Em and the Big Hoom (Book Review)

Book Review of Em and The Big Hoom by Divya Nambiar

On a train journey from Kerala to Mumbai, I lay down on the top berth and silently put down my kindle and closed my eyes for some time. The definitions of normal, abnormal, sane, insane, mad crisscrossed in my mind and I mourned the loss of the so-called ‘mad’ people from the world. Who are we to judge them? Who are we to put them into boxes created by our own definitions of normal, desirable and perfect to survive?

Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the accompanying phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ suddenly seemed hollow. Fittest? By what means? Thanks to Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom, a book I was looking forward to read from a long time now, my mind kept asking me questions to which all I did was to close my eyes and listen.

Living with a patient of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and some other medical conditions has been expansively described. It makes you laugh at times, shed a tear or two at others. But it teaches you to experience life in all its bittersweet glory. There are testing times, moments when one can’t take life even a bit more. And then, there we go – living life to the fullest in the next possible moment. The beauty lies in how not to let go when sticking on may look next to impossible.

Books like these come not too often on one’s way and when they do, they shake your core with words that do not hit too hard but leave an aftertaste for a long time to come.

After the last page was turned, I wondered who the real protagonist was in the story –the one who told the story or the one whose story was being told. A lifetime of experiences, packed within a few pages – it’s a tale worth sharing with the world for eons to come.

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