20-June-2012 APARNA KARTHIKEYAN
Author, poet and journalist Jerry Pinto's Em And The Big Hoom is a movingly
funny take on dealing with mental illness
CHENNAI : "I wanted to tell a story, and I wanted to do it well," says Jerry
Pinto, national award-winning writer (Best Book on Cinema for Helen: The Life
And Times Of An H Bomb ). On a visit to the city for the launch of Em And The
Big Hoom , he talks about the book that was 25 years in the making. "I wrote
nearly 7.5 lakh words - all in longhand - and then discovered I didn't like it
much. So I typed out the bits I thought I could live with, about 12,000 words,
and it is in these that I found enough material to open out into a novel, one
that is 95 per cent fiction, 95 per cent autobiography." And the remaining 5
per cent, he says, is what the reader makes out of it.
Mania and moods
Set in 1980's Bombay, Em And The Big Hoom is the story of a family where the
mother, Em, battles a mental illness, and everybody else battles her mania and
moods. The husband, the big Hoom, never loses control; the teenage children
become stoic, not by choice, but by the lack of it ("there was no going in. And
there was no going away"). And the son - the unnamed narrator (whose birth, the
mother matter-of-factly tells him, gave birth to her depression) tries to find
signs of the madness that engulfs his mother, "the trigger" as Pinto says,
"where it all started, so that he can, possibly, avoid it himself".
And so, he talks to Em in her lucid moments, when she's not "a parody of
herself", to her mother and friends and husband; he reads her old letters and
tries to piece together his whole mother from the fragments he recollects from
his memory and others'.
And yet, despite depression being central to the book, it's anything but a
depressing read. It's moving, yes, but also madly funny; and that's what makes
it so real. "If you try to construct something credible, it should have some
sorrow, some laughter," says Pinto. But the book, he says, is not a memoir; "I
could not write a memoir, it would've been much more painful." Plus, since it
was fictionalised, "any time it grew bleak" he could always take refuge in
fiction.
Learning to live
The book - with its beautiful, incisive prose, written without a hint of
self-pity - Pinto discovered at 40, wasn't going to be a catharsis. So he sets
the novel dramatically in a 450-sq.ft apartment, where the characters are
forced to "live and love and deceive within earshot of each other".
He dates it to 1980's Bombay, because "if you move time around, you are going
to end up with an anachronism". And the novel becomes a social commentary of
that time, when the "mentally ill are simply mad", when asylums for the
mentally ill are "human dumping ground", where the patients have no identity
except being mad.
Except, some of these have not changed much over the years, as Pinto observed
when he recently went to visit a suicidical friend in an asylum for the
mentally ill. And yet, "we prefer not to talk about things; it is an endemic
feature of Indian life. And not talking about becomes a problem". "Mental
health", says Pinto, "is a lottery". And when you're the caregiver for someone
with a mental illness, "you're looking at the loser of that lottery".
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-metroplus/article3548442.ece
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