Em and the Big Hoom (13 page)

‘Black Pants?'

‘You should remember. You were there.'

‘I was where?'

‘No, maybe you were too little. It was the time that the fan was sending messages.'

The fan had been sending messages for a while. Often, these were innocuous messages that had very little impact on the family. The fan – or the people in the fan, we were never sure since the singular and the plural were both used – might dictate a jam sandwich to be consumed at three o'clock in the morning or the washing of the curtains a few days after they had been hung. But this time, the message was clear. Take your son and leave the house.

She did.

‘I think it was some time in the afternoon. You didn't want to go but you came anyway because in those days you followed me around with a sad look in your eyes. Did I ever tell you that you broke my heart?'

‘Repeatedly.'

‘I hope you carry some guilt around.'

‘You must stop reading those American magazines.'

‘Who brings them home in the first place?'

Mother and son wander out on to the road. For a moment, Em seems uncertain about which way she should turn but she knows she will have to move quickly or the friendly neighbourhood watch that keeps an eye on her, an informal eye out for her or for her children, will be alerted. When she begins to walk, she's sure. This is the path they intend her to take. She knows almost every time she takes a wrong turn that she's going the wrong way. The boy tires quickly since he has been promised nothing. There is no treat, no film, no circus, no cream cake, no friendly aunt, nothing at the end of this endless walk in the sun.

And he is barefoot.

‘Black Pants pointed it out to me.'

Black Pants stops the woman and the child and asks, ‘Where are his shoes?'

‘Shoes?' Em asks.

‘The boy. He will get blisters.'

Em looks down. The boy is accustomed to being barefoot. His mother has never seen the point of footwear and has let him run around rough. But it is hot today and the ground beneath his feet has begun to sear through his tough soles, and he is hopping from foot to foot.

‘I will carry him,' says Black Pants and picks the boy up. The boy whines and squirms and twists and pulls at his own hair and knuckles his eyes. He is accustomed to this being enough. He gets his way with this much.

‘I took you from him though you were too big for anyone to carry. But the voices were still there. They were shouting now. I could not make out what they were saying. It was all very confusing and in the middle of it, I found us in a restaurant and Black Pants was having tea and you were crying, a-haan, a-haan, a-haan. I didn't know what to do. I wanted to go home. But I had ordered something. I don't know what. I didn't have money. An ice cream came for you. You refused it. I knew then that it was poisoned and they had come for you.'

The woman is now thoroughly confused. The voices are not so loud now but they have decided that she must pay for not listening attentively enough. Now, they speak in one voice but they speak in code. ‘Fate is a sea without shore,' they say. ‘Love and Death have dealt shocks,' they say. ‘How did you come to eat your ring finger in a sandwich?' they ask. Sometimes they sing. They sing fragments of hymns and Hindi film songs. She knows they are Hindi film songs because she knows the tunes; she does not know the words. There are times when she believes that she might be able to help everyone if she knew the words.

‘Yes, I know Hindi,' the man is saying.

‘I can teach you Hindi in one hour,' the man says.

‘But I am leaving town tomorrow,' the man says.

‘He can play as we learn,' the man says.

‘I have a room nearby,' the man says.

She does not want to go. The voices are very quiet now. They are watching her very carefully. This will decide what will happen next. They have never done this before. They have always been clear about what they thought, who should be in the papers the next morning, what she can no longer say. The terrifying thing about them is that, today, she can't tell what mood they are in. She can't tell anything except that she knows now that Black Pants wants to have sex with her. As they walk, he is touching her wherever he can.

‘Is this what you want?' she asks them aloud. ‘Is this what it will take?'

There is no answer. Just a whispering. No, not even whispering; they're rustling, like satin handkerchiefs left too long in a box.

Black Pants is urging her on faster as if he has caught some of her anxieties, her ambivalences.

