Em and the Big Hoom (7 page)

‘I need a place for my half-brother. I can't look after him forever. There's no blood tie,' said a lady in a blue sari with a matching bag.

‘I think I might go mad and then what will happen to her?' said a retired bank clerk of his wife.

‘You should fight this feeling,' said the lady in the sari.

 • • • 

‘Fight your genes,' The Big Hoom said to us once, to Susan and me. He did not explain. He did not know how to. But we knew what it meant. It meant that we were to march into the hall and take out our school books and reproduce the slipper-shaped animalcule whose pseudopodia power it through a world without feeling; to learn how to inscribe a hexagon into a circle without tearing the paper; to assimilate the causes and consequences of the battle of Panipat without ever identifying your own enemy because that would mean identifying yourself.

‘Fight your genes'. Focus. Be diligent. Concentrate. Do.

The Big Hoom and Susan are discussing historic battles for some reason. I decide to interrupt, feeling left out. Then we hear her.

‘I only remember two names of battles. Both have water in them for some reason: Waterloo and Panipat.'

She's saying something of her own accord. She's saying something that's not ‘Oh God, Oh God'; something that's not ‘Let me die, let me die'. Somewhere a helicopter is landing and the rescue team is beginning to attach straps to her body. She's being airlifted from that Arctic floe; she's being dragged free of the sucking earth. Summer is back.

There's a memory I have from the year I was sixteen. At Christmas Mass, I remember a priest talking about Saint Joseph. The shadowy figure of the father of the incarnate Lord, he called him, and I lost him after that as he maundered on about the virtues of the Holy Family. It was obvious that no one thought much about fathers and fatherhood. Maternity was central.

It wasn't. Not in my world. The Big Hoom was my rock and my refuge. He knew what to do, how to handle stuff. He knew when to let us off and take things over. I tried imagining my life without him and immediately grew cold with fear. I had no idea how one earned money. I knew that one went to work, but what kind of work could I do? When I was asked, I said I wanted to become a doctor but that was ambition by the numbers. Boys of my age, of my social class and academic success, said they wanted to be doctors or engineers. There
were
no other professions in the world, no other professions to which one might aspire. There was only the building of bridges and the repairing of bodies.

But the real fear was not that I wouldn't know how to earn money. It was this: life without The Big Hoom meant life with Em on her own – no, life with Em and no buffer. What if I had to open another door to find that she had sawed at her wrists with one of the knives we had blunted? How would I judge how much blood she had lost and whether she needed a blood transfusion or not? Could that be administered at home? If she died, would I know whom to bribe and how to bribe to make sure it would not turn into a police case? And where would I find the money to bribe, in the first place? What if I put all our savings in a risky business that failed?

At that point I realized what it meant to be a man in India. It meant knowing what one could do and what one could only get done. It meant being able to hold on to two patterns simultaneously. One was methodical, hierarchical, regulated and the outcomes depended on fate, chance, kings and desperate men. The other was intuitive, illicit and guaranteed. The trick was to know when to shift between the patterns, to peel the file off a table and give it to a peon, to speak easily of one's cousin the minister or the archbishop. I did not think I would ever know what these shifts entailed, and that meant, in essence, that I was never going to grow up. Or, and a goose walked over my grave, I would only grow up when The Big Hoom died. Only then would I learn how to deal with the world, this city, this life.

But how did one acquire such knowledge? Did it arrive in the moment itself, the understanding that this was not a man to be suborned, that this was a man who could be subverted? How did other people manage? There must be different ways for every level of society, that much I knew. But what was the way for the son of a mad woman, a ‘vedi' in the schoolboy argot of the playground? Anger didn't show the way. Nor hurt.

So how had
he
managed? How had The Big Hoom grown to the estate of masculinity? Most days I saw him as the perfect man, even in his dense silences that could leave you bleeding for a word in either direction. Then I would correct myself, slowly brutalizing him and so myself and my family. No, he was not a paragon. A paragon would also have been good-looking and would not have thick glasses, passing on to his children the myopia that would have them in spectacles before they were in their teens. Perhaps a paragon might have spotted what was wrong with Em before he married her. A paragon would have been more than a mere crisis manager. And a paragon would have expressed his feelings.

Had Em been the able parent, would things have been different?

