When Em and The Big Hoom set forth on their new conjoined life, the Republic was relatively young and its coffers were empty. Salaries were low, prices were high and the middle class was expected to do its bit by saving as much as it could. Taxes were high and given the foreign exchange regulations and the exchange rate, no one thought of going abroad.
And yet, from all that I could gather, they had been happy. Improbably happy. Their world was clearly vulnerable, as if everyone was walking a tightrope over a smoking volcano. The ship of state could have foundered anytime, and repeatedly, plunging them into an abyss of debt. But none of that seems to reflect in their small black-and-white pictures of the time. Most of the pictures are pretty standard, taken at office parties, the occasional picnic and church weddings. Some, however, are odd: Em trying to smile in a silk sari; The Big Hoom at his desk in the office.
Who could have thought of taking that latter picture? It wasn’t as if there were instamatic cameras in every purse or pocket. Film was rare and often had to be bought on the black market. You didn’t just take a picture. You composed it with care. And that meant you took the kind of picture that everyone else was taking. This kind of picture, man at desk in office, isn’t the kind I have seen in many other people’s albums. Perhaps it has something to do with my father being the first generation of office workers in a family of peasants. It might well have been taken as a way of proving something to the village.
Those pictures tell a story. Imelda and Augustine were part of the dosa-thin middle class of the 1960s. They dressed like other young middle-class Indians of their background, they went to work in respectable, stable establishments and socialized in respectable, stable places. They also did their duties. They opened postal savings accounts and recurring deposits, put aside money for medical emergencies, bought units from the Unit Trust, had babies.
Susan was born two years into the marriage. I could not believe they had had the courage.
‘Why would it take courage? I wasn’t mad then,’ said Em.
‘Not that. Just the expense.’
‘It wasn’t expensive, because it wasn’t a luxury. You got married. You had children. This was assumed. This was what people did. If you didn’t do it, it was because you had a problem and people began to suggest adoption. We didn’t buy a car because that would have been very expensive.’
Em had no recollections of being pregnant.
‘I don’t remember feeling much until I couldn’t get into a rather nice pink skirt I had. Then I thought, “Oh, that’s the baby,” and wondered if I should give up working and all that. One cigarette later, everything was fine.’
‘You were smoking when you were pregnant?’
‘And did it harm you? Or Lao-Tsu? Not as far as I can see. You were a big fat lump and my poor vagina was never the same, though Il Santo never complained.’
‘Em.’
‘It’s true. Natural birth was all the thing and the whole ward at St Elizabeth’s was filled with women in pain. “Nurse, give me another Miltown,” an Anglo-Indian lady would moan every ten minutes from the next bed.’
‘They gave her sedatives?’
‘Oh no, they didn’t, the dirty bitches. They thought you should suffer. I remember a priest coming in on Sunday and reading out of the Genesis. It had to do with Adam and Eve and their apple. Apparently, we were supposed to suffer. Birth was supposed to be painful and we were suffering in expiation of Eve’s sin. Adam got away, of course. Men do.’
The Book of Genesis is quite clear on the subject. The Lord God himself weighs in with ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.’ When anaesthesia was invented, the Church ranged itself against the use of painkillers in the maternity ward. That would be going against the curse of God Himself. It took Queen Victoria’s insistence on a squirt of nitrous oxide, before doctors – and mothers too – decided that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to lessen the worst pain known to humankind.
‘My story sort of ends there,’ Em said. ‘What’s to tell about the rest? You came along and I became a Mudd-dha.’
That word again. That venom. Maybe they should have thought about it, not just had a child because everyone did.
‘I didn’t think it was such a big deal. I don’t know if LOS felt the same way about becoming a Dad. Not that he wasn’t a complete seahorse. I don’t think a man could have been happier when he had his first child. And then when the second one came along . . .’
Me.
‘ . . . he was over the moon. Then I slung my lasso at him and dropped him down to earth. But he took that in his stride as well. I told him, “Put me away.”’
I remember one of the many days on which she had made the plea.
There was an account in the dim grey bank down the road, the cheque book locked up in the Godrej cupboard which sang and creaked whenever anyone tried to open it – ‘Our built-in burglar alarm,’ Em called it. The account was operated by Em and The Big Hoom, and it was money to be used ‘in an emergency’. We knew without being told what ‘emergency’ meant: something happening to The Big Hoom. It was sacred money because, to Susan and me, at least, it carried the terror of being alone in the world. It was the worst possible nightmare we could conceive because we had no idea what we would do if we had to do it all on our own: monitor her pills, decide when she went to hospital, hold on to her life with a daily promise, pay her bills, take her raging or desperate calls, earn a living.
