Em And The Big Hoom Quotes

I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to deal with the world. It seemed too big and demanding and there was no fixed syllabus.

I didn't go to bookshops to buy. That's a little bourgeois. I went because they were civilized places. It made me happy there were people who sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote and there were other people who devoted their lives to making those words into books. It was lovely. Like standing in the middle of civilization.

If there was one thing I feared as I was growing up . . . No, that's stupid. I feared hundreds of things: the dark, the death of my father, the possibility that I might rejoice the death of my mother, sums involving vernier calipers, groups of schoolboys with nothing much to do, death by drowning. But of all these, I feared the most the possibility that I might go mad too.

Honestly.I don't understand Zen.It seems if you don't answer properly,or if you are rude,people get enlightened.

In this city, every deserted street corner conceals a crowd. It appears in a minute when something disrupts the way in which the world is supposed to work. It can disappear almost as instantaneously.

Love is a hollow word which seems at home in song lyrics and greeting cards, until you fall in love and discover it’s disconcerting power. Depression means nothing more than the blues, commercially packaged angst, a hole in the ground; until you find it’s black weight settled inside your mother’s chest, disrupting her breathing, leaching her days, and yours, of colour and the nights of rest.

There was something capricious about God. How could one expect perfect submission from those who are imperfect? How could one create desire and then expect everyone to pull the plug on it? And if God were capricious, then God was imperfect. If God were imperfect, God was not God.

I wanted to understand her predicament because I was her son and I loved her with a helpless corroded love.

Marriage is all right. At least the person you’re having a go at is an adult. But motherhood… You’re given something totally dependent, totally in love with you and it doesn’t seem to come with a manual.

Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself. You can only stand outside it as a woman might stand outside a prison in which her lover is locked up. From time to time, a well-loved face will peer out and love floods back. A scrap of cloth flutters and it becomes a sign and a code and a message and all that you want it to be. Then it vanishes and you are outside the dark tower again.

Home was where others had to gather grace. Home was what I wanted to flee.

You can cry in public as long as you don not sob. Tears are transparent. If you’re walking fast, if the sun’s too strong, no one notices. Sobs intrude. They push their way into people’s consciousness. They feel duty-bound to ask what has happened.

On the balcony of our small flat in a city of small flats.

I am no I. I am now part of a we.

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

He was a natural Protestant when I met him.", Em would say. "He protested everything.

She was in ward 33 again, lying in bed, a bed with a dark green sheet and a view of the outside. We could both see a man and woman getting out of a taxi. They were young and stood for a while, as if hesitating, in front of the hospital. Then the man took the woman’s hand and they walked into the hospital and we lost them. ‘That’s why Indian women fall ill,’ Em said. ‘So that their husbands will hold their hands.

I know I want to marry you. But I wish we were the first to ever get married. I cannot help feeling that the institution has been somewhat corrupted and corroded by the misuse of others. We could show them, by a beyootiful and myoochooal respect for each other, how things must be conducted. Have I ever told you how much I love you? Well, darling, I am telling you now...

Once I was told that living with me would mean being trapped and slowly asphyxiated.

What is it about the sea? Is it because it’s there?

She grinned, a silty grin. 'You were my two dividends, yes? Don't you forget that.' Then she sighed, took a deep breath, and said, 'But what an investment. My life.

Fight your genes.' The Big Hoom said to us once, to Susan and me. He did not explain. He did not know how to. But we knew what it meant. It meant that we were to march into the hall and take out our school books and reproduce the slipper-shaped animalcule whose psuedopodia power it through a world without feeling; to learn how to inscribe a hexagon into a circle without tearing the paper; to assimilate the causes and consequences of the battle of Panipat without ever identifying your own enemy because that would be mean identifying yourself. 'Fight your genes'. Focus. Be diligent. Concentrate. Do

Sometimes I would see myself as a book with bad binding. You know, like one more reader, one more face-down on the bed and I was going to spill everything, lose control

Took myself to Byculla. The area around the elephants is very soothing. I wish I were an elephant. I would be so composed.

