The Illicit Happiness of Other People

1. The Underdog Family

OUSEP CHACKO, ACCORDING TO Mariamma Chacko, is the kind of man who has to be killed at the end of a story. But he knows that she is not very sure about this sometimes, especially in the mornings. He sits at his desk, as usual, studying a large pile of cartoons, trying to solve the only mystery that matters to her. He does not ask for coffee, but she brings it anyway, landing the glass on the wooden desk with minor violence to remind him of last night’s disgrace. She flings open the windows, empties his ashtray and arranges the newspapers on the table. And when he finally leaves for work without a word, she stands in the hall and watches him go down the stairs.

On the playground below, a hard brown earth with stray grass, Ousep walks with quick short strides towards the gate. He can see the other men, the good husbands and the good fathers, their black shoes polished, serious shirts already damp in the humid air. They walk to the scooter shed, carrying inverted helmets that contain their outrageously small vegetarian lunches. More men emerge from the stairway tunnels of Block A, which is an austere white building with three floors. Their tidy, auspicious wives in cotton saris now appear in the balconies to bid goodbye. They are mumbling prayers, smiling at other women, peeping with one eye into their own blouses.

The men never greet Ousep. They turn away, or become interested in the ground, or wipe their spectacles. But among their own, they have great affection. They are a fellowship, and they can communicate by just clearing the phlegm in their throats.

‘Gorbachev,’ a delicate man says.

‘Gorbachev,’ the other one says.

Having thus completed the analysis of the main story in The Hindu, which is Mikhail Gorbachev’s election as the first executive president of the Soviet Union, they walk towards their scooters. A scooter in Madras is a man’s promise that he will not return home drunk in the evening. Hard-news reporters like Ousep Chacko consider it an insult to be seen on one, but these men are mostly bank clerks. They now hold the handlebars of their scooters and stand in a languid way. Then they kick suddenly as if to startle the engine into life. They kick many times, some even appear to bounce in the air. Eventually, the engines roar and they ride out, one by one, sitting at the very edge of the front seat as if that is the cheaper option. They will return the same way at six in the evening carrying jasmine flowers for their wives, who will wear them in their freshly washed hair, filling their homes with an aphrodisiacal odour and stirring the peace of their fathers-in-law who live with them, those old men who are so starved for flesh that they fondle children, fondle fully grown men, furtively flap their thighs when they watch women’s tennis on TV.

At the gates, the fragile watchman stands in a farcical paramilitary outfit that puffs in the wind, and he cautiously salutes his foe. Ousep nods without looking. That always gets the guard’s respect. Ousep turns for a glimpse of the women on the balconies, and they pretend they were not looking at him. On his own balcony on the third floor there is no one.

As he walks towards the far end of the street he is in full view of all the balconies of the four identical buildings on Balaji Lane, in full view of all the housewives and the unmoving old wraiths, who watch with open mouths. Ousep walks fast in the mornings, the little finger of his right hand sticking out as if to receive a signal. From the other gates more scooters emerge. Some of the riders stare at him as if it is safer to meet his eyes when they are wearing helmets, which is true in a way. Women disappear from the balconies munching the final strands of prayer, women appear on the balconies preoccupied with many things. When they see him, their eyes rest on him a moment longer to accommodate a quick judgement. Considering everything, considering all that has passed and the way he is, it is reasonable that people should stare at him, but he hates it. They may find it hilarious if they are told this but the truth is that Ousep Chacko is a man who wants to be inconspicuous, who suffers when eyes are on him. But then the fate of shy people is that all their fears usually come true.

As things are, it does not take much to be a spectacle on this narrow tarred lane. It waits all day to be startled by the faintest hint of strangeness passing through. Such as a stray working woman in the revolutionary sleeveless blouse, who has the same aura here as a divorcee. A man with a ponytail. A north Indian girl in jeans so tight you can see daylight between her legs. It is as if such apparitions are a sign that the future, which has arrived in other places, is now prospecting the city. Here now is the final stand of an age, the last time one can profile a street in Madras and be correct. Men are managers, mothers are housewives. And all bras are white. Anglo-Indian girls who walk in floral frocks are Maria.

That is how the people on Balaji Lane would remember these days many years later. And when they remembered these times they would also remember, with a chuckle, the Malayalee Catholic family, the cuckoos among the crows — the despicable man called Ousep Chacko, his stranded wife who told her bare walls all her reasonable grudges, and their son Thoma, who was weak in maths. What became of them, did they survive the sheer length of life, did they make it through?

And they would remember Unni, of course. They would never forget Unni Chacko. ‘Remember Unni?’ they would say. ‘Did anybody ever find out why he did that? Why did Unni Chacko do what he did?’ Nobody would ever mention what Unni actually did. It is such a terrifying word in any language.

Ousep does not want to think of his boy so early, at least not until the first interview of the day. If his mind drifted in that direction he would be lost once again in all its familiar traps, and he would be asking himself the same exasperating questions a thousand times. He wants to think of something else, something inconsequential. But the image of Unni Chacko is already assembling itself in Ousep’s head, staring back at his father from a self-portrait. What Ousep sees is a boy with keen narrow eyes, a broad forehead and a high mop of thick hair. A seventeen-year-old cartoonist, an exceptional cartoonist, but too young to accept that subtlety is not always a mask of mediocrity. Like most cartoonists, the boy does not talk much, and when he does speak he is not very funny. Most of the time he is excruciatingly terse, even with his mother, whom he loves for exaggerated reasons — the only way sons can love their mothers.

That is what Ousep sees; beyond this he knows very little about his son. There is no shame in accepting that. No matter what their delusions are, parents do not really know their children. Ousep is just a man who knows less than the other fathers. But he has studied every inch of the sixty-three cartoons and comics by Unni that lie about the house, most of them in a wooden trunk. Sixty-four if Ousep includes one inexplicable comic that has landed by chance in his hands, which he has hidden from Mariamma. Not an easy thing to do in that house. He has hidden it inside the radio. He has to unscrew the back panel every time he wants to take it out.

Somewhere in Unni’s cartoons and comics is the clue that will explain everything. That is what Ousep believes. There is nothing else left to believe, really.

Most of Unni’s works are comics, their stories told over several pages, through elaborate black-and-white sketches with a sudden dash of watercolour here and there. There is no single theme that unites all his works, and there are no dark superhero stories as people might imagine. But, for some reason, there is a disproportionate number of comics that lampoon the human search for the meaning of life.

