Em and the Big Hoom (9 page)

I miss you very much but I need hardly say that. You would like Paris, I think. There's a casual beauty about it, rather like yours.

All my love,

Augustine

His letters offered little. And Susan and I rarely asked him any questions about their meeting or their romance. By the time we were prying teenagers, The Big Hoom had become one of those solid-as-a-rock men of the world who rarely give the impression that they have a past or a private life.

Their courtship lasted nearly twelve years. Family legend says that they might have gone on for another twelve, perhaps forever. Imelda had moved on from
ASL
, found a job at the American Consulate that paid much better. Augustine met her outside her office every evening and they walked to their favourite bookshops, and occasionally went to the movies. They were happy enough doing this. But Em had a godmother and aunt, combined in one person, who wielded enormous moral power in the family, and when Em's thirtieth birthday was coming up, her Tia Madrinha Louisa decided to take a hand in the matter of Augustine and Imelda and the bookshops.

One afternoon, two senior women, dressed in silk and magnificent Sunday hats, presented themselves at the offices of Ampersand Smith Limited. They asked to speak to A. G. Mendes and were ushered into his cabin.

‘You must forgive us for intruding upon you like this,' said one of them in perfect Portuguese. ‘But we are only motivated by the love of the young ones of our family.'

Augustine goggled a bit.

‘I am sure you are,' he replied in Portuguese for he had studied the language in school. ‘But you will forgive my incomprehension when you realize that I do not know who you are.'

‘We are not in the habit of introducing ourselves,' said the older lady. ‘I suggest you ask Mr Andrade who works here with you to introduce us.'

Under normal circumstances, Augustine would have simply thrown back his head and roared for Andy. But something told him this might startle the old ladies into dropping their large purses, shiny patent leather objects with wicked golden clasps. He called a peon and asked if Mr Andrade might not be free to drop by.

Andrade came in and sized up the situation in a moment. He put on a formal air and proceeded to make introductions as if the two women had been strolling in the prasa and had come upon Augustine quite by chance. He gestured to Augustine that he should rise to his feet and with the same, almost imperceptible, gesture indicated that it was not necessary for the ladies to rise.

‘Dona Bertha, Dona Louisa, may I present my good friend, Augustine Mendes? This young man has a bright future at the sales department here, ladies. And these ladies, Agostinho, are my mother's close friends. She has known them for many years. Perhaps you have some acquaintance with the daughter of one who is also the niece of the other and who worked with us for some years.'

That was when things fell into place for Augustine. Andrade asked to be excused and left.

And so the young engineer was left in his cabin with the battleaxes.

He didn't do too badly. He offered them tea and biscuits. They were very impressed that the biscuits were British. Word had got around. Perhaps Andy had told the staff that it was an important meeting for
AGM
, a decisive one, and the staff had rallied.

‘The Big Hoom told me later that they were very formal and polite,' Em said.

The exchange, from what I have gathered, went something like this:

‘Our circumstances are not what they once were,' says the elder woman. ‘Bertha was driven from her home in Burma by Herr Hitler. Very little was left.'

‘Our chemist shops,' Bertha adds. ‘And the this-thing.'

‘Teak plantation,' says Louisa. ‘She means the teak plantation.'

‘That's what I this-thing,' says Bertha. Louisa ignores her.

‘I see,' says Augustine, although he doesn't. He hasn't yet learnt his future mother-in-law's conversational style.

‘But much wants thissing-thissing,' Bertha says.

‘Much wants more,' says Louisa. ‘And enough is a feast.'

It becomes clear to Augustine that he is confronted by a double act. (They had always been close, but over time, Bertha and Louisa had got to the point where they could finish each other's sentences.)

Louisa: Where are you from?

Augustine: Moira.

Louisa: That is a good village.

Bertha: Thissing.

Augustine: Pardon me?

Louisa: Christian.

Augustine: Yes, I suppose it is.

Louisa: Are you related to F.X. Mendes of Astora?

Augustine: No, I don't think so.

