Em and the Big Hoom (12 page)

On an ordinary day, returning from college, I would be greeted with: ‘Hey sexy, did you have any luck today?'

‘Luck?'

‘Did you get any sex?'

‘Em!'

‘So you didn't. Those girls must be blind.'

‘Stop it.'

‘But maybe it's all to the good. When Susan was born, Griselda came over. You remember Griselda, no? She was with me at the AmConGen . . . She had beautiful boobs. I think she was a forty but I couldn't be sure. I shouldn't have been looking, do you think? I mean, was it a bit lesbian? I looked but I don't think I wanted to touch. You know when I found your
Debonair
 . . .'

‘You what?'

‘Oh, I put it back, don't worry. Behind the tank in the toilet, what a place! I suppose you'd have hidden them under the mattress in your room, if you had a room. Poor beetle, where else are you going to fiddle?'

‘Em!'

‘Anyway, I looked at the centrefolds and I thought, some nice girls. But I didn't want to nuzzle.'

‘Em!'

Her conversation had a way of reducing me to exclamations. I think she enjoyed that and worked out exactly how she was going to do it.

‘O Lord, talk won't make tea, will it? Let me get you a cup that cheers but does not inebriate and a biscuit and we'll be convivial.'

The phone rang.

‘Do you want to come and see
Wada Chirebandi
? There's a couple of spare tickets.'

I did.

I finished my tea, raced through a bath and was out and confronting this new world of plays and texts and poetry readings. There was always something to do and in my haste to get away from home, I was always willing to make up the numbers. I didn't really care what it was:
Man of Marble
by Wajda, a dance performance by a young bharatanatyam exponent, an experimental play in Gujarati in which somewhat sheepish young men walked past the action, dressed in black masks with tyres balanced on their narrow shoulders. Much of it was ridiculous, but there were also moments that were sublime and among them I discovered what art could do.

Mahesh Elkunchwar's
Wada Chirebandi
turned out to be one of those moments. It outlined a fairly simple story: a traditional upper-caste family, three brothers, one in the city, one on the farm, and Chandu. Where did Chandu fit in? Chandu was the young man who looked after the matriarch of the family played by an asthmatic and self-pitying wheeze emanating off-stage. Chandu had no life other than her. Chandu tore me from my Blue God Defence. What if my karma were to stop and wait? What if each time I blocked my ears to Em's desperate muttering I was denying what I was supposed to be doing? And of course, I could see it was the humanitarian thing to do: to sit by your mother's bed and hold her hand and see if one could reach her.

‘You can't reach her,' Dr Marfatia, who was then her psychiatrist, had said once as Em was led away by hands that were firm and gentle. Or at least hands we hoped were gentle. ‘How do we know they don't hurt her?' I had asked The Big Hoom, and he had said, ‘Because she never protests when she has to go to Ward
33
. That is all we'll know. We'll have to live with that much.' And she had gone willingly into the hospital one more time, releasing us, returning us to ourselves. ‘Go, live.' Did she say this to me when she was led away that time, or am I imagining it?

Except that none of the three she left behind knew
how
to go and live; we didn't know what to do with the brief freedom because it was a tainted freedom. And each time Em came home, we all hoped, for a little while, that the pieces of the jigsaw would fall into place again. Now we could be a textbook illustration: father, mother, sister, brother. Four Mendeses, somewhat love-battered, still standing.

Barely standing, and that wasn't enough. Home was where others had to gather grace. Home was what I wanted to flee.

Home was a blood-stained bathroom which, when it was scraped down for repainting, revealed an old suicide note, scrawled in pencil. So the one I remembered, the one Susan and I had witnessed, that one was attempt number three, at the very least.

Home was uncertainty: Who would open the door? Em in a panic of sorrow? Em in a rage against some unnamed enemies? Em in a laughing fit with a beedi fuming in her hands?

One day, under the huge mango tree that stood in the schoolyard, with a bunch of schoolboys standing around me, mocking me for being the son of a mad woman, I thought suddenly and automatically: ‘I want to go home.' And then I thought as suddenly: ‘I don't want to go home.' I remember thinking, ‘If I go on like this, I will go mad.' I tried not to think too much about home as a concept after that.

Inside and outside, inside and outside. Each exerted its own special pull on me. My job as a journalist meant late nights; you did not leave the office until the newspaper was put to bed. This meant I was away until ten-thirty on most days; Susan, as a lecturer in English literature at a college, came home by mid-afternoon. I would call her soon after and ask, ‘Everything okay?' This was code for ‘Is she all right?' Her reply would always be, ‘About the same,' but this was as false as it was true. Em was subject to microweathers; her manic phase could vary from cheerful and laughing to malevolent and sneering, and back again within an hour. In contrast, her depressive phases were almost unrelieved in their darkness. Susan was a stoic; she would bear with Em and she would never complain but that made it all the more difficult to bear. Had she whined about taking the brunt of these blasts, I might have escaped into the office with an easier conscience.

Work was a great thing. I could bring it home and shore it up against Em's importuning. As a cultural journalist, I could claim that the new play, the old film, the experimental poetry reading, the script session – all these fell within my purview and required my presence.