And one day, the truth came out.
From time to time, The Big Hoom would make Susan and me sit down and try to understand how the world of money worked. He would talk us through the notion of the stock market and the interim dividend, the public provident fund and the fixed deposit. He would make us fill out an application form for a bank loan or for the initial public offering of a company. It was his way of trying to prepare us for a world without him. The last step of this would be an explanation of the bank accounts: what was where and how it was to be used. He would explain about capital and running expenses and the need to forecast our expenses. He would show us how he did it, with a large heading called ‘Imelda’ under which he placed forty per cent of the annual income.
‘Forty per cent?’
‘It’s gone above that some years,’ he said briefly. I knew which years. The suicide years. ‘But mostly, it comes in a little less and allows for some flexibility.’
And finally we would come to the bank down the road.
‘This is to be kept in reserve,’ he would say. ‘For emergencies.’
At which point Em would say something like, ‘Over my dead body, please.’
This time, she was silent.
Then, as if girding herself up, she said, ‘There’s nothing left in that account.’
There was a moment of silence.
‘What?’ His voice was ordinary, his everyday voice.
‘I took it all out.’
‘When?’
‘I don’t know.’
He got up and went into the bedroom. In ten minutes, he came out dressed. He left without saying a word.
‘Oh shit,’ said Em.
‘What did you do?’
‘I don’t have to answer to you,’ she said.
This was true, of course. It wasn’t our money. But it was, in a way. In a terrible future way. It was difficult to point that out to her.
‘I hate this whole money shit,’ said Em. ‘Do you remember that Lawrence poem? You studied it in college. Something about a pound.’
‘The Madness of Money’ by D. H. Lawrence. I knew it well. We knew all our poems well. We learnt them by heart and we learnt the summaries by heart. We did not learn anything about poetry, but we could tell a metaphor from a metonymy. And I could quote at random:
‘I doubt if any man living hands out a pound note without a pang;/ and a real tremor, if he hands out a ten-pound note.’
‘So,’ said Em, as soon as I had finished, ‘what if I was testing myself? What if I thought, I shall write a cheque without a pang?’
‘Were you?’
‘No. But I’m going to see my mother.’
‘I don’t think you should,’ said Susan.
‘I think I should. Suppose he kills me?’ and here she gave a delicate stage shudder. We could see how worried she was, not because she really thought he would kill her, but because she had done something very wrong. Yet she was making it a performance, which was annoying.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Susan. ‘I’ll make a cup of tea.’
‘I love you forever,’ said Em. ‘But this is not the time for tea. It is time to write notes that say, “All is Discovered. Let us Flee.”’
‘Who to?’ I asked.
‘To Mae, who else?’
‘You gave her the money?’
‘I will not endure this interrogation from my own children,’ she said. ‘Oh where are my beedis?’
Susan pointed out that Em had them, as she always did, in the pocket of her housecoat. Em lit one and tried to hold on to being aggrieved but the pose cracked.
Finally, she said: ‘Should I run or should I stay?’
‘Where would you run to?’ asked Susan logically.
‘To my mother,’ Em replied.
‘Don’t be childish. That’s not even running.’
‘What would Angela Brazil have you do?’ I asked.
It was a stupid question but the Anglophile in my mother brightened.
‘Well, I think I should Stay the Course,’ she said. ‘And I should Face up to the Consequences. Then maybe I should put a gun in my mouth and shoot myself before I am blackballed at the club. But I don’t even have much luck at that.’
The wait wore us down, but in the end, she did not run. The Big Hoom came back and said nothing. Em tried to match his silence but could not. She kept breaking down and asking his forgiveness.
‘There’s nothing to forgive,’ he said each time and his voice was normal and terrifying.
After a little while when the pressure got to her, she changed around and started saying that it was her money too because the account had been in her name.
‘If you see it that way,’ he said.
Time inched along. I remember trying to read and failing. Susan was working on a crossword. Only The Big Hoom seemed to be going about as if nothing had happened. When you live in a small house, your lives intersect all the time. There’s no privacy, no way to conceal what is happening. Neither Susan nor I ever stormed off to our rooms and slammed the door and locked the world out, because neither of us had a room. Our lives were contained in a single bedroom and a single living room. There was a kitchen too and a toilet separated from the bathroom – which was an inordinate luxury – and four lives had to be managed within those walls. We had to live and love and deceive within earshot of each other.