In the comic that is titled Absolute Truth, a blank white envelope floats through deep space, orbits strange worlds and finally heads towards Earth. When it enters the Earth’s atmosphere, the envelope burns and what emerges is another white envelope. It has ‘Absolute Truth’ written on it. It floats down and falls on an endless field. A bare-chested farmer picks it up, opens the envelope, takes out a sheet of paper. He reads it and starts laughing uncontrollably. He passes it on to his wife who, too, begins to laugh. She shows it to the infant in her arm, who becomes breathless with laughter. The farmer passes the Absolute Truth to his neighbour, who holds his stomach, rolls about his cabbage farm and laughs. The letter changes hands across homes, villages, across cities, across the whole world, leaving people hysterical with laughter at the long-awaited discovery of absolute truth.

In Enlightenment, a sage in robes is meditating; he is sitting on a high snowy peak. Seasons change, storms pass, but nothing bothers him. He gets a massive erection, which subsides in time, but the man is undisturbed, unaware of what is happening to him and around him. Mountain climbers arrive with their national flags and leave disappointed when they find someone already on the summit. The sage becomes very old, his beard turns white. Finally, he becomes radiant. A halo appears behind him. He has achieved enlightenment. He opens his eyes looking totally stunned. He screams, ‘Shit, I am a cartoon.’

There are very few dialogues in Unni’s comics and the absence of prose lends a brooding, abstract quality to his works, especially in one of his most ambitious stories, Beatles, Crossing, which is twenty-one pages long. It begins with a red beetle standing on one side of a broad black road. The beetle says, ‘I want to go to the other side.’ And it starts crossing the road. The comic then cuts to the four Beatles performing in various parts of the world, against backdrops of iconic monuments. Everywhere they go there are huge delirious crowds. At one point in the comic there is a question: ‘Why Is Ringo Starr Not As Famous As The Other Three Beatles?’ Under the question is a portrait of the four Beatles performing. At the bottom of the page is the answer: ‘Because He Was Always Sitting’. Could this be true? As the story unfolds, it appears that the Beatles are slowly growing sad and discontent. They come to India and meet holy men, who are always in yogic poses. The Beatles begin to meditate, wear Indian clothes, get into extraordinary yogic contortions, play Indian classical instruments, shit on the banks of a river. But then they become sad and lost once again. They return to England, return to their old lives. And one day, they cross a road, they walk across a zebra crossing. All through this, the red beetle has been making its difficult progress across the same road, narrowly escaping violent death under the tyres of speeding vehicles. The final window of the comic has the triumphant red beetle, who has crossed the road and reached the pavement, which is strikingly identical to the pavement from which he had started his difficult journey. He says, ‘I have crossed over to the other side.’

Ousep snaps out of the comic world because he is reminded of something unpleasant, something that vaguely resembles a herbivorous animal’s petty fear of life, but he is not sure what has made him think of this. Then he recognizes what it is. The sight of three adolescent schoolboys who have just emerged from a gate and are now walking in his direction. One of them has sacred ash smeared on his forehead in three straight lines, as if a cycle has run over him. They are in school uniform — white shirts that are already slipping out of their khaki trousers. They don’t walk erect, there is no spring in them, there is no joy. The boys stare at him with meaning; he returns their stares without contempt.

The most foolish description of the young is that they are rebellious. The truth is that they are a fellowship of cowards. It is true anywhere in the world, but the fear of the adolescent boys on Balaji Lane is exceptional. They are terrified of everything, of life, of their future, of friends doing better than them, of falling off their cycles, of big trucks and large men, and of beautiful women. The only thing that does not scare them is calculus.

They might have turned out a bit differently if they had not been so retarded by a long torturous preparation for one engineering entrance exam. The day they were born and were diagnosed with having a penis, their fate was decided — to one day take the Joint Entrance Exam. The toughest exam in the world, their fathers say. One in a hundred would make it. It has been over twenty years since anyone from the colony has got through. Their fathers tell them every day of their lives, sometimes holding a leather belt in their hands, that the JEE alone will decide their lives because it will eventually take them to America on a full scholarship. On a street where every boy knows that his future rests on a single test with multiple-choice questions, it is appropriate that the four identical buildings here are named A, B, C and D.

As the three boys pass Ousep, he hears one of them ask, ‘Tan 2x is equal to?’ The other two answer simultaneously in a burst of triumph, ‘Two tan x by one minus tan square x.’

THE BOY SEES OUSEP walking towards him and turns his face away, like a wounded lover who truly does not wish reconciliation. Sai Shankaran, a close friend of Unni, according to general consensus, waits for his bus every morning at the Liberty bus stop. The last few weeks, Ousep has come here almost every morning to torment him. Sai claims he has revealed all that he knows and has nothing more to say. But Ousep does not believe that, he wants to break him. That should not be very difficult. Sai was seventeen when he was slapped by his father in front of his friends for playing cards. He is twenty now but he still looks like a boy who can be slapped around by an older male.

Sai stands in his spineless way, young but antiquated, studious but not clever, a thick steel watch on his wrist, his oiled black hair combed in the good-boy hairstyle. He looks like the past of an old man.

He failed all the engineering entrance exams that he had taken, and scored just eighty-nine per cent in the twelfth-standard board exams. So he endures the terrifying ignominy of studying physics in just another obsolete arts and science college where Jesuit brothers and blind people go to study English literature. He is in the final year now, but, still unaccustomed to failure, he goes through life like a ghost and probably avoids all the cousins and friends who go to engineering colleges. Sai will learn to be happy again one day, he will even imagine that he is not worthless. He does not know it yet but the simple fact is that he will make it. Ambition is the capacity for unhappiness and Sai has a lot of that to pull through.

And one day he will land in the United States, just like almost everybody else from his class. And one evening he will meet his old friends at a vegetarian restaurant. When they run out of things to say, someone will say, with a gentle smile, ‘Remember Unni Chacko?’ And through the silence that the name will cast he will tell himself that Unni Chacko may have laughed at him once upon a time but as things stand, Sai has won. And Unni had long ago lost.

Sai and Unni, taken together, must have been an odd sight. Sai, always tense, toiling, afraid that he is a moron and groomed from childhood to believe that intelligence is purely a mathematical ability. Unni, handsome in a careless way, and passing through life with the lethargy of an artist. It is hard to accept there was any love or respect between them. That any two men in the world have real affection between them is itself a myth, chiefly of the two men. But Sai and Unni, especially, are impossible friends. One must have used the other.

‘I am here,’ Ousep says. Sai’s head is already turned away, so he cranes his neck and looks beyond the horizon to stress that he is not interested in talking. ‘I hope you’ve changed your mind, Sai. Hope you’ve something more to tell me.’

This is how it goes every morning. Ousep talking, Sai silent. ‘I hate doing this, Sai, I hate bothering you like this, but I have no choice. I know there is something you’re not telling me.’

