Em and the Big Hoom (14 page)

‘I needed the money.'

‘You needed the money?'

And then he suddenly looked across at the two of us transfixed by this discussion and seemed to decide that it was not worth it.

‘I am sure you needed the money,' he said, without expression.

‘Don't act like that.'

‘I'm sorry,' he said. He was slowly packing it away.

‘You're shutting me out.'

‘Am I?' his voice was pleasant now. Almost. ‘And since you cannot tell me why you needed the money, what are you doing?'

‘I don't know. That's different. I think it's a matter of honour.'

‘Is it? And does your code of honour allow you to steal from your children?'

‘For the love of Mike,' Em snarled. ‘It's not as if they're likely to starve.'

After that, The Big Hoom would not be drawn. Finally, Em decided that she had had enough. She walked out of the house and went to her mother.

We watched, almost without breathing, until he followed soon after.

They were back an hour later. They seemed to have resolved the money thing.

I had always been puzzled by how completely uninterested Imelda's parents seemed to have been in getting her married. But of course there had been a sound economic reason. She was the only earning member of the family.

Money had always been a problem, even when it was not supposed to be:

Finally had it out with them. What am I supposed to take with me? I mean, I know dowry is wrong and all that, but what happens to me if I go with empty hands? Surely, there is some money left over from ten-twelve years of working. But there isn't. Mae simply burst into tears and Daddy went to bed and turned his face to the wall. At five o'clock. Finally, as if by magic, as if summoned, Tia Madrinha turned up and said that Agostinho was a good man and had not asked so we should all say a decade of the rosary in thanks.

What power there is in a decade of the rosary! (Oddly, we had to say it to a sorrowful mystery because it is a Friday – although we were saying it in rejoicementation, which should be the opposite of lamentation.) Daddy woke up. Mae agreed to let me make a cup of tea to cheer her up and Tia Madrinha took off her own gold chain and put it around my neck.

‘You are my god-daughter,' she said sternly. ‘I should not wear a gold chain if I have not given you one.'

But she looked bereaved almost as soon as she had done this and an imp of mischief made me want to take her gift seriously. But there had been enough tears and drama for several lifetimes so in the spirit of the thing, I took it off and put it back on her neck and said something about how the thought was gift enough. That settled that and I said I wanted to go to church and make my confession which was of course a way to simply rush off and be alone for a bit.

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

But of course a walk in the maidan outside the zoological gardens in Byculla can only take you so far. After a while, she stopped walking. ‘Almost fell into the arms of some young men,' she said.

‘They might have enjoyed that,' I suggested.

‘You think?' she said. ‘They were kissing. Homos, I think.'

She took the bus to Dadar.

‘Jovial Cottage. What a terrible name. I couldn't bear it. I kept thinking of back-slapping drunken men and false smiles. I don't even know why they would bring Jupiter into it.'

‘You're losing me.'

‘Jovial? Jovial. Jove. Jove is Jupiter. Would you name your home for Jupiter? He seems to have been a thoroughly terrible fellow. Kept sleeping with his sisters and then cut off his father's balls and threw them into the sea. Can you imagine?'

Somewhat startled by the arrival of his fiancée in a state close to despair, Augustine rose to the occasion.

‘He didn't even allow me to come in. Bad for my reputation, he told me. Instead, we went off to have tea. I don't remember where we went but I remember thinking that it was as bad for my reputation. After all, you didn't sit in an Irani restaurant with a man.'

‘Not even a fiancé?'

‘Not even. The rule was pretty clear. If you were a woman, you had better be with your father or your husband in an Irani.'

It was here that Augustine made one of those incidental remarks that would take root in his wife's head.

‘I don't have a dowry,' she said baldly when they were served.

‘I don't care,' he said.

‘Your family will.'

‘They won't.'

‘How can you say that?'

‘Because I'll tell them that you'll bring your dowry every month.'

This was true. At that point in their lives, Imelda – employed at the American Consulate – was earning more than Augustine. His pay was linked to the sales of heavy machinery and the industry was in a slump. It would recover soon enough – India's tryst with gigantism meant that someone somewhere always needed another large chunk of metal – but till it did, she was outperforming him.

He didn't know it but Imelda was equally reassured and horrified by what he had said. She worked because she had to. There was no question about that in her mind. The family relied on her salary. If she did not earn, they would not eat, not eat well at any rate. So she earned. But she had not considered what work meant after marriage. In her diary, she wrote:

He said it as if he thought I was going to work for the rest of my life. I suppose I will but it gives me the megrims, as someone in a G[eorgette] H[eyer] novel would say. Not the work, actually, I don't mind that. Not even those darned reports with their pages and pages of numbers and the carbon copies and all the rest of that. Not even those confidential reports. I will never forgive William Turtle Turner for that stupid remark, ‘She does not keep her desk very clean.' As if I were a slattern and my desk a pigsty. (Is that a mixed metaphor?)

It's just the . . .

She seems to have cut herself off there. But the problem was not really about working. It was about what would happen to her salary. She had assumed that it would continue to go to her mother. Augustine had assumed that it would go into the common kitty of their marriage. The next entry in the diary says as much:

My salary is my dowry. And I can't see how there can be anything wrong with that – except that nothing should be anyone's dowry. No one thinks much if one asks the boy what his prospects are. If money is not important on the girl's side then money should not be important on the boy's side either, not in this day and age at least.

Asked Mae.

Came right out and asked her the question: How will you manage when I am married and living in his house?

She said, We will see. This means nothing. I wish I could get her to see that this means nothing but there was no getting anything else out of her. It was ever so. I must live with uncertainty and I don't think I can handle it.

Until the time she married, Imelda had suffered the deprivations of never having enough money. She also never had to worry about how to spend it. That was someone else's department. She earned it and handed it over, every last paisa of it, to her mother. Augustine had never been able to understand how Imelda could do that.

