Em and The Big Hoom

                 


I had just finished reading this intense, consuming, thought-provoking and very realistic book. I wonder if the author has experienced this with a close family member, for him to be able to describe the experience as realistic and deeply affecting as in the book. Em and The Big Hoom is Indian writer Jerry Pinto first novel.

In a Nutshell, What is Bipolar Disorder?
Bipolar disorder involves extreme mood swings from mania (a form of euphoria or feeling like one has a lot of energy) to deep depression. It has no simple cause, but there is strong evidence that it is associated with changes to various brain chemicals. The precise way in which this happens is not yet known. It may be triggered by the stress of everyday life or a traumatic event or, in rare cases, physical trauma such as a head injury.

The average age of people diagnosed with bipolar disorder used to be 32, but during the past decade it has dropped to under 19. This is probably partly due to increased awareness of the disorder among the public and mental health practitioners.

My Take on This Book
This book about the life of a Catholic Goan family in Mahim, Bombay. It is a young son's account of life with a mentally unstable mother. It is about a mother stricken with manic-depressive disorder who has attempted suicide at least three times. The weight of her illness weighs heavily on the shoulders of the entire family whose lives are brought to a standstill by having to care for the woman they once expected to care for them. And so, instead of growing up carefree like other children, the narrator and his sister become experts in gauging every word that comes out of their mother's tongue for hidden meaning and clues to her state of mind. Life with Em (as they call their mother) is more than a challenge. It is like a chain that tightens its grip until it suffocates them to death literally. However there are also places in the book that are funny and having many endearing and eccentric characters.

Having experience with depression myself, I really hope, this book will go a long way, in helping people come out and speak of mental illness honestly. Too much stigma is attached to mental illness mostly due to ignorance. Most of all, I hope this book will make people outside of this painful world, more sensitive and compassionate to those whom it affects directly and indirectly.

This is a brilliant book and has joined the rank of my evergreen favourite.

Summary of Em and The Big Hoom
Jerry Pinto’s debut novel, Em and the Big Hoom, is one of those rare books that reads as though the author had no choice but to write it. A coming-of-age story set in a contemporary India, it tells the simultaneously harrowing and uplifting story of growing up in a family anchored down by a suicidal, bipolar mother. Originally published in India in 2012, it collected a few national literary prizes and was shortlisted for the short-lived Commonwealth Book Prize.

The “Em” of the title, the reader learns early on, is Imelda; “The Big Hoom”, nicknamed for the loud sound he makes every time he’s asked a question, is Augustine. They are the parents of this mesmerising novel’s young unnamed narrator, who bears a striking closeness to the author. Together with the narrator’s sister, Susan, they occupy a small apartment in Bombay.

Only this is no ordinary family. Em is severely manic-depressive and has attempted suicide at least three times. The weight of her disease weighs heavily on the shoulders of the entire family, whose lives are brought to a standstill by having to care for the woman they once expected would care for them. And so instead of growing up carefree like other children, our narrator and his sister become experts in gauging every word that comes out of their mother’s mouth for hidden meanings and clues to her state of mind. They are supremely aware of what they say and how it might be interpreted, in fear of setting off a chain reaction leading into a depression that can last for days or longer.

The crux of the novel focuses on the children’s conversations with Em, soon after she has been hospitalised for her third suicide attempt, which they discover after coming home to find the newly hired nurse has fallen asleep on the job. Ostensibly, they are keeping their mother company. But between themselves, they are plumbing Em’s memories for clues as to what happened in her life to make her snap. She wasn’t always ill. Something happened soon after the birth of our narrator, she tells him matter-of-factly, a cross he bears heavily.

It’s a testament to Pinto’s wide-ranging talents as a writer that Em and the Big Hoom comes out feeling more wondrously nostalgic and brimming with youthful magic than it does unbearably depressing, which it easily could have been given the material. Like many notable debuts, it reads as more experienced than imagined, as though its author may very well have documented the tragic details of his own childhood to produce such work. It’s tempting to believe, while reading this, that it’s more memoir than fiction. Though in this case, the sense of deep understanding and compassion needed to successfully present such a troubled personality in all its conflicting love and hate only strengthens the unique vantage point that Pinto has chosen.

The narrator’s coming-of-age story — for he inevitably learns that his mother’s burden cannot be his own if is to have his own life — intertwines beautifully with Em’s warm, pre-illness memories of her courtship with Augustine, before they were cajoled into marriage by her indebted family and Em bore the children she claims broke her. Yet in Pinto’s ravishing and precise sense of prose, which produces a voice that’s externally controlled yet internally vulnerable, nothing in Em and the Big Hoom feels spiteful or cathartic.

A little bit on Jerry Pinto
Jerry Pinto began working at the age of 16. He was then a mathematics tutor. Somewhere along the way, a friend suggested journalism and at the age of 21, he began to be published in the newspapers. After spending ten years free-lancing, teaching mathematics writing television scripts and audio-documentaries and indulging in sundry other acts of journalism, he got a ‘real job’ with an alleged media company that was actually into selling space and was only peripherally interested in news. Along the way he acquired a liberal arts degree from Elphinstone College and a law degree from Government Law College.

He left to join a travel dotcom, which won two awards for its content, of which he was the chief architect and editor. He returned to magazine journalism as Executive Editor of Man’s World magazine. Later, he joined Paprika Media (the publishing house that brings out Time Out Mumbai and Time Out Delhi) to edit their special projects. He is now a free lance journalist and editor and is at work on his first novel. This is the public version.

In his own description of himself, he is a poet. His first book of poems Asylum (Allied Publishers) was released in 2004. Some of these poems are to be found in Reasons for Belonging; Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets edited by Ranjit Hoskote. His poems are also to be found in Fulcrum Number 4; An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics (Fulcrum Poetry Press, 2005) edited by Jeet Thayl; in Atlas; New Writing (Crossword/Aark Arts, 2006) edited by Sudeep Sen; and Ninety-nine Words (Panchabati Publications, 2006) edited by Manu Dash.

His first book was Surviving Women (Penguin India, 2000) a manual of gender politics, written for confused Indian men, which has gone into several reprints. Bombay Meri Jaan: Writings on Mumbai (Penguin India, 2003), which he co-edited with Naresh Fernoandes, has also been reprinted. He has also edited Reflected in Water: Writings on Goa (Penguin India, 2006). Together with Arundhathi Subramaniam, he has edited Confronting Love; Contemporary Indian Love Poems in English. They have also edited A Pocketful of Wry; Indian Poets Also Laugh expected soon from Penguin India.

In 2006, Helen: The Life and Times of an H Bomb was released. It was as much a study of Bollywood’s gender and race politics as it was an affectionate examination of a dancing legend who had served the Mumbai film industry for nearly 30 years.
The book won the National Award for the Best Book on Cinema.

Jerry Pinto is guest lecturer at the Social Communications Media department of the Sophia Polytechnic. He has taught journalism at the KC College, at Xavier Institute of Communication, at SIES College and at the University of Mumbai.

He is on the board of directors of MelJol, an NGO that works in the child rights space. He is a Committee Member of the Indian PEN and a member of the Poetry Circle, Mumbai.