We never knew when the weather would change dramatically with Em. You’re vulnerable to those you love and they acknowledge this by being gentle with you, but with Em you could never be sure whether she was going to handle you as if you were made of glass or take your innermost self into a headlock. Sometimes it seemed part of her mental problem. Sometimes it seemed part of her personality. ‘That’s not her, it’s her problem,’ Susan once said to me, when she found me weeping because of something Em had said. It became a way of escaping the sharpness of her tongue. But it also became a way of escaping her as a person. We could always dismiss what she was saying as an emanation of the madness, not an insult or a hurt or a real critique to be taken seriously. We often did dismiss what she said, but more often than not, it was self-defence.
And there were times when all defences failed.
I come home from a bad day at my first job. I’m twenty and I’ve been assigned a story. At my position on the totem pole, the story is not about what I think of the issues involved, it is about what other people think. My job is to make them think aloud and put it all down on paper, and to that end, I must call and ask them for their time. But no one is available. One is out of town and nobody knows how he can be reached. The next is not at home and when I call his office he’s ‘not on his seat’. The secretary of a third appears to have put his phone permanently off the hook. I call and call and all the time I’m aware that there’s a whole beast of a machine waiting for copy. The desk, the designers, the editor, all looking at you as if you’re shirking if you stop calling even for a minute. I need quotes and the only quote I’ve managed to get is from the B-List, an add-on remark which is not without value but only when the experts from the A-List, the politicians, the CEOs, the film stars, have spoken. And none of them have.
When I’m home, I’m hoping to set it all down, though I know failure is never shed so easily. Victories evanesce quickly enough. Failure hangs around you like a cloak and everyone is kind and pretends not to see it.
Not Em.
She wades into the thick of it.
‘Bad day at the office? I can smell it on you. Now there’s a man beaten by the system I would say to the bishop, if there were a bishop sitting next to me. But this ain’t no bishop, this is my son and he’s no great big ball of gas today. Give us a hug.’
I give her a hug. She reeks of beedi smoke and hair oil and Iodex.
‘You in pain?’
‘Pain pain go away, come again some other day. Little Johnny wants to play with himself.’
I don’t want a nasty riff on nursery rhyme. I want tea and sympathy.
‘I asked you a question.’
‘No, you did not. You made a statement.’
‘Okay, let’s go back a bit. Are you in pain?’
She strikes a pose, her wrist to her forehead. ‘You cannot imagine the torment.’
Then she peers at me.
‘No pain, no. I just ate some Iodex.’
I don’t know how to respond. She could be joking.
‘Open your mouth.’
‘Ha ha ha,’ she mocks. But her mouth is open and at the back, I can see a black smear. I reach in with a finger and dab at it. I sniff. Iodex.
‘Why?’
‘Because the sky is so high and the crow shat in your left eye. I could tell you a lie but I don’t see why. The world is a game and the game is a tie. The tie is around your neck and they’ll string you high.’
There were times when I could see a lot of my mother in the body whom I met at home. There were times when there was very little of her. This was one of those times. She was a parody of herself. The mania had taken over but it was a sly episode. She was sitting there, smoking as if she were ordinarily manic. Whatever that means. But she wasn’t. She was into pica, the desire to eat extraordinary stuff, and that was unprecedented. She was suggesting my death and that was also something she wouldn’t normally do. I wanted to reach out to her, even though I knew from previous experience that this was futile. I wanted to understand her and her predicament because I was her son and I loved her with a helpless corroded love. I wanted to but I could only shout.
‘What the fuck are you talking about? Why can’t you answer straight, you piece of shit?’
Em opened her eyes wide. I looked into my own eyes.
‘You’re angry. Ooh, my little p’ecious boy is angry. He’s angry. I’m frightened.’
The mockery was apparent and hideous – she mimed trembling – but it reminded me that this was part of her illness. I tried to calm down.
‘I’ve had a tough day at work . . .’
‘Ooh, he’s had a tough day at work. And for what? For some three thousand rupees. Can’t buy much with three thousand rupees. Can’t go far with three thousand rupees. Can’t even live on his own with three thousand rupees.’
I could not remember ever feeling so violated and hurt.
‘Shut up,’ I said and I could hear my voice beginning to tremble with tears. ‘Shut up, you disgusting bitch.’
‘Do you want a cuppa?’ she asked, suddenly herself.
‘Are you fucking mad?’ I was almost beside myself.
