Dr Michael came into our lives shortly after the Staywell Clinic (to which Em never returned), and soon we were depending on him more than we had on any other psychiatrist. He took to Em, or maybe he was like that with all his patients. ‘Only a phone call away,’ he told us, and he was. Em’s dosages could now be fine-tuned almost from day to day, instead of from week to week.
Did it help?
It helped us to know that we were doing everything in our power. But it seemed as if all psychiatric medicine was aimed only at the symptoms. Mute the paranoia. Calm the rage. Raise the endorphins. Underneath, the mysteries continued, unchanged. Underneath, somewhere in the chemistry of her brain, there was something that could not be reached. I was always aware of this. I could not answer the question ‘How’s mum?’ so I learnt a complicit smile. It worked because it drew the questioner into the penumbra of brave suffering that I manufactured for the world.
Physically, she seemed fine. We had almost never worried about her body. ‘I’m as strong as a mule and twice as ornery,’ she would often say when someone asked how she was. Her preferred diet was bhajiyas and sweet fizzy drinks for what ‘they do to my tongue’. But even those paled when the beedis ran out. There were only two moments of fright. The time when the cauliflower appeared in the middle of her tongue. And then three years later, when she seemed to have a growth in her uterus.
After she turned fifty, Em suddenly began to look a lot fatter than she had ever been. We all put it down to something in her metabolism, something to do with the amount of sugar she could consume when she was high, six spoons in a single cup of tea, a handful just for fun if she were passing the sugar tin, any amount of chocolate or jalebis or sweets from Brijwasi. In times of shortage, this could be a problem since we would be forced to hide the sugar, but most of the time it was a matter of casual teasing and no one seemed to be bothered, least of all Em herself.
But one day, she went off on one of her missions of mercy, to see Sarah-Mae, the nurse. We were related to her in some distant complicated way that everyone in the family understood as a responsibility. Sarah-Mae had lost everything when her younger boyfriend Christopher had disappeared into Canada on what he called a ‘recce mission’. Em would go see her twice a year at Saint Joseph’s Home for the Aged in Bandra, when she could, to ‘make her feel a little less lonely, the silly hag’.
This time, when she returned, she was looking all hot and bothered.
‘I have to go to the hospital,’ she said to me and Susan.
Both of us were startled.
‘What happened? You going to do it again?’
‘No, no. I’m superfine. No, no, actually, I’m not. Or maybe I’m not. But Sarah-Mae says it’s a Growth.’
Sarah-Mae had few charms but she was a skilled nurse, when she wasn’t drunk. She was born one of triplets, who had been lifted out from their mother, two of them conjoined at the head. It was also said that she had a black tongue, which meant that if she predicted something terrible it would come true. Of all the triplets, Sarah-Mae had had the worst time. Early on, she had sacrificed her left ear to Olivia-Mae because they were the two joined at the head – by the ear, and only one of them could have it. So Sarah-Mae’s word was to be taken seriously.
Em was taken to a gynaecologist who suggested various tests and then an operation.
‘At the J. J. Hospital,’ said Em.
The Big Hoom suggested a drive that evening. He drove around the city with Em, late at night, when they had something to talk about or when everyone needed a break from her.
They came back hours later to find both of us awake.
‘Let’s have a cuppa,’ said Em.
‘What’s happening?’
‘She’s going to J. J.,’ said The Big Hoom.
Em began to boil some tea.
‘When?’ Sue asked.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Em and then she began to sing. ‘It’s now or never, come hold me tight . . .’
The Big Hoom went up and hugged her. We drank our tea quietly.
‘If I die under the knife,’ said Em suddenly, ‘give whatever you can to whoever you can.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Meaning, me bits and bobs. I don’t want to be worm fodder. My bits would like a second chance. Someone looking out through my eyes. Someone loving with my heart. Someone having a good lash out with my liver.’
‘Okay,’ said The Big Hoom.
• • •
The next morning, they were gone and Granny was frying bacon and eggs when we got up.
