Mental Health Awareness Month | Love finds a way amidst madness and chaos in Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom

What happens to families when a loved one has a mental illness? Sometimes good writing can show the way. (Image: Riccardo via Pexels)

Contains spoilers

As the month of May, the mental health awareness month, comes to an end, I am left with bigger questions about the possibilities of a life with mental health disorders. What happens after we have successfully named and identified our problems? We are now left to deal with them, to imagine a life with them. In such a case, how does one love? What happens to families when a loved one has a different mind? Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom shows the way.

Aleph Book Company; 248 pages; Rs 399.

Friends, readers, and critics had recommended Em and the Big Hoom to me. It had made all the important lists for books about mental health awareness. When you read it, it is as if you find words to understand depression for the very first time. You may have seen it up close and you may know all the symptoms, but by reading this book, you really come to face it. Instead of monologuing about the depths of that darkness, Jerry Pinto explores what that darkness feels like to the people who suffer from the mental illness of their loved ones.

The Mendeses family live in a small apartment in Mahim, Bombay (Mumbai now), through the last decades of the twentieth century in a rapidly changing India. The narrator of Em and the Big Hoom and his sister, Susan, are growing up living with Em, their mother, driven frequently to psychiatric care after multiple failed suicide attempts, and The Big Hoom, their strong masculine pillar of a father. The narrator and his sister learn about their parents’ love story from Em while she is admitted to Ward 33 (Psychiatric), Sir JJ Hospital. This is where the narrator learns about his parents' great love affair as they courted in the many bookshops without buying any books and took long walks.

Em and the Big Hoom is a story about the human mind, but it is also the story of true love that forgives. This book interrogates the nature of love - How to love a mother who blames you for her post-partum depression without meaning to hurt you? How to love her when she says she never wanted children? How to love a wife who slits her wrists open?

Em’s family has arranged their lives to accommodate her mental illness.

‘I don’t know how to describe her depression except to say that it seemed like it was engrossing her. No, even that sounds like she had some choice in the matter. It was another reality from which she had no escape. It took up every inch of her. She had no time for love or hate, fatigue or hunger.’

The Big Hoom loves Em. He visits her every day in the hospital while the children take turns on alternate days visiting Em. While at home, everyone relaxes when the Big Hoom returns from work. He takes care of the family and he loves his wife. Em has a sharp tongue. She cuts deep with only a few words and the narrator wonders what three decades of marriage would have done to the Big Hoom. How did he survive Em? And how did he love her? The Big Hoom dying is one of the biggest fears the narrator can imagine. How would they care for Em? How will they know when it is time to admit her to the psychiatric ward?

The Big Hoom’s love for Em is forgiving. He understands how little control she has over things in her life. He is patient and forgiving. He loves her through her manic episodes, as the pills take away her sexual appetite. He takes charge and he takes care.

However, it is much harder for the narrator to forgive and forget as his mother speaks with disgust about children and how she never wanted them. Children turned women “inside out”.

Loving a mother who may have passed on her mental-illness gene to you is a difficult task. It is much easier to believe that Em is faking it all to evade her responsibilities. The narrator knows that he is at risk of becoming mentally ill due to his genes, and he is afraid that his one asset will be lost- his mind that helped him take refuge from a life of suffering, of suffering from the mental disorders of his mother.

One of the most heart-rendering moments of the novel arrives when Em is discharged from the psychiatric ward and she is treating the family as if they are only distant friends. It is then that they realize that she has been administered Electroshock Therapy that has disrupted her memories. They realized that love was about memory, it was about what you remembered of why you loved someone. For a while, it seemed like Em did not love them. She did not remember what she loved about them.

Despite all this, Em completes the Mendes family. The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fall in place when she is returned home from the psychiatric ward and they are once again a complete family until the next time Em threatens to end her life and they hope that the Big Hoom will be there to take control of that situation when it happens. ‘Four Mendeses, somewhat love-battered, still standing.’