‘Shhh,’ she said and suddenly picked up the book in which she wrote letters to people, letters that never got posted unless Susan read them and decided that they would not hurt the recipients.
‘They’re listening.’
‘Who?’
She rolled her eyes and looked desperate.
‘Who?’ I asked again. ‘Who’s listening?’
Now her expression suggested that she had transcended despair. Now she was willing to play some mad endgame which she thought I had inaugurated.
‘It began when you were a baby. You pointed to the fan and I knew that they were there, that they were listening. You found them first.’
‘Are they listening now?’
She rolled her eyes again and then, as if she couldn’t bear the whole thing, the stupidity of her son, the pressure of the performance, she shouted, ‘Go, then. Go. Do your damnedest. But if you touch one hair on my family’s head, you’ll regret it.’
Then she smiled and said, ‘Can the disgusting bitch make you some tea? You must be tired.’
The next morning I found a note under my pillow.
I have to get you all out of here. If they come for us, they must not get us all. I have to drive you out. You have to go. That’s why I said what I said. I’m very proud of you but they must not know. If they think I hate you, they may spare you. Go. Go away. Himself and I can manage. We’ll go down together, in flames. We can take it. We’ve lived and loved. You haven’t. I want you to live and love but when you do, they can get you. Susan, they can’t touch, she’s pure of heart. She can stay. But you must go. Soon. But wait for my birthday. And get me a Cadbury’s chocolate. Cad equals Catholic. Bury all the Catholics. Don’t tell anyone.
The note was signed ‘The Disgusting Bitch’.
I didn’t know what to make of it. Em was asleep and so we were all very quiet that morning. I went to work and tried hard not to consider all the issues that were unresolved. When I got home, Em was gone. She had been hospitalized again, at her own suggestion. Susan was with her and The Big Hoom was taking a nap, probably worn out by the hospital thing. When we had dinner together, I suggested to The Big Hoom that I move out. He continued eating quietly as he thought about it. Then he looked at me carefully.
‘It might be a good idea,’ he said. ‘Can you afford it?’
‘No,’ I replied.
He smiled, but it was brief and as much grimace as smile. Then he said, ‘Then the question doesn’t arise, does it?’
‘But you’re not opposed to the idea?’
He put down his spoon and looked at me steadily. He said, ‘You will always be welcome to live here. It is your home as much as it is anyone else’s. But if you want to move, do it when you can, not when you want to.’
As a prescription, that wasn’t a bad one: when you can, not when you want to.
When I went to visit Em in hospital, her eyes were aquaria, full of strange living forms and artificial additions. She had finished cleaning the lady in the next bed who kept spitting up her food. But she was not yet completely there.
‘I hear the words of a song and the music of another. They play together like children. Like children entering the kingdom of heaven. How much chocolate can there be in heaven? The food of the Gods and the shit of the Gods. For me, the food. For Mae, the shit. She wants her gold back, poor darling. I wonder when it went. Where it went. How it went. Why it went, we know. Why, Sister Sarah, why? What it went does not work. Do you follow me?’
She was free associating, gliding through language.
‘I follow.’
‘Oh no, you don’t. Following me will bring you here and here is where the mad people are. You don’t have to be mad. I went mad so that you don’t have to be. You don’t have to do anything now that I am the disgusting bitch.’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘What?’
I looked at her carefully. She was not letting me see what she was thinking. So I knew, immediately, that she had registered the thoughtless insult and that it had mattered. She was not going to give me proof so there was no way I could actually apologize. But I tried.
‘I’m sorry I said that.’
‘Sorry, sorry, kiss the lorry, the schoolboys would say. There was one who walked down the road shouting, “Tony Greig, lambu-ta!” And there was another who read me a poem about butterflies. He read it under the mango tree while I waited for you.’
There was no going in. And there was no going away. I pushed my chair back from her bed, closer to the window with three vertical iron bars, and went back to the book I had carried with me. I read through Em’s rhymes about mango trees and her Mae and Satan’s bee. I read till she was tired and only mumbling, and then The Big Hoom came and I could go home.
