Em and the Big Hoom (3 page)

‘I know. It seems odd. It's cheap now, so says Angel Ears. I thought we would have a tough time when Sue started college. I said he and I could eat bread and drink water and he laughed and said, “No. It's not a problem, the fees are not a problem.”'

Then she was wandering again.

‘You know, I thought he was being all big and manly about it, sending his little girl to college, because the students had gone on strike and tried to set fire to a bus. Only the poor dears didn't quite manage to; the papers showed the bus the next morning and it looked quite all right except the stuffing on the seats was torn. I think they should have got some expert advice from Calcutta. They burn buses there, don't they?'

‘Em. We were talking about your going to college.'

‘Oh, I couldn't. Not now. I've read those nice
Reader's Digest
things where an old lady goes to college and everyone is fond of her, but I don't think it would be the same. I don't want to study now. And I don't want people to be fond of me. It sounds like I'd be the sheepdog of the class. Or I'd have to be a muddha-figure and for that I've got the two of you and God knows I messed that up as well.'

‘Oh come on.'

‘That's sweet of you. But see, if you weren't a messed up child,
my
messed up child, you would have made a nice long speech about how I was the perfect mother. But you can't. 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.'

‘Em, you're not listening. Was college really that expensive in your time?'

‘I don't know. I don't know what it cost . . . How old are you?'

‘Shouldn't you know?'

‘Shouldn't you?'

‘Seventeen.'

‘Gosh, seventeen and so many questions! I couldn't ask questions like that. I didn't say: show me the bank books. But I knew I had to bring in some money. So I put on my blue dress with the lace collar and went to work.'

 • • • 

Em would tell us that she liked being a schoolteacher, and from memories I have of Em combing a young patient's hair in her hospital ward, or feeding the old lady in the bed next to hers as she would feed an infant, I can believe this. But her first day as a teacher nearly destroyed her. 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 slip the dogs of war. Every schoolchild has felt that collective rill of joy trickle down his throat as the hierarchy breaks down and revenge may be had.

‘I think Mother Superior meant well,' Em remembered. ‘But she made a fatal mistake. She came and introduced me and said that I was the new teacher and that it was my first day at teaching. She said she knew what well-behaved children they were and how they would help me. For a few minutes after she left, they tolerated me. Or they held themselves back. I remember trying to think what teachers did or said. No one had even told me what I was supposed to be teaching. I asked what period it was and the class shouted back in one voice, “Mathematics.” I almost wept, because I
hated
mathematics and now it seemed I was supposed to be teaching it. In the next five minutes, they were ready. All of them had pieces of paper under their feet. They began rubbing them on the floor. Khuzzz. Khuzzz. Khuzzz. I said, “Please don't do that,” or something. I knew it wasn't the right thing to say. I knew I sounded weedy. But that was all I could manage.'

‘Gosh,' I said, feeling a pang of guilt. The future sins of the son had been visited on the mother. How many times had I helped do this to a new teacher?

‘They all chorused, “So-rry tea-cher.” I said, “That's all right.” They chorused, “Than-kyou tea-cher . . .” I can still hear their voices, the dirty little shits, though I came to love them later, but they were still dirty little shits . . . and then they began singing “Happy birthday” to me.'

‘What did you do?'

‘I ran out of the class crying.'

‘What?'

‘I was terrified. I just wanted to hide somewhere so I thought I'd hide in a toilet. Only, it was the boys' toilet.'

‘Oh God.'

‘Luckily, it was empty. Then I found the staffroom by mistake and Mother Superior was there, examining workbooks or something. She made me wash my face and then she took me back to class. She made the class kneel down on their desks and pray for forgiveness to the benevolent God who had allowed them to be born in families that sent them to school.'

‘The Hindus and Muslims too?'

‘Everyone. Then they had to write a letter of apology to their parents. She was quite, quite brilliant, Mother Soup.'

‘Who were you teaching?'

‘Seventh standard. I think she assumed I couldn't do too much damage there. I must have been a terrible teacher because I didn't understand any of the stuff I was teaching. Each day I'd ask Daddy what to say about integers or fractions or ratio and proportion and I would read it out slowly in class. Then I would make a clever boy come up to the blackboard and do the sums.'

‘Wow,' I said.

‘What does that mean? No, don't bother telling me. As if I don't know. But what could I do? I didn't understand ratio and proportion. The numbers seemed to skip about, some went up and some went down and nothing seemed to work out. But after a year, they gave me English and history. I was so happy I could have danced.'

But at the end of six months, Granny arrived in Mother Soup's office. Her daughter was now eighteen years old and she was no longer going to work at the school. She wouldn't teach anymore, but learn. She would join the Standard Shorthand and Typewriting Institute.

‘“We set the standard”, that was their motto. Mae said it was the right thing for me to do. Someone must have told her that secretaries make more money. Or something like that. So she decided that I would become a secretary.'

‘Did she ask you?'

Em gave me a speaking look.

‘I was so unhappy I wept almost all the time. I remember a couple of my students passing me on the street and saying, “Good morning, Miss” and I burst into tears. I remember crying because I didn't think I would ever be able to change a typewriter ribbon without getting my fingers dirty. I remember crying because I didn't understand tabs. And just when I had started to understand the typing thing, the shorthand started and the typing seemed like easy butter-jelly-jam. Typing was about getting English out of a machine. Shorthand was a new language and it was terrible, full of chays and jays and things like that. I can't tell you how much I cried.'

