THE BOOK OFSUFFERING
It is the idea of the mother that animates Pinto’s novel set in a Mumbai flat
From the moment you pick up this book, you feel a small thrill of foreboding. There are the black- edged pages suggestive of grief and obituary notices; the black dust jacket with a bright red cover peeping from beneath it, like a freshly slit wrist; and then, in darkly ironic counterpoint, there’s the comic Dr Seuss- ian title: Em and the Big Hoom.
It’s the story of the Mendes family, who live in a small, 1 BHK flat in Mahim: The unnamed narrator, the sister, Susan, the father, Big Hoom, and the mother Em, who suffers from a bipolar disorder that drives her to cycles of selfdestruction, when threatening voices speak to her from the ceiling fan, and she takes to doing things like throwing herself in front of passing buses. It’s a little like reading The Bell Jar, as written from the point of view of Sylvia Plath’s bewildered, adolescent son: How did this happen to his once beautiful mother, the woman who once had a beautiful singing voice and a love of bookshops? “Kill me,” she will whisper, on days when the pain is particularly bad, “Let me die.” But all he can do, of course, is hand her five orange Depsonil tablets, instead of the one that Dr Saha prescribed. Maybe that will soften her pain. But it never does.
Jerry Pinto takes us through the alternating sunlight and darkness of Em’s manic depressive condition, with an admirably controlled, unsentimental style. One moment she is chattering and punning with her children, the next she is emerging from the bathroom, drenched in blood from some new self- inflicted wound, and has to be rushed back to Ward 33 of the JJ Hospital, where she’s a regular. The narrative, meanwhile, keeps cutting back poignantly from the blackness of the present to the innocence of her long- ago love story with ‘ Angel Ears’, her husband— a love story that unfolds through a series of bittersweet conversations with the children, and old letters and diaries that they have permission to read.
And so it goes. Each time Em returns home from Ward 33, the family silently prays that this time the pieces of the jigsaw will fall into place again, that this time they’ll go back to being the ordinary textbook illustration of father, mother, sister, brother. But, of course, the phantoms of the brain are too complex, too perverse to work like that.
Pinto has served a long apprenticeship in the craft of writing— having done everything from hack newspaper journalism to the elegant recent autobiography of Leela Naidu that he cowrote— and he’s become a writer I always look forward to reading. I don’t know how much of this book is autobiographical, but I suspect a large part of it is: It’s just too authentic, in its minutiae of mental illness, and its deliberately matter- of- fact narrative of pain, for it to be the fiction that it pretends to be. It’s an emotionally daunting book and, frankly, I’m not sure everybody will have the strength, or even the compassion, to reap its richness.
Dom Moraes once told me that when he asked the English poet Stephen Spender for advice, the latter replied, “Go suffer, and sing.” One can’t help but sense the great suffering that obviously underlies this book. And, through it, rise the bright, sweet, heart- breaking notes of Pinto’s song.