Em and the Big Hoom (6 page)

No one could offer any explanation for the suffering I watched my mother go through. Nothing I read or heard fitted with the notion of a compassionate God, and God's compassion, one uncomplicated, unequivocal miracle of kindness, was the only thing that could have helped. The sophisticated arguments of all the wise men of faith – their talk about the sins of a past life, the attachment to desire, the lack of perfect submission – only convinced me that there was something capricious about God. How could one demand perfect submission from those who are imperfect? How could one create desire and then expect everyone to pull the plug on it? And if God were capricious, then God was imperfect. If God were imperfect, God was not God.

But being an atheist offers a terrible problem. There is nothing you can do with the feeling that the world has done you wrong or that you, in turn, have hurt someone. I wavered and struggled for a long time before I exiled myself from God's mansion.

I had stopped going to church for a while before that, but when anyone required me to go, whether as escort or mourner or celebrator, I went without demur or comment. The only change I made was in my recitation of the creed which I boiled down to four words: I believe in Jesus Christ.

Because I did. I believed in him and the Buddha and Krishna and Allah because you can believe in anything if you look straight at the message.

Love one another? Good idea.

Detach yourself? Good idea.

Do your duty? Good idea.

Submit to the will of God and go with the flow? Good idea.

In a perfect world, you could even play with permutations and combinations of the above.

Submit to the will of God because he wants you to love everyone and do your duty.

Or, alternatively, detach yourself from everyone as an act of duty to God's will and you will experience perfect and equal love.

It is difficult to see how detachment and love might fit together but the Greeks had a go with
agape
. Only, they didn't use it much, just coined the term and left others to bother about the repercussions of loving someone else with benevolent detachment. It wouldn't work for me. I have to connect to love. I am imperfect, my world is imperfect, I have no time for solutions premised on perfect persons seeing the perfection of solutions that work in a perfect world.

None of my friends would have been surprised by my loss of faith. Most of them were atheists via Marx or Freud and others were agnostic. The few who professed any faith at all hedged it around with disclaimers involving words like meaning, quest and spirituality. No one pushed them to explain. The coyness with which Victorians had approached the sexual was translated into the discomfort with which we approached God. These words were the equivalent of the frilly pantalettes with which the Victorian bourgeoisie covered the legs of their pianos. The mess of faith, the joylessness of disbelief, all these were covered up.

Perhaps that's unfair. All the words about the really important things become chiffon representations of themselves soon enough. Some can be reinvented but others can only be discovered by a personal encounter. Love is a hollow word which seems at home in song lyrics and greeting cards, until you fall in love and discover its disconcerting power. Depression means nothing more than the blues, commercially-packaged angst, a hole in the ground; until you find its black weight settling inside your mother's chest, disrupting her breathing, leaching her days, and yours, of colour and the nights of rest.

But in the summer of lithium carbonate, things were different. Em and The Big Hoom had begun to go out for dinner again. They had started taking walks in Shivaji Park together – short ones in Em's lower phases and longer ones when she was feeling active. They would return with something to eat – fruit sometimes, or a big packet of sev-ghantia – as if we were children. We played along, eating bananas or crunchies as if offered a rare treat.

Then it was over.

One day, Susan came home and Em was at the door. She was snarling slightly, under her breath.

‘Come in,' she said to Susan. ‘Come in and get behind me.'

‘What is it?'

‘Nothing,' Em said. ‘Come on then, ya bastards. Come and try what you want. You can't take her without getting past me first.'

‘Who writes your dialogue?' Susan asked. Oddly, that penetrated the thick red mist.

‘Do you want some tea?' she asked.

‘Yes,' Susan said and watched as Em stood staring at the pot.

‘Come and sit down and have a samosa,' Susan said.

Em grabbed the samosas and threw them into the dustbin.

‘No one is to eat a thing that hasn't been cooked in the house,' she said. ‘They might poison us.'

