Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto Page B

might rejoice at the death of my mother, sums involving vernier calipers, groups of schoolboys with nothing much to do, death by drowning.
    But of all these, I feared most the possibility that I might go mad too. If that happened, my only asset would be taken from me. Growing up, I knew I did not have many advantages. I had no social skills. I had no friends. I had no home – no home that was a refuge. I seemed to have no control over my body; my clumsiness was legendary. All I had was my mind and that was at peril from my genes.
    Em’s manic state was often ugly but it is how I remember her: as a rough, rude, roistering woman. In this state, she came at us as an equal. But it was the other Em who was my night terror. As if it were a wild animal with flecks of foam at its mouth, I feared her depression.
    I found it hard to reconcile the way that word felt to the state my mother was in when she was dragged down into the subterranean depths of her mind. Depression seemed to suggest a state that could be dealt with by ordinary means, by a comedy on the television or an extravagance at a nice shop. It suggested a dip in level ground where you might stumble, but from which you might scramble, a little embarrassed that it should have caught you unawares – a little red-faced from the exertion – but otherwise unharmed.
    Em’s depressions were not like that.
    Imagine you are walking in a pleasant meadow with someone you love, your mother. It’s warm, and there’s just enough of a breeze to cool you. You can smell earth and cut grass, and something of a herb garden. Lunch is a happy memory in your stomach and dinner awaits you – a three-course meal you have devised – all your comfort foods. The light is golden with a touch of blue, as if the sky were leaking.
    Suddenly, your mother steps into a patch of quicksand. The world continues to be idyllic and inviting for you but your mother is being sucked into the centre of the earth. She makes it worse by smiling bravely, by telling you to go on, to leave her there, the man with the broken leg on the Arctic expedition who says, ‘Come back for me; it’s my best chance,’ because the lie allows everyone to believe that they are not abandoning him to die.
    Some part of you walks on and some part of you is frozen there, watching the spectacle. You want to stay but you must go. The imperium of the world’s timetable will allow you to break step and fall out for a while, but it will abandon you, too, if you linger too long by your mother, now a curled-up foetal ball, moaning in pain, breathing only because her body forces her to.
    The only way to deal with such pain is to blot it out. My mother is now in a state where her mind tortures her. It will not even let her sag into apathy. Sometimes I see her body twitching a little in pain. Sometimes I see her forcing herself into a rigid stillness. Nothing will help her answer whatever savage questions her mind is asking.
    This is darkness and all that we have as remedy are pills. They don’t work. Not when she is this way. My mother lives through the long black night of the mind. She longs for death. She asks us if we can give it to her.
    â€˜Kill me,’ she says on days when the pain is so bad that she is panting with it, small barely audible sobs. ‘Let me die.’
    I don’t know what to do or how to respond. I want to kill her. I even know how I will do it. First some very strong drugs, of which there is a readily available supply. Then, when she is sleeping, her breath stertorous, a pillow. I run it as a thought experiment, just as I might run the ‘What will I do when my father dies’ experiment. I don’t think I will be able to hold her down if she flails, so I’m hoping that the drugs will make her quiescent.
    But I also know that I will not do this. (I wonder if she knows this too and that is the reason why she asks.) I will not do this