(This review received second prize in a national-level book review competition conducted by Indian Psychiatric Society in 2021 and has been published in the Kerala Journal of Psychiatry)

One year of being a resident in psychiatry has taught me that mental illness is a lot more than a few neural circuits, neurotransmitters, and a handful of pills. In psychiatry wards, one meets two kinds of people: “those who suffer from mental illness and those who suffer from the mental illness of someone they love.” While the former are caught in an abyss of darkness forever, the latter have to walk the tightrope between love, guilt, and shame.However, an onlooker might find that world difficult to comprehend. Hence, for most authors and filmmakers, madness is either romantic or humorous. Em and the Big Hoom,a novel by Jerry Pinto, gives a raw and intense portrayal of mental illness.However, the novel is much more than the tale of a manic-depressive woman and her family. It is a story of introspection, love, helplessness, hope, fear, and sheer warmth; all blended into a narrative that is as much an autobiography as it is fiction.

The story unravels in a 50-square-foot flat in late twentieth-century Bombay. The unnamed narrator, his sister Susan, and their parents, Imelda and AugustineMendes (nicknamed Em “with an exclamation mark” and the Big Hoom), “live, love, and deceive one another within earshot” in this house. The cramped apartment also represents the reality of their lives, which once held great promise but has now shrunk into the penumbra of Em’s ever-changing moods. Em moves unpredictably from dark, fathomless depression to stratospheric mania in a span of moments. Her moods claw the family together yet inflict deep, bleeding wounds on each of them.

The story begins with Em in the psychiatry ward of J.J. Hospital and the narrator peering through one of her old letters. Em calls her husband ‘Angel Ears’. Peppered throughout the narrative are more such endearing nicknames that convey a sense of warmth, despite the author laying out a heart-wrenching story. A non-linear, yet seamless and flowing, narrative follows, which takes the reader across different timelines. We see a Bollywood-style love story blossoming between Imelda, the daughter of a Burmese immigrant family, and Augustine, who had run away from a Goan village. Both are silently coming to grips with new lives in new places. Imelda is a nervous office newbie who finds peace in the routineness of a stenographer and passively hands over every paisa of her earnings to her mother. Augustine is the well-dressed office heartthrob who manages to climb up the ladder despite having humble beginnings. The author’s prose moves back and forth between past and present as the children try to re-imagine their mother when she was “whole,” to find the roots of her disease. In that sense, the entire book is about the quest of the narrator and his sister to make sense of their surroundings—“the big, demanding place with no fixed syllabus.”

ചെറുതായി പോസിറ്റീവായൊരു കാര്യം പറയാനുണ്ട്.

പത്ത് ദിവസത്തോളം കോവിഡ് ഡ്യൂട്ടി ഉണ്ടായിരുന്നു. പല പല വാർഡിലായി അഡ്മിറ്റായ രോഗികളിൽ മാനസിക സമ്മർദ്ദം നേരിടുന്നവരെ കണ്ടെത്തുകയും അവരെ സഹായിക്കുകയുമൊക്കെയാണ് ജോലി. ഇടക്ക് വച്ച് ഒപ്പമുള്ളാരു ഡോക്ടർ പോസിറ്റീവായപ്പോൾ ഞാനും പോയി സ്വാബെടുത്തു. നെഗറ്റീവാകും എന്നേതാണ്ട് ഉറപ്പിച്ചതാണ്. രോഗലക്ഷണങ്ങളൊന്നും ഇല്ലാതിരുന്നത് കൊണ്ടും ലോ റിസ്ക് എക്സ്പോഷർ ആയത് കൊണ്ടും പ്രോട്ടോകോൾ പ്രകാരം ഡ്യൂട്ടി തുടരണമെന്നാണ്.

സംഭവങ്ങളൊക്കെ U ടേൺ എടുക്കുന്നത് രണ്ട് ദിവസം കഴിഞ്ഞ് കോവിഡ് സെല്ലിൽ നിന്ന് കമ്യൂണിറ്റി മെഡിസിനിലെ ഒരു ഡോക്ടറുടെ ഫോൺ വരുമ്പോഴാണ്.