‘But don't you want to keep some of it?'

‘No,' said Imelda simply.

‘No?'

‘No.'

It was a simple, uninflected response.

‘Aren't there things you want to buy?'

‘Yes,' Imelda said. ‘But most of the things I want to buy, I'd never get from my salary so there's no point thinking about them. I want a boat, for instance. I'm not going to get a boat on my salary.'

‘So dates.'

‘Yes. I can buy dates.'

‘But only if you walk home.'

‘I like walking home.'

‘You sound like some kind of saint,' Augustine said, exasperated.

‘Do saints want boats? Maybe St Christopher. And maybe St John would have wanted a date or two when he was eating locusts and wild honey.'

‘You sound as if you've worked it all out.'

‘I haven't,' she replied. ‘I don't understand money.'

‘Means? What's there to understand?'

‘I don't know how to run a house. I don't know how to budget. I don't know whether one should buy five kilos of rice and one kilo of daal or one kilo of rice and five kilos of daal. I don't know what a good price for pomfret is. I don't know whether we pay the methrani too much or too little or what we tip her for Christmas. I know we don't tip for Diwali, which is something, I suppose. I don't know if I get a good salary or not. See? There's lots you have to know to understand money.'

‘And so you just ignore it?'

‘I'm like Sherlock Holmes. I won't crowd my attic with that which does not concern me.'

‘Even if it means refusing to grow up?'

‘Is that what I seem like to you?'

‘I think you can't be grown up if you don't take charge of your economic life.'

‘Yes, that might be one way of looking at it,' Imelda conceded. ‘But I think of my way as
The Way of Water
.'

Augustine shook his head. ‘I should never have given you that Watts book.'

‘This isn't about Zen,' said Imelda. ‘I didn't even read that book. Honestly. I don't understand Zen. It seems if you don't answer properly, or you're rude, people get enlightened.'

‘Why are we talking about Zen? We were talking about you.'

‘Couldn't be. I wouldn't have been distracted from such a delightful topic.'

‘We were talking about your problem with money.'

‘No, we were talking about
your
problem with my money.'

‘And you said you were like water.'

‘I am like water. I flow past money.'

‘The lady doth protest . . .'

‘If you say that, I'll get up and leave in a pale pink huff,' said Imelda.

But Augustine was right. If this was how their conversation about money went – and this was how Em recalled it to me – then she was indeed protesting too much. Because there were times when her mother's inability to handle a budget could irk her:

Once again, I must do without. I don't understand why. We got you a dress in November, is all Mae will say. November will be my birthday until I die. Christmas will also fall in December until I die. (Unless there's a cataclysm in the Holy Roman Catholic Church or the Gregorian calendar or both. God forbid. Though they might make it easier and turn all the months into thirty-day months and declare a five-day holiday with no dates at the end of each year. I wish I knew mathematics. Then I would know if I would still be a Sagittarian. Or has that something to do with the stars and where the sun is? Must ask Angel Ears.)

But when I said I had spotted a really nice piece of silk which I thought would do well for an Xmas festivity thingy, I was told in no uncertain terms that I must do without. I feel like the March sisters: Christmas isn't Christmas without any new clothes.

What does she do with my money?

I feel mean asking. Like a man in a melodrama. I can't bring myself to ask. Angel Ears says I earn a handsome salary and that should keep us nicely. But he doesn't know that I have to darn my underwear in the most alarming places and wear the same shoes for months after I can feel the road beneath my feet. But I feel if I do ask, she might well say, ‘I spend it on all of us. Why can't you earn some more?' How would I do that? None of the AmConGen girls seem to need more than one job and they spend like sailors on shore leave. In
ASL
, it was different. Liddy, poor duck, gave tuitions to some Marwari kids. English? Or English and History, I think. And there was Gertie who stitched her own clothes and wore them with such an air that you felt you should ask her to make you up something, even if you knew that she wasn't very good. I gave her that lovely floral cotton thing and she made it so deedy, I never had the heart to wear it, even after I took off a whole cartload of satin bows and ornamental buttons. I just told her I had got fat and I needed to slim down. I will get fat at this rate. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Acting on his idea that she was protesting too much, Augustine handed Imelda his first pay after their marriage. Only, she had got her first salary too and had planned on handing it over to him.

I remember The Big Hoom telling us, ‘She looked like I'd dropped a snake into her lap.'

‘It was all too much money,' said Em. ‘My only impulse was to go out and spend all of it.'

But she didn't. For years, she handed over everything she earned to her mother and then to her husband. When she started giving all her money to Augustine, she found she had to steal it back. And she did so, with his knowledge and unwilling consent, until she broke down and could no longer go to work.

‘He made me resign,' she would say angrily. ‘Or I might still have had my job to fall back on.'

‘Stop talking rot,' Susan or I would say. For The Big Hoom said nothing. He knew what we realized much later: the Consulate had allowed her to resign when she started adding her own, and very alarming, comments to diplomatic reports. ‘Personal interpolations', they called them. I loved that phrase and when I used it, aged eight or thereabouts, Em could still laugh though the joke was on her.

 • • • 

Even on the single salary that The Big Hoom brought home, we should have had a better life, materially, than we did. I think The Big Hoom, before he was The Big Hoom, had plans for all of us. Em's illness forced him to rewrite them. We ate well and we had as many books as we wanted. But nothing else was given. No servants. No refrigerator. A television, in any case, was a luxury for the middle classes.

From time to time, we would petition for a fridge, especially when we returned from the home of someone who had one. How effortlessly cold things were served. How easily a meal could be put together from this and that and these and those, all on separate levels, all in separate containers, all sealed away for the future.