Em and the Big Hoom (8 page)

Another element of my father's ability to handle the universe fell into place. He had an almost benevolent contempt for Dr Saha, the family physician. When we were ill, we went to The Big Hoom and he told us what was wrong. Most often he would say, ‘Go and lie down and only get up to go to the toilet.' He believed in rest, lots of fresh fruits and vegetables and boiled water as a cure for almost everything. If he thought we needed pharmaceutical help, he'd take us down to Dr Saha and try very hard not to dictate the prescription.

Em, on the other hand, needed reassurance that we were not about to die.

‘When Susan was a baby,' she told me once, ‘she had diarrhoea. She seemed to be doing nothing but shitting. And green shit too. So I covered the floor with a plastic sheet and I spread out all her soiled nappies for Dr Saha to look at.'

‘What did he say?' I asked, as the image began to blossom in my head and the sheet grew and more and more diapers began to festoon the room and the smell began to grow, putrid and pungent.

‘He gave me that classic look,' she said. It was a classic Em remark. Its origin lay in some advertisement, perhaps for men's clothing.

This was one of my ways of dividing up the world. My mother: incapable. My father: capable. My mother's mind belonged to the humanities. My father was the engineer. I was so used to talking about my father as an engineer, I was a little startled to think of him as a compounder. I had no idea I took any pride in his calling. I liked to think I would have been proud of him as a street sweeper but that, I knew, somewhat uncomfortably, was so hypothetical as to be impossible to imagine. And now the thought of him as a compounder had me thinking.

‘What happened to Pedru?'

‘He came back once, very drunk. The doctor sent him away. “Both of us can't be drunk, Pedru,” he said.'

‘The doctor was an alcoholic?' I asked.

‘Yes,' said The Big Hoom. ‘He was drunk almost all the time. There was nothing much to do since hardly anyone would come to him and so he drank more. There were a few patients who still believed in him, but most of the others wanted a man who didn't smell so strongly of alcohol at ten in the morning. But that was a pity because he was a great doctor. He listened. He took notes. He made out careful case histories. He kept records. He made house calls. He kept secrets. He never prescribed because a medical representative had promised him an incentive or had given him a wall clock. He had some raisins in his desk drawer for children. He washed his hands after every patient. And he would not laugh at Ayurveda or Unani or homoeopathy. “Sometimes, they get in the way less than we do,” he would say.'

This made me slightly uncomfortable. I had discovered The Big Hoom's hero. I did not want my hero to have a hero.

‘He made me read to him from the papers every day and from
Reader's Digest
. “They put in a load of rubbish,” he would say, “but you can learn something and you can learn the language well.” He believed in English. “It is the new Latin,” he would say. “Because of America. All the new inventions come out of America and so everyone has to learn English.”'

‘One thing . . .' I started.

‘One thing,' he said. ‘If you want to get people to talk to you, you should never interrupt.'

‘Never? Even if I think something is wrong or missing?'

‘Especially if you think something is wrong or missing.'

‘Why?'

‘Stops them. Gives them time to think. Interrupts the flow. If you want to get more, you shut up and wait.'

And so did I get my first lesson for life as an adult from my father. I remained silent until he raised his eyebrows in a mute question.

‘Why didn't you go home? Dr da Gama Rose . . .'

‘Rosa.'

‘Whatever.'

‘No, his name was Dr da Gama Rosa. Names are important. Isn't yours important to you?'

My second lesson.

‘He'd have given you the money to go home. Or you could have earned it with your first salary.'

‘I suppose,' my father said. ‘I could have. But I didn't. Why didn't I? I don't think anyone has ever asked me that before. No, I don't think I've asked myself that question before. That's a good question, then. I didn't go home. I stayed.'

He thought about it for a while. I felt important, and I felt silly that I was feeling important.

‘I suppose I was ashamed. I had been stupid. I had taken a boy's invitation and come to the city. I had lost all my money. And maybe it was because everyone who came back from the city, came back rich. They went to Bombay or Aden or Nairobi and they came back with stories of things they had seen or what they had done. I would have had to say that I went to the city and became a coolie and a compounder and had come home.'

He fell silent again. I was minding my manners and my lessons in life, so I was quiet and was rewarded.

‘Or maybe it was simpler. Maybe it was ambition. Maybe it was the city. I don't think you'll ever understand how challenging the city can be for a boy from a village. You don't know anything about it. You don't know if you buy your ticket before or after you get onto the train. You don't know if you can go into a mosque or not. You don't know if the man holding out booklets is offering them free or is selling them. You don't know why a stranger is smiling at you from the next park bench.'

