to sit if you want to stand.'

‘Not even Motasim, Gertie?' asked Imelda.

‘
Certainly
not Motasim,' said Gertrude. ‘Do you know he wasn't married when we met? And it was like that –' and here she snapped her fingers.

‘
Un coup de foudre
!' said Imelda happily. She had always wanted one of those to happen, not necessarily to her but to someone, so she could watch from a safe distance.

‘That only. He took one look at me at Andrade's – this was after the flickers, we had all gone from the office –
one
look and he knew. He was looking at me, saying with his eyes, “I want, I want.” I was so young then, so innocent. I believed in love.'

Like many women Gertrude saw herself as a cynic, largely because the man she loved would not marry her and because she had two cigarette holders – one of onyx and one of mother-of-pearl – which she dug out of her capacious bag when she could be bothered. And finally, because there had once been a good young man, a medical representative, who had loved her and wanted to take her away from it all.

‘And so I put in a word,' she told me on one of the few occasions she came to meet her old, old friend Imelda, our Em. She chose her times carefully, never coming when Em wanted to meet her. She would come when Em was depressed and withdrawn. This meant Susan or I had to entertain her for the mandatory forty-five minutes which she thought constituted a visit to a sick friend. Then she could go away and pretend to be offended when Em really did want to see her. I could see that she thought this made her a friend in need. It was one of my first lessons in the self-deception people practise on themselves. I hated talking to Gertrude for this reason. But I loved talking to her because she had known Em when she was whole. I loved it also because talking to anyone normal was an invitation to the world of ordinary people who had ordinary woes and worries: money, sex, sin and real estate, for instance. They were not, or so I imagined, people with ambivalences about their mothers or fears about their own acceptability.

‘I put in a word with your father,' Gertrude said. ‘If you're looking to talk to her, I told him, you'll have to go a little easy. No yorricking about.'

‘Yorricking?'

‘You'll have to step carefully, I told him. She wasn't like one of us; she wouldn't love'em and leave'em. And she seemed lost, I could tell.'

 • • • 

Gertrude was right. Em was not quite sure what she was doing in an office. She began her day with Mass; or she was supposed to. And then she was on the tram to work. It seemed like a job she could have done in her sleep: taking dictation and typing letters, doing the filing and answering telephones. Em had been a teacher before this, and I could imagine her as one. I couldn't see her as a steno. My version of elitism, perhaps.

‘The job was all right, but I was a little worried about being in a big office with adults,' she told us.

‘Adults? Weren't you one?'

‘Technically, I was. But I didn't think of myself that way. All those cartoons about “Come in and take some dictation” and being chased around the desk . . . and I hadn't even
wanted
to be an office girl.'

When Em finished her Senior Cambridge at the age of sixteen, she had thought she was going to college. She dreamt of standing at the bus stop, chattering with her friends and refusing to admit that those boys were looking. She dreamt of lectures and Milton and prosody (‘It sounded so naughty'). She dreamt of French literature. In the confines of her head, she debated whether she would wear dresses like the other Roman Catholic and Anglo-Indian girls of Byculla or whether she would follow the Coelho sisters in their khadi saris and Kolhapuri chappals – carelessly, gorgeously beautiful, incidental flowers in their hair.

She stopped dreaming when she came home with her certificate and the good wishes of her teachers.

‘Daddy will ask,' Granny said. ‘You say no.'

Em's mother spoke in code. She omitted almost all the important words in every sentence. She had had far too many languages drummed into her ears – first Konkani in Goa, then Burmese in Rangoon, then Bengali in wartime Calcutta, and now English, in which her child spoke and dreamed. It had taken away most of her vocabulary. She communicated through gestures, facial expressions and the assumption that everyone knew what she was talking about. It doesn't sound likely, but it worked.

Em realized that she was being asked to say that she had no wish to go to college. She didn't understand why. So Granny told her.

‘Where there is? You have to. I can't. How long?'

Em understood. There was no money for college. She would have to work. Granny had scrounged and saved for too long on granddad's modest salary – a mathematics teacher's salary. Besides, college would take an awful lot of time.

‘She was right. Daddy did ask if I wanted to go to college,' Em said. ‘I couldn't say “No” because I wanted to go and I didn't want to lie. I asked, “Where will the money come from?” I was hoping he would have an answer. A gold wristwatch that he could sell, a ruby he had smuggled in from Burma. Anything. But he only said, “That can be arranged.” And I knew it would mean taking a loan and maybe the house would go. I didn't talk about it again, and he didn't talk about it either.'

Instead Granny went out looking and found her a job at a school run by nuns.

‘They hired you?' I asked.

‘How could they? I was sixteen. So the nuns told Ma they would hire Astrid instead. Astrid the Ostrich, you know?'

‘No. I don't.'

‘You don't remember Astrid the Ostrich? No, she must have been before your time. Astrid DeSa, poor dear, she's dead. Died not long after she replaced me at the school – that's what I heard. She was at the blackboard and she put her hand up to her head and coughed once. Then she threw up her lunch, right on the blackboard, and slumped. The stain is still there, they say. By the time the other teachers came, she was gone.'

‘She died with her boots on.'

‘That's supposed to mean you died happy. Did she? I don't know. Who can know? I would like to die with my boots on too. But what would that mean? I haven't had any boots for a while. I don't know that I ever had boots. I think I had booties once – booties . . . sounds like something you develop if you don't wash. Or is that cooties? Spellings! I could never bear American spelling, not even when I took their dollars. For me, it was always the Queen's English. How I longed to type “colour” at the AmConGen . . . that's the American Consulate, before you ask.'

We didn't have to ask. We knew that she worked there, after leaving
ASL
.

‘Why couldn't you type it?'

‘Type what?'

‘Colour.'

‘I could type. No, I meant I couldn't type it with a “u”. I had to do it all without “u”. And then
you
came along. Gosh. That's another story.'

Conversations with Em could be like wandering in a town you had never seen before, where every path you took might change course midway and take you with it. You had to keep finding your way back to the main street in order to get anywhere.

‘So what did Astrid DeSa have to do with your job?' I asked.

‘Oh, she had the paperwork. She had a Teacher's Certificate. But she couldn't work because she had had twins and there were abscesses on her nipples and she always said, “My boys drink my milk and pus and blood.” In my head, I called one Pus and the other Blood for a long time . . . So the nuns hired her on paper but I did the teaching.'

‘And Astrid agreed?'

‘She got twenty per cent.'

‘Of your salary?'

‘Of my salary. I got sixty per cent.'

‘And the rest?'

‘A donation to the work of Jesus.'

‘It went to the nuns?'

‘Don't be harsh. They did all this to help your Granny. They could easily have turned her away.'

‘And you could have gone to college.'

‘Could I?' She frowned. ‘I suppose I could have. But I would have had to ask Daddy. And he would have had to take a loan. And the house would have gone.'

‘Really? To send just one student to college?'

I tried to believe Em in everything she said. It was my act of faith, because I could see how the outside world immediately discounted whatever she said. But I wanted so hard to believe that I often found myself in the position of the inquisitor, the interrogator, demanding verification, corroboration, further proof. Most of the time, she didn't seem to mind.