‘I can’t tell you where the money went,’ said Em defiantly.
‘I can’t remember asking,’ he said.
‘Don’t be sarky,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ she said. She even meant it but it broke the storm.
‘You’re sorry? You’re sorry? Is that all you can say? You break the faith and you say you’re sorry?’
‘What faith?’
‘The faith I have in you as a mother. The faith I have in you as a wife. The faith I have in you that you might have shifted some of your allegiance to this family.’
‘I have. I have. Oh why didn’t you listen to me and put me away when I told you to?’
It seemed like we were listening to an argument that was old and worn, being dragged out into the open. But I could not remember hearing this argument before. Could they have had it when we were asleep? I didn’t think so. Both Susan and I were light sleepers, attuned to Em’s emotional changes. If she started walking about too much, we woke up. When she spoke, we woke up. When she was lonely in the late night or in the early watches of the morning, all she had to do was start talking ‘to herself’ and one of us would be up sooner or later, crabby and irritable. ‘Why did you get up?’ she would ask disingenuously. ‘You need your sleep.’ ‘Shut up,’ Susan or I would say. ‘Make tea.’ And she would and we would begin to wake up and begin to talk. Sometimes, if we were very tired, she would send us back to bed and pretend to sleep herself.
During exam time, it was the unwritten rule that The Big Hoom would do the honours. Perhaps that was when they had discussed money?
Now The Big Hoom was looking at her in a way we had never seen. Not indulgently, not as a responsible brother looking at a younger sibling, not as the lover who seemed to ask for nothing in return, but as a trusting man injured in friendship, and surprised by the hurt.
‘You have?’ he asked quietly.
‘In what way have I not?’ demanded Em, though she sounded uncertain.
‘If I had fallen down dead and you had needed some money, what would you have done?’
‘I’d have asked Gunwantiben.’
There was a moment of silence. It was chilling.
‘You would? You would go out and beg?’
‘It wouldn’t be begging. It would be a loan.’
‘A loan? A loan like the ones your family has taken? It has a history of loans. And everyone plays along when they actually know that you people are begging.’
‘Begging?’
‘What do you think it is when you take a loan, then you take another loan, and you pay some of the first loan with the second? What do you think it is when someone gives you money and then writes it off? It’s called begging.’
‘Gunwantiben would not . . .’
‘I am not talking about Gunwantiben. I am talking about you. I am talking about you turning your children into beggars. I am talking about how you cannot be trusted to keep even a single account inviolate.’
‘I needed the money.’
‘You needed the money?’
And then he suddenly looked across at the two of us transfixed by this discussion and seemed to decide that it was not worth it.
‘I am sure you needed the money,’ he said, without expression.
‘Don’t act like that.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He was slowly packing it away.
‘You’re shutting me out.’
‘Am I?’ his voice was pleasant now. Almost. ‘And since you cannot tell me why you needed the money, what are you doing?’
‘I don’t know. That’s different. I think it’s a matter of honour.’
‘Is it? And does your code of honour allow you to steal from your children?’
‘For the love of Mike,’ Em snarled. ‘It’s not as if they’re likely to starve.’
After that, The Big Hoom would not be drawn. Finally, Em decided that she had had enough. She walked out of the house and went to her mother.
We watched, almost without breathing, until he followed soon after.
They were back an hour later. They seemed to have resolved the money thing.
I had always been puzzled by how completely uninterested Imelda’s parents seemed to have been in getting her married. But of course there had been a sound economic reason. She was the only earning member of the family.
Money had always been a problem, even when it was not supposed to be:
Finally had it out with them. What am I supposed to take with me? I mean, I know dowry is wrong and all that, but what happens to me if I go with empty hands? Surely, there is some money left over from ten-twelve years of working. But there isn’t. Mae simply burst into tears and Daddy went to bed and turned his face to the wall. At five o’clock. Finally, as if by magic, as if summoned, Tia Madrinha turned up and said that Agostinho was a good man and had not asked so we should all say a decade of the rosary in thanks.