‘Wouldn't that make you want to run away from it all?'

‘That's where pride comes in, and stubbornness. The city is a challenge but it's a challenge that doesn't care either way. If you go home, it won't jeer, it just won't notice. You can stay and work hard and make something of yourself and it still won't notice. But you will know. I would have known that I had failed. So I stayed.'

‘You could have written,' I said. It was family legend that Masses had been held in the village church for my father's soul. The family had assumed he was dead.

‘They thought I had died in Poona or on the way back.'

‘Why not on the way there?'

‘Because my examination results came in the post. I did well too.'

That must have fitted in nicely with the tragedy, I thought.

‘When did you return?'

‘With my engineering degree.'

As the doctor's practice declined, he began to invest more and more of his life into his compounder's future.

‘We work in the
ABC
professions,' Dr da Gama Rosa said. ‘Ayahs. Butlers. Cooks.'

‘Doctors too,' said his compounder.

‘Drunks, more likely,' said the Doctor. ‘If you want to be someone else, you have to work ten times as hard because they see us as the boys in the band. But what's worse is that that's how we see ourselves. Do a little work, sing a song, drink yourself to death, go out with a funeral band and four children following the coffin.'

Once his assistant had begun to master the English newspapers, the doctor made him read a series of English classics borrowed from a public library that stood at the corner of Dhobi Talao. At first, Dr da Gama Rosa picked the books but eventually he started sending The Big Hoom.

‘One day, I happened to look over a young man's shoulder and saw a cutaway drawing of a motor. I did not know what it was at the time but it looked fascinating. So I asked him what the book was and he flipped it over so I could see the cover. It was Coates' Manual for Engineers. I wanted to ask him more but he said he was studying for an exam, so please. I looked at the shelves and found another Coates. It was marked ‘for reference only' but Dr da Gama Rosa had told me how to get around that. Most of the time the labels were old so all you had to do was peel it off and get the book issued anyway.'

‘What did the doctor say when you started reading Coates?'

‘I think he was disappointed. I think he wanted me to become a doctor. When I was in the clinic, he would test me all the time. He would make me read temperatures and take blood pressure and ask me what I would prescribe.'

Which explained the almost impersonal kindness with which The Big Hoom treated us when we were ill.

‘And so you got into the Victoria Regina Technical Institute?'

‘On the second attempt,' said The Big Hoom. ‘And three years later, with an engineering degree, I went home.'

The prodigal was not welcomed, even if he had made good.

‘Your grandmother was a big woman for her time. She was nearly five foot ten and she could carry a head-load of firewood five kilometres to the Mapusa market, talking all the while.'

The news spread even before he got off the bus.

‘By the time I reached home, mother was waiting for me with a stick,' he smiled. ‘Later, I was told she had burst into tears at the news, then dried her eyes, killed three chickens, changed her sari and picked up the stick.'

‘Did she beat you?'

‘No. Six years had passed. She remembered a boy of fifteen who would take his father's shirts without permission. She hit me once or twice but there was no conviction in her. And I remember when she hit me, the village, standing behind, said “Ohhhhh” and then when she hit me the second time, they all said “Aaahhhhh”. She got angry and roared at them. “Kaam na?” Don't you have any work to do? And then she took me in to see my father.'

‘He didn't come out to see you?'

‘He was paralysed from the waist down. We don't know how it happened. He was working as a cook in Hyderabad. My mother said he was in the Nizam's palace, but then everyone in Goa said that they were cooking for royalty if they were cooks. Most of the time, they were cooking for middle-class Parsis in Bombay.'

‘Were they happy to see you?'

‘I suppose. But I think they were happier when I showed them my degree. Neither could read so my mother brought in a lady from the next house to read it out to her so she could be sure that I wasn't fooling them. Then I showed them the letter from Ampersand Smith Limited, the company I had joined as a trainee engineer.'

‘What happened to Dr da Gama Rosa?'

‘When I got the job, he said, “Now don't show your face here again.” I said that I would come and see him on Saturdays. He said, “We'll see.” Of course, that made me all the more determined to go and see him. But when I went on the first Saturday, the clinic was closed. So I went on Monday, sneaking out at lunch. He was pleased to see me and told me to keep two shirts and a pair of trousers at the office at all times.'

‘Why?'

‘I think he meant that a man had to look fresh at all times. And if the rain got you, you could change.'

It seemed like odd advice but perhaps a drink-sodden doctor felt that any other advice coming from him might seem odd.

