There’s a memory I have from the year I was sixteen. At Christmas Mass, I remember a priest talking about Saint Joseph. The shadowy figure of the father of the incarnate Lord, he called him, and I lost him after that as he maundered on about the virtues of the Holy Family. It was obvious that no one thought much about fathers and fatherhood. Maternity was central.
It wasn’t. Not in my world. The Big Hoom was my rock and my refuge. He knew what to do, how to handle stuff. He knew when to let us off and take things over. I tried imagining my life without him and immediately grew cold with fear. I had no idea how one earned money. I knew that one went to work, but what kind of work could I do? When I was asked, I said I wanted to become a doctor but that was ambition by the numbers. Boys of my age, of my social class and academic success, said they wanted to be doctors or engineers. There were no other professions in the world, no other professions to which one might aspire. There was only the building of bridges and the repairing of bodies.
But the real fear was not that I wouldn’t know how to earn money. It was this: life without The Big Hoom meant life with Em on her own – no, life with Em and no buffer. What if I had to open another door to find that she had sawed at her wrists with one of the knives we had blunted? How would I judge how much blood she had lost and whether she needed a blood transfusion or not? Could that be administered at home? If she died, would I know whom to bribe and how to bribe to make sure it would not turn into a police case? And where would I find the money to bribe, in the first place? What if I put all our savings in a risky business that failed?
At that point I realized what it meant to be a man in India. It meant knowing what one could do and what one could only get done. It meant being able to hold on to two patterns simultaneously. One was methodical, hierarchical, regulated and the outcomes depended on fate, chance, kings and desperate men. The other was intuitive, illicit and guaranteed. The trick was to know when to shift between the patterns, to peel the file off a table and give it to a peon, to speak easily of one’s cousin the minister or the archbishop. I did not think I would ever know what these shifts entailed, and that meant, in essence, that I was never going to grow up. Or, and a goose walked over my grave, I would only grow up when The Big Hoom died. Only then would I learn how to deal with the world, this city, this life.
But how did one acquire such knowledge? Did it arrive in the moment itself, the understanding that this was not a man to be suborned, that this was a man who could be subverted? How did other people manage? There must be different ways for every level of society, that much I knew. But what was the way for the son of a mad woman, a ‘vedi’ in the schoolboy argot of the playground? Anger didn’t show the way. Nor hurt.
So how had he managed? How had The Big Hoom grown to the estate of masculinity? Most days I saw him as the perfect man, even in his dense silences that could leave you bleeding for a word in either direction. Then I would correct myself, slowly brutalizing him and so myself and my family. No, he was not a paragon. A paragon would also have been good-looking and would not have thick glasses, passing on to his children the myopia that would have them in spectacles before they were in their teens. Perhaps a paragon might have spotted what was wrong with Em before he married her. A paragon would have been more than a mere crisis manager. And a paragon would have expressed his feelings.
Had Em been the able parent, would things have been different?
This was an exercise that defeated me so completely that I was forced to recognize that The Big Hoom was indeed my paragon. Perhaps I did not want to recognize it only because it made me like every other boy I knew. But they somehow overthrew their fathers or dethroned them or got past them. There was no getting past The Big Hoom.
• • •
The Big Hoom’s story has the mythic resonance of India in it. I might never have found out, never asked him about it, had it not been for a trip to Goa that we made together. Why weren’t Susan and Em there? I don’t know. I don’t remember. It was not a funeral, it was just something that happened. Perhaps The Big Hoom himself had engineered it.
On the second day, after he had been cried over by sundry old women, most of whom would remain nameless to me, we went for a walk together in the village to which he had never shown much desire to return. Em said it was something to do with the property. He had signed away his rights to prevent a family feud turning into a court case. It hadn’t helped and he was now a Goan with no land in Goa.
He was wearing a banian with his office trousers, an odd combination, while I loped beside him, a clumsy fourteen-year-old, unsure of what it meant to be on a holiday with my father, alone. The phrase ‘male bonding’ was far in the future.
He stopped after we had walked half a furlong, or some distance I imagined to be half a furlong, and looked up at a tank that had been erected on two brick columns with a metal rod, about six feet long, hanging between them.
‘When Mr Fernandes built that tank, it seemed like the ultimate modern contraption. Everyone came from miles around to see it being built. Now, it looks like a giant with his dong hanging out of his pants.’
He startled a giggle out of me, because he did not use words like dong. He didn’t respond and we walked down a thirsty path, all red mud and stones.
‘This was a green and shady walk when I was a boy,’ he said. ‘They’ve cut down all the trees.’