‘Off again?' Em would ask.

‘Off again,' I would say.

And through all this, I told myself, and with all this, I told myself, I'll try and understand her. I'll try and figure out how this happened to my mother, once a beautiful woman with a lovely singing voice, and – yes – how this happened to my father, a man with a future who had given it all up to make sure the present was manageable. For her. For us.

The engagement was low-key. This was all to the good because Imelda had thrown another fit when she saw the engagement ring she was supposed to present to her fiancé. And the battle did not die there. It went on for years afterwards. We would hear it from time to time as Em and Granny repeated the old lines.

Em: I wanted a blue stone to match his eyes. What I got was the tiniest chip of sapphire.

Granny: All we could thissing [afford].

Em: Who asked you for a sapphire?

Granny: Who said thissing [blue stone]?

Em: Yes, but is there only one blue stone in the world?

Granny: You're saying we should have given a semi-thissing [semi-precious stone]?

Em: That is precisely what I'm suggesting.

Granny: We don't do that-thing.

It puzzled me, this ability to fight over things that had happened years ago until I realized that Em and Granny could only fight over things that had happened years ago. They used them as placeholders for the slights and hurts of the present. In ten years time, whatever was bothering them now would spill out into the open, when it could be handled just that much better.

‘It's a stupid argument,' said The Big Hoom from behind his newspaper one convivial Sunday afternoon. Granny had just left, muttering about thankless children, and we were having a rare family moment over cups of Nescafé and under a pall of beedi smoke.

‘I liked the ring.'

‘You wore it on the wrong side, with the flake pointing inwards,' Em said.

‘I didn't say I thought it was a good-looking ring. I said I liked it.'

‘How can you like an ugly ring?'

He put down the paper and focused his attention on her.

‘It came from you.'

Em melted but tried to look unmoved. The paper went back up.

‘Did you continue visiting bookshops after the engagement?' I asked.

‘No time,' said The Big Hoom.

‘Don't you ever marry anyone,' said Em feelingly. ‘You cannot do that to a woman you love. Once you've said yes and the family knows that it's on, an invisible machine forms around you. It's here, it's there, it's everywhere. No one is outside its workings. Nothing you do is exempt. It takes all your time, every waking minute. I suppose it's all right if you're not working, but if you are, then it's curtains to everything else. Your evenings are full. You have to go and choose the lace. You choose it. Then someone tells your mother, Have you looked at the lace at this other shop, it might be better. But we've already bought the lace, you say. No, your mother says, this is your wedding, we can return that lace if we get a better lace at the same price, that's what the man said. No, you say, he was only making a sales pitch, there's no point going, he won't take it back. But Mae is a literalist when she wants to be, so we have to go and see more lace. And we have to stop by at Dodo's . . .'

‘Who's Dodo?' Susan asked.

‘Oh God, can the world have changed so swiftly? Can the world have forgotten Dodo of Clare Road?'

‘The world may well have not. I just don't know who you're talking about.'

‘You're a literalist too. Me, I believe in metaphors.'

‘Never mind the metaphors. Who was Dodo?'

Dodo, apparently, made every wedding dress in Saint Anne's. She heard about engagements even before they were announced.

‘About two days after Angel Ears came and asked for my hand, she was there, with swatches of lace and pieces of satin and pattern books and photographs of bouquets and godknowswhat.'

‘A pushy broad.'

‘She was a single woman living on her own, with an only son, Christopher, and our family stole that son from her.'

‘Yes, yes, Sarah-Mae the nurse.'

‘You know that story?' Em looked at Susan, surprised.

‘Who doesn't?'

‘She had a good idea, Sarah-Mae. Find a nice, meek boy and run around with him for as long as you want.'

‘I don't think it ended quite so well. He ran off to Canada with her money or something, no?'

‘Yes, but at least she didn't have to wander about the city with her mother distributing wedding cards to people she barely knew.'

‘Did The Big Hoom also do it?'

‘Did you?'

The newspaper rustled.

‘No,' he said briefly.

Susan tapped on the newsprint barrier. The Big Hoom relented and offered an explanation: ‘I thought, those who want to come will come and those who don't, won't. So why bother?'

‘Didn't you even tell your friends?'

‘They knew before the cards were printed. Only the details were needed and those were on the cards, which could be sent by post.'

I thought this made sense. ‘That sounds like a solution. Why didn't you do that?' I asked Em.

‘Well, I wasn't as smart as Hizzonner. I didn't know that was something I could do because I didn't know that was what he had done. I only found out on the honeymoon.'

Em stopped talking. Susan and I tensed. ‘Honeymoon' could set her off, and we feared it might be something we would rather not hear. Not with The Big Hoom around, not when she was having a ‘normal' day and there would be nothing to hide behind.

Em began. ‘I won't do it on the first night, I told him. I was thinking of poor Audrey. She had screamed fit to bring the house down, she said. The hotel people had to come and stop things. I was dying of shame and pain for her as she told me all this, but when I saw her face she looked as pleased and proud as if she'd been mentioned in
Punch
!'

Susan and I squirmed. The Big Hoom was silent. Em, thankfully, fell silent too. Susan shot up to clear the table. On her way to the kitchen, she switched on the radio.

