Em and the Big Hoom (15 page)

‘Why do we need a fridge?' The Big Hoom would ask rhetorically. ‘We have the city's best market next to us. We eat our food fresh.'

‘But what about keeping things in the fridge?' Susan said.

‘Like pedas,' I said. ‘Remember how your office sent us that huge box?'

‘And do you remember how long it lasted?' he asked. Susan laughed ruefully. Em chuckled too.

‘Gosh, I had a leaky bum for days after that.'

‘Chhee,' I said and Susan said and even The Big Hoom made a sound of displeasure. But we knew that the phrase was now enshrined in Em's vocabulary. She would use it whenever diarrhoea surfaced in anyone's life.

So we had the market, we had fresh food, and for everything that was left over, there was Em.

‘Except for doodhi,' she reminded me, the friendly spectre at my shoulder. ‘And elaichi-flavoured Horlicks. I couldn't stand that. But if we're talking about food and eating, you must never forget the tale of the sweet fugya.'

Of course. It isn't easily forgotten. There was a time when Em hadn't slept for three days, except for short catnaps, during which she would drop half-smoked beedis on the floor. The flat swelled and trembled with the fever of her restless energy and unending chatter. Then one afternoon, halfway through lunch, it all caught up with her.

‘I'm going to take a nap,' she said and we heaved a sigh of relief. She went off to sleep, and her body took its revenge. She slept for sixteen hours, straight, during which one of us would drip some water on her lips every four hours or so.

Then she woke up, much refreshed and ready to roister again. And began chewing.

‘Hmm,' she said, ‘this is a very sweet fugya'

Everyone stopped what they were doing. We had been eating fugyas – bread balls, slightly sweet, to be consumed with fiery hot sorpotel – at the meal from which Em had risen to take a nap.

‘No wonder it's sweet,' said The Big Hoom. ‘The saliva in your mouth has been working on it for sixteen hours.'

She had walked away from the table with a fugya in her mouth. Felled by the lack of sleep, she had succumbed with it still in her mouth. It was only some miracle that had prevented it from slipping down the wrong passage and killing her.

But then, she lived under some magic star as far as her body was concerned. She smoked for the greater part of her life and for most of it she suffered from a terrible hacking cough.

One day, things turned serious. She mentioned in passing, to Susan, ‘my cauliflower'. Susan told me when I got home from college.

‘You know, I didn't know what she was talking about. It could have been any part of her body but somehow, it made me stop. I said, “What cauliflower?” She said, “The one growing on my tongue.” I said, “Show it to me,” and she did.'

We both went back to peer into her mouth. Her tongue had a deep fissure on it, and in the middle of the fissure was a whitish growth, very like a cauliflower.

We freaked.

‘Should we call him now?' I asked.

‘I think not,' said Susan. ‘It doesn't look like an emergency.'

I thought about it.

‘Yeah, I don't think it's going anywhere right now.'

‘You will not tell him,' said Em.

‘Are you nuts?'

‘I'll make you a deal. Let's wait until my birthday. If it's still there, you can tell him.'

Her birthday was two weeks away.

‘What do you think is going to happen?'

‘It's going to vanish.'

‘You're mad or what?' I asked.

‘
You're
mad or what?' Susan asked me.

But Em had an answer: ‘I plead the fifth amendment.'

‘The fifth amendment to the Indian Constitution concerns the relationship between the Centre and the states,' I said.

‘Save me from this pedantic brute,' Em said.

Susan started in: ‘Shut up. She has can –'

‘Don't say it,' shouted Em. We couldn't tell whether this was common-or-garden superstition, or one more symptom: ‘They' might hear.

‘Okay, you have a cauliflower in the middle of your tongue . . .'

‘Much nicer. I like cauliflower. I don't want a crab in the middle of my mouth.'

‘Well, if you don't, you should stop smoking.'

‘I am not going to stop anything.'

There was to be no discussion.

‘May I see it again?' I asked.

‘Certainly,' said Em and stuck her tongue out.

‘Bejasus. That certainly looks like . . .'

‘Don't say it.'

‘Okay, but we're going to have to tell The Big Hoom.'

‘You are not. I told you. It won't be there on my birthday. If it is, well, shoot me.'

‘The point is not to have you die,' Susan pointed out.

Thinking about it now, I cannot believe that we did not rush her to an oncologist right there. But we didn't. Because we were used to the idea of Em being in a medical emergency of some kind or the other.

And on her birthday, we checked her tongue, Susan and I.

No cauliflower.

‘What happened?' I asked.

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘But I told Our Lady, I am not going like this. So she took it away.'