What power there is in a decade of the rosary! (Oddly, we had to say it to a sorrowful mystery because it is a Friday – although we were saying it in rejoicementation, which should be the opposite of lamentation.) Daddy woke up. Mae agreed to let me make a cup of tea to cheer her up and Tia Madrinha took off her own gold chain and put it around my neck.
‘You are my god-daughter,’ she said sternly. ‘I should not wear a gold chain if I have not given you one.’
But she looked bereaved almost as soon as she had done this and an imp of mischief made me want to take her gift seriously. But there had been enough tears and drama for several lifetimes so in the spirit of the thing, I took it off and put it back on her neck and said something about how the thought was gift enough. That settled that and I said I wanted to go to church and make my confession which was of course a way to simply rush off and be alone for a bit.
Took myself to Byculla. The area around the elephants is very soothing. I wish I were an elephant. I would be so composed.
But of course a walk in the maidan outside the zoological gardens in Byculla can only take you so far. After a while, she stopped walking. ‘Almost fell into the arms of some young men,’ she said.
‘They might have enjoyed that,’ I suggested.
‘You think?’ she said. ‘They were kissing. Homos, I think.’
She took the bus to Dadar.
‘Jovial Cottage. What a terrible name. I couldn’t bear it. I kept thinking of back-slapping drunken men and false smiles. I don’t even know why they would bring Jupiter into it.’
‘You’re losing me.’
‘Jovial? Jovial. Jove. Jove is Jupiter. Would you name your home for Jupiter? He seems to have been a thoroughly terrible fellow. Kept sleeping with his sisters and then cut off his father’s balls and threw them into the sea. Can you imagine?’
Somewhat startled by the arrival of his fiancée in a state close to despair, Augustine rose to the occasion.
‘He didn’t even allow me to come in. Bad for my reputation, he told me. Instead, we went off to have tea. I don’t remember where we went but I remember thinking that it was as bad for my reputation. After all, you didn’t sit in an Irani restaurant with a man.’
‘Not even a fiancé?’
‘Not even. The rule was pretty clear. If you were a woman, you had better be with your father or your husband in an Irani.’
It was here that Augustine made one of those incidental remarks that would take root in his wife’s head.
‘I don’t have a dowry,’ she said baldly when they were served.
‘I don’t care,’ he said.
‘Your family will.’
‘They won’t.’
‘How can you say that?’
‘Because I’ll tell them that you’ll bring your dowry every month.’
This was true. At that point in their lives, Imelda – employed at the American Consulate – was earning more than Augustine. His pay was linked to the sales of heavy machinery and the industry was in a slump. It would recover soon enough – India’s tryst with gigantism meant that someone somewhere always needed another large chunk of metal – but till it did, she was outperforming him.
He didn’t know it but Imelda was equally reassured and horrified by what he had said. She worked because she had to. There was no question about that in her mind. The family relied on her salary. If she did not earn, they would not eat, not eat well at any rate. So she earned. But she had not considered what work meant after marriage. In her diary, she wrote:
He said it as if he thought I was going to work for the rest of my life. I suppose I will but it gives me the megrims, as someone in a G[eorgette] H[eyer] novel would say. Not the work, actually, I don’t mind that. Not even those darned reports with their pages and pages of numbers and the carbon copies and all the rest of that. Not even those confidential reports. I will never forgive William Turtle Turner for that stupid remark, ‘She does not keep her desk very clean.’ As if I were a slattern and my desk a pigsty. (Is that a mixed metaphor?)
It’s just the . . .
She seems to have cut herself off there. But the problem was not really about working. It was about what would happen to her salary. She had assumed that it would continue to go to her mother. Augustine had assumed that it would go into the common kitty of their marriage. The next entry in the diary says as much:
My salary is my dowry. And I can’t see how there can be anything wrong with that – except that nothing should be anyone’s dowry. No one thinks much if one asks the boy what his prospects are. If money is not important on the girl’s side then money should not be important on the boy’s side either, not in this day and age at least.
Asked Mae.
Came right out and asked her the question: How will you manage when I am married and living in his house?
She said, We will see. This means nothing. I wish I could get her to see that this means nothing but there was no getting anything else out of her. It was ever so. I must live with uncertainty and I don’t think I can handle it.
Until the time she married, Imelda had suffered the deprivations of never having enough money. She also never had to worry about how to spend it. That was someone else’s department. She earned it and handed it over, every last paisa of it, to her mother. Augustine had never been able to understand how Imelda could do that.
‘But don’t you want to keep some of it?’
