Jerry Pinto

In a one-bedroom-hall-kitchen in Mahim, Bombay, Imelda Mendes-Em to her children-holds her family in thrall with her flamboyance, her compelling imagination, her unspoken love, her sometimes cruel candour. Through this, her husband, to whom she was once 'buttercup', her son and daughter learn to cope with her mania and her frequent wish to die. A searing and at times darkly funny, study of mental illness, and also a deeply moving story about love and family relationships.

EM and the Big Hoom

Srijita Sarkar 

I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to deal with the world. It seemed too big and demanding and there wasn’t a fixed syllabus.

‘It’s like oil. Like molasses, slow at first. Then one morning I woke up and it was flowing free and fast. I thought I would drown in it. I thought it would drown little you, and Susan. So I got up and got dressed and went out onto the road and tried to jump in front of a bus. I thought it would be a final thing, quick, like a bang. Only, it wasn’t.’

Even now, I look in Em’s notebooks not for my mother but for Augustine’s Beloved.

Imelda was too young to understand that love could be an injury.

Was this just how people remembered things, in patches and images, or was this the repression of a painful memory?

‘And thus you were alienated from your labour as well as from your wages.’

‘Only one word of advice,’ said Em. ‘Do what your heart tells you. It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake. The only things we regret are the things we did not do.’

A well-told lie can heal. Otherwise, what’s fiction?’

And what can mental health mean in a nation that wants an injection to put it back on its feet the next morning?

How could one demand perfect submission from those who are imperfect?

And if God were capricious, then God was imperfect. If God were imperfect, God was not God.

EM and the Big Hoom quotes

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