‘Come,’ said Granny.
We sat down.
‘They are thissing,’ she said, ‘we can only thissing.’
We enjoyed praying with Granny. She prayed in a mellifluous mess of syllables. The first half of the Ave Maria was reduced from ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus’ to ‘Hail Meh fluh grace loswiddhee blessdaathou blessdfroo thaiwoom Jee-zus . . .’ It was difficult not to giggle. If she noticed, it did not seem to bother her. She slurred on, simply slowing the words down. Perhaps they did not make sense to her, which wouldn’t have been unusual.
That morning, however, we weren’t giggling, or thinking about the meaning. We were simply praying. For our Em. We were not praying for her mind. We had not given up doing that, but we were losing hope that prayer could be part of the solution. We were praying for her body and it occurred to me that we had never had occasion to, before this. (‘Strong as a horse,’ Susan said when I pointed this out and for a week or so we called her The Horse.)
I tried to look now at the words we were saying and I could not see how they matched our needs. We seemed to be as anachronistic as a shaman in an operation theatre. We were indulging in some old ritual, some practice devised more for us than for her.
Em made a full recovery. The growth was large but benign and in order to prevent any recurrence, they took out her ovaries as well.
‘Just call me the Female Eunuch,’ she laughed, as she pulled on her first beedi in three weeks.
‘Do you really mind?’ Sue asked.
‘I don’t know. I’ll let you know,’ said Em, in a rare moment of uncertainty about her own feelings. ‘But right now, they’re saying I’m over with menstruation and I can only say, Callooh-Callay! If the hot flushes and emotional instability start, that’s another matter. Who wants a hot flush? Who wants emotional instability? It sounds like something from a Mills & Boon, and at the wrong end of my life, too. And now, we can have sex without worrying about the consequences.’
She never alluded to it after that. I remember wondering if she would be calmer now. When I was growing up no one ever talked about PMS or anything like that, so this was not a scientific thing. It was some atavistic throwback to the time when hysteria was believed to be seated in the uterus. And since science will eventually win through, we never did see a change in her cycles after her hysterectomy. She went on being Em. She went on trying to kill herself. So when the old man knocked on the door, one morning in May, we thought the worst.
Susan answered the imperious knocking.
‘Your mother,’ said the old man.
Susan went from bleary-eyed to alert. She woke me and I woke The Big Hoom and we ran down into the street. Em was lying in the street, a bottle of milk shattered close to her arm, which was awkwardly bent next to her.
‘It wasn’t me,’ she said and smiled before she passed out.
We carried her home, The Big Hoom and I, and then we called Dr Saha.
‘Broken,’ said Dr Saha, who had learnt that words were not much use when diagnoses were needed.
‘Fracture?’ The Big Hoom asked.
‘Broken,’ said Dr Saha again. I had always thought it was the same thing. It wasn’t. A broken arm required surgery and a pin to be put in and another scar running down Em’s arm.
‘He came at me like a bat out of hell,’ she said later. ‘I always look left, look right, and all that. But then there he was –’ She stopped abruptly. ‘The milk bottle?’
Milk bottles were precious things back then. You couldn’t get milk out of the rationing system if you didn’t produce your bottle, nicely washed.
‘It’s all right,’ Susan said.
‘Liar,’ said Em. ‘How could it have survived? I felt it fly out of my hand and then I was out like a light. Anyway, I appreciate the thought.’
We all knew what that meant. She would remember that bottle for years. She would worry about the loss of it when she was depressed and it would translate into a new worry about what we would eat and who would cook it. Her mind was like that: a sponge for troubles. Events turned into omens; carelessly uttered phrases into mantras.
But as she aged, the process of accretion, the rate of accretion slowed down.
‘It’s age,’ Dr Michael said. ‘The highs will get lower; the lows won’t be that bad.’
We couldn’t see it but we clung to this hope; that things were getting better. And maybe they were, for three full years passed without her trying to kill herself. Then, suddenly, death turned around and claimed her.