‘No,’ said Imelda simply.
‘No?’
‘No.’
It was a simple, uninflected response.
‘Aren’t there things you want to buy?’
‘Yes,’ Imelda said. ‘But most of the things I want to buy, I’d never get from my salary so there’s no point thinking about them. I want a boat, for instance. I’m not going to get a boat on my salary.’
‘So dates.’
‘Yes. I can buy dates.’
‘But only if you walk home.’
‘I like walking home.’
‘You sound like some kind of saint,’ Augustine said, exasperated.
‘Do saints want boats? Maybe St Christopher. And maybe St John would have wanted a date or two when he was eating locusts and wild honey.’
‘You sound as if you’ve worked it all out.’
‘I haven’t,’ she replied. ‘I don’t understand money.’
‘Means? What’s there to understand?’
‘I don’t know how to run a house. I don’t know how to budget. I don’t know whether one should buy five kilos of rice and one kilo of daal or one kilo of rice and five kilos of daal. I don’t know what a good price for pomfret is. I don’t know whether we pay the methrani too much or too little or what we tip her for Christmas. I know we don’t tip for Diwali, which is something, I suppose. I don’t know if I get a good salary or not. See? There’s lots you have to know to understand money.’
‘And so you just ignore it?’
‘I’m like Sherlock Holmes. I won’t crowd my attic with that which does not concern me.’
‘Even if it means refusing to grow up?’
‘Is that what I seem like to you?’
‘I think you can’t be grown up if you don’t take charge of your economic life.’
‘Yes, that might be one way of looking at it,’ Imelda conceded. ‘But I think of my way as The Way of Water.’
Augustine shook his head. ‘I should never have given you that Watts book.’
‘This isn’t about Zen,’ said Imelda. ‘I didn’t even read that book. Honestly. I don’t understand Zen. It seems if you don’t answer properly, or you’re rude, people get enlightened.’
‘Why are we talking about Zen? We were talking about you.’
‘Couldn’t be. I wouldn’t have been distracted from such a delightful topic.’
‘We were talking about your problem with money.’
‘No, we were talking about your problem with my money.’
‘And you said you were like water.’
‘I am like water. I flow past money.’
‘The lady doth protest . . .’
‘If you say that, I’ll get up and leave in a pale pink huff,’ said Imelda.
But Augustine was right. If this was how their conversation about money went – and this was how Em recalled it to me – then she was indeed protesting too much. Because there were times when her mother’s inability to handle a budget could irk her:
Once again, I must do without. I don’t understand why. We got you a dress in November, is all Mae will say. November will be my birthday until I die. Christmas will also fall in December until I die. (Unless there’s a cataclysm in the Holy Roman Catholic Church or the Gregorian calendar or both. God forbid. Though they might make it easier and turn all the months into thirty-day months and declare a five-day holiday with no dates at the end of each year. I wish I knew mathematics. Then I would know if I would still be a Sagittarian. Or has that something to do with the stars and where the sun is? Must ask Angel Ears.)
But when I said I had spotted a really nice piece of silk which I thought would do well for an Xmas festivity thingy, I was told in no uncertain terms that I must do without. I feel like the March sisters: Christmas isn’t Christmas without any new clothes.
What does she do with my money?
I feel mean asking. Like a man in a melodrama. I can’t bring myself to ask. Angel Ears says I earn a handsome salary and that should keep us nicely. But he doesn’t know that I have to darn my underwear in the most alarming places and wear the same shoes for months after I can feel the road beneath my feet. But I feel if I do ask, she might well say, ‘I spend it on all of us. Why can’t you earn some more?’ How would I do that? None of the AmConGen girls seem to need more than one job and they spend like sailors on shore leave. In ASL, it was different. Liddy, poor duck, gave tuitions to some Marwari kids. English? Or English and History, I think. And there was Gertie who stitched her own clothes and wore them with such an air that you felt you should ask her to make you up something, even if you knew that she wasn’t very good. I gave her that lovely floral cotton thing and she made it so deedy, I never had the heart to wear it, even after I took off a whole cartload of satin bows and ornamental buttons. I just told her I had got fat and I needed to slim down. I will get fat at this rate. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
Acting on his idea that she was protesting too much, Augustine handed Imelda his first pay after their marriage. Only, she had got her first salary too and had planned on handing it over to him.
I remember The Big Hoom telling us, ‘She looked like I’d dropped a snake into her lap.’
