Em and the Big Hoom (5 page)

‘You could be, but . . .'

‘Have you never heard of the phrase “a comforting lie”?'

Living with Em, having survived her into adolescence, we'd earned the right to be her equals. ‘Will it comfort you?' I said. ‘I'll lie if it will.'

‘Oh shut up,' she said, waving at me dismissively. ‘You would have to make it comforting.'

‘How?'

‘How? How? A well-told lie can heal. Otherwise, what's fiction?'

‘Okay. You could never be a devouring mother.'

‘I don't think a comforting lie can be told after the truth. I'd have to be desperate to accept that. So you can tell the truth.'

‘I think you could have been but you lost your chance.'

‘Don't be too sure. I could still give it a shot.'

‘I don't think you'd have the nerve.'

‘Are you challenging me?'

‘No, I'm complimenting you.'

‘Well, make it a compliment then.'

‘Okay. I don't think you could be the kind of person who would go around trying to fuck someone's life up.'

‘Is that what you think Mae did?'

‘I don't know. I don't think all those terrible women who destroy their children actually look at their babies and say, “Your life is mine. I'm going to maim it.”'

‘Oh don't,' Em shuddered slightly. ‘Marriage is all right. At least the person you're having a go at is an adult. But motherhood . . . You're given something totally dependent, totally in love with you and it doesn't seem to come with a manual. I remember when Lao-Tsu was born . . .'

Lao-Tsu was how she referred to Susan. It came from Sue to Tsu – in some letter she had written to us of an afternoon – to Lao-Tsu.

‘ . . . the doctor showed me how to carry her, to feed her, and I thought, “I should know this stuff, shouldn't I?” I mean, all those dolls. They were about learning the ropes, no?'

Em lit another beedi. She contemplated the floor.

‘She's grown up now. I must confront that. I must see her as men see her. But how can I? I'm hardly the expert on the subject. I only knew three men well – my father, your father and you. And two of you I didn't fuck so that leaves me with your Big Hoom. I'm the world expert on him but who's asking.'

‘I am.'

‘You are. You are. But you want information. I want to give advice. Experts should be asked for advice. Who would need advice on him? Maybe his mistress. If he ever had one.'

‘For a moment there . . .' I began, but stopped.

‘Don't be silly,' Em snapped. ‘Though I told him once. Mad people don't want sex. They kick the sex drive out of you with those pills. No, even before the pills. There's so much in your head that you can't bear any distractions, you want to pay attention, careful attention, otherwise everything is going to explode. Or something like that. It's like being in a dream where you can do something and every time you try to get it right, you find that the action has shifted to another place and you have to start again. There were times I didn't want sex for months. So I told him, “Get a maid servant. One of those nice buxom girls. She might even teach your son.”'

‘Me?' I squeaked.

She giggled, a wicked giggle.

‘Of course. Fuck the maid, a game for men of middle-class families. Penalty: pissing blood in the morning, that's all. Why should my son be deprived? But he said, “I think he'll find a way to learn about sex without exploiting someone.” I hadn't thought of it like that. I suppose it's my upbringing. I thought of it as something men did all the time.'

‘To the poske?'

‘Yes, to their own adopted sisters, the behenchods. That is what it means, no? I can never remember whether behenchod is sister-fucker or –'

‘It is.'

‘Keep a mistress, I told him.'

‘You didn't mean that.'

‘Didn't I though? I don't know. It's very difficult to know what I mean or what I don't mean. Afterwards. At the time, I know.'

‘Then how are
we
supposed to know?'

‘Osmosis?'

‘And how was
he
supposed to know?'

‘You're right. How? By the kick of the cow. But he said, “No, if it's okay by you, I'll just stay faithful.” What to say to a man like that?'

At the time, I remember wondering why The Big Hoom hadn't taken her up on her offer. I was too young then to figure out the game Em was playing. Today, it seems quite obvious: she was playing out her insecurities. This was allowed by her ‘condition'. She could say what other ‘normal' women could not.

For one wild moment, I thought I'd challenge her: did she ever repeat that offer? What if he'd been tempted, how could she be sure? But then both of us realized we were very close to the brink and we retreated to familiar territory: the first date, in her version of it.

‘What did you eat?' I asked.

‘A chicken salad to begin with. And when the edge was taken off, I think I had a ham steak. It was totally gorgeous and what was even better was that he was paying. I wanted to order one more dish but I thought that would be rude so I ate his mashed potatoes as well. And I had a Coke float at the end of it.'

‘A Coke float?'

‘They would freeze the Coca Cola and put it in a bowl and put a dollop of vanilla ice-cream on top of it.'