This was an exercise that defeated me so completely that I was forced to recognize that The Big Hoom was indeed my paragon. Perhaps I did not want to recognize it only because it made me like every other boy I knew. But they somehow overthrew their fathers or dethroned them or got past them. There was no getting past The Big Hoom.

 • • • 

The Big Hoom's story has the mythic resonance of India in it. I might never have found out, never asked him about it, had it not been for a trip to Goa that we made together. Why weren't Susan and Em there? I don't know. I don't remember. It was not a funeral, it was just something that happened. Perhaps The Big Hoom himself had engineered it.

On the second day, after he had been cried over by sundry old women, most of whom would remain nameless to me, we went for a walk together in the village to which he had never shown much desire to return. Em said it was something to do with the property. He had signed away his rights to prevent a family feud turning into a court case. It hadn't helped and he was now a Goan with no land in Goa.

He was wearing a banian with his office trousers, an odd combination, while I loped beside him, a clumsy fourteen-year-old, unsure of what it meant to be on a holiday with my father, alone. The phrase ‘male bonding' was far in the future.

He stopped after we had walked half a furlong, or some distance I imagined to be half a furlong, and looked up at a tank that had been erected on two brick columns with a metal rod, about six feet long, hanging between them.

‘When Mr Fernandes built that tank, it seemed like the ultimate modern contraption. Everyone came from miles around to see it being built. Now, it looks like a giant with his dong hanging out of his pants.'

He startled a giggle out of me, because he did not use words like dong. He didn't respond and we walked down a thirsty path, all red mud and stones.

‘This was a green and shady walk when I was a boy,' he said. ‘They've cut down all the trees.'

The church appeared somewhere to our left.

‘That was the biggest building I saw before I went to the Basilica in Old Goa,' he said. ‘That's probably why I went to Bombay from Poona.'

‘Poona?

‘I went to Poona to sit for what you would call a board examination. It was like another planet: a huge world of cars and buses and cycles and noise. On the first day, I felt dizzy at the thought of so many people. All of them looked like they were about to crash into each other but at the last minute they would manage to slip past. It was like watching a hundred games of football going on at once and me in the goal, waiting for a hundred balls, none of which I could see.'

He stopped for a while and then shook his head a little.

‘Why did you go to Poona?'

‘It was the closest centre for the English examination. I didn't want to study in Portuguese.'

‘The language of the overlords.'

‘I don't think it had much to do with that,' he said. ‘It was just that there seemed to be more jobs available to people who spoke English.'

I fell silent. I felt silly. But then I was fourteen. I could be made to feel silly if someone sneezed.

‘There were many boys from Bombay at the school where I was staying. In those days, boys from Bombay would sit for their exams in Poona if they could manage it. I think they felt that the competition would not be as stiff, that they would shine in comparison.'

Among them was Mario, from Dhobi Talao. ‘You think this is a city?' he asked scornfully, as the boys sat on the steps of the dormitory of the school. ‘Come to Bombay. Now that's a city.'

‘I don't know anyone in Bombay,' said Augustine, aged fifteen.

(Was he being disingenuous? Or was he really an innocent from Moira? I didn't ask.)

‘You know me,' Mario said grandly. ‘Come and see.'

And so it was decided, on the spur of an invitation and a moment, on the challenge of a city vaster and grander than he could imagine, that Augustine would go to Bombay.

‘I had money to go home. I used it on a ticket to Bombay. I don't know what I was thinking. Or whether I was thinking about money at all. I had never had any before that, no pocket money, no spending money. Everything I had was second-hand or third-hand or bought for me. So perhaps I thought one could get on without money.'

Mario's mother came to receive him. The Big Hoom was not big on details but I imagined her in the standard garb of the Goan Roman Catholic lower-middle-class housewife. She would have been in a white-ish rayon shirt – not quite white because white is difficult to keep clean, who has the time? – embellished with fake lace. From under the collar, two pink satin ribbons falling limply on her chest. A black skirt riding under her paunch. And on her feet, low slippers that showed her cracked heels and the bunions on her toes. There would have been a faint smell around her, a smell of worry – Mario's exams, husband's alcoholism, Maria's marriage, her own over-strained budget, the leaking bathroom, the troublesome boss who did not understand why she had to take an hour off to fetch her son from the station; the worry that had carved a single deep line between her brows. I realized later that I was dressing her with the contempt of my class and the notions of my time. Rayon would not have been as popular at the time. And that entire outfit was more
1980
s than
1950
s.

