Jerry Pinto holds forth at An Author’s Afternoon. Pictures: Rashbehari Das

His mother was always “Em” to his sister and him, his father the “Big Hoom”, because that’s how he mostly replied to his children’s incessant questions. On December 16, journalist-writer-teacher Jerry Pinto chatted with a select Calcutta audience about why he started writing his novel Em and the Big Hoom at age 16, and much more, at An Author’s Afternoon, organised by Prabha Khaitan Foundation in association with Siyahi, a Jaipur-based literary consultancy.

The smell of Jerry

Em and the Big Hoom is probably the first work I ever embarked upon. I started writing at the age of 16. It was finally sent to the publisher at the age of 45. The first time I started to write was the time when I learnt the meaning of the word ‘catharsis’.

I started writing with a desire for catharsis after my mother tried to kill herself the third time. I felt the need to write about it because I seemed to be surrounded by people whose mothers were Mother India! They were caring, loving, ordinary women who packed a lunch box and sent their children off to school with ironed uniforms. My mother did nothing of the kind. She neither cooked nor did she go into the kitchen, she thought the best diet would be Coke and bhajiya and if you could throw the bhajiya papers on the floor then it would form a kind of carpet and no one would see the dirt.

Now it seems quite funny but when you are a child one of the things you want most is to conform, you want to be like everybody else, you want to have the same look and feel to your family. So one summer I decided that I would start writing my novel.

I spent the whole summer writing it. Then I went to a friend’s house who was in publishing and I said, ‘how many words do you need in a book?’

He picked a book off the shelf and counted the number of words in a line and counted the number of lines on a page. I thought I could have done this at home, I didn’t have to come all the way to ask this fellow. He multiplied all the figures and said 40,000 to 50,000. And he was holding a Perry Mason [detective fiction written by Erle Stanley Gardner]. Now I wasn’t going to write a Perry Mason, I was going to write the ‘Great Indian Novel’, even before Shashi Tharoor had thought about it! I thought I would have to write three times the amount. But when I counted how many words I had written all summer, it was 950! I thought Dilli durast, it is very far away, it is not going to happen.

But I persisted, I kept trying again and again and I think one is equipped to do it if one reads enough. I have come for a day to Calcutta and I have brought four books — one for the flight here, one for the night here, one for the flight back and one is a just-in- case book. Just in case I finish all the other three, then what am I going to do? I can’t possibly live without something to read!

So, if you read enough and you read good stuff, you can tell when your writing is bad. Each time I would read what I had written I would smell Amitav Ghosh, I would smell Anita Desai, I would smell whoever I was reading at present. I wasn’t coming to a place where I could smell Jerry and I wanted to smell Jerry, however bad it smelt, I wanted to be able to say, ‘Okay, that’s my voice, that’s where I am speaking.’

A pact with the universe

This voice seems to come without too much effort in journalism. But I couldn’t seem to find a way to write my novel. So at the age of 40, I went to the Jaipur Literature Festival and friends organised for me to be at the same table as Suketu Mehta, Salman Rushdie and David Godwin [well-known literary agent]. When David arrived, Suketu said to me, ‘Tell us the story about your family’. I looked a bit puzzled but I am known to be telling stories about my family, which has all sorts of strange people and strange situations. I started telling it and David Godwin said, ‘If you’re ever writing a novel let me know, I’ll represent it.’

So on the flight home I thought, I have a day job, I have an NGO to run — MelJol, which works with children in schools — but it’s time now to just give up all work. I continued to do MelJol but I said I will give up all work and I will focus only on the novel. So I resigned.

I decided that I was going to trust the universe to look after me. I made a pact with the universe — I am going to do my karma, which is every morning I will get up and write my 1,000 words and I will not brush my teeth until I have written those 1,000 words. After that I will be at ease, I will relax and do nothing else.

Some days I’d be brushing my teeth at 10am, other days it would be 4pm! And I did that for two-and-a-half years. Then I stopped. Because by then I had 750,000 words, which is three times War and Peace (by Leo Tolstoy). I thought iss kabaare mein se kuch toh niklega. I started reading it and I found it to be a disaster, lots of it was bad, terrible stuff — boring, self-indulgent, just talking to myself. And then I came across a passage and suddenly felt, ‘Ah, I could put my name to this! It might just be a short story.’

Of course I am saying it this way now but I was really heartbroken that time because it was two-and- a-half years down the drain. It was end of the dream that I was going to write a novel or that I could write a novel because I was writing badly, even when I had given myself the time and space.

Nation of book hunger

My first draft is always handwritten and I typed that passage into the computer. It was again 950 words. I found the bits that worked and finally when I checked the word count, it was 20,000. I built that up into 45,000 words, which is the size of this novel.

Then the novel came out. Last week I won the Crossword Book Award for it, which was really nice, and The Hindu Literary Prize, which also made me very happy. I decided to give the money that I won for the Crossword Award to MelJol’s peti library scheme so that we can open more libraries in India and more children will at least have access to books.

We are a nation of book hunger. I am sure in your homes there are many books sitting next to your bedside saying, ‘read me, read me’. But while we live these lives that are book-saturated, there are many Indians not terribly far from where we are for whom the only books they will see in their lives are may be school textbooks. Imagine the horror of that! Imagine trying to build a nation of readers with only school textbooks. So I think it’s time for us to go out there and start giving books to kids.