‘Forgive me,' she says to her husband, in her head. She thinks of him and something warm breaks through her eyelids. She is crying, from both eyes. Her son notices. He screams now, screams and vomits. This is not an ordinary child's crying but the sound of a child in despair. She sets him down to speak to him but immediately a crowd has gathered. The boy is struggling with her, trying to hit her because he is now on the verge of hysterics. The man tries to intervene. The boy's screams become shrieks. In this city, every deserted street corner conceals a crowd. It appears in a minute when something disrupts the way in which the world is wont to work. It can disappear almost as instantaneously.

The crowd sizes up the situation immediately. Kidnapping, the crowd thinks. The woman has kidnapped the boy. She looks respectable but the boy is barefoot. He must have been playing around the house. She must have taken advantage of him, lured him away with some sweets or a poison. That's why he has vomited. They do not know her here, not her or the boy. One of the women pulls her hair. Another slaps her face. The boy goes berserk with grief. He tries to throw himself at the women who would be his avenging angels. They think he is seeking protection. One of them sweeps him up in her arms. He begins to wail in earnest, sure that he is going to be separated from his mother. Black Pants slips away through the crowd.

‘How old was I?'

‘I don't know. Maybe two or three.'

The women take her to the police station.

‘Didn't you explain?'

‘I was trying to tell them about the voices.'

‘Why not tell them I was your son?'

‘I didn't think of that.'

At the police station, Em gives the inspector-in-charge a number to call. An hour or so later, The Big Hoom is in the police station.

‘He must have been in a great mood.'

‘Oh don't. He was. But he couldn't say a word to them.'

I knew why he couldn't. Somewhere, there was a file. Somewhere, there was a file with a bus conductor in lotus pose, perhaps. Money had changed hands and the police had promised that the file had been wiped clean but no one could be sure. Suicide was a crime, the only one where you could be punished for failing. The Indian Penal Code lays it down clearly under Section
309
: ‘Whoever attempts to commit suicide and does any act towards the commission of such offence, shall be punished with simple imprisonment for term which may extend to one year (or with fine, or with both).'

So you could be miserable enough to kill yourself but the law will pay no heed to misery. It's an old law, a colonizer's law for the colonized, and it's not such a stupid law as it looks. How else to throw a troublemaker, fasting unto death, into jail? How else to deal with the likes of Gandhi?

But then, what of the Jain monks who simply stop eating and drinking? What of Vinobha Bhave, who decided it was time and went peaceably? The law could turn a blind eye if it wanted.

In Em's case, it had done that, helped by a little of The Big Hoom's hard-earned money.

But it might change its mind this time. We simply went home.

 • • • 

A few days later, we got a telephone. This in itself was a magnificent feat. A telephone line was not an easy thing to acquire. It required intervention at the ministerial level, even if you had a valid reason, such as a ‘heart patient' in the house. Few people had phones and those who did often found themselves with a dead instrument. This gave rise to some dramatic protests such as the instrument being carried in a funeral procession through the streets.

‘He made me swear to call him the next time the voices spoke to me,' Em said.

This fragile thing, the word of a woman who was mentally ill, was what kept the family going. We could not afford full-time nursing. And even when we could and did have a nurse, things still went very badly wrong. A nurse had been present when Em had slit her wrists, a nurse who had fallen asleep on the one afternoon when she should not have been sleeping.

So all we had was Em's word.

‘You won't do anything silly?' The Big Hoom would ask her before he left in the morning.

‘No,' she would say and her voice would sometimes be a sick moan. ‘No.'

He would hug her and for a moment, her brow would clear, but soon he had to be gone and she would be shivering and hugging herself and asking for another Depsonil or death or a beedi. Even smoking was not a pleasure on her bad days. She would inhale deeply as if looking for something in the first fumes and when she did not find it, the despair would be back. The surcease was for a second only and after a couple of puffs, she would drop the beedi, literally drop it, sometimes burning her clothes, often letting it extinguish on the floor. The good thing about beedis is that they go out almost immediately.

Held by a single ‘No' and by those beedis, she would wait for him to return. When he did, she would immediately ask for release.

‘Kill me.'

