THE TEXTURES OF US

It's very rare that you come across a book that moves you too much. Now that's a loaded sentence, you might say, and you might wonder what is 'too much', and you might question if that makes it a good book. Well, a bad book can also move you (into never ever reading that author again) but a when a good book moves you – ah, that is a beautiful thing. In a world full of vapid posturing blogs and vanity first novels, not much moves me these days, but this one book has – Jerry Pinto's Em And The Big Hoom. If you've never heard of it in Dhaka, I don't blame you, as it's not readily available here; and if you are skeptical of what I say since Pinto isn't exactly a Seth or a Ghosh or even a Bhagat, who can blame you? But believe Kiran Desai when she says that this book drowned her. Once you've read it, you'll know what she means.

The book tells many stories all at once.

It is a story narrated by an unnamed boy who is translating his life for us as though he has no other choice but to try desperately to understand his own mother's illness, and through that, trying to understand his own place in life.

This unnamed boy is me; this unnamed boy is anybody who reads this book. He is anybody who has tried to make sense of what it is like to realize at a young age that relationships are actually made of very thin wires and that when those wires catch fire, you must be able to carry it through, no matter how burnt your young fingers might get.

This novel is the story of carrying things through.  A book means something to you personally when it explains something that you didn't understand before; when it presents a new way of looking at something; when it takes the ordinary and magnifies it to show the little extraordinary elements that have gone into making it a whole.  A novel means something to you when it teaches you something. Em and the Big Hoom is all of these things.  

This novel teaches you and changes you. It tells the story of a family that is trying to be a family, around a mother who, instead of being what we typically expect of mothers in a family story, is a manic-depressive and by the nature of her illness is consumed by it emotionally and physically. She is not the mother that comes home from the office, checks your homework, scolds you for not eating your vegetables and sits down with your father about this month's expenses. She is the mother who smokes beedis and has rather inappropriate conversations with her children as a way to cope and understand what is going on with her. She talks at length about her own childhood, her short lived secretarial job, her first flush romance with the man she eventually married and had two children with – Susan the elder sister and the unnamed narrator.  

She willfully shocks her family by the things she says and plays out her own insecurities as a woman, wife and mother, because she knows in her heart that her illness has removed her from what she perhaps could have been – if only she weren't depressed – if only she had been “normal”. Almost as though on a dare with her illness, she hits out at her husband the most, keeps on challenging him to react, knowing full well that he wouldn't; totally oblivious to the effects this might have on him, or on their marriage. Everything else, all other relationships and all other expectations are distractions to the main event which is her own suffering. She becomes so preoccupied by what her mind is telling her that all her attention is on her illness. That is her world, and everybody else in it is secondary. Her illness is the sun and her family orbits around it.

The family barely functions outside the framework of Em's illness. The children have no “normal” pursuits, no normal romantic or social lives as they grow up into adulthood. They exist in between their mother's words and fits. During one of Em's bouts, she tells her son that she thinks she was fine until he was born, and that while she loved his sister Susan, the blackness of depression slowly started to creep in after she had given birth to her second child. A growing adolescent boy grows up even faster in those few sentences as his mother's words tear a hole inside him that he never quite manages to sew shut.  These conversations don't stop, and the narrator is filled with dread wondering what his mother's words might mean. He wonders if there are clues within the things she says that might signal another attempt to kill herself, and he is afraid of hurting her with his words.  He wants to hear, but he doesn't want to hear.

They are always cleaning up after her physically and emotionally.  In one scene the boy is cleaning up after one of Em's suicide attempts and is struggling to wash away the blood clots all over the bathroom floor. Nobody helps them clean up the wounds inside their souls caused by the lashings of Em's demons.

Em tries to commit suicide three times, to let the darkness out by opening up her body to the world, even though she did not once want her children to see her die like that. She had no choice but to try to escape what was killing her inside her mind, because she could no longer answer the things that her mind was asking of her. This is the nature of Em's manic depression.  

We live in a society that never talks about depression, and this book is such a relief from the bottling up. We need to talk about it. We need to understand it better so as to know how to handle it better. We need to know what it might be like to feel the darkness slowly swelling up within the mind; feeling helpless within its grip, letting the body shut down and shrink while the mind expands, running free with its own paranoiac demons.  Mental illness is hard enough to even talk about and you really don't know what it's like unless you've suffered from it. This book teaches you what somebody's darkness might be like for them.

Em isn't the perfect mother, and there is no prescription in this novel about what the perfect family is supposed to be like either.  The easiest thing to do as the reader would be to blame the family, but you come away without judgment of their flaws. That's the power of a truly great novel – it shows you the insides of us clearly, with our vulnerabilities and strains laid bare. There is no prescription, there is no judgment. Just like real life, but magnified and revealed. Like the narrator, trying to make sense of his life, searching for clues that give him some way out of the mess that is his life – it occurred to me several times in the book that he could be any one of us, searching for a vocabulary to explain our own lives to ourselves. How can that not move us 'too much'?

Shahpar Selim has a Doctorate in environmental policy from the London School of Economics, and currently resides in Dhaka.