The book is told through a series of interviews, conversations, and anecdotes from the narrator’s interactions with Em and the big Hoom. Em has suicidal tendencies and suffers with issues with mental health. The story centers around the narrator, his sister Susan, his mother: Em, his father: the big Hoom, and his Grandmother. If you’re going to stop reading this piece here because of those spoilers, here is a short summary of my “review”: please read the book, for it is a fine piece of literary fiction that will warm the cockles of your heart and take you on a journey where you know about the horrors that lie ahead, but you wish to go on nonetheless. There are a few spoilers ahead, and I do hope you won’t mind them. I’d like to focus on what made the book special to read for me. Everyone knows these nuggets about Pinto and his writing, and there are enough interviews available on the internet to indulge you more. A rigorous editing process (clearly) led to a draft that was originally 750,000 words being cut down to its final form (definitely way lesser than that number).

Pinto’s own mother suffered from bipolar disorder, and the original version of this story was accurate to a fault, leading to its abandonment. A little bit of research after reading the book confirmed this for me: while this is a piece of fiction, there are blurred lines between the source of his inspiration and the words that find themselves on paper. Pinto makes you very aware, right from when he first mentions Sir JJ Hospital, that what you’re reading is a part of him. This isn’t some specific trait in the book itself, but an amalgam of several features: the first-person narrator, the creative use of dialogue, the emotional responses, and the anecdotal knowledge attached to every interaction.

It becomes clear almost instantly that this is a tale that is extremely personal.

Till I found the digitized version of the book on the Internet Archive this afternoon, and thus successfully immersed myself in the storytelling of Jerry Pinto for the rest of my Sunday. I’ve been searching for this book for two years, trying to get my hands on a copy without much success.

Big hoom