‘They' were back. And we went back to the psychiatrists hoping for another drug. There was none. The pharmacopoeia was exhausted; we were back to the old faithfuls –Largactil, Espazine, Pacitane for the highs and Depsonil added on when she was depressed. Only this time, we were depressed.

Granny tried to offer me consolation. She tried to tell me the story of the king who looked at his ring in good times and in bad. On his ring there was inscribed, ‘This too shall pass away.' Like so many young people offered this purulence of cliché, I said in my heart, ‘Fuck off, you stupid old shit with your chutiya clichés and your kings with rings.' In real time, confronted by my grandmother's much-loved, guilt-worn slow dissolve of a face, I said, ‘I'll make tea.'

‘I'll have a cup too, you silly bastard,' said my mother. ‘Not that you were. He took my hymen with his danda, he did. And then three years later, bang on the dot, there you came. Do you know Susan took ten years off the Limb's life? He was white with fear because of my screams. But you? You just popped. They shouted –“The head” – and there you were. A tit man too. You just found the nipple and latched on. Susan, on the other hand, just wouldn't drink. She must have known, woman to woman, she must have known that they had got to me. Don't let them get at the tea. They'll send beautiful girls who will try to bamboozle you.'

‘What Imelda . . . ?' Granny tried to stem the tide.

‘You don't know anything, Mae. You don't know anything. You don't know how
they
work.'

‘Who is . . . ?'

‘They target young men. They work on them through the sex instinct. It's very strong in young men. Do you know, Mae, I read somewhere that women peak later but men come into their sexual prime at the age of eighteen. What do you think he would have been like at eighteen?'

‘The king with the ring?' I asked. It was enough to distract Em from a subject I hated: her sex life with The Big Hoom. She brayed with laughter, demanded another beedi, and asked me whether I was waiting for an embossed invitation from the Queen before I made the tea.

In the kitchen, I could hear Granny trying to convince Em that no one was after her. I felt my rage rise again. Years of this, no, decades of this, had not taught Granny a simple truth. There was no way into my mother's head. Not at this stage. For most of the year, it was possible to carry on a conversation, even to influence her behaviour with ordinary logic. But when she was twitching with despair or riding the crest of a wave of laughter and fury, you could only make contact by mistake.

‘How was your day?' Susan asked her once, when she was depressed.

Em sat up bolt upright in bed and then her shoulders collapsed. Her face crumpled like a little girl's and she began to wring her hands.

‘Am I a standing red pen?' she asked.

It would be funny many years later. It would become a family symbol for the cross-connections and misunderstandings that happened when our words went through the prism of Em's illness. They turned into something exotic and bizarre, bearing only a surface resemblance to our meanings. But at that moment, the question came out of the pit. It was coated with the animal intensity you see in the eyes of a dog hit by a car and dying on the road.

‘No, you're not,' said Susan firmly. She was taking a huge chance.

‘Oh thank God, thank God,' Em sighed and lay down again.

Susan looked around the room for red pens. She checked the house for them. ‘I was wondering if there was a standing red pen somewhere. I thought: is this some kind of symbol? I thought: you know, she was a teacher. Red pens? Corrections? Right and wrong? I don't know.'

Sometimes it was possible to catch a glimpse of how Em's mind worked. You saw a note somewhere or you saw the name of a book or a headline. But this was not one of those times. There were no red pens in the house. So she asked Em why she thought she was a standing red pen.

‘I don't know,' Em ground out. ‘I don't know. I wish I knew but I don't know.'

So trying to tell Em that no one was going to poison her tea was simply not going to work. I wanted to say to Granny, ‘You'll only make her think you're one of the people who want to poison her.' I didn't have to say it because by the time I brought the tea back for all of us, Em had independently arrived at the same conclusion.

‘Oh so they got to you too, huh?'

Then to me: ‘Roger, take over.'

Then she made a dismissive gesture.

‘You want me to go?' Granny asked, her tone suggesting that no one could want such a thing.

Em laughed again.

