Mumbai-based author and freelance journalist Jerry Pinto’s novel, Em and the Big Hoom (Rupa Publications, 2012), which won him the Windham-Campbell literature Prize 2016, worth $150,000, was a profoundly gripping story of his mother who suffered from bipolar disorder. Em was the nickname for her and The Big Hoom was an endearment for the father in the novel.
Beautifully written, it documented the lives of the family and their everyday struggles. But then, chronicling was not new to Pinto who had earlier written Bombay, Meri Jaan: Writings on Mumbai, Helen: The life and Times of An H-Bomb, leela: A Patchwork life (with leela Naidu), and so on. Something about the process of registering histories always appealed to him.
Pinto emphasises, “I’ve a terrible fear that we live in a state called Amnesia, not India. Forgetting is our favourite sport. If it were an Olympic sport, we would be gold medalists. Names, people, myths, legends, stories, languages, cultural nuances, recipes — they are all dying around us. In some sense, writing for me is an act of retrieval, to control this tide of forgetting.
When I teach at the post-graduate Social Media Communications department at Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai, I make my students write a 5,000-word long essay on their mothers. They are required to go and interview their mothers, the mothers’ friends and family, and document their lives. I tell the students that they have to hand over their essays to their daughters because we tend to forget women’s stories. Women’s histories are the first to be erased. This may be why I use anthologies so often: To remind people of what has happened in the world of the book and to bring these in contact with things that I have made happen by commissioning them. And why I chose somewhat peripheral figures in Helen and leela Naidu. Because the periphery can tell you a lot about the mainstream but also about itself.”
It becomes apparent that he treats nostalgia as a literary technique to attain catharsis. Through his writing, he goes back in time to relive memories. He says, “Nostalgia needs rose-tinted glasses; it means inventing a glorious past and contrasting it with the unsavoury present. When we try and remember our past, it should be located in its context. To cite a minor example, if people say that they could buy a whole basket of mangoes for one paise back in the day, one should realise that they earned a salary of one rupee at that time and that one paise had a completely different value. Thus remembering needs us to look around, to have a stereoscopic view, taking into account all the problems and conflicts of the past as well. In this country, there’s a golden view of anything from the past; we romanticise it. As they say about the great Indian family, ‘It’s all about loving your parents’ (from Karan Johar’s Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham). We like to uphold families as emblems of collective contentment but we all know our families. The first 20 minutes of any family party is peaceful, then the debates and fights ensue amidst all merriment and on their way back in the cars, the arguments resume, “Why did you say thatIJ” or “Why didn’t you ask…IJ”
We tend to be more cautious about how we project our family life. For instance, we erase the nutty grandmother from our clean familial narratives, ditto the aunty who went away to say the Osho ashram.”
And it is this scrutiny of an Indian family set-up which has led to his forthcoming book. He recalls, “Many readings of Em and the Big Hoom would turn into deeply densely emotional sessions. I remember in the Q&A round, a woman started weeping, saying that her family had locked her brother for five years because he was hearing voices. I am not a trained mental health professional and don’t know how to react to that level of emotion; I’m a writer and in that capacity, I become a catalyst for these people to channelise their grief. So eventually, I told them to write their stories down. A friend suggested putting them together in a book. The Book of light (Speaking Tiger) is almost ready and will be released soon. Again, the past comes in, people come in, and the quiet person in the corner of the photograph comes to life.”
Nonetheless, writing seemed to have helped him stabilise something that was missing in his life. It’s rare that a novel like this — strikingly original, insightful and profoundly poetic — could not help him enhance his own personality. He replies, “Whenever I meet a younger person, I feel like apologising for where we are headed today. My generation should have worked harder at establishing the ideals and institutions of the country. We should have made civil society more resilient. But then when I watch the vigour and determination of the young lot — in JNU and Hyderabad, so to say — I feel glad that the spirit is alive and hopefully they will do a better job. And so perhaps words produce the cement that holds things together for me. I am happiest when I am writing.”
It’s this quest to establish one’s identity that did not allow him to name the narrator of the novel; so as not to limit him. He says, “I appreciate the slippage of meaning between the reader and writer. I didn’t write it as a book of mental ill health as well, it was a book of love. Again, if it is perceived as a narrative of psychology, I wouldn’t complain”.
When he actually decided to pen his story, it accumulated into a work that was seven lakh words long and written over 25 years, finally reduced to 60,000. And they were all handwritten! About this fascinatingly unique journey, he says: “Every year, I indulged in self-imposed ‘self-improvement’ exercises. If one summer was invested in reading Plato, Aristotle, Socrates etc, one would be about reading Kamala Subramaniam’s version of the Mahabharata. So, one summer, it became about writing my own novel. I thought I would start in April and end in June. I did about 14,000 words that summer and then gave it up. Draft one dead in the water. There were other attempts in other forms: A play, a dramatic monologue, a novel with an omniscient observer, Em telling her own story.
