by Jerry Pinto
‘What?’
I looked at her carefully. She was not letting me see what she was thinking. So I knew, immediately, that she had registered the thoughtless insult and that it had mattered. She was not going to give me proof so there was no way I could actually apologize. But I tried.
‘I’m sorry I said that.’
‘Sorry, sorry, kiss the lorry, the schoolboys would say. There was one who walked down the road shouting, “Tony Greig, lambu-ta!” And there was another who read me a poem about butterflies. He read it under the mango tree while I waited for you.’
There was no going in. And there was no going away. I pushed my chair back from her bed, closer to the window with three vertical iron bars, and went back to the book I had carried with me. I read through Em’s rhymes about mango trees and her Mae and Satan’s bee. I read till she was tired and only mumbling, and then The Big Hoom came and I could go home.
• • •
In my late teens, prey to all kinds of inadequacies, I embarked on a programme of remedial reading. First, Plato, an omnibus edition with forty-eight of the fifty-five dialogues, which left me annoyed and exhausted because I did not believe that beauty had much to do with truth or vice versa. And then, for no apparent reason, I began reading the Mahabharata in Kamala Subramaniam’s translation. This was wild and terrifying and it almost drove me to despair. The whole book seemed to be a thicket of names and relationships, many of which sounded dangerously like each other. I used a piece of paper, solemnly writing down the names of the Pandavas, their antecedents, their wife and wives and children and relatives, but it was still difficult. Finally, I grew exhausted – it was summer, the hardcover edition was cutting into my chest, and the sun was bright outside – and so I began reading from page to page, not bothering about who was who. Once I had given up trying to conquer the text, it began to glow with an epic excess of almost every conceivable human passion. I was transfixed.
Then I came upon the Bhagawad Gita and it seemed as if Krishna was speaking to me. He was telling me that if I were a student then I had to be a student. I did not have to be my mother’s nurse. I had to do my duty according to my station in life . . .
For a whole six hours one morning, I felt the glow of a benign blue Hinduism pouring down upon me. At the end of that period, I looked across the room. Em loved the heat, so she had had a good summer, full of manic energy and insomnia. She had been on a roll, talking endlessly, making or asking for endless cups of tea, roaring at all of us if we asked for peace and quiet. ‘You’ll get an eternity of peace and quiet in the grave.’ She would sober down a little only when The Big Hoom returned from work in the evenings, but when he was in the kitchen, cooking, she would break loose.
April had been quieter, but then Em was a great respecter of education. When we were studying for examinations, she could always be quelled by one of us saying, sounding agonized, ‘I’m studying.’ ‘Okay, then I’ll zip my lip,’ she would say and light another beedi and scratch out a letter to someone. Or make some more tea. Perhaps the processes calmed her, though there was nothing Zen-like or ceremonial about the way she made tea, whistling old snatches of Broadway and vaudeville melodies as she thumped and slammed and poured and strained and sugared and slurped her way through another cup, standing up, her head already bubbling over with something else that had to be said.
But this was well into June. Susan and I hadn’t had any need to study for over a month; there had been nothing to restrain Em. She had exhausted herself and us with her mania. And now, as I put away the Mahabharata, I knew instantly that she was beginning the slide into depression. Perhaps it was the silence that had disturbed me and broken the spell of the Blue God’s arguments.
Em had lit a beedi but she was staring at the floor, as if it might conceal a pattern or a story.
After a few seconds, she shook her head like a dog pestered by a fly, got up, stretched and said, ‘Time for another cuppa.’
‘I’ll join you if I may,’ I said.
‘No hope of my joining you while you make it, is there?’ she said. ‘No, I thought not.’ Then she was in the kitchen, silent, and the slow sounds of the pan being put on the stove, the tins being opened, her feet dragging across the cramped space told me that she was sinking into night, that the black drip had started inside her.
I could hold on to my karma defence for a little longer but it was already seeming thin. How could you do your duty when love beckoned you to do something else? No, that was easy enough. Lord Krishna had dealt with that: you ignored love.
And I tried to. When Em was ‘high’, I could be a busy student, in every sense of the word. I could run amok in art galleries where I would write comments and sign them as John Ruskin or Clement Greenberg. I could watch two long movies back-to-back at film festivals. I could spend entire afternoons borrowing and returning books from three libraries in three different parts of the city. I could find fifty other ways to block her out because she could be an extremely painful mother for an adolescent boy.
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 t
hat 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.
8.
‘Three to get married’
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.