‘Sounds vile.'

‘Don't knock it until you've tried it, buddy.'

‘Did he kiss you at your doorstep?'

Em roared, a hoarse rattle in throat and lung. ‘I'd have liked to see him try. There was no doorstep in D'Souza Villa, Clare Road, Byculla, Bombay. The door was open, the old ladies of the house were taking the air and saying their prayers and peeking outside. Children were sitting on the steps or playing Mountain-Land-Bridge-Gutter-Sea.'

‘So there were no goodnight kisses at all.'

‘We were in a taxi. We had to find other places to kiss.'

‘What a pity.'

‘I don't see why. I don't think the goodnight kiss is such a hot idea anyway. I mean, why send the poor man off with a hard on? Unless you're a tease.'

It was time to change the topic.

‘Didn't The Big Hoom have a car?'

‘In those days only the bosses had cars. Or the Parsis. Or the white men. Everyone else used the buses or the trams. But it was a date so we went home in a taxi.'

‘Did he at least try? To kiss you?'

‘I was frightened to death that he would. I was frightened to death that he wouldn't. But he did the next best thing.'

‘What?'

‘When we were on Marine Drive, he held my hand.'

‘Awww.'

‘And well you may say “Aww” because it was perfect. It said, “I want you,” but it also said, “I know you're worried about this so I'm willing to wait.”'

‘That sounds . . .'

‘Like I'm thinking up what he thought when he did it? I think we all do that. All women do, at any rate. If I kiss him on the nose, he'll know I love him so I'll kiss him on the nose. We hope he gets it, we fear he doesn't but if he looks even vaguely gratified, we know he's the one.'

‘Does it work?'

‘What work is it supposed to do?'

‘I mean, that “he's the one” stuff?'

‘What do I know about men? I've only . . .'

‘Yes, yes, you've only had one.'

‘Got you there, you foul-mouthed blob of scum. I was going to say I'd only known one well.'

‘In the Biblical sense, no doubt.'

‘Got me back. Where was I when I so rudely interrupted myself?'

‘He took your hand. You thought it was a subtle gesture, coded with many meanings. I wondered about that. You were explaining.'

‘That must be a skill you could use.'

‘I think it's called being a rapporteur.'

‘Does it pay?'

‘I suppose. I don't know.'

‘Not much use then.'

Not much use. The trail was lost and the story had ended. For a while.

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 calipers, 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. If that happened, my only asset would be taken from me. Growing up, I knew I did not have many advantages. I had no social skills. I had no friends. I had no home – no home that was a refuge. I seemed to have no control over my body; my clumsiness was legendary. All I had was my mind and that was at peril from my genes.

Em's manic state was often ugly but it is how I remember her: as a rough, rude, roistering woman. In this state, she came at us as an equal. But it was the other Em who was my night terror. As if it were a wild animal with flecks of foam at its mouth, I feared her depression.

I found it hard to reconcile the way that word felt to the state my mother was in when she was dragged down into the subterranean depths of her mind. Depression seemed to suggest a state that could be dealt with by ordinary means, by a comedy on the television or an extravagance at a nice shop. It suggested a dip in level ground where you might stumble, but from which you might scramble, a little embarrassed that it should have caught you unawares – a little red-faced from the exertion – but otherwise unharmed.

Em's depressions were not like that.

Imagine you are walking in a pleasant meadow with someone you love, your mother. It's warm, and there's just enough of a breeze to cool you. You can smell earth and cut grass, and something of a herb garden. Lunch is a happy memory in your stomach and dinner awaits you – a three-course meal you have devised – all your comfort foods. The light is golden with a touch of blue, as if the sky were leaking.

Suddenly, your mother steps into a patch of quicksand. The world continues to be idyllic and inviting for you but your mother is being sucked into the centre of the earth. She makes it worse by smiling bravely, by telling you to go on, to leave her there, the man with the broken leg on the Arctic expedition who says, ‘Come back for me; it's my best chance,' because the lie allows everyone to believe that they are not abandoning him to die.

Some part of you walks on and some part of you is frozen there, watching the spectacle. You want to stay but you must go. The imperium of the world's timetable will allow you to break step and fall out for a while, but it will abandon you, too, if you linger too long by your mother, now a curled-up foetal ball, moaning in pain, breathing only because her body forces her to.

The only way to deal with such pain is to blot it out. My mother is now in a state where her mind tortures her. It will not even let her sag into apathy. Sometimes I see her body twitching a little in pain. Sometimes I see her forcing herself into a rigid stillness. Nothing will help her answer whatever savage questions her mind is asking.