The church appeared somewhere to our left.
‘That was the biggest building I saw before I went to the Basilica in Old Goa,’ he said. ‘That’s probably why I went to Bombay from Poona.’
‘Poona?
‘I went to Poona to sit for what you would call a board examination. It was like another planet: a huge world of cars and buses and cycles and noise. On the first day, I felt dizzy at the thought of so many people. All of them looked like they were about to crash into each other but at the last minute they would manage to slip past. It was like watching a hundred games of football going on at once and me in the goal, waiting for a hundred balls, none of which I could see.’
He stopped for a while and then shook his head a little.
‘Why did you go to Poona?’
‘It was the closest centre for the English examination. I didn’t want to study in Portuguese.’
‘The language of the overlords.’
‘I don’t think it had much to do with that,’ he said. ‘It was just that there seemed to be more jobs available to people who spoke English.’
I fell silent. I felt silly. But then I was fourteen. I could be made to feel silly if someone sneezed.
‘There were many boys from Bombay at the school where I was staying. In those days, boys from Bombay would sit for their exams in Poona if they could manage it. I think they felt that the competition would not be as stiff, that they would shine in comparison.’
Among them was Mario, from Dhobi Talao. ‘You think this is a city?’ he asked scornfully, as the boys sat on the steps of the dormitory of the school. ‘Come to Bombay. Now that’s a city.’
‘I don’t know anyone in Bombay,’ said Augustine, aged fifteen.
(Was he being disingenuous? Or was he really an innocent from Moira? I didn’t ask.)
‘You know me,’ Mario said grandly. ‘Come and see.’
And so it was decided, on the spur of an invitation and a moment, on the challenge of a city vaster and grander than he could imagine, that Augustine would go to Bombay.
‘I had money to go home. I used it on a ticket to Bombay. I don’t know what I was thinking. Or whether I was thinking about money at all. I had never had any before that, no pocket money, no spending money. Everything I had was second-hand or third-hand or bought for me. So perhaps I thought one could get on without money.’
Mario’s mother came to receive him. The Big Hoom was not big on details but I imagined her in the standard garb of the Goan Roman Catholic lower-middle-class housewife. She would have been in a white-ish rayon shirt – not quite white because white is difficult to keep clean, who has the time? – embellished with fake lace. From under the collar, two pink satin ribbons falling limply on her chest. A black skirt riding under her paunch. And on her feet, low slippers that showed her cracked heels and the bunions on her toes. There would have been a faint smell around her, a smell of worry – Mario’s exams, husband’s alcoholism, Maria’s marriage, her own over-strained budget, the leaking bathroom, the troublesome boss who did not understand why she had to take an hour off to fetch her son from the station; the worry that had carved a single deep line between her brows. I realized later that I was dressing her with the contempt of my class and the notions of my time. Rayon would not have been as popular at the time. And that entire outfit was more 1980s than 1950s.
‘She took one look at me,’ The Big Hoom said, ‘and said, “Who is this?” Mario said, “He’s Augustine. He’s from Goa.” “Okay, nice to meet you,” she said and took her son and left.’
‘Didn’t Mario tell her that he had invited you?’
‘He turned around as if to say something, I think. Maybe he even said “Sorry aahn?” or something like that. I don’t think he ever told his mother that he had invited me to Bombay to stay with them.’
‘What did you do?’
Suddenly on that warm Goa afternoon, I felt the cold horror of that moment reach me across the years. The Big Hoom had been about as old as I was. I would not have known what to do. I would probably have burst into tears or gone running after Mario and his mother.
‘I stood there for a while. I didn’t know what to do. I had very little money left. And then a car stopped in front of the station and a lady got out and said, “Take out those bags.” I thought she wanted some help so I got the bags out but when I had carried them into the station, she gave me two pice.’
‘Two pice?’
‘A grand sum,’ said The Big Hoom. ‘My first earnings ever. I spent them immediately on tea and an omelette at the railway canteen.’
‘So you became a coolie?’
‘Who knows what would have happened if I had become a coolie?’ The Big Hoom asked reflectively and I promised myself that I would stop my silliness by simply not saying anything more. ‘It’s like that Maugham story of the illiterate sacristan who gets the sack and becomes a millionaire because he goes into business for himself. A journalist comes to interview him and asks him something like, “You achieved all this and you were illiterate. What would have happened if you were literate?” And the millionaire replies, “I would have been a sacristan.”’
Railway coolies were a closed shop.
