Language: English Pages: 175 About The Author Jerry Pinto is the author of Em and the Big Hoom (winner of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Hindu Literary Prize and the Crossword Book Award for Fiction) and Helen: The Lift and Times of an H-Bomb (winner of the National Award for the Best Book on Cinema). His other works include Asylum, a book of poems; and translations (from Marathi) of Daya Pawar's autobiography Baluta, Sachin Kundalkar's novel Cobalt Blue and Vandana Mishra's memoir I, the Salt Doll. He has also edited several anthologies, including Bombay, Meri Jaan: Writings on Mumbai (with Naresh Fernandes). Introduction MY MOTHER WAS bipolar. It began when I was born. For the next thirty-six years, she would make several attempts to kill herself. Of this material, I crafted a novel, Em and the Big Hoorn, published by Ravi Singh in 2012. At one of the first readings that followed, a journalist whom I had thought of as a friend stood up and asked, `Don't you feel guilty that you used your mother and her life to craft this beautiful book? Somehow I got through the moment and the rest of the evening without tears or rage, and I thought the toughest part was behind me. But of course I was being optimistic. Over the next few months, the readings I did went well enough, but the question-and-answer sessions that followed left me wondering what I had unleashed. 'I don't know what happens,' I said to a colleague, 'but these readings seem to become encounter groups. The last one had this woman who began to talk about how her family had locked her brother in his room for five years because he claimed that God was talking to him. It was only much later that they realized what was going on and got him psychiatric help.' My colleague smiled and I had the uncomfortable fee