Sai’s chest heaves, he shuffles a bit and makes an exaggerated gesture of putting his palm over his eyes and trying to divine the number of an approaching bus. But it appears that it is not his bus, and he makes another dramatic face of great dismay. The city is full of terrible actors. That is what historians never say about Madras, it is filled with hams. The bus arrives fully packed, spilling a swarm of tiny starved young men who would not have made it this far in life if it had not been for all those free vaccinations. Dozens of them, some in trousers, many in lungis, are still dangling from the doors and windows. Two cops in plain clothes who have been waiting on the road take the sticks they had hidden in the back of their shirts, and start hitting the legs of the danglers, who now try to surge into the bus, screaming and laughing.

The commotion passes and there is reasonable quiet for the moment. Just speeding vehicles, and their horns. ‘I heard something yesterday,’ Ousep says. ‘You, Unni and Somen Pillai went to meet a nun who had taken a lifelong vow of silence. You didn’t tell me about this. See, this is what I mean. There are some things you didn’t tell me. Why, Sai? Why didn’t you tell me?’ Sai remains silent, as expected, and cranes his neck again. ‘Why would three boys go to meet a nun who does not speak?’ Ousep asks. ‘Say something, talk to me. I am meeting her tomorrow. What must I ask her?’

Sai’s stoic silence is a clever strategy. It does frustrate Ousep and make him feel silly. Or is Ousep imagining things? Maybe it is not a strategy, maybe the boy has truly told him everything that he thought was significant.

‘OK, don’t tell me anything, Sai. Just tell me how I can meet Somen Pillai. Take me to Somen Pillai. That’s all I ask. Somen Pillai.’

A look of immense relief comes over Sai. His bus has finally arrived. He looks without affection at Ousep and says what he has said before. ‘Why have you started probing again? What happened?’

‘Nothing has happened.’

‘People say you’ve found something. That’s why you’re hounding all his classmates again.’

‘They don’t know what they are talking about.’

‘I hear you have been trying to meet everyone.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Why are you doing this now? Why now? After three years. Why?’

Why now? Why now? That is what people ask Ousep every day.

‘Just give up,’ Sai says. ‘Get on with your life. That’s all I can say.’

Sai wades through the layers of damp bodies on the footboard of the bus, and makes his way in. He will squeeze himself safely between the men, feel his wallet at all times, and take great care to ensure that he does not brush against the women because he is precisely the sort of harmless fruit the ladies in the bus wait to slap and punch and stab with the sharp end of their floral umbrellas for the times when they are touched and poked, the elastic of their underwear pulled and released like a catapult by the flying squads of college boys who board the packed buses just to do that.

There is an untitled comic by Unni about one of these squads, which shows how they do what they do, and how much they enjoy it. The comic ends in the distant future of the five boys of the gang. All of them are respectable men who go home every evening to a loving traditional wife and two adoring children.

After Sai’s bus leaves, only a young woman and her little daughter are left at the bus stop. The woman and the girl have yellow faces from a turmeric treatment the previous night to make them fairer. The daughter is playing a private game. She pats her mother’s buttocks and runs away giggling, returns to pat again and run a few feet. She keeps doing it. The mother stands looking in one direction, hoping to see her bus. A man appears and stands behind the woman. The daughter stops playing the game now and begins to toy with a chocolate wrapper she has found on the ground. The man gently pats the woman’s back. She thinks it is her daughter, so she stands there without any expression. The man pats her again and looks away. He pats her at short intervals, and finally he lets his hand stay on her. Ousep stares at the scene without opinion, without outrage. A man’s hand on a woman’s arse and the woman, yawning now, looking at the world go by.

It is a moment that has no meaning. It is as if the tired charade of human life with its great pursuits and history and wounds and deep convictions has collapsed, and the world has been suddenly revealed as a place that has no point, that does not need the hypothesis of meaning to explain its existence.

IT IS A MISFORTUNE to be in the presence of a writer, even a failed writer, to be seen by him, be his passing study and remain in his corrupt memory. It is like the insult of a corpse on the road by a war photographer. Ousep wonders whether cartoonists are writers, he hopes they have different minds. He is with a lot of them and all of them are looking at him. What do they see? A man with silver-and-black hair that falls in curls at his nape, and a journalistic French beard. Surely a creative type, like them. Or do they see more than that, do they see a man illuminated by failure, a tragic father who is still probing the life of his son? Should he try to achieve a feeble stoop and somewhat moist eyes, look weak and dependent, make them careless about what they choose to say?

The Society of Amateur Cartoonists meets once a month in the Madras Christian College, in a portion of a long corridor. The far end of the sunlit corridor frames a huddle of ancient trees that pretends to hide a thick forest within its darkness. Usually, not more than twenty cartoonists attend these meetings but today, because word had spread that Unni Chacko’s father wanted to see them, there are nearly fifty cartoonists of various ages, all of them sitting in a crescent on the ground. Ousep is among them, he has refused the offer of a foldable chair. In the small crowd, there are five identical bald Buddhist monks in saffron robes, who look like giant infants. And just two girls in jeans and T-shirt who survey the others with the amused look of a newsreader who is finished with political news and is about to announce that the lioness in the Vandalur Zoo has delivered four healthy cubs.

Ousep did not know that his son was a member of such a group until a few days ago when someone mentioned it to him in passing. Unni was in the society for just a few months, he was among the youngest they have ever admitted, but people here remember him in a way that suggests he was important. When Ousep walked into the gathering, everyone stood up and clapped. After the fuss ended and Ousep did not have to nod graciously any more, the president of the society formally introduced him as ‘chief reporter of the UNI’.

Ousep cannot deny that, but it reminds him that he would never be introduced as the greatest writer Kerala has ever produced. When he was young, everybody said that was his destiny. But then the years passed and somehow he did not write his great novel. He decayed in a state of gentle happiness. Or is it just that he did not truly believe he could write a brilliant novel? Many years ago, when Mariamma was still interested in him, she had told him, while sticking a stamp on an envelope, ‘Strong people write bad stories.’ Why has the comment stayed with him? Was she calling him strong or was it a cruel review of his short stories?

OUSEP TELLS THE CARTOONISTS, ‘I don’t want you to solve the puzzle for me,’ which is a lie, of course. ‘I want you to tell me what you remember. I want to know Unni Chacko better, that’s all there is to this.’

Nobody speaks after that, they stare at him. It is as if he is a wounded presence. But then, slowly, the silence gives way to festive murmurs and even laughter. Through all this, Ousep’s eye scans the gathering for the quiet ones, who may know what he really wants to know.

‘Way beyond his age,’ the president is saying. He is a large man with an enormous paunch and a thick moustache. ‘Unni was way beyond seventeen.’ The man is probably in his late thirties and Ousep finds it hard to accept that his child used to know such men, grown men, fat men. ‘Unni didn’t like to get into the conventional superhero-supervillain kind of stuff, you know,’ the man says. ‘But he created a superhero series. Stunning work, stunning.’