Bertha: He was our thissing.

Louisa: Father.

Augustine: The editor F.X. Mendes?

Bertha: Yes.

Augustine: I have heard of him.

Augustine is not being facetious. He really has. F.X. Mendes had conducted, through the civilized medium of his newspaper, a case against the toilet of a wealthy brahmin. The facts: the brahmin's home faced a plot, long unused, upon which he had had his eye. One day, he discovered that it had been bought by a man of unquestionably lower caste. He also discovered that the low-caste man was intent on building on his land and was going to build a house, by virtue of funds supplied to him by his brothers who were settled in East Africa and doing ‘quite well for themselves', a term by which opprobrium and praise – in equal measure – may be heaped upon those who try to get beyond their station. And to build a house right in front of that of the only rich man in the village – and a brahmin – was an act of hubris that demanded a suitable response. At that time, no one thought much of having an outhouse, a pig toilet at which an eager porcine nose might suddenly meet one's rear end as one squatted. The rich man had a bright idea. He would build an indoor toilet. He would build it so that it came very close to the living room of his new neighbour. He would then fart in the upstart's face each morning.

It was this terrible plan that F.X. Mendes worked to foil. It is entirely likely that he ran other campaigns. It is entirely likely that he opposed Portuguese rule or supported it fervently. No one knows. No one remembers. They only remember that F.X. Mendes fought the toilet case and won it. Depending on who is telling it, there is either admiration at the old man's stubborn insistence on the rights of the poor or incredulity that newspaper columns should concern themselves with such petty matters.

Bertha and Louisa must have both peered into his face to see on which side of the divide Augustine fell. To have a famous father can be a terrible burden.

Augustine: My brothers often said he wrote beautiful Portuguese.

Bertha: He was quite this-thing but now this-thing.

Augustine: He made his mark.

Louisa: Do you speak Konkani?

Augustine (switching to Konkani): I speak Konkani.

He knows there is a slippery patch coming along. (In those days, and among the kind of women who were sitting in front of him, there were those who maintained that Konkani was the language of the tiller of the soil and the bearer of the load. They maintained as well that Portuguese was the language through which Goans could dream of some success in Lisbon where everyone always told them how beautifully they spoke the language. And then there were those who believed that Portuguese was a foreign import that belonged only to a certain community and that Konkani was the fertile red mud of their inheritance.)

Augustine waits for judgement. Then Louisa puts him out of his misery: ‘That is good. Too many young people do not speak their mother tongues.'

Bertha: Your parents?

Augustine: My father is dead.

Louisa: Please accept our sincere condolences.

Augustine: It happened a while ago.

Louisa: We always regret the loss of a departed parent.

Augustine: Indeed we do.

Louisa: Do you have perpetual Masses sung in his honour?

Augustine: No.

(Augustine was not a believer in a personal god who would listen to your prayers. Even less did he believe that you could pray for someone else. And to have a third party, a disinterested third party, offering intercessory prayers on behalf of people they did not know, seemed outrageous to him. After all, these Masses were subdivided into thousands, since perpetual Mass cards were sold at almost every church in the world and by the minute. There would never be enough priests for even a hundredth of a Mass per soul, and the idea of asking the powers that be to consider minuscule fractions of benefit accruing to the dead seemed far more ridiculous than any other dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. ‘He was a natural Protestant when I met him,' Em would say. ‘He protested everything.')

Louisa: Then we shall organize it for you.

Bertha: What's your this-thing?

Augustine: I beg your pardon?

Bertha (impatient): Where do you thissing?

Augustine takes a wild guess and names his parish: Our Lady of Victories.

Bertha nods. Augustine is relieved. He's catching on.

Bertha: You go?

Augustine: I go whenever I am in need of spiritual sustenance.