‘I might go to jail,' he would say patiently. ‘Do you want that?'

‘No,' she would say, but her voice would hold no real belief. She did not care one way or another. I remember the hurt I felt when he tried another tack once.

‘I might go to jail,' he said, ‘and who would look after the children?'

‘I don't know,' she said and she didn't have to add, ‘I don't care'. Both Susan and I knew it was the subtext. It was easy to forgive; we could see how much pain she was in. It was not easy to forgive; her pain sealed her off from us.

But how did The Big Hoom forgive? How did he hold on?

When Em and The Big Hoom set forth on their new conjoined life, the Republic was relatively young and its coffers were empty. Salaries were low, prices were high and the middle class was expected to do its bit by saving as much as it could. Taxes were high and given the foreign exchange regulations and the exchange rate, no one thought of going abroad.

And yet, from all that I could gather, they had been happy. Improbably happy. Their world was clearly vulnerable, as if everyone was walking a tightrope over a smoking volcano. The ship of state could have foundered anytime, and repeatedly, plunging them into an abyss of debt. But none of that seems to reflect in their small black-and-white pictures of the time. Most of the pictures are pretty standard, taken at office parties, the occasional picnic and church weddings. Some, however, are odd: Em trying to smile in a silk sari; The Big Hoom at his desk in the office.

Who could have thought of taking that latter picture? It wasn't as if there were instamatic cameras in every purse or pocket. Film was rare and often had to be bought on the black market. You didn't just take a picture. You composed it with care. And that meant you took the kind of picture that everyone else was taking. This kind of picture, man at desk in office, isn't the kind I have seen in many other people's albums. Perhaps it has something to do with my father being the first generation of office workers in a family of peasants. It might well have been taken as a way of proving something to the village.

Those pictures tell a story. Imelda and Augustine were part of the dosa-thin middle class of the
1960
s. They dressed like other young middle-class Indians of their background, they went to work in respectable, stable establishments and socialized in respectable, stable places. They also did their duties. They opened postal savings accounts and recurring deposits, put aside money for medical emergencies, bought units from the Unit Trust, had babies.

Susan was born two years into the marriage. I could not believe they had had the courage.

‘Why would it take courage? I wasn't mad then,' said Em.

‘Not that. Just the expense.'

‘It wasn't expensive, because it wasn't a luxury. You got married. You had children. This was assumed. This was what people did. If you didn't do it, it was because you had a problem and people began to suggest adoption. We didn't buy a car because that would have been very expensive.'

Em had no recollections of being pregnant.

‘I don't remember feeling much until I couldn't get into a rather nice pink skirt I had. Then I thought, “Oh, that's the baby,” and wondered if I should give up working and all that. One cigarette later, everything was fine.'

‘You were smoking when you were pregnant?'

‘And did it harm you? Or Lao-Tsu? Not as far as I can see. You were a big fat lump and my poor vagina was never the same, though Il Santo never complained.'

‘Em.'

‘It's true. Natural birth was all the thing and the whole ward at St Elizabeth's was filled with women in pain. “Nurse, give me another Miltown,” an Anglo-Indian lady would moan every ten minutes from the next bed.'

‘They gave her sedatives?'

‘Oh no, they didn't, the dirty bitches. They thought you should suffer. I remember a priest coming in on Sunday and reading out of the Genesis. It had to do with Adam and Eve and their apple. Apparently, we were supposed to suffer. Birth was supposed to be painful and we were suffering in expiation of Eve's sin. Adam got away, of course. Men do.'

The Book of Genesis is quite clear on the subject. The Lord God himself weighs in with ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.' When anaesthesia was invented, the Church ranged itself against the use of painkillers in the maternity ward. That would be going against the curse of God Himself. It took Queen Victoria's insistence on a squirt of nitrous oxide, before doctors – and mothers too – decided that it wouldn't be a bad thing to lessen the worst pain known to humankind.

‘My story sort of ends there,' Em said. ‘What's to tell about the rest? You came along and I became a Mudd-dha.'

