Em and the Big Hoom, published in 2012, is an account of an unnamed narrator about the life of his family with his mentally unstable mother, Imelda Mendes or Em, his “paragon” father, Augustine or the Big Hoom, his sister, Susan and his grandmother. The story is multi-layered, with the narrator’s discovery of the courtship between Em and the Big Hoom before they were married, Em’s days of normalcy and the narrator’s attempt to understand what triggered his mother’s mental instability. It also explores his understanding of family, love and relationships, while living with his manic depressive mother and the setting of the story alternates between a one-bedroom-hall kitchen in Mahim, Mumbai and Psychiatric Ward 33 at J.J. Hospital, Mumbai.
Though mostly written in a conversational manner and often with colloquial English, Jerry Pinto uses a variety of imagery and metaphors in the story to convey the mental state of Em. In the early stages of the book, readers come across the image of “the tap” that was opened when the narrator was born. This tap, the narrator describes, filled Em up and tore a hole in his heart. When she tries to commit suicide by slitting her wrists, she is possibly trying to drain all the blood from her body. The image of the tap and the black drip leaves a lasting impact in the mind of the reader; and the narrator wondered how his father handled everything for years, if that one statement was enough to tear up his heart. His father, a “paragon” has a calm and collected demeanor that he has developed over the years. He had seen and been with Em when she was whole. Both the Big Hoom and Em had faced hardships in their lives; the former, as he worked his way to become an engineer after he came to Mumbai from Goa and the latter, because she had suffered the impact of migration and displacement in her childhood and had to give up her studies to support her family when she grew up.
The book also reflects the bond between the family members through metaphors about love. Love, the narrator says, is something people never understand the power of, till they experience. Similarly, depression is nothing more than “a hole in the ground” till it settles inside someone you love. For Em, this disrupted her life, made her smoke beedis incessantly, attempt suicide multiple times, hear voices and see hallucinations that put her and her family’s life in danger. All this snatched the “colour and the nights of rest” from their lives.
Another metaphor used is that of “the tower”. The far-off world to which Em belongs is a realm that outsiders can only visit but never truly be a part of. But visiting would not mean anything because the narrator could choose to leave at any time. Mental illness is not often explored in the way Pinto explores it, interwoven with casual dialogue and deep thinking. The tower analogy makes a normal person realise that they will never know what a person inside the tower experiences. He or she can only fleetingly see what the lives of those within the confines encompass. The narrator thus draws an analogy to his mother stepping on a patch of quicksand and sinking deep, and his deepest desire is to stay, but he knows he must go.
In a conversation with his father, the narrator is told “Anything less makes you less”, referring to the debts his father is trying to repay people in his lifetime. He extrapolates this to the love between his parents. Imelda had loved him earlier in her life and now, he would love her back, unconditionally knowing that even the most would not be enough, further reiterated by the lines, “Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself.”
Throughout the book, we read religious references. Perceived as a follower of Roman Catholicism, Em refers to the Big Hoom as the “Limb of Satan”, always tempting her to sin. This is in contrast to her talks about sex with her children during some of her “moods”. She confronts the narrator about his pornographic collection, accuses boys of knowing everything about the “cock and cunt business” and is very casual about her references to the Oedipus complex, which she calls “Oedipal Shmeedipal”. Another area where religion (or the disbelief of it) makes an impact, is in the narrator’s life. At times of despair, people seek solace in the power and compassion of God but the narrator lost his faith “as an hourglass loses sand” because he failed to understand any explanation for the pain his mother was going through.
Despite her turbulent life, Em left the world, “without a bang or a whimper”. Em’s death was described as “the last great mystery” and the narrator describes his living family as “shipwreck survivors”, waiting for normalcy to be restored in their lives, grieving the loss of someone who physically belonged with them and was present in their hearts, but mentally ceased to be a part, many years ago.
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