‘You couldn’t just pick up a bag and earn a couple of pice. You had to belong to the fraternity. And to belong to the fraternity, you had to speak Marathi and know someone who already belonged. I could only speak Konkani and Portuguese and English and I knew no coolies. So I was warned and kicked out of the station and went back to get my luggage.’
‘Oh God.’
Of course. He would have had to put down his own bags to carry the woman’s bags . . .
‘The bags were gone. But someone said that they had been handed over to the stationmaster as lost luggage.’
Finally, a stroke of luck. The stationmaster was Goan.
‘He made me wait outside his office. He said he would put me on the bus the next day. He took me to the Moira coor and bought me dinner. They found a bed for me. In the evening, the men and boys came back. I didn’t know any of them but they took me to Cross Maidan and we played football. They bought me dinner too. The cleaners gave me some breakfast and in return, I had to help wash the floor. That was okay. I didn’t mind work. At around five, an old man came into the dorm and said, “Where’s Pedru?” No one knew where Pedru was. One of the cleaners said, “Patraõ, you know what Pedru’s problem is.” “Fallen down drunk again?” said the old man, ignoring the fact that he was reeking of alcohol himself. “Such a pity.” Then he saw me and said, “You, what’s your name?” I told him. “Got a job?” I told him I didn’t have one. He switched to Portuguese. “Do you speak Portuguese?” he asked. “I speak it fairly well,” I said. “Do you speak English?” he asked. “I speak it well,” I said. He switched to Konkani. I could speak that too. Then he switched to Hindi and Marathi and Gujarati but I just kept shrugging. I didn’t even know a few words in any of those languages. I thought: “Gone, now I won’t get the job.” But finally, he shrugged and said, “You’ll pick them up, I suppose. Come on, then.”
‘So I went with Dr da Gama Rosa to his clinic. It was the first time I had ever sat in a car. And when I told him that he laughed and said it was the first of many firsts.’
‘What did he want you to do?’
‘Oh, didn’t I tell you? He was a doctor and he needed a compounder.’
‘You were a compounder?’ I asked.
‘Why not?’
I knew what a compounder was. He was the guy who shelled out the pills, wrapping up your morning, afternoon and evening doses separately, pouring a bit of red syrup into a bottle and adding a bit of pink syrup that tasted of mint. Then the bottle itself would have a label stuck on it and the dose marked on the obverse with a strip of paper. The compounders I knew were all ghostly presences. George, the one who reigned in our family doctor’s clinic, was a man whose face I would always remember foreshortened, framed in the circular aperture through which he passed pudias of pills and bottles of syrup. Through the years that we knew him, he said very little. ‘Three times a day after meals,’ he might say. ‘Come back in three days.’ Or, ‘The white ones are to be stopped if the fever goes.’
Another element of my father’s ability to handle the universe fell into place. He had an almost benevolent contempt for Dr Saha, the family physician. When we were ill, we went to The Big Hoom and he told us what was wrong. Most often he would say, ‘Go and lie down and only get up to go to the toilet.’ He believed in rest, lots of fresh fruits and vegetables and boiled water as a cure for almost everything. If he thought we needed pharmaceutical help, he’d take us down to Dr Saha and try very hard not to dictate the prescription.
Em, on the other hand, needed reassurance that we were not about to die.
‘When Susan was a baby,’ she told me once, ‘she had diarrhoea. She seemed to be doing nothing but shitting. And green shit too. So I covered the floor with a plastic sheet and I spread out all her soiled nappies for Dr Saha to look at.’
‘What did he say?’ I asked, as the image began to blossom in my head and the sheet grew and more and more diapers began to festoon the room and the smell began to grow, putrid and pungent.
‘He gave me that classic look,’ she said. It was a classic Em remark. Its origin lay in some advertisement, perhaps for men’s clothing.
This was one of my ways of dividing up the world. My mother: incapable. My father: capable. My mother’s mind belonged to the humanities. My father was the engineer. I was so used to talking about my father as an engineer, I was a little startled to think of him as a compounder. I had no idea I took any pride in his calling. I liked to think I would have been proud of him as a street sweeper but that, I knew, somewhat uncomfortably, was so hypothetical as to be impossible to imagine. And now the thought of him as a compounder had me thinking.
‘What happened to Pedru?’
‘He came back once, very drunk. The doctor sent him away. “Both of us can’t be drunk, Pedru,” he said.’
