Em and The Big Hoom

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.