This is darkness and all that we have as remedy are pills. They don't work. Not when she is this way. My mother lives through the long black night of the mind. She longs for death. She asks us if we can give it to her.

‘Kill me,' she says on days when the pain is so bad that she is panting with it, small barely audible sobs. ‘Let me die.'

I don't know what to do or how to respond. I want to kill her. I even know how I will do it. First some very strong drugs, of which there is a readily available supply. Then, when she is sleeping, her breath stertorous, a pillow. I run it as a thought experiment, just as I might run the ‘What will I do when my father dies' experiment. I don't think I will be able to hold her down if she flails, so I'm hoping that the drugs will make her quiescent.

But I also know that I will not do this. (I wonder if she knows this too and that is the reason why she asks.) I will not do this because I know that she is coming up now. This is the worst of it and it can only be a couple of days more before she begins to surface. These will be days when The Big Hoom will sit by her bed and she will hold his forearm as he reads the paper. From time to time, she will say, ‘Mambo?'

And he will put down the paper and look at her.

‘Nothing,' she will say.

And he will begin to read again.

For two or three days, we will all live with the knowledge that one of us is gulping for air, swallowing sobs, experiencing pain that will not let up. We will rearrange our lives so that someone is always with her. One morning when I am alone with her, I give her five small orange Depsonils, when her prescription says one.

Does it help? I think not.

The only thing that helps is nicotine, but often on these sludge days of small jerks, aching gasps and no tears, too deep now for tears, she cannot even bring herself to smoke more than a few puffs. She pulls hard and then lets go, gives up, throws away the burning beedi and rushes back to bed and curls up again.

I don't know how to deal with this.

Once, in a desperate – why do these words come when I'm talking about me? I have no despair, have had no despair so immense as this – so: once, in a timid attempt to help, I took her hand in mine and sat with her. My motives were mixed. I wanted to help but I had also written the stage directions for myself: ‘Enter son, stage left. He looks at her for a moment and then goes and sits by her side. He takes her hand in his and offers her what consolation he can.'

For a while her hand lay limp in mine and she stopped twitching and she stopped gasping and she looked at me and she rearranged her face into a smile.

But this was her, my sensitive and civilized mother, allowing herself to be part of my script. And so we did not sit like that for long because she was acknowledging the gesture of being comforted by pretending to be comforted. The effort was too great, and finally she took her hand away and said, ‘Go baba, go do your work,' and then exhaled her relief.

As I exhaled mine.

I don't know how to describe her depression except to say that it seemed like it was engrossing her. No, even that sounds like she had some choice in the matter. It was another reality from which she had no escape. It took up every inch of her. She had no time for love or hate, fatigue or hunger. She slept ravenously but it was drugged sleep, probably dreamless sleep, sleep that gives back nothing.

She went up. She came down. She went up again. We snatched at her during the intervals. There was no way to say when she would be up or when she would be down. Susan had tried to plot her moods against the cycles of the moon and had come up with no conclusive data even after five years. Then she tried to plot them against Em's menstrual cycles but that had revealed nothing either. The only thing we knew was that September was a bad month; she would be manic through the whole of September, manic in a way that made me wonder how I could ever feel pain for her when she was low.

Between each phase of the cycle, we were vouchsafed a period of normal time. This could last for a few days.

‘Or a few weeks,' Susan reminds me.

‘When did it ever last a few weeks?'

‘The dawn of Lithosun,' she says.

 • • • 

Lithosun. How could I have forgotten? Just when the pharmacopeia seemed fixed, lithium carbonate came into our lives. Li
2
CO
3
. At first, The Big Hoom seemed sceptical, but since close monitoring was worked into the care, he agreed and the first prescriptions were written.

Lithium was indeed the miracle drug. For two years, Em did not suffer the terrors of twitching depression, nor were her manic states stratospheric. This did not make her an ordinary mother. She still refused to have anything to do with the kitchen. She still thought baths were a necessary evil and tried, like the boys of hundreds of American cartoons, to avoid them. She still laughed immoderately and wondered aloud whether there would be news in the paper about trees because there was a white light shining out of the subabul outside our balcony. But we could all live with this and we settled down happily and humdrummily. We could taste our happiness.

Every month Susan or I would take her for a blood test because lithium carbonate was a poison and could not be allowed to accumulate in her body. Like so many medical tests, this one had to be conducted on an empty stomach. So, early in the morning, armed with a flask of tea and some sandwiches, we would set out for Breach Candy Hospital.

What was it about hospitals that made Em so calm? She was always civil to the doctors and nurses and only once in every while would the mania flash out. In the depressive phase, she was terribly, horribly polite, often begging for forgiveness from total strangers and, more often than not, receiving puzzled benisons.