We seemed to have reached the church. It was time to turn back. But The Big Hoom kept on walking, lost in thought.

‘Did you visit him every week?'

He stopped and looked at me.

‘If anyone ever does you a favour, you cannot forget it. You must always credit them, especially in public, especially to those they love and those who love them. You must pay your debts, even those that you can never fully repay. Anything less makes you less.'

But he did not say anything more. He was in the process of taking out a cigarette, a rare pleasure that he allowed himself infrequently, although he always carried a packet around. It was understood that no one was allowed to speak to him when he was smoking, no one except Em.

 • • • 

Anything less makes you less. Was that how it was for him as a husband? She had loved him, and he would never forget it; he would be with her and love her in return, always, even if it wasn't enough.

It is only now that I think of this – of him. Em filled our lives, there was no space in our minds for The Big Hoom. He was our constant, he was perfect, he just was. We were never really curious about his past, or even his present outside our flat.

When did he first sense that his buttercup wasn't whole? I don't know. How did he deal with it when he first discovered that she needed to open up her veins, throw herself in front of a bus? I don't know. How did he deal with it when she turned over in bed and asked him whether showing the Marines her Maidenform underwear would save her children? I don't know.

Perhaps the truth is not that Em extinguished all curiosity about The Big Hoom, but that I, at least, couldn't ask because I was afraid. I thought he might no longer be able to do what he did if he realized he was doing it.

How did he deal with it all? Now, I can only guess: One day I told him about the boys of the neighbourhood, about their mocking.

He said, ‘That's because they don't understand.'

‘They should understand,' I said. I didn't want to cry, but I was crying.

‘If your mother had diabetes, what would they say?'

‘I don't know.'

‘This is like diabetes. She's not well. That's all.'

Was that what he told himself? That she was not well? That she might get better? I don't know.

Em, Susan and I were talking about the buying of books. Susan and I assumed that Imelda wanted to buy books on those endless bookshop evenings with Augustine.

‘No,' she said. ‘I didn't.'

‘You just told yourself that because you didn't have the money,' Susan said.

‘Did I? Much you know. I didn't want to buy books. And I don't, not now. I don't know if I ever did. I love books. I love reading. The pills took that away from me. They made it difficult.'

‘To concentrate?'

‘Yes. But that's only sometimes. Most often, they made it difficult to sympathize. You have to care a little and I couldn't because caring would mean letting go.'

‘Letting what go?'

She looked at Susan, then at me, with none of her usual defiance. Instead, there was something like bewilderment in her eyes. ‘I wish I knew. Sometimes I would see myself as a book with bad binding. You know, like one more reader, one more face-down on the bed and I was going to spill everything, lose control.'

She shrugged.

‘I know. What control do mad people have? I don't know myself. I only know there is some control. Some things you can choose not to say. Some things you can choose not to do. It's such a mess, that's why it's madness. Because even when you say things which are not in your control, you're saying them because not saying them will mean having to say other things. So you say, “I'll let this one out of its cage and that should make the other cage stronger.”'

She looked at us again.

‘Never mind, I'm happy you don't understand. Maybe it does skip a generation.'

I shivered but put the thought away.

‘But I liked bookshops,' she said.

And somehow the boy from Moira figured that one out. His own parents had been as close to illiterate as made no difference. His father, as a cook in a palace somewhere out in the Deccan Plateau, could read Urdu. His mother could sign her name on the letters she dictated to him. The only books he had ever possessed as a child were the battered hand-me-down textbooks of the English-medium school to which he had been sent.

Perhaps that was why he loved books so passionately.

‘There's a book sale on,' Augustine would announce in passing to Imelda, as he whirled by her desk in
ASL
.

I remember Em saying, ‘He always looked like he was in a hurry. Not that he ran, but he seemed to move very fast, like Mercury. So when he slowed down and took his time to chat to you, the effect was devastating.'

I tried to imagine The Big Hoom like that. I couldn't. Had she slowed him down? Had we?

There weren't many bookshops in the days when Imelda and Augustine were young. And in the bookshops, there weren't many buyers. Just lovers, long-distance lovers.

‘I didn't go to bookshops to buy. That's a little bourgeois. I went because they were civilized places. It made me happy there were people who sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote and there were other people who devoted their lives to making those words into books. It was lovely. Like standing in the middle of civilization.'

I rolled my eyes. Susan glared at me. Em didn't seem to care. She was picking idly at the edge of her dress and a part of me wondered if this was only her reverie or an early warning sign of a bout of depression.