‘It was all too much money,’ said Em. ‘My only impulse was to go out and spend all of it.’
But she didn’t. For years, she handed over everything she earned to her mother and then to her husband. When she started giving all her money to Augustine, she found she had to steal it back. And she did so, with his knowledge and unwilling consent, until she broke down and could no longer go to work.
‘He made me resign,’ she would say angrily. ‘Or I might still have had my job to fall back on.’
‘Stop talking rot,’ Susan or I would say. For The Big Hoom said nothing. He knew what we realized much later: the Consulate had allowed her to resign when she started adding her own, and very alarming, comments to diplomatic reports. ‘Personal interpolations’, they called them. I loved that phrase and when I used it, aged eight or thereabouts, Em could still laugh though the joke was on her.
• • •
Even on the single salary that The Big Hoom brought home, we should have had a better life, materially, than we did. I think The Big Hoom, before he was The Big Hoom, had plans for all of us. Em’s illness forced him to rewrite them. We ate well and we had as many books as we wanted. But nothing else was given. No servants. No refrigerator. A television, in any case, was a luxury for the middle classes.
From time to time, we would petition for a fridge, especially when we returned from the home of someone who had one. How effortlessly cold things were served. How easily a meal could be put together from this and that and these and those, all on separate levels, all in separate containers, all sealed away for the future.
‘Why do we need a fridge?’ The Big Hoom would ask rhetorically. ‘We have the city’s best market next to us. We eat our food fresh.’
‘But what about keeping things in the fridge?’ Susan said.
‘Like pedas,’ I said. ‘Remember how your office sent us that huge box?’
‘And do you remember how long it lasted?’ he asked. Susan laughed ruefully. Em chuckled too.
‘Gosh, I had a leaky bum for days after that.’
‘Chhee,’ I said and Susan said and even The Big Hoom made a sound of displeasure. But we knew that the phrase was now enshrined in Em’s vocabulary. She would use it whenever diarrhoea surfaced in anyone’s life.
So we had the market, we had fresh food, and for everything that was left over, there was Em.
‘Except for doodhi,’ she reminded me, the friendly spectre at my shoulder. ‘And elaichi-flavoured Horlicks. I couldn’t stand that. But if we’re talking about food and eating, you must never forget the tale of the sweet fugya.’
Of course. It isn’t easily forgotten. There was a time when Em hadn’t slept for three days, except for short catnaps, during which she would drop half-smoked beedis on the floor. The flat swelled and trembled with the fever of her restless energy and unending chatter. Then one afternoon, halfway through lunch, it all caught up with her.
‘I’m going to take a nap,’ she said and we heaved a sigh of relief. She went off to sleep, and her body took its revenge. She slept for sixteen hours, straight, during which one of us would drip some water on her lips every four hours or so.
Then she woke up, much refreshed and ready to roister again. And began chewing.
‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘this is a very sweet fugya’
Everyone stopped what they were doing. We had been eating fugyas – bread balls, slightly sweet, to be consumed with fiery hot sorpotel – at the meal from which Em had risen to take a nap.
‘No wonder it’s sweet,’ said The Big Hoom. ‘The saliva in your mouth has been working on it for sixteen hours.’
She had walked away from the table with a fugya in her mouth. Felled by the lack of sleep, she had succumbed with it still in her mouth. It was only some miracle that had prevented it from slipping down the wrong passage and killing her.
But then, she lived under some magic star as far as her body was concerned. She smoked for the greater part of her life and for most of it she suffered from a terrible hacking cough.
One day, things turned serious. She mentioned in passing, to Susan, ‘my cauliflower’. Susan told me when I got home from college.
‘You know, I didn’t know what she was talking about. It could have been any part of her body but somehow, it made me stop. I said, “What cauliflower?” She said, “The one growing on my tongue.” I said, “Show it to me,” and she did.’
We both went back to peer into her mouth. Her tongue had a deep fissure on it, and in the middle of the fissure was a whitish growth, very like a cauliflower.
We freaked.
‘Should we call him now?’ I asked.
‘I think not,’ said Susan. ‘It doesn’t look like an emergency.’
I thought about it.
‘Yeah, I don’t think it’s going anywhere right now.’
‘You will not tell him,’ said Em.
‘Are you nuts?’
‘I’ll make you a deal. Let’s wait until my birthday. If it’s still there, you can tell him.’
Her birthday was two weeks away.
