On an emotional roller coaster with Jerry Pinto
Jerry Pinto: Language layered with emotion.Pic by M.A. Pushpa Kumara
Jerry Pinto is easily one of the most prominent writers to come out of India in the last 15 years, and Colombo was lucky to have him at the HSBC Ceylon Literary and Arts Festival last week.
His first novel “Em and the Big Hoom” was instrumental in starting a conversation on Mental Health in India at the time. It tells a story of his childhood growing up in 1970s Bombay with his mother experiencing bipolar disorder.
My conversation with Pinto felt intimate. His language is always layered with emotion, whether he is writing or speaking. His intensity is palpable, taking you on an emotional roller coaster, where you are left with your inner world laid out before your eyes. So for some, reading and hearing Pinto can be overwhelming, like having someone go through your soul, scrape all the burnt and caramelised emotions stuck to the bottom of the pot.
Pinto went through an extraordinary childhood, forced to grow up at a young age to care for his mother, and struggling through the loneliness of teenage years. Having made his first friend at 14, he says he remembers clearly the joy of the moment. Pinto’s advice is to be your own archivist, to keep such memories of your life alive. For budding writers this is especially important, he says, to access the emotional and psychological states of years gone by.
He tells me that some of his fans have shared deeply haunting personal stories of their experience of living with a person struggling with their mental health. Indeed, Pinto’s conversations with his readers shape his work. His “A Book of Light: When a Loved One Has a Different Mind” is a compilation of letters Pinto received from fans who shared their experiences of living with a family member with major mental health struggles.
But Pinto also warns his readers that writing is not a replacement for healing and advises finding healthy ways to cope with mental health struggles including eating healthy, exercising and counselling. He himself set boundaries with his writing when working on “Em and the Big Hoom” intentionally making it a novel rather than a memoir to protect himself.
When it comes to genre, there is little that Pinto has not tried.
He has written biographies, poetry, children’s books, essays, and translations. He has edited collections of stories on topics ranging from caste and adolescence to Bollywood and Christmas.
“Form is subsidiary” he tells me. He never sets out to write a poem or a story. Rather, as he writes he discovers the form the words would like to take. Pinto seems to have little control over the creative process. New ideas “represent themselves to you” he declared. And his process seems to reflect the lack of agency his characters feel where they grapple with an unpredictable world.
Pinto challenges form. His novels could be memoirs, and he skillfully walks the fine line between comedy and tragedy, mixing and mangling the two as he pleases. He breaks traditions, not only in his writing but in his entire persona.
During his session, he refused to sit on the chair on stage, stepping down to be with his audience (and running back up back up on to stage every time to hear his interviewers’ questions–no small feat for a man of 59). One reason Pinto writes is because he wants to move his readers deeply and connect with them.
He is currently working on the second part of his book, “The Education of Yuri” and a translation of Susham Bedi’s “Havan,” a book about a young woman who moves to America.
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