Unni’s superheroes, according to this man, did not have any useful powers. They could not fly, they did not have muscles, they did not even wear tight outfits. They wore shirts and trousers, and they possessed silly gifts. The Styleman, for instance, could comb his hair by just moving the skin on his scalp. The Staplerman could staple anything with his fingers. These heroes somehow valiantly fought equally ridiculous villains. Ousep has not seen the series, it is not among the collection at home. There were probably several works that Unni destroyed for some reason.

‘I remember a single-panel cartoon by Unni,’ a pleasant boy with affluent skin says. ‘It has an old woman telling her old husband, “Let’s go to a restaurant for dinner tonight and talk about you, you and you.”’ There is mild laughter, like a passing breeze.

A delicate silence falls as people decide what they want to share. Someone begins to giggle. It is a slender effeminate boy with a jovial face. He says, ‘Unni had a very serious problem. He had this artistic objection to the love symbol. He said it doesn’t look like a heart, he said it looks more like a red arse.’ Everybody laughs but soon a debate erupts over the red heart. Some like the symbol, they think it is a stroke of genius on a par with something called the Smiley. But others take Unni’s side. They do see it as a red arse. As the debate collapses into a good-natured commotion, the jovial boy stands up and threatens to take off his clothes to prove his point. Everybody begs him not to do it. Some cartoonists throw nervous glances at Ousep, probably to check whether they are being disrespectful, insensitive maybe. So Ousep maintains a sporting smile. The boy bends forward, raising his arse in the air. ‘Look at it from this angle,’ he says, and runs his long thin hand over the shape of his haunches. ‘See, can you see, my bum is the symbol of love.’

As the debate continues, Ousep whispers to the president, who is sitting beside him, and asks why the two girls have nothing to say about Unni. ‘They joined us long after Unni stopped coming here,’ the president says. ‘They don’t know him but they have heard of him. Everybody has heard about him. We talk a lot about Unni.’

It appears, at least for now, there is not a single girl in Madras who knows Unni well. How unfortunate it is for Unni that he does not live in the extravagant memory of an infatuated young woman.

There is a full-bearded young man in the gathering, who is somehow isolated from all that is going on, but he has been staring at Ousep for a while. He looks away when Ousep catches his gaze. ‘Who is that?’ Ousep asks in a whisper. ‘That bearded boy in the T-shirt which has a cow’s skull on it.’

‘That’s Beta,’ the president says. ‘It’s his pen name. Nobody knows his real name.’

‘Beta as in alpha, beta, gamma?’

‘I think so. Yes. I am surprised he is here. He does not come often. Mr Chacko, if he says anything about Unni, don’t mind him. Something is wrong with him.’

Soon, the cartoonists forget Ousep, which is a good development. They are still talking about Unni but they are talking among themselves and not putting on a show any more. They have even stopped throwing glances at him, except Beta, who stares like a child. Ousep listens with full attention to what the cartoonists are saying, though he has heard versions of all this before, many times — Unni’s theory that the unfortunate are not as miserable as the world imagines. That urchins, the handicapped, orphans, prisoners and others are much happier than people think. And that language is a trap, that a dark evolutionary force has created language to limit human thought. That writers are overrated fools. That all religions came from ancient comic writers. And that the ultimate goal of comics is the same as the purpose of humanity — to break free from language.

There is now a sudden silence as if everybody has finished talking at once. And it appears that nobody has anything more to say. But then a feeble voice from somewhere in the last row says, ‘He read my mind, he actually read my mind.’ It is a boy with expensive rimless spectacles. He tries to laugh to convey that he does not really believe in the paranormal.

Ousep has heard this, too. Unni’s classmates have told him about his son’s rumoured ability but Ousep has met only three before this day who have experienced it first-hand. The cartoonist here is the fourth. The boy says, ‘He asked me to think of a number. I thought of a number and he guessed it. Simple.’

‘Do you remember what the number was?’ Ousep asks, though he is certain that the answer is ‘thirty-three’.

‘Interesting question,’ the boy says.

‘Do you remember the number?’

‘I will never forget the number,’ the boy says. ‘It was thirty-three.’

As the evening grows, the silences stretch longer, and the cartoonists clearly have very little left to say. Ousep asks, ‘Does any of you know who Somen Pillai is?’ The cartoonists shake their heads. Nobody knows Somen Pillai here.

The silence that follows is long and decisive. The society looks restless now, the cartoonists want to leave. Some boys are wearing their bags around their shoulders, ready to stand. How long can people talk about a seventeen-year-old boy, really? The president grabs the chance to raise his oversized black pen and says, ‘Unni Chacko.’ The cartoonists raise their pens and repeat, ‘Unni Chacko.’ The president makes a squiggle on a sheet of paper and gives it to Ousep. It is a caricature of Unni, a very good one considering that it was made in just seconds. Others stand in line to hand their quick squiggles to Ousep. In most of these comic portraits, his boy has acquired angelic wings and a halo. One has him sitting in the clouds, looking bored. That breaks Ousep’s heart. To imagine the eternal boredom of his child. He wishes there to be no eternity, he wishes that even for his foes.

Beta is not part of the queue of cartoonists who are handing in their tributes. But he stands leaning on a fat, ancient pillar and looks on. When everybody is done with their tributes, Ousep holds the thick bunch of papers in his hand and walks to Beta.

‘What is your name?’ Ousep asks.

‘Beta.’

‘What’s your real name?’

‘What’s real about a name?’

‘Why are you not Alpha?’

‘Because I am Beta.’

Some of the cartoonists who are leaving look with passing curiosity at Beta, who does not meet their eyes. He appears clever and formidable, the type of bearded young man who would call himself Alpha. But he has restive eyes and they throw suspicious glances at distant objects. He is now staring at the five monks who are walking away down the lawns in a swarm of college girls.

‘I feel you want to say something to me,’ Ousep says.

‘Yes,’ Beta says, returning his steady gaze to Ousep. ‘I’ve something to say but it is nothing important, is that all right?’

‘That’s all right. I am not here to dig out important things.’

‘That’s not true. You’re here to solve the puzzle.’

‘I am here to understand my son better.’

‘As you say. I won’t argue with you,’ Beta says. ‘I remember once when I attended one of these dumb meetings, Unni told me that he was working on a graphic novel. He had an idea but he didn’t know how to get into it.’

‘What was the idea?’

Ousep takes a moment to realize that Beta has launched straight into the story. Thousands of years ago in the history of man, a great darkness has fallen. The war between good and evil has ended. And it has ended with the complete triumph of evil and a total, irrevocable extermination of good. Evil is cunning, it quickly splits itself into two — into apparent good and evil, so that mankind is under the delusion that the great conflict is still raging and it will not go in search of the truth.

‘So all that we think is good,’ Beta says, ‘love and art and enlightenment, and all that we think is the pursuit of truth is actually a form of evil. That was the idea. He had to work characters into it. Make something out of it.’

‘It is a good story.’

‘It’s an idea. It’s not a story. He had to find the story.’