Louisa would probably have let it go at that. She was a wise woman and she knew that religion was best in small doses. Too much and the boy was no good. There was disquieting evidence in the family itself; their own Cousin Letitia had demonstrated that. Letitia had been the God-fearing woman who went to church every Sunday but she had chosen to live in sin with her Francis. Francis had been willing to marry her in church but it was she who had not wanted marriage. The world knew how often he had asked. The world knew how often they had sex because that was when Letitia would be in the line for confession. The world knew that their first child had been born a bastard. The world knew but did not understand that an atheist-communist-unionist like Francis wanted marriage and a good Catholic girl like Letitia did not. And then they had a son who was a bastard and a son who wasn't. Very often, Louisa's aunt Matilde, Letitia's mother, had said that she would prefer a communist-atheist-unionist like Francis as a child and wondered how her God-fertile womb – a nun and a priest and three angels sent to heaven apart from the five other children – could have borne something as vile and frightening as her last-born with the gentle hands that nursed her in old age and illness. It could get very complicated, this God thing, this love thing.

Bertha knew this too but she did not apply Letitia and her story to their lives. She did not believe in application, so she persisted:

Bertha: How often?

Augustine: Once a year.

Louisa decides that she would have to step in or lose the boy on a technicality.

Louisa: Well, that is between you and your confessor.

Augustine: No, it is between me and God.

On the way home, Louisa was not kind.

‘If you do not want your daughter to marry, you should have let me know,' she told Bertha in her most stately Portuguese.

‘How can you say that?' Bertha asked.

‘Because you were quizzing him on his religion. In these days!'

Bertha protested that she had the right to ask whether her daughter was going to a God-fearing man.

‘And how much will you put into your daughter's hands?' Louisa asked savagely. For the matter of dowry had not been discussed. Both sisters had hoped that since this was a love match, there would be no demand made. Both sisters knew that demands were almost inevitable since no Indian wedding was an affair that concerned two people. It took in the family and the family would speak where love would prefer silence. And if a woman did not have any money coming to her, if she was in her late twenties, if she was known to have been ‘moving around' with a young man for several years, she had very little bargaining power.

‘Here you have a brahmin boy – okay, maybe not a first-class brahmin family, but brahmin, from a good village, with a good job, who wants to marry your daughter . . .'

‘Then why . . .'

‘He may not have asked. He may need a push or two. Which man doesn't? He earns well. Andrade says he's going to do even better. And you are worried how many times he goes to church? Enough if he goes one more time, at the time of nuptials, that's what I say. But don't ask me, who am I? You know more than I do.'

It was a classic move in the game. If you are older, you can always play this one and sweep the board. Your wisdom has been ignored, your opinions have been spurned with contempt, and you accept this without demur. You know that you have no value in the world. That immediately puts your opposition in the terrible position of having to bring you back into the argument, of having to beg for any further advice; and as soon as an apology is issued, you can put it down for future use. You were slighted. If you were not, why apologize?

After the ladies had left, Augustine simply got on with his work. Perhaps his hand reached for the telephone once. Perhaps he didn't even go so far. He had always had the admirable ability to cut out anything that did not pertain to the problem at hand.

‘Can you imagine?' Em said. ‘We met that evening and went out for a Coke float and to the pictures, and he didn't say a word. Though I thought there was a naughty flicker in his eyes and I got ready to ask for his Wassermann report.'

‘His what?'

‘I didn't even know what it was but Gertie said I should ask for it if he ever asked me to go to a hotel.'

I looked it up; it was a venereal disease test and not even a reliable one at that. It could show that you were carrying syphilis when you were actually suffering from cholera or tuberculosis.

Imelda did not, finally, ask Augustine for his syphilis certificate. But she did continue to be puzzled and a little unnerved by the mischief in his eyes.

She discovered the cause of it later that evening.

I got home and Mae was crying and Tia Madrinha was looking stern and Daddy was reading more intently than usual. When I kissed him, he said, ‘Congratulations.' I didn't know what he meant. Then Tia Madrinha said, ‘You may ask your young man to ask your father's permission.' Daddy said, with a rare spark, ‘Ask my permission when you two went and sought his hand in marriage for my daughter?'