‘She took one look at me,' The Big Hoom said, ‘and said, “Who is this?” Mario said, “He's Augustine. He's from Goa.” “Okay, nice to meet you,” she said and took her son and left.'

‘Didn't Mario tell her that he had invited you?'

‘He turned around as if to say something, I think. Maybe he even said “Sorry aahn?” or something like that. I don't think he ever told his mother that he had invited me to Bombay to stay with them.'

‘What did you do?'

Suddenly on that warm Goa afternoon, I felt the cold horror of that moment reach me across the years. The Big Hoom had been about as old as I was. I would not have known what to do. I would probably have burst into tears or gone running after Mario and his mother.

‘I stood there for a while. I didn't know what to do. I had very little money left. And then a car stopped in front of the station and a lady got out and said, “Take out those bags.” I thought she wanted some help so I got the bags out but when I had carried them into the station, she gave me two pice.'

‘Two pice?'

‘A grand sum,' said The Big Hoom. ‘My first earnings ever. I spent them immediately on tea and an omelette at the railway canteen.'

‘So you became a coolie?'

‘Who knows what would have happened if I had become a coolie?' The Big Hoom asked reflectively and I promised myself that I would stop my silliness by simply not saying anything more. ‘It's like that Maugham story of the illiterate sacristan who gets the sack and becomes a millionaire because he goes into business for himself. A journalist comes to interview him and asks him something like, “You achieved all this and you were illiterate. What would have happened if you were literate?” And the millionaire replies, “I would have been a sacristan.”'

Railway coolies were a closed shop.

‘You couldn't just pick up a bag and earn a couple of pice. You had to belong to the fraternity. And to belong to the fraternity, you had to speak Marathi and know someone who already belonged. I could only speak Konkani and Portuguese and English and I knew no coolies. So I was warned and kicked out of the station and went back to get my luggage.'

‘Oh God.'

Of course. He would have had to put down his own bags to carry the woman's bags . . .

‘The bags were gone. But someone said that they had been handed over to the stationmaster as lost luggage.'

Finally, a stroke of luck. The stationmaster was Goan.

‘He made me wait outside his office. He said he would put me on the bus the next day. He took me to the Moira
coor
and bought me dinner. They found a bed for me. In the evening, the men and boys came back. I didn't know any of them but they took me to Cross Maidan and we played football. They bought me dinner too. The cleaners gave me some breakfast and in return, I had to help wash the floor. That was okay. I didn't mind work. At around five, an old man came into the dorm and said, “Where's Pedru?” No one knew where Pedru was. One of the cleaners said, “Patraõ, you know what Pedru's problem is.” “Fallen down drunk again?” said the old man, ignoring the fact that he was reeking of alcohol himself. “Such a pity.” Then he saw me and said, “You, what's your name?” I told him. “Got a job?” I told him I didn't have one. He switched to Portuguese. “Do you speak Portuguese?” he asked. “I speak it fairly well,” I said. “Do you speak English?” he asked. “I speak it well,” I said. He switched to Konkani. I could speak that too. Then he switched to Hindi and Marathi and Gujarati but I just kept shrugging. I didn't even know a few words in any of those languages. I thought: “Gone, now I won't get the job.” But finally, he shrugged and said, “You'll pick them up, I suppose. Come on, then.”

‘So I went with Dr da Gama Rosa to his clinic. It was the first time I had ever sat in a car. And when I told him that he laughed and said it was the first of many firsts.'

‘What did he want you to do?'

‘Oh, didn't I tell you? He was a doctor and he needed a compounder.'

‘You were a compounder?' I asked.

‘Why not?'

I knew what a compounder was. He was the guy who shelled out the pills, wrapping up your morning, afternoon and evening doses separately, pouring a bit of red syrup into a bottle and adding a bit of pink syrup that tasted of mint. Then the bottle itself would have a label stuck on it and the dose marked on the obverse with a strip of paper. The compounders I knew were all ghostly presences. George, the one who reigned in our family doctor's clinic, was a man whose face I would always remember foreshortened, framed in the circular aperture through which he passed pudias of pills and bottles of syrup. Through the years that we knew him, he said very little. ‘Three times a day after meals,' he might say. ‘Come back in three days.' Or, ‘The white ones are to be stopped if the fever goes.'