‘I went to bookshops to smell that lovely aroma of a new book. I would pick up a copy and run the pages across the ball of my thumb and let the fresh-baked smell flow up my nose. Then I would lick my thumb. It didn't taste of anything, but it was like finding a chocolate wrapper inside a book and remembering the taste of the chocolate.'

‘You put chocolate wrappers into books?'

‘Indeed we did. Not just any old chocolate. Special chocolate. Chocolate from abroad. Chocolate your best friend gave you.'

‘As a bookmark?'

‘No, not as a bookmark. As remembrance. That should you never get chocolate again, you would know you had once eaten this bar.'

It seemed odd.

She read my mind. (‘Mad people are telepathic, clairvoyant and everything that should frighten you. Be afraid of me,' she had once joked.)

‘Yes, I was a little odd even back then – I must have been, no? In fact, I think we were both odd. We did not go to buy. We went to bookstores because they were high-ceilinged rooms with slow-turning fans. We went for the evening light and the shelves full of lovely things. We didn't have quite as many things back then. Things like these,' she said, pointing to the bowl of glass toffees a cousin had brought us from Prague. ‘I can't imagine why anyone would make glass toffees when real toffees in a bowl make people so much happier. What do glass toffees mean?'

‘I think they're supposed to be for ironic amusement,' I said.

‘Gosh. No, I don't think there was a shop full of ironic amusements.'

She picked up a glass toffee and twirled it between her fingers.

‘When you two are not here, I'm going to raise an eyebrow at them and look ironically amused.'

We giggled together. Em set down the toffee.

On days like this – no, at moments like this – it was quite possible to forget all the tags – mad, manic depressive, bipolar – and frolic with her through van Goghian fields of free association.

‘There's something brave about a piece of glass that is fated to live its life as a toffee when it could have been a bulb or a thermometer,' she said. ‘But I can't imagine anyone window-shopping these days.'

‘They do. People say they do it all the time,' Susan assured her.

‘I wonder. How can anyone go window-shopping when people actually buy glass toffees? How does one say “That's what I'm going to buy when my boat comes home” when you're already buying whatever you want?'

‘I think your budget would constrain you still.'

‘It would, I suppose. But window-shopping was tourism once upon a time. You never thought you would take any of that stuff home. You didn't think it would belong to you. Like the Taj Mahal. You went to look at it and then you got a good shot of it running in your veins. You now had some beauty under your eyelids.'

‘It was enough?'

‘It was enough. You could live with the street on which you lived. I remember I cried when I saw my first vacuum cleaner.'

‘Why?'

‘I was so glad someone had thought to make something like that. I felt it was a kindness to women everywhere. But I certainly didn't think we could afford one. I don't even think I asked.'

‘So you and The Big Hoom just stood in bookshops and read?' I asked to bring her back to where we'd started.

‘No. I don't think that was allowed, or even encouraged. Not at Lalvani's or at Thacker's. You could read the back of the book and maybe sniff a few pages, but I remember Mr Lalvani once bearing down on a customer, hissing, “Do you want to damage the spine?” I thought
he
was going to damage that man's spine instead.'

Augustine and Imelda did not start dating at any real point in time. It simply became clear that they were dating. As if by an unspoken agreement, without anyone admitting it, they began to go around.

‘Going around? Is that what you call it these days? It makes me dizzy.'

‘What did you call it?'

‘Dating, I suppose.'

‘That's better or what?'

‘No, it's stupid. Half dry fruit and half almanac. But I think if The Big Hoom had asked me out on a date, I would have refused.'

‘Why?'

‘I don't know. I was prudish, I think. We all were. We thought no one would marry us if we weren't virgins. I remember listening to stories about women putting lemon juice there or cutting themselves to bleed and I remember thinking, “What a lot of fuss. So much easier not to do anything at all so you don't have to fake it.”'

‘But a date was hardly going to end in . . .'

‘Yes, yes, I know that now,' she said a little testily. ‘But then? In the American magazines, it seemed like there was a strict calendar. You didn't kiss on the first date or you would be seen as cheap and he wouldn't respect you. If you went on a second date and didn't let him kiss you, you were a tease. I thought: “What happens if you meet a man you like to talk to but don't want to kiss?” But you couldn't be like that. You had to let him kiss you and then you could do some necking after that but no petting . . .'

‘What's the difference?'

‘I think, but don't quote me, necking was above the shoulders and petting was below it.'

‘But when did you know?' Susan wanted to know. ‘When did you know that he was the one?'

