“If there was one thing I feared as I was growing up... No, that’s stupid. I feared hundreds of things: the dark, the death of my father, the possibility that I might rejoice at the death of my mother, sums involving vernier callipers, groups of schoolboys with nothing much to do, death by drowning.
But of all these, I feared most the possibility that I might go mad too...”
So says the narrator of Em and The Big Hoom—a boy growing up in a one BHK in the nosy, noisy Mumbai of the ’80s. His is a world that we can step into effortlessly; memories we recognise immediately. When he looks out his window, he sees a familiar jumble of grimy roofs; when he has a free afternoon, he spends it laughing with Amitabh in Coolie; when his parents mention their courtship they talk, as Bombayites of that vintage must, about Coke Float at Bombellis. Indeed, we can share almost everything with the narrator, except his fears.
For Imelda Mendes—the narrator’s mother in this beautiful, strongly autobiographical novel by Jerry Pinto—suffers from a mental illness. The doctors say she is manic-depressive; she describes herself as mad; and in the common parlance of her city she is “mental”.
For much of the time Em is a “rough, rude, roistering woman” who wears flowery dresses, avoids baths, sucks desperately on Ganesh Chhaap Beedis and delights in embarrassing her children by talking about sex. Then, without warning, the manic laughter and fury give way to an unfathomable, bottomless terror. And for days she curls up into a foetal ball, twitching in pain, begging for death. Occasionally, there are interludes of normalcy—cruel glimpses of what life could so easily have been.
Em’s steady, silent husband—Augustine or The Big Hoom—is the crisis manager in the family. Their daughter Susan tries to quell the routine outbreaks of turbulence with stoicism and a soothing cup of tea. While the narrator struggles to reach his mother even as he accepts that “home was what I wanted to flee”.
Em and the Big Hoom is the story of this love-battered family; of long spells in Ward 33 (Psychiatric), Sir J.J. Hospital; of bathrooms garish with blood from a slit wrist. More than that, however, it’s a quest on the part of a boy who wants to know his mother when she was whole; to understand that luminous, slender-waisted young woman who once set hearts aflutter; to relive the unconventional courtship that his parents conducted in various bookshops; to glimpse moments of happiness before the darkness began flooding into Em.
Despite the stomach-clenching subject of his novel, Pinto disdains melodrama and sticky sentimentality. Instead, he employs the factual tone of one describing a shopping expedition to Sahakari Bhandar—and allows ridiculous asides and oddball characters to intrude upon the bleakest moments. Take, for example, this account of a 3 am calamity in the Mendes apartment:
“The Brihanmumbai Mahanagarpalika, the municipal corporation of the city, had decided to dig up the roads outside our house. The trenches looked like graves to Em and she became convinced that the architects of the conspiracy were winning. There was nothing left to do but to appease them. They demanded offerings, and so late one night she began to throw things into the trenches. A clock hit a sleeping worker, some of our household goods were flung back at us with shrill abuse, and the neighbourhood was roused. ‘They’ who would bury us in unmarked graves under Mahim’s roads, had demanded our alarm clock, several handkerchiefs, The Big Hoom’s watch, spoons, katoris, glass toffees, ashtrays and some of my college books.”
Just like Em’s terrors spill onto the Mumbai streets, the city constantly wanders into the story. Pinto has a real feel for Mumbai-speak and an enormous affection for the Goan Catholic community with all its eccentricities. So we get to meet a procession of colourful characters like Sarah-Mae, who sacrificed her ear to her conjoined triplet, and was widely feared for her black, prophetic tongue. Or the cynical Gertie, who for years was “carrying on” with a married “Muzzlim”. Or the narrator’s grandmother, whose conversation is made up entirely of, “He was quite this-thing but now this-thing,” and “Where do you thissing?”
Em and the Big Hoom is a marvellously evocative book about Mumbai—and a searing tale about the havoc that mental illness wreaks on a family. To borrow a Pintoism, it is an easy-butter-jelly-jam book to recommend.
