Of madness and an adulthood that came too early
Written with tenderness, love permeating every word, Em and the Big Hoom is a brutally honest book about growing up far too early. It lays bare the pressures of dealing with an adult’s illness while still a child.
‘Beloved’ Imelda has ‘cool green eyes’, lives in ‘a small flat in a city of small flats’, smokes beedis, and plays delightfully with words. She is also mad. ‘When you have a mad mother,’ says the narrator, ‘then the word wakes up from time to time and blinks at you, eyes of fire.’ Such as the time Imelda indulges in some wishful thinking and her son responds as any of us would, ‘You’re mad or what?’.
Augustine, or ‘Big Hoom’ to his children, is the quiet constant of this story, a hero when he courted Imelda and an even bigger hero when he copes magnificently with her in sickness and in health. His parents’ courtship becomes a mythic unknowable time for the narrator, a time when Imelda was whole.
Through the course of the novel, the narrator tries to put together pieces of a puzzle to figure out the enigma that is his mother. At some point in Imelda’s life, a break occurred tipping her into mental illness. Was it the long voyage from Burma and her family’s straightened circumstances thereafter? Was it the conflict between her orthodox Roman Catholic upbringing with its strictures against sex for pleasure and her yielding to the charms of ‘Angel Ears’ Augustine, the office hunk whom she married?
Or was it the birth of her second child, the narrator himself? ‘After you were born, someone turned on a tap. At first it was only a drip, a black drip, and I felt it as sadness.’ The sadness floods Imelda, turning her into Em for mother, or mudd-dha as she contemptuously puts it. “I didn’t want to be a mudd-dha. I didn’t want to be turned inside out.’
Em communicates with her children through free association, which can be searing at times, candid at others. Words are all she has to try and explain her state of being, but words do not convey the whole truth. ‘Em wrote. She wrote when she was with us. She wrote when no one was around. She wrote postcards, she wrote letters in books, she wrote in other people’s diaries, in telephone diaries, on the menus of takeaway places.’ Typically her entries in her diary remain unfinished and her
thoughts scattered.
Many of her meandering conversations with her children are so witty and her perceptions of life so true that it hurts to understand that there is a part of her that is opaque. All their love and concern for her may well be redundant when she reaches the acute stages of depression. ‘Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself. You can only stand outside it…’
Saddled with adult responsibilities while still young, the narrator finds himself in a world that is ‘too big and demanding and there wasn’t a fixed syllabus’. His biggest fear is that of losing the able parent Augustine and having to deal with Em on his own. His other biggest fear is that of going mad himself.
Jerry Pinto fashions the raw, sometimes ugly, emotions of dealing with mental illness into a rivetting novel. One suspects that he has been kind to his readers, reining in the more horrific, troubling aspects of such a situation. In deceptively simple language, shorn of excess, Pinto crafts a beautiful setting for all of Imelda’s flamboyant lapses. Funny throughout, it evokes an entire world packed into a 450-square foot home in Bombay.