But during the Lithosun period, she was always ready for a little chat. She would try to draw other patients out, specially the quiet women in the waiting rooms.

‘What's wrong with her?' she would ask the husband if the wife could not be teased out of her cocoon of stubborn silence.

‘Nerves,' the husband would reply briefly.

‘Come home and give her a hug,' my mother would say. ‘Take her to the pictures and hold her hand.'

Most of the time, the men took these comments in their stride. Some smiled condescendingly, some looked discomfited but said nothing. Those who suffer from mental illness and those who suffer from the mental illness of someone they love grow accustomed to such invasions of their privacy. Does that make things easier? For everyone? I'm still not sure. I used to wonder: what must it mean for a lower middle-class woman to tell a stranger about her sexual history and her fantasy life? Does she understand the free association that is sometimes used, or why the psychiatric social worker wants to know so much about her childhood? Those who have some experience with homoeopathy may not be shaken or shamed by the bizarreness of the questions, but which Indian woman will talk about masturbation? And what can mental health mean in a nation that wants an injection to put it back on its feet the next morning?

By day, the Breach Candy Hospital catered to the affluent. In the early morning, the place was different. That was the time a wide range of patients turned up, from those who needed their toxins monitored to young men taking a second physical examination in the hope that the results of the first would be invalidated – or at least declared an aberration. Em loved the unexpectedness of the hospital.

‘What are you waiting for?' she once asked a morose young man who was thumbing through a thin file.

‘I want to go to
NDA
, aunty.'

‘So why aren't you going?' she asked him.

‘They are saying I have albumen in my urine.'

‘Is that like egg white?'

‘I don't know, aunty. But they are not allowing.'

‘Have you prayed?' Em asked. This seemed unnecessary since he was well anointed with sandalwood paste and turmeric and there were a few grains of rice still sticking to the red oxide of iron on his forehead.

‘Yes aunty. I have promised to write God's name one lakh times if I get into
NDA
.'

‘What is this
NDA
?'

The young man looked startled. ‘Aunty! You don't know? It's National Defence Academy.'

‘Oh.' Em was not sure she approved but she rallied. ‘I will pray that you get to do what is right for you.'

‘What about you, aunty?'

‘I had a nervous breakdown and tried . . .'

I began to hiss a little at such promiscuous revelation.

‘Don't mind my son. He's shy. I tried to kill myself so I have to take pills and they have to examine my blood.'

‘You are mental, aunty?'

I bristled but my mother didn't seem to mind.

‘Yes, yes.'

‘Oh good. My Buaji says God listens to the prayers of mentals because they are touched by His hand.'

‘How nice. You hear that, baba? I was touched by the hand of God. And I have a hotline to Him, according to this young man's someone or the other. I will pray right now.'

‘Only . . .'

The young man hesitated. He seemed to be assessing us. Then he took the plunge.

‘My Buaji is Muslim.'

‘And I am Christian. And you are Hindu. So?'

‘Means . . .'

‘He's wondering whom you will pray to,' I said to Em. She looked at me. Then at him.

‘I will pray to your Buaji's God, then. I'll pray to Allah,' she said.

Did she? I would have prayed to any god, any god at all, if I could have been handed a miracle, a whole mother, a complete family, and with it, the ability to turn and look away.

 • • • 

I lost my faith as an hourglass loses sand. There was no breaking moment but one day I found myself reading the Gospel without a twinge. I had always hated the Gospels because they had unhappy endings, all four of them. They seemed rushed stories. He's born. He grows up. He preaches. He cures. He saves. All this is in the course of a few chapters. And then that Thursday and Friday, the horror of his foreknowledge, the last desperate plea to be permitted to elude this ordeal, the abandonment by friends who cannot keep vigil with him, the humiliation of his nakedness, the pain of the scourgings and the crown of thorns, the mocking crowds, the crying women, the cross, the crucifixion and even the last request – ‘I thirst' – denied. I had always felt genuine distress at all this. I could not bear to read it, could not bear to put it down. It was the pain of empathy, the sorrow that this should happen to anyone.

That pain vanished one day. I read the passion through to check myself again. I read another version by another evangelist and was left unmoved. I remember being vaguely relieved and slightly guilty. I did not even realize at that moment that I had lost my faith. What I had left was a syrupy sentimentality and an aesthetic appreciation of the Gregorian chant, the form of the fasting Buddha, and a love of stories. This is the standard equipment of the neo-atheist: eager to allow other people to believe, unwilling to proselytize to his own world which seems bleaker without God but easier to accept.