‘The doctor was an alcoholic?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said The Big Hoom. ‘He was drunk almost all the time. There was nothing much to do since hardly anyone would come to him and so he drank more. There were a few patients who still believed in him, but most of the others wanted a man who didn’t smell so strongly of alcohol at ten in the morning. But that was a pity because he was a great doctor. He listened. He took notes. He made out careful case histories. He kept records. He made house calls. He kept secrets. He never prescribed because a medical representative had promised him an incentive or had given him a wall clock. He had some raisins in his desk drawer for children. He washed his hands after every patient. And he would not laugh at Ayurveda or Unani or homoeopathy. “Sometimes, they get in the way less than we do,” he would say.’
This made me slightly uncomfortable. I had discovered The Big Hoom’s hero. I did not want my hero to have a hero.
‘He made me read to him from the papers every day and from Reader’s Digest. “They put in a load of rubbish,” he would say, “but you can learn something and you can learn the language well.” He believed in English. “It is the new Latin,” he would say. “Because of America. All the new inventions come out of America and so everyone has to learn English.”’
‘One thing . . .’ I started.
‘One thing,’ he said. ‘If you want to get people to talk to you, you should never interrupt.’
‘Never? Even if I think something is wrong or missing?’
‘Especially if you think something is wrong or missing.’
‘Why?’
‘Stops them. Gives them time to think. Interrupts the flow. If you want to get more, you shut up and wait.’
And so did I get my first lesson for life as an adult from my father. I remained silent until he raised his eyebrows in a mute question.
‘Why didn’t you go home? Dr da Gama Rose . . .’
‘Rosa.’
‘Whatever.’
‘No, his name was Dr da Gama Rosa. Names are important. Isn’t yours important to you?’
My second lesson.
‘He’d have given you the money to go home. Or you could have earned it with your first salary.’
‘I suppose,’ my father said. ‘I could have. But I didn’t. Why didn’t I? I don’t think anyone has ever asked me that before. No, I don’t think I’ve asked myself that question before. That’s a good question, then. I didn’t go home. I stayed.’
He thought about it for a while. I felt important, and I felt silly that I was feeling important.
‘I suppose I was ashamed. I had been stupid. I had taken a boy’s invitation and come to the city. I had lost all my money. And maybe it was because everyone who came back from the city, came back rich. They went to Bombay or Aden or Nairobi and they came back with stories of things they had seen or what they had done. I would have had to say that I went to the city and became a coolie and a compounder and had come home.’
He fell silent again. I was minding my manners and my lessons in life, so I was quiet and was rewarded.
‘Or maybe it was simpler. Maybe it was ambition. Maybe it was the city. I don’t think you’ll ever understand how challenging the city can be for a boy from a village. You don’t know anything about it. You don’t know if you buy your ticket before or after you get onto the train. You don’t know if you can go into a mosque or not. You don’t know if the man holding out booklets is offering them free or is selling them. You don’t know why a stranger is smiling at you from the next park bench.’
‘Wouldn’t that make you want to run away from it all?’
‘That’s where pride comes in, and stubbornness. The city is a challenge but it’s a challenge that doesn’t care either way. If you go home, it won’t jeer, it just won’t notice. You can stay and work hard and make something of yourself and it still won’t notice. But you will know. I would have known that I had failed. So I stayed.’
‘You could have written,’ I said. It was family legend that Masses had been held in the village church for my father’s soul. The family had assumed he was dead.
‘They thought I had died in Poona or on the way back.’
‘Why not on the way there?’
‘Because my examination results came in the post. I did well too.’
That must have fitted in nicely with the tragedy, I thought.
‘When did you return?’
‘With my engineering degree.’
As the doctor’s practice declined, he began to invest more and more of his life into his compounder’s future.
‘We work in the ABC professions,’ Dr da Gama Rosa said. ‘Ayahs. Butlers. Cooks.’
‘Doctors too,’ said his compounder.
‘Drunks, more likely,’ said the Doctor. ‘If you want to be someone else, you have to work ten times as hard because they see us as the boys in the band. But what’s worse is that that’s how we see ourselves. Do a little work, sing a song, drink yourself to death, go out with a funeral band and four children following the coffin.’
Once his assistant had begun to master the English newspapers, the doctor made him read a series of English classics borrowed from a public library that stood at the corner of Dhobi Talao. At first, Dr da Gama Rosa picked the books but eventually he started sending The Big Hoom.
‘One day, I happened to look over a young man’s shoulder and saw a cutaway drawing of a motor. I did not know what it was at the time but it looked fascinating. So I asked him what the book was and he flipped it over so I could see the cover. It was Coates’ Manual for Engineers. I wanted to ask him more but he said he was studying for an exam, so please. I looked at the shelves and found another Coates. It was marked ‘for reference only’ but Dr da Gama Rosa had told me how to get around that. Most of the time the labels were old so all you had to do was peel it off and get the book issued anyway.’