Then when I was 40, at the Jaipur literature Festival, my friend Naresh Fernandes arranged for me to meet Suketu Mehta, his friend. He told Suketu sternly that he was to get me to the right company and create the opportunity for me to tell a story. So Suketu Mehta gets me to a table where Salman Rushdie and Kiran Desai are having a conversation and David Godwin is also sitting around. Then he knocks on the table and says, ‘Jerry will now tell a story’. I was horrified but I thought, ‘let’s do this then’ and I told a story, a family story. They listened, they laughed, they seemed to be having fun. Not only that, Godwin said that if I wrote the story, he would represent me. On my way back from Jaipur, I thought, loha garam hai maar do hathoda (from Sholay)! I quit my job and wrote for five years, I wrote a thousand words a day and ended up with the 750,000 words. But when I tried to edit them after a six-month gap, I discovered that the first two lakh words were so pathetic that it was unfair to put anyone through them. I thought I had waited five years of my life but I read on dutifully and dolefully. Then suddenly, I liked a passage and typed it out. Ten thousand words later I found another. Then a third and suddenly I began to see that I might have a novel. I found 40,000 words in that rubbish heap and I rewrote it and it became Em and the Big Hoom.”
It was difficult to tell such a personal story because there are moments, as he says, when one is hamstrung by the truth. But at the same time, he knew that the mother lode was always present. All he had to do was to nurture it. The responses have been as overwhelming as well. He says, “I remember this one time when a journalist who I thought was a friend asked me at a public event if I felt guilty about using my mother’s mental illness to write a book. It’s difficult to react to such hurtful questions in public but the appropriate answer occurred to me a couple of days later: ‘Don’t you feel guilty about asking me such a questionIJ’
I believe for every author, every story we write comes from our own storehouse of the self. For example, Helen is about Helen but it is also about my father sending me to watch Hindi films every Thursday. And sitting in the seven different theatres in Mahim, I discovered this strange figure, so Indian, so alien and I fell in love. I wouldn’t have found my way to the book had it not been for those encounters. My editor, publisher and friend Ravi Singh and I were at a bar and her song Mungda mungda (from Inkaar) started playing. We both stopped talking just to listen to it and to smile, and then Ravi asked if I knew someone who could write a book on Helen and I said, “Me” and the next day I was at lamington Road, buying her films.
It’s the same with leela Naidu. As a young journalist I had gone to interview Dom Moraes, who was then her husband, and it was such a difficult task to interview him because of his sophistication. He was very elegant, such a world citizen; he knew Sir Stephen Spender and Roger Bacon, and he spoke with this British accent that was almost impossible to decipher. On the other hand, leela was kindness itself. Suketu tells this story where leela went to a house party, sat herself and did not move for several minutes after all guests had left. In the presence of just the family members, she finally moved her feet under which a cockroach was trapped. She did not want the family to be embarrassed by the presence of cockroaches in their house. So when she asked Adil Jussawalla if he could help her find someone who could assist her in writing her autobiography, he recommended me.
At the same time, he also unsettled many stereotypes about Roman Catholics in Mumbai, such as, say, ‘Sandra from Bandra’ (borrowing from Paromita Vohra’s documentary by the same name). As he notes, “You know, I actually appear in Paromita’s film. Stereotypes are a lazy way of thinking about people. literary fiction is about making a case for highly specific individuals and that should always break stereotypes.”
Apart from the sentimental nuances, he also had the literary information and expertise to write the novel. He made a lot of literary references in it. How did he strategise its formatIJ He answers, “It is, of course, a collaborative effort. First, don’t send your draft until you are very sure of its credibility. I sent it to Adil Jussawalla, Rashmi Palkhivala, Naresh Fernandes etc for their opinions. Adil, for example, suggested that I put titles for chapters because he felt it read like an investigative report, as if some journalist were trying to find out about a family. I think I had kind and talented friends who could help me enhance the prospects of the book.”
He has also mentioned in the past how he can write only in Mumbai. He says, “That is because I hand-write everything and I cannot afford to lose the pages. So I prefer to be at home in Mumbai for that purpose. So I edit what I have written when I am travelling or I translate. But if push comes to shove, I know I will be able to write where I am because I need me to be there”.
One might find writing a lucrative career option after winning this award but Pinto clarifies, “I must say I did the book on Bollywood posters for money. However, I love Bollywood and its aesthetic gives me a peculiar pleasure. So even in that case, there was still a connection with the subject and the desire to say something.
I think it is possible to earn a living from writing as long as you do not have children and do not have to pay the rent (or EMIs) in a metro. Oh and a codicil for all those people who are living in their own homes and do not have children. You cannot want to live it up and still earn a living through writing. If you are willing to keep it simple, if you’re willing to buy only what you need, then it’s just about possible, I think”.
He continues, “I have never really been burdened by worries in the first place. My needs are books, films, and travel. If I can’t travel physically, I will do so through reading. What makes me feel elated about the prize is that the novel was rejected by everyone abroad when David Godwin approached publishers as my agent. Then Radhakrishnan Nair commissioned me to interview Pankaj Mishra and I handed him the novel. He loved it, he showed it to his wife Mary Mount and I got published in England and America. So I did it my way.”
Does that redefine contemporary Indian literature under the Western gazeIJ Because his writing is an Indian story, unlike the works of say, Jhumpa lahiri or even Rushdie. His story is not about expatriates but is rooted in ‘Indianness’, like we have seen in the works of an Arundhati Roy or a Vikas Swarup and Raj Kamal Jha. He says, “I don’t know. I think every book we read helps reshape our world. So I hope it will reconfigure things in its own small way but I also believe we should all be a part of the reshaping of literature. Before we say: America should read more Indian novels, can we say: I should be reading more Indonesian/Nigerian/Peruvian novelsIJ Can we open our libraries and hearts and reading lists to authors from other nations before we insist on other nations reading usIJ And can we reach out, through translation, to the languages we have in IndiaIJ”
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