‘It is a good idea.’

‘It’s a lousy story,’ Beta says. ‘In a story, good has to triumph over evil. You cannot start a story by saying that good is finished for ever. You have to give good a chance to defeat evil in the end. That’s the con. That’s the structure of every story in the history of stories. Every storyteller has to work within this con.’

‘That’s true,’ Ousep says. ‘That is very obviously true. I am so glad I am talking to you.’

‘I don’t think Unni was working on that comic,’ Beta says. ‘I think he really believed that.’

‘Believed what?’

‘What I just told you. It was not a comic. I think he really believed that good was destroyed thousands of years ago, and evil split into two.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Unni was like that. He used to tell me, “What if the meaning of life was realized ages ago by early man, the whole business of truth settled, and the world today is merely a post-Enlightenment residue?” I think that’s why he was very interested in delusions.’

‘Did you say “delusions”?’

‘Yes. He said every delusion has an objective, and the objective of a delusion is not merely to colonize one brain but to transmit itself to as many brains as possible. That is the purpose of every delusion, that is how a delusion survives, that is how it succeeds. By spreading, maximizing its colony, like a virus. According to Unni, any philosophy that can be transmitted to another person is a delusion. If two people believe in the same idea of truth, it is a delusion.’

Ousep feels silly asking a young bearded man this but it is a reasonable question in the circumstances. ‘So what is truth, then?’

‘Truth is a successful delusion.’

‘According to Unni?’

‘That’s what he said.’

‘Do you know who Somen Pillai is?’

‘You ask this again. Who is that?’

‘He was in Unni’s school, his class. His closest friend, everyone says.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘I do feel silly asking this, Beta, but I can’t help it. Why do you think Unni did what he did?’

‘Why have you started digging again, Mr Chacko?’

‘I never stopped.’

‘Is that the truth?’

‘Yes.’

‘I have no idea why Unni did that, Mr Chacko. I am sorry. I know that’s why you are here.’

And so it goes every day. People have a lot of things to say about Unni Chacko, they show his world as a surprisingly large place, but nobody can explain his final act. Ousep wonders whether anyone truly knows why his son died, if a day will ever come when he finally solves Unni.

That a mystery must have a resolution is obviously not a requirement of nature. It is, in fact, another deceit of writers. A plot device, like the idea of a beginning, a middle and an end. In the real world, are mysteries usually solved? What are the chances? Was there ever a person in this world who went in search of an answer and actually found it?

Ousep has been searching for three years, since that Saturday when he had returned to his office after the chief minister’s lunch. He found almost the entire staff, more than twenty of them, standing near his desk, in a huddle. When they saw him they grew nervous, he could see. They stared at him. He stopped a few feet away and looked at them with his hands on his hips. It is a moment that comes to every person in the world. It may come as a phone call, it can arrive through a stranger at the door, or it can happen this way — when you return to your desk to file a quick report, people stand waiting for you. And someone gathers the courage to say, ‘Your son is dead, Ousep. He fell from the terrace. That’s what your neighbours say. They say he fell.’

When Ousep reached the hospital he saw Thoma standing outside the gates with a neighbour. Ousep was mad with relief and joy. Obviously, there had been a mistake. The boy was very much alive, Thoma was alive. But for some reason the boy was standing outside the hospital gates. Then, for the first time in his life, Ousep went numb with raw fear. Could it be Unni? But how could it be Unni? Only little children fell, wasn’t that true, only children died falling. And if there was a person in the world who was sure of his every step it was that boy. Minutes later, in the morgue, Ousep saw the corpse, the still, cold body of Unni Chacko, a boy of seventeen. By evening, people were beginning to tell him the most absurd thing he had ever heard.

Unni had jumped from the terrace, head first. Of all the people in the world, Unni. Why, Unni? Nobody still has a clue. After three years, nobody has a clue.

These are the facts, they are not disputed. About three years ago, on 16 May 1987, Unni Chacko left home in the morning after working all night on a comic. He was gone for nearly four hours. Nobody knows where he had gone. At noon he got a haircut. When he returned to Block A, he played cricket with the boys. He bowled, he did not like to bat. Then he decided to go home. He took the stairs. It is not clear what happened next. He must have reached home, which is on the third floor, the highest floor, but nobody saw him on the stairs or going into his house. His mother was not at home, she had gone to attend a prayer meeting. His younger brother, Thoma, was at home, but fast asleep in his room. In all probability, Unni reached home. The house is never latched or locked in the day, so he could have entered without ringing the doorbell. About twenty minutes after Unni took the stairs, he was seen on the terrace. According to six eyewitnesses — three boys on the terrace of Block A and three women in Block B who had a clear view — Unni stood on the railing, composed and in control. He stopped for a moment, crossed his hands behind his back and plunged down. He fell on the concrete walkway that runs beside the playground. He died instantly, people say. He did not leave a note. His death came weeks after the school board exams in which, as it turned out, he had somehow scored seventy-eight per cent. He had no intention of going to a regular college, but he had plans, the boy had many plans. In six weeks he would have turned eighteen.

Ousep did not know it then, but Unni told a lot of people that he was a Hindu, an atheist Hindu, whatever that means, but he went the Christian way. The funeral mass was in Fatima Church. That was the first time Ousep had entered a church in over two decades. The coffin moved down the aisle towards the altar on the arms of strangers. Ousep walked behind them, hugging the shoulder of the boy’s mother, both slowly passing through rows of empty pews. How strong, the legs of dumb parents, how strong. The strangers placed the coffin in front of the altar and left. The lights went on, the fans that hung from the ceiling on long white stems came to life. The silence was so deep that he could hear the hum of the tube lights. Mariamma sat on the floor beside the coffin. She took her son’s lifeless hand in hers and rubbed it slowly. Ousep stood beside her, with his hands on his hips, wondering what he must do. What does a father do at the final mass of his son?

A short, stout man in a white cassock walked to the coffin and stood with his hands joined at his crotch. After a few moments he said, ‘You must be Ousep Chacko.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve never seen you before.’

‘I never come here,’ Ousep said.

‘Eventually, they all come. Isn’t that true, Ousep? The high and the low, they all come. Your wife is a good woman. She is a pious woman.’

‘She is.’

‘She is like a child.’

‘That’s true.’

‘I want to tell you something, Ousep,’ the man said softly, taking Ousep a few feet away from the coffin. ‘We are in the temple of truth but we are also men of the world, we are practical men. I am hearing things about how the boy died, you know people talk. I don’t want to know how he died. It does not matter. As long as he is truly dead I will bury him. But what we say is that it was an accident. We will say that today and we will say it every day.’

‘As you wish.’

‘The boy, he was a good boy deep inside. But he was not normal.’

Ousep looked carefully at the priest. A fifty-year-old virgin, a fully grown man in a white gown who believed that he was an elf who connected God to man, this clown thought Unni was strange.