‘No, the boy will take you out and shoot you through the head.'

Granny's face collapsed.

‘Never mind,' I said to her. ‘Just think of the king and his ring.'

Em sprayed us both with tea.

‘He got you in the gut, you old hound dog.'

I sympathized with Granny but I also felt a deep vexation. She loved Em and she thought that should be enough. It wasn't. Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself. You can only stand outside it, as a woman might stand outside a prison in which her lover is locked up. From time to time, a well-loved face will peer out and love floods back. A scrap of cloth flutters and it becomes a sign and a code and a message and all that you want it to be. Then it vanishes and you are outside the dark tower again. At times, when I was young, I wanted to be inside the tower so I could understand what it was like. But I knew, even then, that I did not want to be a permanent resident of the tower. I wanted to visit and even visiting meant nothing because you could always leave. You're a tourist; she's a resident.

 • • • 

And as all analogies must, this one breaks down too. You would never be able to visit her tower. You would only be able to visit another tower, a quite similar yet independent one. There were no shared towers, no room for more than one person. I heard this often enough in the shared spaces where Em and I waited for test results, new prescriptions, other doctors.

‘Nobody knows what I am going through.'

‘What I suffer only I know.'

And so on.

Then one day I was sitting next to two polycot-swathed ladies, both of whom had troubled children.

‘What days I have taken out, only I know,' said one.

‘But Brian has some good days, no? With Terry, can't say when he gets up whether he'll be this way or that way. Got to be on your toes. One day, Dr Menezes came over for Molly, my small one. She had fever, cough-cold, wouldn't go to the clinic, lying down and crying. So I called Dr Menezes for a home visit . . .'

‘Two hundred now?'

‘Gone to sleep or what? Three hundred now and without pills. Open mouth. Aaahn. Pull this lid, pull that lid, cough for me, ptack-ptack on the chest and write write write. Finished. Three hundred rupees in the pocket and “Send her to the clinic next time” he got the bupka to tell me. I told him, “Doctor, with all this on my hands I got time? Better to spend this than to listen pitti-pitti-pitti all day.” So he's saying, “Must take a heavy toll. How come I never see you in the clinic?” And I said, “Doctor, you'll see me when Terry is well. Because I got no time to be sick when he's like that.”'

‘Brian is not less, let me tell you. One day, I went out, to novenas only, at Mahim church . . .'

‘All the way?'

‘Got to go, no?'

‘You're lucky you got time. I say in the morning, nine times while I'm cooking. Praying, praying, nine times. “Muttering Matilda”, that Terry put name for me. I'm saying, “Storming heaven on your behalf on'y.”'

‘But I made promise. I got to go. I come back and he's there, taken off everything and standing in the balcony, singing to the sun. What to say? No one comes forward. When there is something, death, sickness, marriage, whatever it is, I still put up my hand. Not much I can do but I'm always putting up my hand. But no one came forward.'

In all this, I saw no real pain, only a need to demonstrate one's tolerance and generosity and deep Mother Courage-ousness. I saw a desperate desire not to affirm each other or to cling together but to establish a clear hierarchy of suffering. Brian does so-and-so. Well, Terry does such and such. You were up all night? I haven't slept for a week. I'll concede now that I was being unfair. I was guilty of hierarchy myself: I handle it better than them, I suffer with greater grace, I don't show it. But at the time, I listened to the ladies and it filled me with anger and contempt.

I had thought once of starting a support group for carers, for those who lived with the mentally ill, but this kind of conversation unnerved me. In the days before the Internet, I put an ad in the papers. I didn't get as many responses as I had thought I would. One woman would turn up, but only if the group were Jungian. Another thought that it was a place where she could leave her brother while she took a break. A third wanted us to petition the government to set up more mental hospitals. Yet another said the group should be anonymous and modelled on the Alcoholics Anonymous. No one could agree on the time and the place and the date. When we finally did agree, three people came. They wanted the names and numbers of institutions to which they could consign their relatives.