• • •
In my late teens, prey to all kinds of inadequacies, I embarked on a programme of remedial reading. First, Plato, an omnibus edition with forty-eight of the fifty-five dialogues, which left me annoyed and exhausted because I did not believe that beauty had much to do with truth or vice versa. And then, for no apparent reason, I began reading the Mahabharata in Kamala Subramaniam’s translation. This was wild and terrifying and it almost drove me to despair. The whole book seemed to be a thicket of names and relationships, many of which sounded dangerously like each other. I used a piece of paper, solemnly writing down the names of the Pandavas, their antecedents, their wife and wives and children and relatives, but it was still difficult. Finally, I grew exhausted – it was summer, the hardcover edition was cutting into my chest, and the sun was bright outside – and so I began reading from page to page, not bothering about who was who. Once I had given up trying to conquer the text, it began to glow with an epic excess of almost every conceivable human passion. I was transfixed.
Then I came upon the Bhagawad Gita and it seemed as if Krishna was speaking to me. He was telling me that if I were a student then I had to be a student. I did not have to be my mother’s nurse. I had to do my duty according to my station in life . . .
For a whole six hours one morning, I felt the glow of a benign blue Hinduism pouring down upon me. At the end of that period, I looked across the room. Em loved the heat, so she had had a good summer, full of manic energy and insomnia. She had been on a roll, talking endlessly, making or asking for endless cups of tea, roaring at all of us if we asked for peace and quiet. ‘You’ll get an eternity of peace and quiet in the grave.’ She would sober down a little only when The Big Hoom returned from work in the evenings, but when he was in the kitchen, cooking, she would break loose.
April had been quieter, but then Em was a great respecter of education. When we were studying for examinations, she could always be quelled by one of us saying, sounding agonized, ‘I’m studying.’ ‘Okay, then I’ll zip my lip,’ she would say and light another beedi and scratch out a letter to someone. Or make some more tea. Perhaps the processes calmed her, though there was nothing Zen-like or ceremonial about the way she made tea, whistling old snatches of Broadway and vaudeville melodies as she thumped and slammed and poured and strained and sugared and slurped her way through another cup, standing up, her head already bubbling over with something else that had to be said.
But this was well into June. Susan and I hadn’t had any need to study for over a month; there had been nothing to restrain Em. She had exhausted herself and us with her mania. And now, as I put away the Mahabharata, I knew instantly that she was beginning the slide into depression. Perhaps it was the silence that had disturbed me and broken the spell of the Blue God’s arguments.
Em had lit a beedi but she was staring at the floor, as if it might conceal a pattern or a story.
After a few seconds, she shook her head like a dog pestered by a fly, got up, stretched and said, ‘Time for another cuppa.’
‘I’ll join you if I may,’ I said.
‘No hope of my joining you while you make it, is there?’ she said. ‘No, I thought not.’ Then she was in the kitchen, silent, and the slow sounds of the pan being put on the stove, the tins being opened, her feet dragging across the cramped space told me that she was sinking into night, that the black drip had started inside her.
I could hold on to my karma defence for a little longer but it was already seeming thin. How could you do your duty when love beckoned you to do something else? No, that was easy enough. Lord Krishna had dealt with that: you ignored love.
And I tried to. When Em was ‘high’, I could be a busy student, in every sense of the word. I could run amok in art galleries where I would write comments and sign them as John Ruskin or Clement Greenberg. I could watch two long movies back-to-back at film festivals. I could spend entire afternoons borrowing and returning books from three libraries in three different parts of the city. I could find fifty other ways to block her out because she could be an extremely painful mother for an adolescent boy.
On an ordinary day, returning from college, I would be greeted with: ‘Hey sexy, did you have any luck today?’
‘Luck?’
‘Did you get any sex?’
‘Em!’
‘So you didn’t. Those girls must be blind.’
‘Stop it.’
‘But maybe it’s all to the good. When Susan was born, Griselda came over. You remember Griselda, no? She was with me at the AmConGen . . . She had beautiful boobs. I think she was a forty but I couldn’t be sure. I shouldn’t have been looking, do you think? I mean, was it a bit lesbian? I looked but I don’t think I wanted to touch. You know when I found your Debonair . . .’
‘You what?’
‘Oh, I put it back, don’t worry. Behind the tank in the toilet, what a place! I suppose you’d have hidden them under the mattress in your room, if you had a room. Poor beetle, where else are you going to fiddle?’
‘Em!’
‘Anyway, I looked at the centrefolds and I thought, some nice girls. But I didn’t want to nuzzle.’
‘Em!’
Her conversation had a way of reducing me to exclamations. I think she enjoyed that and worked out exactly how she was going to do it.