That word again. That venom. Maybe they should have thought about it, not just had a child because everyone did.

‘I didn't think it was such a big deal. I don't know if
LOS
felt the same way about becoming a Dad. Not that he wasn't a complete seahorse. I don't think a man could have been happier when he had his first child. And then when the second one came along . . .'

Me.

‘ . . . he was over the moon. Then I slung my lasso at him and dropped him down to earth. But he took that in his stride as well. I told him, “Put me away.”'

I remember one of the many days on which she had made the plea.

There was an account in the dim grey bank down the road, the cheque book locked up in the Godrej cupboard which sang and creaked whenever anyone tried to open it – ‘Our built-in burglar alarm,' Em called it. The account was operated by Em and The Big Hoom, and it was money to be used ‘in an emergency'. We knew without being told what ‘emergency' meant: something happening to The Big Hoom. It was sacred money because, to Susan and me, at least, it carried the terror of being alone in the world. It was the worst possible nightmare we could conceive because we had no idea what we would do if we had to do it all on our own: monitor her pills, decide when she went to hospital, hold on to her life with a daily promise, pay her bills, take her raging or desperate calls, earn a living.

And one day, the truth came out.

From time to time, The Big Hoom would make Susan and me sit down and try to understand how the world of money worked. He would talk us through the notion of the stock market and the interim dividend, the public provident fund and the fixed deposit. He would make us fill out an application form for a bank loan or for the initial public offering of a company. It was his way of trying to prepare us for a world without him. The last step of this would be an explanation of the bank accounts: what was where and how it was to be used. He would explain about capital and running expenses and the need to forecast our expenses. He would show us how he did it, with a large heading called ‘Imelda' under which he placed forty per cent of the annual income.

‘Forty per cent?'

‘It's gone above that some years,' he said briefly. I knew which years. The suicide years. ‘But mostly, it comes in a little less and allows for some flexibility.'

And finally we would come to the bank down the road.

‘This is to be kept in reserve,' he would say. ‘For emergencies.'

At which point Em would say something like, ‘Over my dead body, please.'

This time, she was silent.

Then, as if girding herself up, she said, ‘There's nothing left in that account.'

There was a moment of silence.

‘What?' His voice was ordinary, his everyday voice.

‘I took it all out.'

‘When?'

‘I don't know.'

He got up and went into the bedroom. In ten minutes, he came out dressed. He left without saying a word.

‘Oh shit,' said Em.

‘What did you do?'

‘I don't have to answer to you,' she said.

This was true, of course. It wasn't our money. But it was, in a way. In a terrible future way. It was difficult to point that out to her.

‘I hate this whole money shit,' said Em. ‘Do you remember that Lawrence poem? You studied it in college. Something about a pound.'

‘The Madness of Money' by D. H. Lawrence. I knew it well. We knew all our poems well. We learnt them by heart and we learnt the summaries by heart. We did not learn anything about poetry, but we could tell a metaphor from a metonymy. And I could quote at random:

‘I doubt if any man living hands out a pound note without a pang;/ and a real tremor, if he hands out a ten-pound note.'

‘So,' said Em, as soon as I had finished, ‘what if I was testing myself? What if I thought, I shall write a cheque without a pang?'

‘Were you?'

‘No. But I'm going to see my mother.'

‘I don't think you should,' said Susan.

‘I think I should. Suppose he kills me?' and here she gave a delicate stage shudder. We could see how worried she was, not because she really thought he would kill her, but because she had done something very wrong. Yet she was making it a performance, which was annoying.

‘Don't be stupid,' said Susan. ‘I'll make a cup of tea.'

‘I love you forever,' said Em. ‘But this is not the time for tea. It is time to write notes that say, “All is Discovered. Let us Flee.”'

‘Who to?' I asked.

‘To Mae, who else?'

‘You gave her the money?'

‘I will not endure this interrogation from my own children,' she said. ‘Oh where are my beedis?'