‘Ousep,’ the priest said, ‘some boys wander far. There is nothing we can do about it. They wander too far.’

There was a flicker of triumph in his narrow eyes. It was a triumph Ousep would see often, in the days to come, in the eyes of other men.

The priest left and in a few minutes appeared at the altar. He told the empty church, ‘We are here today to remember Unni Chacko, son of Ousep Chacko and Mariamma Chacko. A child of only seventeen. Such a pure child that God has taken him to heaven. Unni was a very talented and bright boy. He was a good person, and everybody loved him.’

That was it. The story of Unni Chacko’s life as told by an imbecile to an empty hall.

The priest wiped his mouth and said his prayers with slow tired movements, throwing glances at the walls and the floor and the empty pews. For a moment his eyes rested on Mariamma; they stayed longer than he had intended and his face slowly changed from blank to disturbed, and he began to pray in a distracted way.

Ousep looked at his wife. Her lips were curled into her mouth, her head tilted, her eyes glaring at the giant crucifix on the altar, and she wagged a finger.

MARIAMMA CHACKO BITES HER lip with a ferocity that makes her head tremble and her eyes look interested. She stands facing the bare yellow wall and she wags her index finger. She tells the wall, in a quivering voice, about Ousep’s mother and his nine sisters, all unforgettable cows whom only the soil and weather of Kerala can produce. She gets into this state sometimes and when she is this way she loses her sense of the world around her. But there is something about the hum in the air, and the way it stirs the peace of noon. It is now clearly the murmur of men and it does not have the joy of a road accident. The voices are faint and meek as if the men are trying to achieve silence, which is impossible in Madras if more than one person has gathered at a place. As the hum grows, Mariamma’s rebuke of the wall becomes softer, she begins to whisper. Finally, she gives a snide nod, relaxes her muscles and is even mildly embarrassed by what she has been doing. She licks her lips and listens carefully.

The murmur reminds her of Unni. The truth is that everything reminds her of Unni and she only invents the special connections. But the murmur does have a haunting presence in her memories because the worst day of her life had begun this way — with the whispers of men that she had first thought had nothing to do with her life. That Saturday, after the prayer meeting, she walked home with a branch of stolen bougainvillea in her hand. When she went down Balaji Lane people looked at her from their balconies and windows, and she thought it strange because people did not look at her any more. When she was at the gates of Block A, she saw a crowd that looked her in the eye. A deep human silence spread, and she could not feel her legs any more. A woman took her by hand and said that they must walk to Ajanta Hospital.

The moment Unni’s head hit the ground, what was she doing? She has thought about this many times. She hopes it was not the moment when she was trying not to laugh as the prayer group raised its cries to the heavens, or when she approached one of the ladies for a loan, or when she tried to smile in shame as her request was being politely declined. She hopes he had not fallen when she was in the prayer group because she is not proud of what she does there. She is the spy of the parish priest, the mole who brings him news about the Catholic sheep that are increasingly flocking to Pentecostal evangelists. That is what Mariamma does in her spare time, and she does it because the priest waives the school fees, instructs the Sacred Heart Family Store to give her anything she wants on credit as long as she clears the dues every two months.

She hopes she was doing something dignified when the last sigh of breath left the lungs of her child; she hopes she was walking back home like a good mother, thinking about what meal to cook for two boys who ate so much.

When Unni was a little boy he was deeply interested in getting married. He was just five then and he was willing to wait till he reached the legal age but not a day more. He was so desperate to be married that she often used it to get her way. ‘Unni, if you don’t brush your teeth I won’t get you married.’ That was enough to send him running to the bathroom. How did that boy grow so strong?

He spoke a lot about death but not in a dark way as people now claim. One morning he stood in the doorway of the kitchen, bare-chested as he always was when he was at home. He had red spots all over his firm athletic chest because he was the type mosquitoes would bite. He told her that he had had a very funny thought. As he spoke he ran his thumbs over her forehead, a habit he had picked up when he was around seven, believing that the lines on her forehead were worries and that he could make them vanish by straightening the creases. ‘People want to be happy, don’t they?’ he said. ‘They are desperate to be happy, aren’t they? But look at how many things have to go right in a person’s life for that. Your spouse has to be all right. Your children should not die before your time. And your grandchildren should not have polio or something. They, too, should not die young, of course. And their children, and their children, even if they come after you are long gone, they have to be all right. Everyone has to turn out fine. So many lives have to turn out right. What have you started, Mariamma Chacko, do you realize what you have started by having children? A whole line of humanity that would not have appeared without you. Surely, things would go wrong somewhere?’

And he said something strange. ‘But still, if I die, imagine I die,’ he said, ‘you would be sad, I know. Of course, you will be sad. But not as deeply as people would presume. In this world, it is very hard to escape happiness. That’s how it is.’

The boy thought too much, he was full of ideas. And he told her everything. He was not like the other boys, he did not treat his mother as an idiot who made food. He loved talking to her.

Sometimes he would say, ‘Come, let’s find the meaning of life.’ And he would hold his chin and look at the floor, pretending to be in deep thought. After a few seconds he would shake his head and say, ‘No, couldn’t find it.’ And they would laugh, always laugh.

Other days he was more serious about these matters. He told her that there were people who walked among them who knew something, something very important, but they could not explain. He really wanted to believe that. If he heard of a person who behaved in an extraordinary way, he would become very curious, he would try to find out more, even loiter near their homes. That’s why some people thought Unni was a bit odd himself.

He told her about a man who lived not very far away. He was a good man, an ordinary man. A good father and a good husband, which were terms used very often in her house, as a rebuke, a longing or satire, depending on who was talking. The man returned from work one day, had his dinner as he always did, played with his children and went to bed. He had two children, a girl and a boy, which emphasized his normalcy. Next morning he told his wife and children that he was going away for ever, that he could not explain why he was going away. He left in his nightclothes, taking nothing with him, not even his toothbrush. He never came back.

Unni narrated these stories as if he had a faint idea where such men were going and what they hoped to do with the rest of their lives. Some days, she saw Unni standing on the balcony, looking carefully at everything around him. He told her there were rogues among the birds, too, who went against the natural flow of life, who behaved in unexpected ways. It is a clue, he said, and he said that with a shy smile. ‘Something is going on, Mother.’ Maybe he was just a boy who liked to look at life around him and he invented the mysteries to grant a greater meaning to an idleness that was not tolerated any more in the new nervous city where a boy had so much maths to learn. She told him, ‘You must look, Unni, you must just stand and look at life for hours. If you were born in a village as I was, you would not need a reason, you would not need the high infidel thoughts that are not sanctioned by the pope.’

There was so much peace in her boy. That was why the mosquitoes drank from him. He slept without moving an inch, like a corpse.

