JOIN USEm and the big hoom
Jerry Pinto
Aleph
2012, pp 235
495
Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto is not merely a brutally honest portrait of a manic mother by a probing son who plays part psychologist, part protagonist to delve into the deep recesses of a mentally ailing mum’s mind, but also a prism through which the maze of relationships that shape, sustain and support this manic mind are
showcased.
The novel’s opening chapter itself paves the way for the psycho-sentimental journey that is to be undertaken in this autobiographical narrative by painting the duality of existence of Imelda Mendes, endearingly called Em by her loving children, who swings back and forth along the pendulum spanning sanity and stupor. Gently, the author pokes open the window through which the world of his mad mother is to be showcased by vividly introducing the genesis of her ailment as “someone turning on a tap.”
From thence flows the son’s quest to uncover layer by layer the life of his mother in the hope of stumbling upon the key that would unlock the mystery of when, where and how the seeds that were to unsettle her mind were sown. It is a quest born both of love and fear, love for the mother whom the son cannot bear to see sinking into a mental abyss, and a fear of becoming a victim of those faulty genes, a concern that is articulated thus: “I feared most the possibility that I might go mad too. If that happened, my only asset would be taken from me…All I had was my mind and that was at peril from my genes.”
The author’s quest is like that of a child watching from the brink a placid and pleasant parent enjoying by the seaside one moment, only to see the elder engulfed by a sudden tsunami of brain-clouding and soul-consuming current the next moment, swept away by demons of the mind into a cesspool of self-destructive depression. Seen from a son’s eyes, the portrait is painted thus through the author’s evocative pen-strokes of visual imagery: “Imagine you are walking in a pleasant meadow with someone you love, your mother…Suddenly, your mother steps into a patch of quicksand. The world continues to be idyllic and inviting for you but your mother is being sucked into the centre of the earth.”
To navigate the thin dividing line between being part spectator and part sufferer or, as the author puts it aptly, being a “tourist” into the dark mental prison where his mother is a “resident,” visiting and revisiting her but being able to “always leave” as a visitor — is tough call. But it is tricky terrain that the author-son negotiates skillfully, being clinical and objective enough not to let self-pity or surfeit of emotion choke the narrative, yet not too clinical and cold so as to be dry, drab or disconnected.
And it is in this clinical search for the first clues, the foreshadows of his mother’s inexplicable insanity that the author digs into her diaries and travels back and forth in time, to the heyday of his mother, from when Imelda became “buttercup” to Augustine (Big Hoom to his children post-paternity) to the subsequent old-world wooing, courtship, betrothal and post-matrimonial life of the Goan couple, tracing Em’s journey from girlhood to motherhood in the hope of detecting some clue, some signal of the suffering that was to come and consume.
As the narrative travels back and forth between past and present, between home and hospital, between throbbing nostalgia and anaesthetised reality, two characters form a steady background prop in the prose, never obtrusive enough to snatch the spotlight from Em yet integral to the telling of the tale — the Big Hoom and the author’s sister, Susan.
The common suffering serves as the thread that ties the family together, unites it in its isolation and insulation from the outside world, a household “where visitors were not encouraged’, a home that was “not used to other people. We went to see them; they did not come to see us”.
Thus, when it is time for Em’s final journey, this household is suffused with an awkwardness as it finds “the world come back in.”
Em’s ailment is like a venetian blind that blocks out the world and insulates this family of four from outside intrusions, and when this blind is lifted, what streams in for the “shipwreck survivors” is a world that has long been alien.
When the curtain thus falls on the tale, or when the blinds open, so to say, the undercurrent of empathy and melancholy, punctuated by bemusement at the eccentricities of its endearing characters, that constantly engages the reader is suddenly streamed out, too.
It’s as if someone turns off the tap.