 • • • 

One day I found a pair of letters in an envelope marked ‘Contract'.

Dear Angel Ears,

I know we have agreed to pledge our troth & etc. And this may come as a shock but it is best said now before it is too late and you discover the awful truth for yourself and end up hurt and miserable and believing that you have been cheated.

Without further roundaboutation, then.

(She takes a long steadying draught of tasteless tea. Just so you should know how difficult this is to write.)

I do not think I am much interested in the whole business of copulation. I love you deeply and I enjoy very much our ‘necking and petting'. I must say I thought it pretty disgusting that one should open one's mouth but I closed my eyes and prayed to Saint Anne and that seemed to work and now I'm quite accustomed to the taste of it. I may even have developed a taste for it, which, I suppose, I might attribute to the magic of love.

But from what I have read – and I must say that
Three to Get Married
was not very explicit on the subject and, despite all the fierce warnings from the pulpit, nor was Alberto Moravia – it seems as if the whole penetration thing might be more fun for you than for me.

Please read this letter seriously. I can almost imagine you smiling here. I feel warm thinking about your smile, but you must not imagine me smiling. You must imagine that my eyes are meeting yours directly and I am
refusing
to smile. (I am the greatest hypocri-sissy in the world.)

So: what if I don't take to the thing? How often will you expect it? Will I be within my rights to refuse? I asked Father Fabregad but he said, ‘That will settle itself by and by,' and went all twinkly and rosy and Portugoosey on me. Though why I should ask a celibate man what a woman's rights are, beats even me. But who else, I wondered, and that's when I thought, well, there's him to whom . . . He's the most concerned in this affair, after all.

I will never speak to you again if you mention this letter to me or if you do not reply in full and with frankness.

With all that my mind and spirit can muster,

Imelda

Only recently, after some years of an on-again-off-again search, I found a second-hand copy of
Three to Get Married
. It's a book by Fulton Sheen, now Servant of God. Written in the beautifully expressive prose of the pulpit, it is quite clear about certain things:

If love does not climb, it falls. If, like the flame, it does not burn upward to the sun, it burns downward to destroy. If sex does not mount to heaven, it descends into hell. There is no such thing as giving the body without giving the soul. Those who think they can be faithful in soul to one another, but unfaithful in body, forget that the two are inseparable. Sex in isolation from personality does not exist! An arm living and gesticulating apart from the living organism is an impossibility. Man has no organic functions isolated from his soul.

It's easy to mock. No organic functions isolated from the soul? You fart and your soul knows what you ate at the last meal? Your hair falls and your soul clucks its tongue over your failure to use conditioner after a shampoo? And the book never mentions the genitals at all. Nor does it mention the word orgasm. It is an abstract work as befits the idea of a man, a woman and a god getting married; it is full of paradoxes which stop short of the Chestertonian. Yet, it was the book that was given to almost every affianced couple of the Roman Catholic persuasion, and it had a lasting effect on many.

Thirty years after Em was a teenager, we were being told the story of the Pieta in school by the Father Henrys and the Sister Marias: Michelangelo was asked why his Virgin was so young and beautiful even as she held the broken body of her thirty-three-year-old son in her arms. And he is supposed to have said: ‘Do you not know that chaste women stay fresh much more than those who are not chaste? How much more in the case of the Virgin, who had never experienced the least lascivious desire that might change her body?' Even in the
1980
s, when I entered the ‘dangerous' period in which I might violate the temple of the Lord, Sin was about sex; Sanctity was about chastity. Imelda must have been prey to far greater fears and shame in her youth. It is a small miracle that she wrote Augustine the kind of letter she did.

But the reply she received had all the hallmarks of the man who became The Big Hoom. He got straight to the point and got past it.

Dear Imelda,

In accordance with your wishes, I did not imagine you smiling. I did not smile myself.

But I am willing to take my chances.

Your body is yours to give or not. Should you decide not, I will respect that, although I must warn you that I will work hard to reverse your decision.

Let me say, though, that I find all the signs most encouraging.

Shall we go forward then?

Love,

Augustine.

I showed Em the letters. She read them both and began to cry, but only out of one eye. (‘I gave up crying from both eyes after Vietnam,' she said, and meant it.)

‘It was the first time,' she said after a bit, ‘that I knew there was an alternative. And only after that, I knew how scared I was of the whole sex thing. We had been told it was the gateway to hell, that we would lose everything if we went all the way. We were told that men were dangerous. Unpredictable. Violent. You could never be sure what would happen if you were alone with them. They could not be relied on if they had had something to drink. A girl had to be ready for anything. Then, as soon as you were all ready to get married, the same people told you: close the door and be his wife.'

‘Have sex with him, you mean.'

‘That was only one part of it. In those days, it wasn't even a problem if he gave you a slap or two. Everyone gets a couple, they'd say. They don't know their own strength, that's why he broke your jaw, how else is he to make sure you respect him, what else can a man do . . .'

She stopped. Perhaps she saw something on my face.

‘No, no, not him. He never did. Though God knows I gave him enough cause. Do you remember Black Pants?'