The murmur of the men rises. Mariamma pats her sari, and goes to the kitchen balcony to see what has happened. The commotion has naturally charmed all the women of Block A to their tiny balconies, where the sun is unbearable at this time of day. In normal circumstances they appear here at noon only to hang their secrets out to dry. This is the rear side of the building and there is an imagined discretion to all activities here, unlike at the front, which apparently faces the world.

As she is on the third floor she has a good view of the doctor’s house in the neighbouring plot, which shares a wall with Block A. It is a small independent house with a proud woman’s rose garden. Its door is wide open and all around the jute doormat that says ‘Welcome’ there are lots of footwear, chiefly male footwear. Several men are standing in the garden and talking among themselves with their arms folded. The signs are unmistakable but the women of Block A decide to ask what has happened anyway. They lean over the balcony railings, hold their chests to keep their saris from falling and whisper their queries. The men walk down the garden towards the common wall as if they are about to urinate, which is not beyond them. They look up and whisper to the women what has happened. And the chatter of women begins, which drives away the sparrows.

The women stand on their balconies and discuss the matter with the women on the other balconies. Some of them lean dangerously, with half their bodies in the air, to speak to women directly below, who in turn are twisted around their spines as they look up. They speak diagonally too. They also peep through the windows of their neighbours to announce the news to the old, who are probably lying on their hard beds and begging to know what has happened. And word soon spreads that the smart young doctor has been found dead in his chair, his Walkman attached to his ears, a feeble music still coming from it.

Those who live on the ground floor of Block A, whose view is hindered by the wall, have moved to the homes that are on the higher floors. They may have gone without any clever ruses. Just rang the bell, and walked to the view in brisk gloom.

Word now spreads that the doctor, whose age they had never known, was forty-two years old. It is somehow appropriate that the age of such a fine man must be an even number. Late in the morning, when his wife had left home for the market, there was nothing wrong with him. He seemed fine. When she returned after an hour and rang the doorbell, there was no response. She peeped through a window to look inside and found him sitting in his chair with his eyes open. He was not moving. She tossed a brinjal at him, which hit him, but he did not react. She ran to a neighbour for help, and soon several men appeared outside her house. They broke open the door.

This is how it happens, always. Every now and then, they hear these stories, which are all the same. The wife rings the bell and the door does not open. It is broken by the neighbours. Inside, they find, in poses that are generally granted only to the living, the corpse of a man who was in the middle of a routine. In fact, the children know these stories too, and their greatest fear is that they will return from school one day and find a lot of footwear outside their door.

A hush falls; it appears that something important is about to happen. The women wait, but nothing happens. So the murmur returns, and word spreads that someone has gone to fetch the doctor’s only child, a girl of fourteen, who is at school. She will not be immediately told about her father’s death. She will be led out of her classroom on some other pretext so that she does not faint or wail on the streets. She will soon appear at the mouth of the narrow lane that leads to her house and walk down the path, unaware that her life has changed, wondering why so many people are standing on their balconies and staring at her. She will be here soon, in a sky-blue pinafore. And everybody will get to see a rare spectacle — of a girl who is about to learn that her father is dead.

Women from the other three blocks of Balaji Lane have begun to arrive, and the swarms of housewives on the balconies of the higher floors begin to swell. Chairs too must have come out because some people have now lost their height. One woman sombrely hands carrots to another woman on the next balcony. The chatter grows and the air is filled with the little things they know about heart attacks. There is probably no Tamil word for it yet. They say it in English — Heart Attack. Some who are prone to eloquence call it ‘cardiac arrest’. In the buzzing hive, Mariamma stands alone. Nobody speaks to her.

She wonders why a woman would go to the vegetable market in this unearthly heat, why would a woman go to the market at noon? She looks carefully at the porch of the dead doctor’s house. There is no bag there, no vegetables. A woman returns from the market and rings the doorbell. Her husband does not respond. She peeps through a window and finds him sitting in a chair motionless, his eyes wide open. What would she do? She would drop the bag. If her purse is in it, she may take it out. That is acceptable. But she would leave the bag there. And she would scream for help. But nobody heard a woman scream. It was the time of day when one could hear even the sudden wind from the aged in other houses. Even if she had run quietly to the neighbours, being a slim, refined woman and all that, where was the bag? Neighbours broke open the door, and as she ran in she took the vegetables inside? Or, later, as she was wailing beside the corpse of her husband, the neighbours took the bag in? All this is against human nature. But then Mariamma asks, ‘Mariammo, what are you suggesting?’

Mariamma is not suggesting anything. She is just thinking. As a girl who grew up far away from the city, in a forest of rubber trees on a giant hill, she remembers the time when men were strong and they moved like alluring beasts. When a man died young those days, in mysterious circumstances, people looked carefully at his wife. Now, things are different, nobody is surprised when a man goes young, people have given a name to such a death.

What she is actually getting at is a question she has asked many times. Will Ousep Chacko die this way one day? Of natural causes? She would return from church on a quiet Sunday, and she would ring the doorbell and he would not answer. And the door would be broken down, without much damage hopefully, if it were broken along the lock. She imagines Ousep dead, lying on the floor, his eyes wide open. She remembers the advertisement for a sunflower cooking oil — ‘A Gentleman’s Cholesterol Is In The Hands Of His Wife’. But then Ousep Chacko is not a man who can be killed by oil. He does not eat much. He smokes a lot, though, which may have thickened his blood, or thinned his arteries, she always forgets which of the two happens. A man’s heart can also be arranged to stop if he is given a good sudden fright. But she knows it would take a lot to damage the pastoral heart of that man. He is made of red earth and Malabar air.

She walks to the bedroom and has a good look at Ousep’s chair. She sits on it and feels the strain of her body on its legs. This is her only hope, but she has to be very patient, which she is.

She snaps out of her thoughts, asking herself the disturbing question, ‘Mariammo, what are you thinking?’ She is obviously not a murderer, she is just a housewife with exaggerated notions about herself. She does write occasional book reviews under the name ‘Gabriel’ for a women’s weekly, but still she is not a bad person. Also, it is important that Ousep lives, at least for now. If anyone can solve Unni’s death, it is Ousep. He has found something significant, she can tell. But for some reason he is keeping it from her.

The doorbell gives her a jolt. She is surprised to find six women from the other blocks, standing in line like penguins outside her door. They say that the other balconies are full, can they come in? They must be desperate to ring Mariamma’s doorbell. Nobody comes to her house any more. Out of habit, she wonders whether the women are hiding enchanted coins and nails and needles in their saris to plant them in her house and bring doom to her family, as Ousep’s relatives used to once upon a time. But then that is a laughable thought. Nobody is jealous of the Chacko household any more.