‘O Lord, talk won’t make tea, will it? Let me get you a cup that cheers but does not inebriate and a biscuit and we’ll be convivial.’
The phone rang.
‘Do you want to come and see Wada Chirebandi? There’s a couple of spare tickets.’
I did.
I finished my tea, raced through a bath and was out and confronting this new world of plays and texts and poetry readings. There was always something to do and in my haste to get away from home, I was always willing to make up the numbers. I didn’t really care what it was: Man of Marble by Wajda, a dance performance by a young bharatanatyam exponent, an experimental play in Gujarati in which somewhat sheepish young men walked past the action, dressed in black masks with tyres balanced on their narrow shoulders. Much of it was ridiculous, but there were also moments that were sublime and among them I discovered what art could do.
Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Wada Chirebandi turned out to be one of those moments. It outlined a fairly simple story: a traditional upper-caste family, three brothers, one in the city, one on the farm, and Chandu. Where did Chandu fit in? Chandu was the young man who looked after the matriarch of the family played by an asthmatic and self-pitying wheeze emanating off-stage. Chandu had no life other than her. Chandu tore me from my Blue God Defence. What if my karma were to stop and wait? What if each time I blocked my ears to Em’s desperate muttering I was denying what I was supposed to be doing? And of course, I could see it was the humanitarian thing to do: to sit by your mother’s bed and hold her hand and see if one could reach her.
‘You can’t reach her,’ Dr Marfatia, who was then her psychiatrist, had said once as Em was led away by hands that were firm and gentle. Or at least hands we hoped were gentle. ‘How do we know they don’t hurt her?’ I had asked The Big Hoom, and he had said, ‘Because she never protests when she has to go to Ward 33. That is all we’ll know. We’ll have to live with that much.’ And she had gone willingly into the hospital one more time, releasing us, returning us to ourselves. ‘Go, live.’ Did she say this to me when she was led away that time, or am I imagining it?
Except that none of the three she left behind knew how to go and live; we didn’t know what to do with the brief freedom because it was a tainted freedom. And each time Em came home, we all hoped, for a little while, that the pieces of the jigsaw would fall into place again. Now we could be a textbook illustration: father, mother, sister, brother. Four Mendeses, somewhat love-battered, still standing.
Barely standing, and that wasn’t enough. Home was where others had to gather grace. Home was what I wanted to flee.
Home was a blood-stained bathroom which, when it was scraped down for repainting, revealed an old suicide note, scrawled in pencil. So the one I remembered, the one Susan and I had witnessed, that one was attempt number three, at the very least.
Home was uncertainty: Who would open the door? Em in a panic of sorrow? Em in a rage against some unnamed enemies? Em in a laughing fit with a beedi fuming in her hands?
One day, under the huge mango tree that stood in the schoolyard, with a bunch of schoolboys standing around me, mocking me for being the son of a mad woman, I thought suddenly and automatically: ‘I want to go home.’ And then I thought as suddenly: ‘I don’t want to go home.’ I remember thinking, ‘If I go on like this, I will go mad.’ I tried not to think too much about home as a concept after that.
Inside and outside, inside and outside. Each exerted its own special pull on me. My job as a journalist meant late nights; you did not leave the office until the newspaper was put to bed. This meant I was away until ten-thirty on most days; Susan, as a lecturer in English literature at a college, came home by mid-afternoon. I would call her soon after and ask, ‘Everything okay?’ This was code for ‘Is she all right?’ Her reply would always be, ‘About the same,’ but this was as false as it was true. Em was subject to microweathers; her manic phase could vary from cheerful and laughing to malevolent and sneering, and back again within an hour. In contrast, her depressive phases were almost unrelieved in their darkness. Susan was a stoic; she would bear with Em and she would never complain but that made it all the more difficult to bear. Had she whined about taking the brunt of these blasts, I might have escaped into the office with an easier conscience.
Work was a great thing. I could bring it home and shore it up against Em’s importuning. As a cultural journalist, I could claim that the new play, the old film, the experimental poetry reading, the script session – all these fell within my purview and required my presence.
‘Off again?’ Em would ask.
‘Off again,’ I would say.
And through all this, I told myself, and with all this, I told myself, I’ll try and understand her. I’ll try and figure out how this happened to my mother, once a beautiful woman with a lovely singing voice, and – yes – how this happened to my father, a man with a future who had given it all up to make sure the present was manageable. For her. For us.