That’s what comes of this celibacy business. We confess to men who’ve never had to worry about a family. Naturally, it’s a huge sin to them, this abortion business. What do they know? They probably think it’s fun and games. Let them try it.

After you were born, someone turned on a tap. At first it was only a drip, a black drip, and I felt it as sadness. I had felt sad before . . . who hasn't ? I knew what it was like. But I didn't know that it would come like that, for no reason. I lived with it for weeks.

And then we discovered that love was about memory and something had disrupted her store of our collective memories.

One day I told him about the boys of the neighborhood, about their mocking. He said, "That's because they don't understand." "They should understand, I said. I didn't want to cry, but I was crying. "If your mother had diabetes, what would they say?" "I don't know." "This is like diabetes. She's not well. That's all." Was that what he told himself? That she was not well? That she might get better? I don't know.

It was only later that I came to understand why she never used her condition as a refuge: it would have violated her sense of fair play.

Because the sky is so high and the crow shat in your left eye. I could tell you a lie but I don’t see why. The world is a game and the game is a tie. The tie is around your neck and they’ll string you high.

she had forgotten, and the world was lying askew around

But it seemed as if all psychiatric medicine was aimed only at the symptoms. Mute the paranoia. Calm the rage. Raise the endorphins. Underneath, the mysteries continued, unchanged. Underneath, somewhere in the chemistry of her brain, there was something that could not be reached.

Dear Imelda, In accordance with your wishes, I did not imagine you smiling. I did not smile myself. But I am willing to take my chances. Your body is yours to give or not. Should you decide not, I will respect that, although I must warn you that I will work hard to reverse your decision. Let me say, though, that I find all the signs most encouraging. Shall we go forward then? Love, Augustine.

But we knew that something was wrong. We smelt it in the aura she exuded. We felt it in the way her eyes met ours. There was nothing in her eyes, none of the collusive appeal to family that she normally made. Something in her brain told us we were friends so she treated us like friends, but there was nothing behind it. And then we discovered that love was about memory and something had disrupted her store of our collective memories.

One thing,’ he said. ‘If you want to get people to talk to you, you should never interrupt.’ ‘Never? Even if I think something is wrong or missing?’ ‘Especially if you think something is wrong or missing.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Stops them. Gives them time to think. Interrupts the flow. If you want to get more, you shut up and wait.’ And

Gertrude was a veteran of the love wars.

Was there a drain?' 'No. There was no drain. There isn't one even now'.

Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself.

Each time she had tried to kill herself she had opened her body and let her blood flow out. Was that the drain, then, I wondered, was that how it worked?

It’s like being in a dream where you can do something and every time you try to get it right, you find that the action has shifted to another place and you have to start again.

The city continued on its way. Boys tried to sell me drumsticks, girls played hopscotch, the Bihari badly worker carried his gathri of ironed clothes to the homes from which they had come, and the buses honked at suicidal cyclists. At one level this was vaguely confusing. Surely, something should acknowledge how much things had changed? At another level, it was oddly comforting.

She wrote when she was with us. She wrote when no one was around. She wrote postcards. She wrote letters in books. She wrote in other people's diaries, in telephone diaries, on menus of takeaway places.

If anyone ever does you a favour, you cannot forget it. You must always credit them, especially in public, especially to those they love and those who love them. You must pay your debts, even those that you can never fully repay. Anything less makes you less.’ But

Schoolchildren can smell a nervous teacher. They see it in her gait as she enters the room, uncertain of her ability to command and instruct. They hear it in her voice as she clears her throat before she begins to speak. They sense it when she looks at the teacher's table and chair, set on a platform to give her a view of the class, as if she has no right to be there. They watch without remorse or sympathy as she walks the gauntlet and suddenly they are in the grip of a completely new sensation. It is power that they are feeling as they anneal into a single organism: the class. At any moment now they will cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war.

I went to bookshops to smell that lovely aroma of a new book. I would pick up a copy and run the pages across the ball of my thumb and let the fresh-baked smell flow up my nose. Then I would lick my thumb. It didn’t taste of anything, but it was like finding a chocolate wrapper inside a book and remembering the taste of the chocolate.