How to read those tears would always be a problem. For anyone else, they would be the outpourings of an eighteen-year-old forced out of a world she had grown to enjoy into a new one. But each time Em told me something about her life, I would examine it for signs, for early indications of the ‘nervous breakdown'. It was an obsession and might have something to do with my curiosity about her life. She was born in Rangoon, I knew, and had come to India on one of the ships that crossed the Bay of Bengal when the Japanese attacked Burma. Her father had walked, from Rangoon to Assam; legend has it that he had departed with a head of black hair and appeared again in Calcutta with a shock of white hair. Was this it? Was this the break? She didn't seem to remember much about that crossing except how she used orange sweets to quell her nausea and began menstruating on board the ship. Was this just how people remembered things, in patches and images, or was this the repression of a painful memory?

Somewhere along the way their piano had been jettisoned to lighten the boat. When I first heard this, I thought it was a good place for things to start, for my mother's breakdown to begin. I imagined the dabbassh as the piano hit the water with, perhaps, a wail of notes. I imagined my mother weeping for the piano as it began to bubble its way to the bottom of the Bay of Bengal. I cut between her tears, the white handkerchief handed to her by her impatient mother, the plume of dust rising from the seabed, the tear-soaked face, the first curious fish . . .

Then I heard another Roman Catholic Goan family speak of their piano. And another. And a fourth. Then I got it. The pianos were a metaphor, a tribal way of expressing loss. It did not matter if the pianos were real or had never existed. The story was their farewell to Rangoon. It expressed, also, their sense of being exiled home to Goa, to a poor present. The past could be reinvented. It could be rich with Burmese silk and coal mines and rubies and emeralds and jade. It could be filled with anything you wanted and a piano that was thrown overboard could express so much more than talking about how one lent money out at interest in the city. Or how one taught English to fill up the gaps of a schoolteacher's salary.

The family had come to Goa and then to Bombay. They had lived in a single room that would later become a laundry before Em's father found a job as a mathematics teacher. Was that it? The years of deprivation? Only, it didn't seem to be much more deprivation than many young women of the time endured. Was it the sacrifice of her teaching job, then? Hundreds of women had sacrificed the same or more. Every fact, every bit of information had to be scanned. Sometimes it was exhausting to listen to her because she seemed to be throwing out clues faster than I could absorb them.

Eventually Em did learn to type sixty words per minute and take dictation. The Standard Shorthand and Typewriting Institute awarded her a certificate and gave her a special mention for her shorthand.

‘Which is very good, even if I say so myself. Most of the other girls couldn't read their own shorthand one hour later. I can still read my notes thirty years after I made them.'

For the next two months, Em worked with a small firm called Mehta Mechanical Electrical and Engineering Corporation.

‘It was called Memecorp. So Baig the joker called it Mommecorp.'

‘Didn't get that one.'

‘He spoke some Konkani.'

‘Oh right. Sorry.'

Momme, in demotic Konkani, is the word for breasts.

Despite its rather grand name, Memecorp was not a particularly good place to work.

‘They paid me a daily wage. If I went in, I got paid. If I didn't, I didn't. And two or three times, I went in and they said there's no work for you today so you can go and I had to go, even though I had paid my tram fare.'

‘Like a labourer.'

‘That's what I thought. So I kept an eye out, and one day I saw an ad for a steno in
ASL
and I applied. There was an Anglo-Indian lady at the reception desk. She looked at me and said, “Have you been teaching, dearie?” I said, “Yes.” She smiled at me and said, “It shows.” I was such a duffer then, I didn't even know that she was insulting me. I said, “Yes, I want to go back and teach but we need the money at home.” She said, “My, you won't get a job as a steno if you look like a teacher, dearie.” Then she gave me a card and told me to go and see a certain gentleman. “He'll kit you out in the latest style,” she said. “What about the job interview?” I asked. “You won't get the job,” she said. “Go on now.” That's when I got a bit angry and said, “I'd like to take my chances.” I sat down and waited.'

‘And you got the job?'

Then, as now, I loved a happy ending. And at least this little bit of Em's story had a happy ending.

‘Of course I did,' she snorted. ‘I wrote good English and I knew when to use a dictionary. I knew grammar. They gave me a little test and I think I did very well on it. They also asked me to draft a letter to the bank asking for an overdraft. I didn't know what an overdraft was so I kept it simple. But, as Andrade told me later, that was what got me the job.'

At the end of the test and a short interview, Em left but found the receptionist missing. She was having a cigarette outside the building, oblivious to the men staring at her.

‘I felt a bit triumphant as I told her that I had been offered the job. “Are you taking it?” she asked. I thought she must be out of her mind. In those days jobs were scarce and you took what you were offered. But she asked again, “Are you taking it?” I thought perhaps she had a sister and her sister had her eye on the job, so I said, “Yes. And I told them so.” Then I thought I would be kind and I said, “But I'll need some new clothes so I'll go to that gentleman who you said will kit me out.” But she didn't seem very happy with that. She started saying that it wasn't a good idea, I already had the job, so why bother? I don't know why but I became stubborn. “I don't want to look like a teacher,” I said. “What's wrong with being a teacher?” she asked. “Nothing,” I said, “but I'm a steno in a big firm now so I want to look like that.” I don't know why I was saying these things. I thought my clothes were all right, but there was something about Brigitte that made me say these things. I think she oozed a challenge. Do you remember that film we saw about the Bengali woman taking up a job?'

‘
Mahanagar
?'

We'd seen it together for some reason. It must have been on the Saturday evening slot that was reserved for ‘regional cinema' on Doordarshan. We couldn't have gone to a neighbour's house to watch it. Not with Em. So it would have been after we got our own television. The memory makes me smile: Em, with her beedi, and Susan and I watching Satyajit Ray on a Saturday evening, with The Big Hoom working overtime or busy in the kitchen. Even when we were a family, we weren't quite the usual.