I didn't know what to make of this miracle.

‘What happened?' Susan asked. Her tone was different. She wasn't taking any of that.

‘It detached itself and I swallowed it,' said Em.

‘Ick,' said Susan but she seemed satisfied with that.

‘Can we tell him now?'

‘Tell him about what?'

‘Your cauliflower.'

‘What cauliflower?' she said, her eyes wide open. But The Big Hoom entered the room carrying a tray of bacon and eggs and toast, her favourite breakfast. He heard too.

‘What cauliflower?' he repeated. He had a way of scenting the important. I told him. He looked at both of us. Then he looked at her. All of us wilted a bit. We ate our breakfast in silence. Finally, Em broke the silence.

‘It's gone,' she said.

He said nothing.

‘She made us promise,' I said.

He said nothing. When breakfast was over, he made a phone call. Em was to go with him to the doctor. When it was all fixed, he said to both of us: ‘Sometimes, I wonder whether education really matters.'

Then he left for work.

Em tried to cheer us up.

‘Nothing's wrong with me.'

‘This isn't about you,' said Susan.

‘We should have told him,' I said.

‘No, we should have taken her to a doctor ourselves.'

‘You and whose army?' asked Em, truculent. It was one of her favourite phrases. The marines posted at the AmConGen had used it a lot.

But the miracle continued. She was examined thoroughly, pinched and prodded, scanned and sounded and even had ‘a finger put up my bum after due warning from a sweet Malayali girl'. But nothing was found.

‘Lungs like bags of phlegm. Voice like a pross on the prowl. Cough like a lion in the Serengeti. But no crabs in the body, no crabs in the crotch. I beat the odds. How's that? I would like to donate my body to science, you bounders, so that they can find out what exactly made me immune. Break out the bids, folks,' she chortled.

‘So what was the cauliflower?'

‘You silly berks can't tell a ruddy miracle when you see one?”

‘No.'

‘Oh ye of little faith. How shall ye be ducks in the gardens of paradise were I not there to wish it for ye?'

‘I don't recognize that from any version of the Bible,' I said.

‘It's my version,' said Em, bubbling. ‘I shall be swanning about in the promised land and you two will get a good ducking.'

‘Stop it,' I snarled.

‘Em,' said Sue.

‘I told Our Lady . . .' she trailed off. ‘Okay, I said to her: take five years from my score but let me go eating and drinking and smoking. You gave me this stuff . . .' she tapped her forehead, ‘and I took it with good grace.'

‘Good grace?'

‘You have to live through what I've lived. You'd think it good grace too. So I said, take five years. Obviously, someone was listening. Lady in blue, I love you. That's why I told you, I can't take too much more male will in my life. No thy-will-be-done for me. I surrender nothing. I surrender nothing. I'll take my chances with a woman's kindness.'

On a college trip to the Thane Mental Hospital, I had seen what I thought was the worst of India's mental health care system. Thirty or so third-year students with an interest in psychology, we were shepherded there by Arpana Shetty, a junior lecturer, so junior that she had just finished her masters and was seen as a suitable object for lechery. We were introduced to Sunil, a drug addict who was in recovery – or so the hospital claimed. He was obviously a young man from the middle class or above. He spoke English well and without self-consciousness, as to the manor born.

‘You can get anything here,' Sunil said peaceably. ‘It's all part of the way India works.'

‘I don't understand,' said Arpana.

‘Free your mind, Ms Shetty,' said Sunil. ‘This is a poor country with good topsoil. A poor country pays its people poorly. They can be bought and sold easily enough.'

‘Sunil . . .' said a voice behind us. It was someone who looked like a bureaucrat. Arpana Shetty presented her credentials. As the bureaucrat examined them and introduced himself, Sunil continued to address us, his gaze abstracted, his manner gentle.

‘I am only saying that if you give a poor man a poor man's pay and good topsoil, he will sow some seeds and grow some greens and sell them to the first bidder,' said Sunil.

‘Sunil, what lies are these?' asked Mr Shinde, the psychiatric social worker of the hospital, for that was who the bureaucrat was. Sunil smiled at him gently.

‘I am only saying these things in a hypodermic manner, you understand,' he said.

‘Hypothetical, you mean?' asked Marina, a girl who would have been beautiful if she had had a chin.

‘Do I?' Sunil asked. ‘I must go now and cut myself some envelopes to prove to the world that I am a socially useful and productive person.'

Then he turned and ambled off, his minders gently urging him on when he slowed down, or redirecting him when he tried to wander away.

‘He got arrested,' Shinde explained. ‘The court said jail or here. Here means no criminal record so his parents put him here. He will go home in two months.'