It is 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. I got up, 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.

At this point I realised what it meant to be a man in India. It meant knowing what one could do and knowing what one could only get done. It meant being able to hold onto two patterns simultaneously. One was methodical, hierarchical, regulated and the outcome depended on fate, chance, kings and desperate men. The other was intuitive, illicit and guaranteed. The trick was to know when to shift between the patterns, to peel the file off a table and give it to a peon, to speak easily of one's cousin the minister or archbishop. I did not think I would ever know what these shifts entailed, and that meant, in essence, that I was never going to grow up.

You didn’t want children?’ I don’t remember who said this, Susan or I or both of us together. ‘Oh God, no. I saw what children do. They turn a good respectable woman into a mudd-dha. I didn’t want to be a mudh-dha. I didn’t want to be turned inside out. I didn’t want to have my world shifted so that I was no longer the centre of it. This is what you have to be careful about, Lao-Tsu. It never happens to men. They just sow the seed and hand out the cigars when you’ve pushed a football through your vadge. For the next hundred years of your life, you’re stuck with being someone whose definition isn’t even herself. You’re now someone’s mudd-dha!’ She

I found it hard to reconcile the way that word felt to the state my mother was in when she was dragged down into the subterranean depths of her mind. Depression seemed to suggest a state that could be dealt with by ordinary means, by a comedy on the television or an extravagance at a nice shop. It suggested a dip in level ground where you might stumble, but from which you might scramble, a little embarrassed that it should have caught you unawares—a little red-faced from the exertion—but otherwise unharmed. Em’s depressions were not like that.

All the words about the really important things become chiffon representations of themselves soon enough. Some can be reinvented but others can only be discovered by a personal encounter. Love is a hollow word which seems at home in song lyrics and greeting cards, until you fall in love and discover its disconcerting power. Depression means nothing more than the blues, commercially-packaged angst, a hole in the ground; until you find its black weight settling inside your mother’s chest, disrupting her breathing, leaching her days, and yours, of colour and the nights of rest.

And then Em too would die and I would be alone and the whole world would be different. I had no idea how, but it would, because I would finally have space to myself and then I could exercise the choice to do as I pleased and when I pleased instead of waiting for a stolen moment in the busy life of this 1BHK. And now the world expanded as people left the flat. As we opened the door together, I discovered departures make the world smaller, slighter, less significant.

This was The City, India's biggest, a huge city, but people heard and responded to what was happening in your life. Sometimes, this much was enough.

Imagine you are walking in a pleasant meadow with someone you love, your mother. It's warm, and there's just enough of a breeze to cool you. You can smell earth and cut grass, and something of a herb garden. Lunch is a happy memory in your stomach and dinner awaits you - a three-course meal you have devised - all your comfort foods. The light is golden with a touch of blue, as if the sky were leaking. Suddenly, your mother steps into a patch of quicksand. The world continues to be idyllic and inviting for you but your mother is being sucked into the centre of the earth. She makes it worse by smiling bravely, by telling you to go on, to leave here there, the man with the broken leg on the Arctic expedition who says, 'Come back for me; it's my best chance,' because the lie allows everyone to believe that they are not abandoning him to die.

She loved Em and she thought that should be enough. It wasn't. Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself. You can only stand outside it, as a woman might stand outside a prison in which her lover is locked up. From time to time, a well-loved face will peer out and love floods back. A scrap of cloth flutters and it becomes a sign and a code and a message and all that you want it to be. Then it vanishes and you are outside the dark tower again. At times, when I was young, I wanted to be inside the tower so I could understand what it was like. But I knew, even then, that I did not want to be a permanent resident of the tower. I wanted to visit and even visiting meant nothing because you could always leave. You're a tourist; she's a resident.