Susan pointed out that Em had them, as she always did, in the pocket of her housecoat. Em lit one and tried to hold on to being aggrieved but the pose cracked.

Finally, she said: ‘Should I run or should I stay?'

‘Where would you run to?' asked Susan logically.

‘To my mother,' Em replied.

‘Don't be childish. That's not even running.'

‘What would Angela Brazil have you do?' I asked.

It was a stupid question but the Anglophile in my mother brightened.

‘Well, I think I should Stay the Course,' she said. ‘And I should Face up to the Consequences. Then maybe I should put a gun in my mouth and shoot myself before I am blackballed at the club. But I don't even have much luck at that.'

The wait wore us down, but in the end, she did not run. The Big Hoom came back and said nothing. Em tried to match his silence but could not. She kept breaking down and asking his forgiveness.

‘There's nothing to forgive,' he said each time and his voice was normal and terrifying.

After a little while when the pressure got to her, she changed around and started saying that it was her money too because the account had been in her name.

‘If you see it that way,' he said.

Time inched along. I remember trying to read and failing. Susan was working on a crossword. Only The Big Hoom seemed to be going about as if nothing had happened. When you live in a small house, your lives intersect all the time. There's no privacy, no way to conceal what is happening. Neither Susan nor I ever stormed off to our rooms and slammed the door and locked the world out, because neither of us had a room. Our lives were contained in a single bedroom and a single living room. There was a kitchen too and a toilet separated from the bathroom – which was an inordinate luxury – and four lives had to be managed within those walls. We had to live and love and deceive within earshot of each other.

‘I can't tell you where the money went,' said Em defiantly.

‘I can't remember asking,' he said.

‘Don't be sarky,' she said.

‘I'm sorry,' he said.

‘No, I'm sorry,' she said. She even meant it but it broke the storm.

‘You're sorry? You're
sorry
? Is that all you can say? You break the faith and you say you're sorry?'

‘What faith?'

‘The faith I have in you as a mother. The faith I have in you as a wife. The faith I have in you that you might have shifted some of your allegiance to this family.'

‘I have. I have. Oh why didn't you listen to me and put me away when I told you to?'

It seemed like we were listening to an argument that was old and worn, being dragged out into the open. But I could not remember hearing this argument before. Could they have had it when we were asleep? I didn't think so. Both Susan and I were light sleepers, attuned to Em's emotional changes. If she started walking about too much, we woke up. When she spoke, we woke up. When she was lonely in the late night or in the early watches of the morning, all she had to do was start talking ‘to herself' and one of us would be up sooner or later, crabby and irritable. ‘Why did you get up?' she would ask disingenuously. ‘You need your sleep.' ‘Shut up,' Susan or I would say. ‘Make tea.' And she would and we would begin to wake up and begin to talk. Sometimes, if we were very tired, she would send us back to bed and pretend to sleep herself.

During exam time, it was the unwritten rule that The Big Hoom would do the honours. Perhaps that was when they had discussed money?

Now The Big Hoom was looking at her in a way we had never seen. Not indulgently, not as a responsible brother looking at a younger sibling, not as the lover who seemed to ask for nothing in return, but as a trusting man injured in friendship, and surprised by the hurt.

‘You have?' he asked quietly.

‘In what way have I not?' demanded Em, though she sounded uncertain.

‘If I had fallen down dead and you had needed some money, what would you have done?'

‘I'd have asked Gunwantiben.'

There was a moment of silence. It was chilling.

‘You would? You would go out and beg?'

‘It wouldn't be begging. It would be a loan.'

‘A loan? A loan like the ones your family has taken? It has a history of loans. And everyone plays along when they actually know that you people are begging.'

‘Begging?'

‘What do you think it is when you take a loan, then you take another loan, and you pay some of the first loan with the second? What do you think it is when someone gives you money and then writes it off? It's called begging.'

‘Gunwantiben would not . . .'

‘I am not talking about Gunwantiben. I am talking about you. I am talking about you turning your children into beggars. I am talking about how you cannot be trusted to keep even a single account inviolate.'