Jerry Pinto

Set in Bombay during the last decades of the twentieth century, Em and The Big Hoom tells the compelling story of the Mendeses mother, father, daughter and son. Between Em, the beedi smoking, hyperactive mother, driven frequently to hospital by her mania and failed suicide attempts and the Big Hoom, the rock solid, dependable father, trying to hold things together as best he can, they are an extraordinary family.

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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