‘I don't know. Is there a moment? Like that?' Em asked, snapping her fingers. ‘Maybe there is. Let me see. How about a cuppa while I rack my brains?'

Susan obliged, but when she was back, the conversation had wandered somewhere else – to the story of the priest who had fathered six boys and baptized them all because they were his nephews.

 • • • 

It was many years later that I discovered how Imelda knew that Augustine was the one. I discovered it from an old letter she had written a friend, a letter she had forgotten to post but remembered to preserve.

 . . . he breezed into the office with chocolate for one and all. He had a whole bunch of them he had swiped from some swanky do to which he had been invited. Though Gertie says no one says ‘do' any more because it's common. It's common? Well, so be it. If I had had the good sense to write in pencil, I might have made myself uncommon and corrected that to ‘party', but ‘party' sounds like something with cake and cold drink. And ‘function' sounds like a bunch of local yokels making speeches. Well, whatever. I shall say ‘do' if I want. Begone, Gertie.

Where was I? Ahn? (Anh? Aahn? Nothing looks right.) The chocolate mints. I'm writing this letter in fits and spurts because Mae is fluttering around looking like she's about to rearrange the furniture, while I'm trying my best to be the immovable object against which the irresistible force must expend itself. Or must it? I don't know. Will ask Him Who Knows All About Engineering. And promptly forget.

Oh stop it! I'm doing it again.

And now Mae's saying it is time for my bath, which is a sure way of making me plant myself . . .

She won. She always does. She said I was beginning to smell. So I went and had a bath that was a lick and a promise, but when I came back All Was Lost and I had no Alternative But to Flee and am writing to you now in the Irani café at the end of the lane with the beady eye of Mr Ghobadi on me. He knows me too well to uproot me when my tea is done and the last crumb of mawa cake wiped from my plate, but he resents the occupation of his space without the earning of some pounds and pence and pice.

As I was saying.

The mints went down nicely with all the girls. (I did mention that the chocolates had mints in them, non?) But Audrey was not among those accounted for. She had stepped out to buy some feminine sanitary products. I wish there was a nice word for them things. Pads? I suppose. Okay, she went out to buy some pads and did not get her share of the goodies. Of course, Gertie had to rub it in. Gertie has had it in for her ever since Audrey announced the nuptials. She can't bear it. When Audrey asks us whether we prefer mauve gauze or pink tulle for the bridesmaids, her joy turns to ashes in her mouth.

So Gertie rubs it in: ‘None for you, poor dear?' And then he fetches up at my desk and says, ‘We have a problem.'

I handed over my chocolate because I knew what the problem was. And anyway, couldn't tell him, but those chocolates with mint in them taste like toothpaste. He grinned and winked and bounced off to make Aud feel less like the odd one out. (I worked out that pun. I know one is supposed to say, ‘Forgive the pun,' but I worked it out so why should I ask forgiveness? The English language is very complicated, hein?) And when I was on my way home that evening – he was off on another client meeting – I realized that I had plighted my troth over a chocolate mint. I am no I. I am now part of a we. Wee wee wee, I wanted to weep and run all the way home and bury my head in my mother's lap.

Not that . . .

The fragment ended there.

 • • • 

Most of what I know about their love came from Em in her garrulous phases, and the occasional letter or scrawl in one of her diaries that she showed me. Little of it came from The Big Hoom. Not because he was a man of few words – he was a salesman and could talk the milk into butter, as they said in Moira – but he does not seem to have wasted too many on his Beloved. His letters to her are classic ‘male' letters. This one was written before they were married; he was away on a buying trip to France.

Beloved,

Arrived in Paris to weather that to my subtropical body seemed intolerably cold. Yet the young lady waiting at the airport to receive her boyfriend was wearing a mini skirt. I took pains not to notice this, but it did rather obtrude upon the consciousness.

I will be meeting with several of the suppliers. The problem, of course, is that we would like to deal with the Europeans but the government of India would like us to deal with the East Europeans. It's a matter of bloc politics. Now, I was going to suggest to the French that they should set up a company, a small independent company with a branch in Prague. We could then deal with Prague and they could invoice us in francs through the holding company. You will point out that the currency is the rub, right? But it seems that the Communist bloc is quite pragmatic about these things; they would like to be paid in dollars so I suppose francs won't upset the government too much.

There is the likelihood also that they might turn this down as too much work. But I think if we promise them an estimated
600
machines in the next three years, that's almost a three per cent increase in their sales. That is why I want to deal with Corbeaux and not Franco. Franco would not get excited at the thought of
600
machines; they'd probably shrug and ask me to do business in the way business should be done.