‘What did the doctor say when you started reading Coates?’
‘I think he was disappointed. I think he wanted me to become a doctor. When I was in the clinic, he would test me all the time. He would make me read temperatures and take blood pressure and ask me what I would prescribe.’
Which explained the almost impersonal kindness with which The Big Hoom treated us when we were ill.
‘And so you got into the Victoria Regina Technical Institute?’
‘On the second attempt,’ said The Big Hoom. ‘And three years later, with an engineering degree, I went home.’
The prodigal was not welcomed, even if he had made good.
‘Your grandmother was a big woman for her time. She was nearly five foot ten and she could carry a head-load of firewood five kilometres to the Mapusa market, talking all the while.’
The news spread even before he got off the bus.
‘By the time I reached home, mother was waiting for me with a stick,’ he smiled. ‘Later, I was told she had burst into tears at the news, then dried her eyes, killed three chickens, changed her sari and picked up the stick.’
‘Did she beat you?’
‘No. Six years had passed. She remembered a boy of fifteen who would take his father’s shirts without permission. She hit me once or twice but there was no conviction in her. And I remember when she hit me, the village, standing behind, said “Ohhhhh” and then when she hit me the second time, they all said “Aaahhhhh”. She got angry and roared at them. “Kaam na?” Don’t you have any work to do? And then she took me in to see my father.’
‘He didn’t come out to see you?’
‘He was paralysed from the waist down. We don’t know how it happened. He was working as a cook in Hyderabad. My mother said he was in the Nizam’s palace, but then everyone in Goa said that they were cooking for royalty if they were cooks. Most of the time, they were cooking for middle-class Parsis in Bombay.’
‘Were they happy to see you?’
‘I suppose. But I think they were happier when I showed them my degree. Neither could read so my mother brought in a lady from the next house to read it out to her so she could be sure that I wasn’t fooling them. Then I showed them the letter from Ampersand Smith Limited, the company I had joined as a trainee engineer.’
‘What happened to Dr da Gama Rosa?’
‘When I got the job, he said, “Now don’t show your face here again.” I said that I would come and see him on Saturdays. He said, “We’ll see.” Of course, that made me all the more determined to go and see him. But when I went on the first Saturday, the clinic was closed. So I went on Monday, sneaking out at lunch. He was pleased to see me and told me to keep two shirts and a pair of trousers at the office at all times.’
‘Why?’
‘I think he meant that a man had to look fresh at all times. And if the rain got you, you could change.’
It seemed like odd advice but perhaps a drink-sodden doctor felt that any other advice coming from him might seem odd.
We seemed to have reached the church. It was time to turn back. But The Big Hoom kept on walking, lost in thought.
‘Did you visit him every week?’
He stopped and looked at me.
‘If anyone ever does you a favour, you cannot forget it. You must always credit them, especially in public, especially to those they love and those who love them. You must pay your debts, even those that you can never fully repay. Anything less makes you less.’
But he did not say anything more. He was in the process of taking out a cigarette, a rare pleasure that he allowed himself infrequently, although he always carried a packet around. It was understood that no one was allowed to speak to him when he was smoking, no one except Em.
• • •
Anything less makes you less. Was that how it was for him as a husband? She had loved him, and he would never forget it; he would be with her and love her in return, always, even if it wasn’t enough.
It is only now that I think of this – of him. Em filled our lives, there was no space in our minds for The Big Hoom. He was our constant, he was perfect, he just was. We were never really curious about his past, or even his present outside our flat.
When did he first sense that his buttercup wasn’t whole? I don’t know. How did he deal with it when he first discovered that she needed to open up her veins, throw herself in front of a bus? I don’t know. How did he deal with it when she turned over in bed and asked him whether showing the Marines her Maidenform underwear would save her children? I don’t know.
Perhaps the truth is not that Em extinguished all curiosity about The Big Hoom, but that I, at least, couldn’t ask because I was afraid. I thought he might no longer be able to do what he did if he realized he was doing it.
How did he deal with it all? Now, I can only guess: One day I told him about the boys of the neighbourhood, about their mocking.
He said, ‘That’s because they don’t understand.’
‘They should understand,’ I said. I didn’t want to cry, but I was crying.
‘If your mother had diabetes, what would they say?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘This is like diabetes. She’s not well. That’s all.’
Was that what he told himself? That she was not well? That she might get better? I don’t know.