Mad is an everyday, ordinary word. It is compact. It fits into songs. As the old Hindi film song has it, M-A-D, mad mane paagal. It can become a phrase-'Maddaw-what?' which began life as 'Are you mad or what?'. It can be everything you choose it to be: a mad whirl, a mad idea, a mad March day, a mad heiress, a mad mad mad mad world, a mad passion, a mad hatter, a mad dog. But it is different when you have a mad mother. Then the word wakes up from time to time and blinks at you, eyes of fire. But only sometimes, for we used the word casually ourselves, children of a mad mother. There is no automatic gift that arises out of such a circumstance. If sensitivity or gentleness came with such a genetic load, there would be no old people in mental homes.

It meant that we were to march into the hall and take out our school books and reproduce the slipper-shaped animalcule whose pseudopodia power it through a world without feeling; to learn how to inscribe a hexagon into a circle without tearing the paper; to assimilate the causes and consequences of the battle of Panipat without ever identifying your own enemy because that would mean identifying yourself.

I loved the word hypothesis. It sounded adult and beautifully alieu. I have never heard anything like it before. I wanted more words like it. I felt, instinctively, that when you had enough words like hypothesis, you would be able to deal with the world. It seems so big and demanding and there wasn't a fixed syllable.

It intrigues me, love. Especially theirs, which seems to have been full of codes and rituals, almost all of them devised by her.

I didn't really want to know, but a question was a good wat to get him to pay attention to me.

I didn't really want to know, but a question was a good way to get him to pay attention to me.

Em's mother spoke in code. She omitted almost all the important words in every sentence. She communicated through gestures, facial expressions, and assumptions that everyone knew what she was talking about. It doesn't sound likely but it worked.

Conversations with Em could be like wandering in town you had never seen before where every path you took might change course midway and take you with it. You had to keep finding your way back to the Main Street in order to get anywhere.

So, we're all messed up by Reader's Digest standards. We'll never make it to a heart rending story you can read on your summer vacation.

Why do you want to know? I had no idea why. I delight in details. I'm never sure where I am with people who may give me large truths about themselves but not the everyday, even trivial details. I've been told I exhaust people with my curiosity. I've been told that living with me would mean people trapped and slowly asphyxiated.

I'm the world expert on him, but who's asking

But you want information. I want to give advice.

It's very difficult to know what I mean or what I don't mean. Afterwards. At that time, I know.

She was acknowledging the gesture of being comforted by pretending to be comforted.

It is difficult to see how love and detachment might fit together. I bother about the repercussions of loving someone else with benevolent detachment. It wouldn't work for me. I have to connect to love. I am imperfect. My world is imperfect. I have no time for solutions premised on perfect persons seeing the perfection of solutions that work in a perfect world.

He came back once, very drunk. The doctor sent him away. "Both of us can't be drunk".

I didn't want my hero to have a hero.

I have discovered that such effortlessness is not easy to achieve and its weightlessness is in direct proportion to the effort put in.

Have you never heard of the phrase 'a comforting lie'? Are you challenging me? No, I am complimenting you.

I would have prayed to any god, any god at all, if I could have been handed a miracle, a whole mother, a complete family, and with it, the ability to turn and look away.

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.

Love is a hollow word which seems at home in song lyrics and greeting cards, until you fall in love and discover its disconcerting power.

If anyone ever does you a favour, you cannot forget it. You must always credit them, especially in public, especially to those they love and those who love them. You must pay your debts, even those that you can never fully repay. Anything less makes you less.

otherwise, she was Em, and most of the time she was Em with an exclamation mark.

Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself. You can only stand outside it, as a woman might stand outside a prison in which her lover is locked up.

Conversations with Em could be like wandering in a town you had never seen before, where every path you took might change course midway and take you with it. You had to keep finding your way back to the main street in order to get anywhere.

I won't crowd my attic with that which does not concern me.

I grew up being told that my mother had a nervous problem. Later, I was told it was a nervous breakdown. Then we had a diagnosis, for a brief while, when she was said to be schizophrenic and was treated as one. And finally, everyone settled down to calling her manic depressive. Through it all, she had only one word for herself: mad.

A diagnosis helps cure. But it also pigeonholes the patient. She's manic depressive; he's schizophrenic. Into your box.