Meeting and Reading Jerry Pinto

I say, ‘I have survived a lot on my own, I can do it alone for the rest of my life.’ I wait for, ‘I know you can do it alone. I am saying, you don’t have to. I am staying right here.’ No, not just the words. I wonder, is it too much to ask? I know the answer, 'You haven't asked.'

I heard Jerry Pinto tell an aspiring writer, ‘Make a pact with the universe, nobody needs to know about it.’ He advised another, ‘Read one hour every day and start writing today. I’ll see you in ten years in a literary fest.’ I smiled standing on the side.

I spoke to him after everyone got their books signed. I didn’t tell him about writing. I said, ‘I have been through cancer, sexual abuses, and mostly, emotional abuse. I look at them as facts. I wrote about them, I tried to, I keep trying. It’s like I am the performer and narrator at once. I have always been that, just more aware and conscious about it since a couple of years.’ He nodded in affirmation. I didn’t hear, ‘You should get yourself checked, you sound crazy.’ In fact, when I began explaining gaslighting, out of habit, he termed it. It felt good to have someone say the term when people have constantly dismissed it or laughed at it. I told him that if I have to put my experiences of cancer together, I’ll probably write them as Fifty Funny Anecdotes and a Tale of Guilt. I don’t know how to add the sympathy or pity or bravery that people saw in me. If I were to write the tales of my poor mental health, then I will write about surviving but then people can’t even see it.

I didn’t sound half as serious as it might seem here. I have a record of downplaying things, ignoring them, laughing at them in order to not go through the tedious task of explaining what goes on in my head because most of it does sound ridiculous to my ears and I am learning to value them nonetheless. Sometimes when I hear people speak and tears well up on the sides of my eyes from laughing too hard at similar experiences, I feel the need to do something, to try and leave something. Meeting Jerry Pinto at Hyderabad Literary Fest 2020 felt a lot like that.

After his talk 'Dial M for Empathy', I rushed to the book stall to buy Em and the Big Hoom. As I searched for it, a guy picked the last copy that was right in front of my eyes. It was right there and I couldn’t see it. Is this what they call bad luck? Instead of sulking I picked up A Book of Light, When A Loved One has a Different Mind. I kept calling the guy who got the last copy of Em lucky; he kept teasing me about my bad sight. We went together to get the books signed. I made sure that Jerry Pinto knew how lucky this guy was. He was surprised to know that the stock has run out. He said, I’ll ask them to get some more tomorrow. I replied, they said the publisher doesn’t have it.

I watched him sign books, make conversations with everyone, get clicked with the ones who asked for it. It was delightful. For some reason, I perceived him as a performer who has balanced what I am trying to balance. He swapped his moods with respect to the people he interacted with, depending on the content, with finesse. His humour reminded me of my post-cancer days. This perhaps is the reason why I firmly believe that such humour is possessed by people who have not only been through shit but also made efforts to understand it, tried to get out of the why(s) and how(s), built a convincing story for the answers that were nowhere near satisfying. A personal bias.

I don’t know what I expected to feel after talking to him. I wasn't looking for validation. I just got my copy of Cobalt Blue out at the end for him to sign. He wrote “Write on! Right on!” before signing it. I clicked a picture with him. I wished I had somehow gotten a copy of Em but it was alright.

It was alright till I thought the next day, ‘Let me take a chance, what if they got the book?’ They didn’t. I checked in the morning. Somehow I couldn’t get it out of my system. I went to the stall again in the afternoon. The book was there. I bought it immediately. I hoped to get it signed too, so I carried it around that day and the next. I missed him by a second. It was alright too. Somehow it seemed okay that Em and the Big Hoom wasn’t signed. It felt like an unfinished business. My mind hovers a lot on open ends, a million possibilities of everything that can be.

I was overwhelmed by this at the end of Em!

I returned home after the festival weekend. I began reading Em while still at the Secunderabad railway station, unable to put it down. Yet, I had to. It took me a week to read the book because I had to distance myself from it. It felt too much, it felt too real. Reading the narrator talk about taking care of Em who suffered from bipolar disorder, I couldn’t stop thinking, ‘I was both’. I was the one dissociated from reality, I was the one who was aware of the dissociation. For a long time, I took care of myself. I often wondered, Is this because I wasn’t suicidal? Did people not see because I confined everything in my diary and word documents and facebook posts with privacy set to ‘Only Me’ and reverted drafts on my blog? Or did I just not suffer enough for people to notice?

Like I said, it felt too much. At once there were a few resentments and a relief, ‘Thank goodness no one saw me when I was alone, it’s a good thing that I came home only when the apex of the storm had passed. My family has been through enough already with my physical sickness, they need to relax. They are with me in ways they can be. It's not their job to fight the isolation in my head.’  Yet, all I did was whined about how they don’t see me for a long time. Eventually, it was alright. Everyone doesn’t need to see everything.

I couldn’t consciously want anyone to suffer irrespective of how badly I was hurting. All I ever hoped for was, let no one go through this, let no one suffer as I did. However, in trying to ask for help (which I could never do, I think) by keeping my experiences as transparent as possible eliminating things I am not prepared to deal with, I opened floodgates of stories from everyone around me. If I already was a listener, I learnt that listening is a selfless act. Wanting reciprocation cannot make one a good listener. I had stories that I didn’t know how to deal with, how to help my own family members. I sensed the pain when they cried by my side till 3am, as they went to bed revealing something about their childhood that kept me up all night. So, I just listened.

Yet, I cannot call it a selfless act. I was curious to know more. I wasn’t equipped to deal with those realities so I began seeing them as fictional stories. That’s the best I could do, collect raw material from anywhere and everywhere. Meeting Jerry Pinto, reading his work, unleashed something that I was trying to tame inside me. I constantly said, I don’t need to write, it’s not important. Now, all I hear is his voice saying, ‘Whatever your story is, it matters.’ These are the exact words I have told people many times, I could never believe in it for myself till I heard it from him. Not completely sure though. 

No, he didn't say them to me. He just said them.