A crocodile of patients went past. They all looked alike in dirty grey white clothes and near-shaved heads. They looked dehumanized, as if their identities had been stolen. They looked like something from a Holocaust film.

‘Where are they going?' Arpana asked Shinde.

‘Electro-Convulsive Throppy,' said Shinde. ‘
ECT
. Shock treatment.'

We had learnt about it in abnormal psychology. James Coleman, who had written our text book, was sure that this treatment had outlived its utility and spoke with heavy irony of how the Russians still reported great results from its use in state mental hospitals. He seemed to be suggesting that the socialists would do anything to maintain their quotas.

‘Can the students watch?' Arpana asked.

Shinde nodded as if it were a matter of indifference to him. He was casual, as if granting her the right to use the toilet in his house. It occurred to me then that the mad in India are not the mentally ill, they are, simply, mad. They have no other identity. Here, everyone was mad. They had lost their hair so that the institution could keep them free of lice. They had lost their clothes because their families had abandoned them, and they had lost their lives because they had lost their families. They were now free, in a bizarre sort of way. They were also alone except for the shoulder in front and the touch of the fingers of the person following behind.

No wonder Shinde did not ask their permission. No one asked their permission. They did not need to be asked. I thought it would be disconcerting meeting their eyes because I wouldn't know what was going to look out or what I was going to be looking into. But in the line I found nothing much. An old woman who was looking at everyone with venomous eyes. A man who seemed to be stripping the women. And then a young man who smiled at me, a smile of such awesome sweetness that I felt I had found the key.

The key was me.

Add me and the mentally ill could be saved. The young man was healed. He had reached out. But then I noticed that the smile came and went like something mechanical. He did not even seem to notice who he was smiling at.

The line dissolved at the door of the dispensary. One of the ward boys used his body as a battering ram and got everyone into line again. The first mad person, a man of indeterminate age, lay down on a table and a cup was placed by his side. The next two patients strapped him down while he struggled weakly, almost as if by habit. They stepped back. The electricity was turned on. The patient's body arched. Then he relaxed. His head was turned over and saliva came bubbling, frothing out of his mouth. Then the switch was thrown again and he went into a spasm. Then the next two patients undid the straps, rolled him off and helped him to stumble groggily to the side of the room where he slumped, as if his bones had melted, into a heap on the floor. His legs were splayed, his head drooped on his chest and some last drops of saliva ran down his chest.

It was like watching some ancient medicine man at work. Even in the late
1980
s, it was old juju.

‘It has a remarkable success rate,' said Arpana defensively. Shinde seemed to have vanished.

‘What is success?' Ravi asked. He was a sharp-faced and silky-haired boy from my university, with a quicksilver mind. It glittered but it had no staying power. You could tell he would go on to become a huge success in advertising.

I could have told them both what success meant, what
ECT
did, but I held my peace.

Later, Arpana told us that she knew of a doctor who administered
ECT
to a fourteen-year-old girl who had started wetting her bed and a twenty-four-year-old who had memory lapses.

‘Did it cure them?' Ravi asked.

‘It helped them.'

‘And how exactly?'

‘It helped them to be normal,' said Arpana with the ease of someone who had never really been interested in words.

‘So the end of psychiatric medicine is to iron out all differences and produce identical paper dolls?'

‘I didn't say that.'

‘Well, the word normal comes from “norm” and the norm . . .'

‘... allows for deviation,' said Arpana triumphantly.

‘And the limits for that are set by the word normal?' Ravi asked.

‘Yes.'

‘Who sets the limits?'

For a moment, I could clearly see how this would shape up. Ravi was going to beat the shit out of Arpana with his mind. He was going to demonstrate his intellectual superiority. He was going to show us his debating skills. The rest of the debate wound its way past R. D. Laing, definitions of normalcy, the state of middle-class morality, the issue of Marxist analysis, and other bits and pieces of our sophomore reading.

But a question stayed with me. What is a cure when you're dealing with the human mind? What is normal? I saw Em at that moment, the time she went into the Staywell Clinic: a raving maniac, her face flushed, a blob of frothy spit caught between her lips, her hair wild, her voice cracked and harsh, her eyes flickering incessantly, as she assessed the flood of information that was her world for new threats to all of us . . .

No, that's not quite how it was.

Em didn't go into the Staywell Clinic. We sent her there. Susan and I.

In the fading light of Li
2
CO
3
, Em decided that there was a conspiracy aimed at her. Soon, she was sure that it was aimed at the entire family. 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 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.

