Free Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto

believe in Jesus Christ.
    Because I did. I believed in him and the Buddha and Krishna and Allah because you can believe in anything if you look straight at the message.
    Love one another? Good idea.
    Detach yourself? Good idea.
    Do your duty? Good idea.
    Submit to the will of God and go with the flow? Good idea.
    In a perfect world, you could even play with permutations and combinations of the above.
    Submit to the will of God because he wants you to love everyone and do your duty.
    Or, alternatively, detach yourself from everyone as an act of duty to God’s will and you will experience perfect and equal love.
    It is difficult to see how detachment and love might fit together but the Greeks had a go with agape . Only, they didn’t use it much, just coined the term and left others to bother about the repercussions of loving someone else with benevolent detachment. It wouldn’t work for me. I have to connect to love. I am imperfect, my world is imperfect, I have no time for solutions premised on perfect persons seeing the perfection of solutions that work in a perfect world.
    None of my friends would have been surprised by my loss of faith. Most of them were atheists via Marx or Freud and others were agnostic. The few who professed any faith at all hedged it around with disclaimers involving words like meaning, quest and spirituality. No one pushed them to explain. The coyness with which Victorians had approached the sexual was translated into the discomfort with which we approached God. These words were the equivalent of the frilly pantalettes with which the Victorian bourgeoisie covered the legs of their pianos. The mess of faith, the joylessness of disbelief, all these were covered up.
    Perhaps that’s unfair. All the words about the really important things become chiffon representations of themselves soon enough. Some can be reinvented but others can only be discovered by a personal encounter. Love is a hollow word which seems at home in song lyrics and greeting cards, until you fall in love and discover its disconcerting power. Depression means nothing more than the blues, commercially-packaged angst, a hole in the ground; until you find its black weight settling inside your mother’s chest, disrupting her breathing, leaching her days, and yours, of colour and the nights of rest.
    But in the summer of lithium carbonate, things were different. Em and The Big Hoom had begun to go out for dinner again. They had started taking walks in Shivaji Park together – short ones in Em’s lower phases and longer ones when she was feeling active. They would return with something to eat – fruit sometimes, or a big packet of sev-ghantia – as if we were children. We played along, eating bananas or crunchies as if offered a rare treat.
    Then it was over.
    One day, Susan came home and Em was at the door. She was snarling slightly, under her breath.
    â€˜Come in,’ she said to Susan. ‘Come in and get behind me.’
    â€˜What is it?’
    â€˜Nothing,’ Em said. ‘Come on then, ya bastards. Come and try what you want. You can’t take her without getting past me first.’
    â€˜Who writes your dialogue?’ Susan asked. Oddly, that penetrated the thick red mist.
    â€˜Do you want some tea?’ she asked.
    â€˜Yes,’ Susan said and watched as Em stood staring at the pot.
    â€˜Come and sit down and have a samosa,’ Susan said.
    Em grabbed the samosas and threw them into the dustbin.
    â€˜No one is to eat a thing that hasn’t been cooked in the house,’ she said. ‘They might poison us.’
    â€˜They’ were back. And we went back to the psychiatrists hoping for another drug. There was none. The pharmacopoeia was exhausted; we were back to the old faithfuls –Largactil, Espazine, Pacitane for the highs and Depsonil added on when she was depressed. Only this time, we were depressed.
    Granny tried to offer me consolation. She