‘What do you think is going to happen?’
‘It’s going to vanish.’
‘You’re mad or what?’ I asked.
‘You’re mad or what?’ Susan asked me.
But Em had an answer: ‘I plead the fifth amendment.’
‘The fifth amendment to the Indian Constitution concerns the relationship between the Centre and the states,’ I said.
‘Save me from this pedantic brute,’ Em said.
Susan started in: ‘Shut up. She has can –’
‘Don’t say it,’ shouted Em. We couldn’t tell whether this was common-or-garden superstition, or one more symptom: ‘They’ might hear.
‘Okay, you have a cauliflower in the middle of your tongue . . .’
‘Much nicer. I like cauliflower. I don’t want a crab in the middle of my mouth.’
‘Well, if you don’t, you should stop smoking.’
‘I am not going to stop anything.’
There was to be no discussion.
‘May I see it again?’ I asked.
‘Certainly,’ said Em and stuck her tongue out.
‘Bejasus. That certainly looks like . . .’
‘Don’t say it.’
‘Okay, but we’re going to have to tell The Big Hoom.’
‘You are not. I told you. It won’t be there on my birthday. If it is, well, shoot me.’
‘The point is not to have you die,’ Susan pointed out.
Thinking about it now, I cannot believe that we did not rush her to an oncologist right there. But we didn’t. Because we were used to the idea of Em being in a medical emergency of some kind or the other.
And on her birthday, we checked her tongue, Susan and I.
No cauliflower.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I told Our Lady, I am not going like this. So she took it away.’
I didn’t know what to make of this miracle.
‘What happened?’ Susan asked. Her tone was different. She wasn’t taking any of that.
‘It detached itself and I swallowed it,’ said Em.
‘Ick,’ said Susan but she seemed satisfied with that.
‘Can we tell him now?’
‘Tell him about what?’
‘Your cauliflower.’
‘What cauliflower?’ she said, her eyes wide open. But The Big Hoom entered the room carrying a tray of bacon and eggs and toast, her favourite breakfast. He heard too.
‘What cauliflower?’ he repeated. He had a way of scenting the important. I told him. He looked at both of us. Then he looked at her. All of us wilted a bit. We ate our breakfast in silence. Finally, Em broke the silence.
‘It’s gone,’ she said.
He said nothing.
‘She made us promise,’ I said.
He said nothing. When breakfast was over, he made a phone call. Em was to go with him to the doctor. When it was all fixed, he said to both of us: ‘Sometimes, I wonder whether education really matters.’
Then he left for work.
Em tried to cheer us up.
‘Nothing’s wrong with me.’
‘This isn’t about you,’ said Susan.
‘We should have told him,’ I said.
‘No, we should have taken her to a doctor ourselves.’
‘You and whose army?’ asked Em, truculent. It was one of her favourite phrases. The marines posted at the AmConGen had used it a lot.
But the miracle continued. She was examined thoroughly, pinched and prodded, scanned and sounded and even had ‘a finger put up my bum after due warning from a sweet Malayali girl’. But nothing was found.
‘Lungs like bags of phlegm. Voice like a pross on the prowl. Cough like a lion in the Serengeti. But no crabs in the body, no crabs in the crotch. I beat the odds. How’s that? I would like to donate my body to science, you bounders, so that they can find out what exactly made me immune. Break out the bids, folks,’ she chortled.
‘So what was the cauliflower?’
‘You silly berks can’t tell a ruddy miracle when you see one?”
‘No.’
‘Oh ye of little faith. How shall ye be ducks in the gardens of paradise were I not there to wish it for ye?’
‘I don’t recognize that from any version of the Bible,’ I said.
‘It’s my version,’ said Em, bubbling. ‘I shall be swanning about in the promised land and you two will get a good ducking.’
‘Stop it,’ I snarled.
‘Em,’ said Sue.
‘I told Our Lady . . .’ she trailed off. ‘Okay, I said to her: take five years from my score but let me go eating and drinking and smoking. You gave me this stuff . . .’ she tapped her forehead, ‘and I took it with good grace.’
‘Good grace?’
‘You have to live through what I’ve lived. You’d think it good grace too. So I said, take five years. Obviously, someone was listening. Lady in blue, I love you. That’s why I told you, I can’t take too much more male will in my life. No thy-will-be-done for me. I surrender nothing. I surrender nothing. I’ll take my chances with a woman’s kindness.’