Helen and Leela

People ask me if Em and the Big Hoom is autobiographical and they feel embarrassed because Em has a mental problem, she is bipolar, she tries to kill herself on a regular basis, otherwise she is full of happiness, excitement, jokes and laughter. She is both people rolled into one and the other three members of the family are in the middle of this. They love her but they don’t know how to love her.

I look them in the eye and say of course it’s autobiographical. But Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb was autobiographical too. I grew up in Mahim, a part of Bombay that had nine theatres. So I saw all kinds of films.

Leela: A Portrait (the autobiography of actress Leela Naidu that he co-wrote) was also autobiographical. Whenever you talk to a writer, he is always dealing with the material and substance of his life. It’s different transformations that are taking place and different reasons why we tackle subjects that we tackle but all those reasons are in our mind and our heart, not anywhere else.

Pradeep Kakkar (founder-member of NGO PUBLIC): You said you went through seven-and-a-half-lakh words and you reduced that to 20,000! You didn’t think of bringing anybody else in to help you with that?

Jerry: As a writer you must never inflict the toilet training of your book on others. If you are a parent you must toilet train your own child, you can’t send it to the neighbour and say, ‘Usko toilet train karo zara, bahut achha ladka hai.’ It’s your duty, you do the bad work, like cutting it and refining it.

I often get manuscripts from young people… and there might be some of you here who will ask me later, can I send you my manuscript? Yes, you can, but you must send it in the best possible fashion already. You can’t expect me to be putting your commas or correcting your spelling mistakes. Then by page 3 you get angry, by page 5 you are no longer paying any attention… you get so crabby that you don’t pay any attention to the work at all. So do the best you can before you send it out.

So, because I love Ravi Singh [his editor in Penguin and close friend] and I think he’s a wonderful person, I would give him the best I can. When Em and the Big Hoom went out to him, he made about five changes, he made suggestions, which I followed blindly, because I trust him.

Ekavali Khanna (actress): I had read somewhere that your mum would read out to you…

Jerry: I was a nawab. You know, other writers say, ‘When I was two years old I was already reading Shakespeare...’ but I did not want to read at all. I wanted to be read to. I wanted to lie down, put my legs up and play with my toes or whatever else I wanted to do, while someone else read. And my mother was that way very happy to, when she was in a position to, she would read to me. I had three books that I liked to be read to: Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell and Leave it to Psmith by PG Wodehouse. Again and again and again and again, she would read them out and again and again I would laugh at the same points, I would be happy at the same points, cry at the same point.

Then one day my father came home a little early and found that I was lying with my legs up in the air and he asked, ‘What is going on?’ So my mother said, ‘I’m reading to him.’ From the next day I was made to read to myself.

I got used to it pretty soon but even now I think I would sometimes like to have someone read to me while I am doing something else (grins). But I think that’s also partly because of needing to do several things at one time. These drawings for instance, the artwork on the cover [Em and the Big Hoom] and also sprinkled through the book, these are mine as well.

Sundeep Bhutoria (of the Prabha Khaitan Foundation): Why did you decide to write a biography of Helen?

Jerry: Once I was chatting with Pankaj Mishra, telling him about growing up in Bombay, watching Hindi films and … do you remember Namak Halal — Amitabh Bachchan, Parveen Babi, Shashi Kapoor? Jawaani janeman, haseen dilruba… Parveen Babi is dancing and there is a big metal porcupine on the floor, in the centre of the dance hall. He started laughing and said you should write a book about Bollywood.

Eight-nine years after that, I was sitting with Ravi in a bar with dark blue ashtrays and I was thinking how can I rob that ashtray when he said, who do you think can write a book about Helen? I didn’t even stop for a second, I said ‘me’. And he said ‘oh lovely’!

To answer your question, I have no idea why I wrote it but at some point, it’s like friendship, which for me is an automatic instinctive thing. Of course there comes a time in every project when you are thinking, yeh maine kyon kiya? On those days I would just put on Helen ke Haseen Lamhe and in no time I would be dancing!

Rita Bhimani (PR consultant and columnist): The books you’ve written are all about real people. If you were to be asked to write a novel that is total invention, would you take on that challenge?

Jerry: Right now what I am writing is a set of detective stories. One of them is a police inspector, the other is a retired subeditor and they solve cases in Mahim, where I live. It’s a complete invention, nobody in that book ever existed.

Except… see, when I go to my gym, I notice that lots of people leave their keys in their bags and leave them at the entrance. So I kept thinking, man sitting behind desk, has all these keys, suppose he makes copies of the keys and then goes into the houses and starts stealing small things each time, so that he has a steady income? Then one day he steals something that is really valuable but he doesn’t know that, then what happens? I’m just walking into the gym but a story is starting to work in my head. So, if you look at the root of it, you’ll find that every fiction has some reality in it.

Manjri Agarwal (of the Ladies’ Study Group): Have you considered writing for children?

Jerry: I’ve written three children’s books. Mowgli and the Bear, which is a story of Balu the bear from The Jungle Book where he gets kidnapped and all that. The second is A Bear for Felicia, which came to me when I thought what would happen if my childhood teddy bear got sold. The third happened because I am very worried about our intolerant society. I wrote a book called When Crows Are White, which is a graphic novel for children about a crow that dreams that her baby is going to be white. She’s frightened that the rest of the crows won’t accept her so she asks why are crows black, why do we all have to be black? I thought we’re always talking about babies being gora or kala, and here being white is a problem. I thought that would be a nice change.

Text: Samhita Chakraborty and Malancha Dasgupta