At three o'clock in the morning, it seemed like a horrible calamity. When one was surrounded by neighbours who could not decide whether to be angry at having their sleep disturbed or vastly intrigued by the goings-on, when one had just had a couple of years of comparative peace, this seemed to be the last straw for me. I began to scream and wail and carry on in the manner of the people I despised most. I screamed that I was leaving the house. I said I could not live with someone like that. I said I wanted to kill myself. I said I could not bear my life. Perhaps if The Big Hoom had been in town, it might have been different. But he wasn't. He had been offered the chance of a lifetime; an opportunity to earn some money in Brazil, on deputation for the Indian government.

‘It's only because I speak Portuguese,' he had said when he told us he would be away.

I felt my heart sink. I was to be the man of the house?

‘Granny will come and stay here,' he continued, and I began to bristle. What did we need Granny for?

Granny had agreed with me, but she came. She had nothing much to do for several days. Em and she sat around and chatted desultorily. Em sang hymns and made some ‘personal interpolations' at which Granny clucked in perfunctory and half-hearted disapproval. Tea was consumed in large quantities and mealtimes were full of unexpected excitement since Granny cooked happily for four.

But on the day before the storm, Granny had been tempted to go off to the novena at St Michael's church. She was going to say it nine times in a single day for her daughter's health. When she came home the following morning, she began to wail and blame herself. We were all distraught. I thought I might cry so I started to shout again. Susan told me to shut up. Em said irritably, ‘Oh stop it. I'll go to hospital.'

Then she went off to bed, exhausted.

We agreed, Susan and I, that this was a cry for help. Was it? Or was it us, hoping for some peace and quiet? At any rate, Em felt at home in Ward
33
of Sir J. J. Hospital. It was as much a government hospital ward as any. The schizophrenics and the anorexics and the depressives were locked in with the alcoholics and the drug addicts. None of this seemed to matter to Em. She always slipped into the ecosystem without much effort. Divorced from decision-making, she soon became the star patient. She would change from the raving ranting harridan who smoked and shrieked and threw things out of the house into Nursie's Little Helper. She would feed the recalcitrant and collect the pills that they spat out. She would urge gentleness on the ward boys and chat in broken Hindi to everyone. Perhaps this was just strategy, a way to avoid
ECT
, but it worked. She went to Ward
33
willingly, even when she was depressed and wanted to die. Perhaps the rhythm of hospital life soothed her, suited her. Here, no decisions were to be made and no one expected you to be anything other than a survivor, lying on a somewhat grubby bed, waiting for the tide to rise again. It might even have been the home she kept asking for. ‘Put me in a home,' she would moan. There was no answer to this because there were no homes for the mentally ill, not unless you wanted to take your chances with the mental hospitals and
ECT
.

However, this time the ward was full. There was not a mattress on the floor to be had although one more could always be squeezed in. All you had to do was claim that your patient was suicidal and the hospital would be obliged to take her in. But since Em was in full form – already trying to bum beedis off ward boys and greeting ward sisters as if they were old friends, patting old women on the head and telling them that everything would be all right if they had ‘bharwasa' in God – it was not an easy sell. This was what made everything about her illness so difficult to understand. If she had had a paranoid attack last night, where was it now? If she had been worried about her family being buried in the trenches of road repairs, why was she hugging a shy Malayali nurse and telling her that she was not to worry about being short because she had ‘more inches to choose from'? Had she made some sort of pact? Had she worked it out in her head that if she went to hospital, we would all be safe? Or had the paranoia passed?

The answer was: any or all of the above.

What was not the answer was the one that always came to my overheated mind when something had happened that upset me: she was faking it. She was indulging herself. She was taking us all for a ride.

This was the lazy way. It was also a way of getting cheap relief. For a few moments, everything was located squarely within the range of ordinary human emotions and motives. Em was not mad. She was simply another malingerer. Like any other malingerer, she wanted to evade her ordinary responsibilities. Like any other malingerer, she wanted to be served hand and foot. We had all been taken for a ride. We were fools.

I don't remember thinking this when she was depressed, for there was no way she could have been faking her depression.

But now, the terror and embarrassment of the night's chaos still fresh in my mind, I told myself, Yes, she's faking it, no way she's not faking it. This spared me the phenomenal expense of empathy. Unfortunately, it was not very convincing and did not last long. I could not convince myself that Em really wanted to laze around. She was always willing to make tea, to clean up in a desultory fashion if you insisted on cleanliness, to type out a play script so that it could be photocopied. She would help out with anything you wanted. And what could be the advantage that accrued to her in faking an attack of paranoia? While she did think of Ward
33
as a kind of second home, it was still second best.