The murmur outside grows louder, and it excites the women at the door. They look to their right, at the stairway, which goes up to the gloomy terrace door, but that door is now kept locked at all times after what Unni did. Mariamma asks the women to come in. They rush to the balcony to see what has happened. She does not stand alone any more, she stands in the huddle of women on her balcony like the other women on theirs. Mariamma, finally a host.

They can see the doctor’s daughter now. ‘Bindu or something like that,’ one of the women says. The girl walks down the narrow lane towards her home. She is in a blue pinafore, her hair tied in a red ribbon. She walks with a man who is holding her schoolbag. She smiles at an acquaintance, but she is clearly confused. She looks around at the silent people on the street, who are standing without meeting her eyes. She looks up at the rear balconies of Block A, at the swarms of unmoving women who stare back at her. The girl’s face turns serious. She opens the short gate of her home and sees the whispering strangers in the garden. She begins to walk faster. She stops for a moment when she sees the mass of footwear outside the front door, and she runs in crying.

IN THESE CIRCUMSTANCES, AS he listens to the beatings in the next classroom, Thoma Chacko feels a liquid gloom in his groin. He considers how hard it is to be a bright person. He imagines the sheer length of human life, the many years ahead of him. He is twelve, he has a long way to go. Will Thoma make it? Unni had always tried to reassure him, he even said maths was about to get a lot easier. He said the home minister, who is responsible for happy homes, would soon pass a law changing the value of pi from 3.14159 to just 3, making it easier for all Indian children to calculate the area of a circle. That was what Unni said. But then it was probably a lie, like the many other things he used to say.

Every day, Thoma tries to improve his mind, but he does not possess the Power of Concentration, he is a Wool-gatherer. He stares at the open textbook for hours and is distracted by the pain of the parallelogram, which is slanted for ever. His nails scratch the page to straighten its tired limbs. It affects him, the great arrogance of the Equilateral Triangle, the failed aspiration of the octagon to be a circle, the eternal suffocation of the denominator that has to bear the weight of the unjust numerator, the loneliness of Pluto. And the smallness of Mercury, always a mere dot next to a yellow sun. In this world, there is no respect for Mercury.

Every day, Thoma tries to memorize Interesting Facts but his head is porous. There are only two impressive facts he knows. For some reason they have stuck in his head — the full form of KGB, which is Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, and Pele’s real name, which is Edson Arantes do Nascimento. Every day, Thoma hopes a miracle will occur and Mythili Balasubramanium will ask him, ‘Thoma, what does KGB stand for? And I wonder if Pele is his real name.’ But miracles do not happen in Thoma’s life, even though he is Christian.

The thought of his bleak future brings the apparition of a woman to his mind. She has black decaying teeth. It is his future wife, a fate foretold to all the boys who are not very clever. But when he becomes a man he wants a pretty wife. She would have long braided hair, she would be in a red cotton sari, and a tight blue blouse, and she would be somewhat scared of him. On the days of sorrow she would put her nervous head on his shoulder and cry, inaudibly, and just for a few moments, not long. He would never beat her, he would speak to her with respect, he would treat her well, he would never penetrate her.

But would she find Thoma handsome? Is Thoma handsome? Like Unni? It would be really wonderful if there was a canvas tent where a boy could go in unnoticed, probably wearing a mask. Inside, a panel of men and women would ask him to remove his mask. They would inspect him carefully and pass the verdict — handsome, or not handsome. Thoma wishes there was a way he could solve his doubt for ever.

There is a calm, methodical beating in the next room. An occasional thud, like the sound of a dictionary falling on the floor, followed by a brief silence, as if for appreciation. Then another bang, the unmistakable sound of a hand landing on the bent back of a boy who has failed in science or maths, or both. Sometimes the blow is soft, sometimes hard, depending on how much flesh there is on the boy. Thin backs are louder than fat backs but the pain travels longer through the fat. There is now a loud blow, a sad grunt and silence after that. The silence grows longer than expected. It does not end. Thoma is sure that H.M. Dorai is done with the eighth standard and is now walking towards the seventh. The time has come. Thoma stares hard at the desk, he does not look around, but he can sense that the other boys have stopped moving. They wait.

It is improbable that Thoma will be thrashed today because he has not failed in any subject in the monthly tests. Somehow, he usually manages to pass, barely pass, but there is always a chance that something can go wrong. They always pick on something he has written in the tests. Mistakes that he does not fully comprehend. For example, his answer to the question: ‘If the base of the triangle is 3.87 cm and its height is 5.13 cm, can you find its area?’

‘Of course I can,’ Thoma had written.

A slap for that, he does not know why. Then there was the laughably easy question, ‘Which living thing makes its own food?’

Gloria Miss had caned his palms several times. ‘Not Mariamma Chacko, you idiot, not Mariamma Chacko. Which living thing, which living thing? Is your mother a thing?’

The correct answer was plants, she said. Which is absurd.

Science is hard because it cannot be fully understood, it can only be accepted, like catechism. Maybe he should become a writer. But writing is hard, too. As a writer, Thoma must write like this: ‘He faced the western winds’. But how would Thoma know if a wind were a western wind? It terrifies him, that even writers must know a set of facts, that even writers must have information. Thoma does have information, but it always turns out to be wrong information as opposed to right information, which is useful.

‘What is the opposite gender of ram?’

It is amazing that every single person in the class had got the answer right, as if everybody had copied from a single source. ‘Ewe’. That was the answer. ‘Ewe’? How do people in Madras know such facts? Thoma’s answer was ‘Sita’. He received several slaps for that.

The boys wonder why H.M. Dorai has not arrived yet. Then they hear a loud thud in the next room. He is still there. They exhale in relief and that makes Gloria Miss laugh because it is inevitable that he will come, there is no escape. She is standing in front of the class, smiling, nodding her head. She is standing with her arms folded, so her breasts are bulging out of her blouse. He feels sorry for her because everybody knows she has breasts. It must be shameful. How do women go through life?

H.M. Dorai steams in, rearranging the air somehow. The stillness and the silence of the room collapse and in their place there is now a new stillness and a new silence. He looks as if he does not have much time and he knows what he must do. He has mad eyes, his gleaming black hair appears to tumble off his head as comic tides. And he has no arse. He places his thick cane and other things on the table and reads out eight names from a piece of paper. The boys rise and go to the door. They stand there, looking serious. He has chosen only those who failed in both science and maths. He looks at the boys and rolls up his sleeves. ‘Attention,’ he says. ‘And the special guests of the evening are …’ He calls out a name. The boy marches, swinging his arms, lifting his legs high, chanting, ‘Left, right, left.’ He is crying now and his ‘left, right, left’ sounds like a song. He stops in front of H.M. Dorai and bends his back. Dorai circles his hand on the boy’s back, and lands a hard blow. The boy stomps his leg, salutes, shouts ‘Thank you’, and walks back to his seat.

H.M. Dorai calls out the next name. When he is finished with all the eight special guests, there is a Silence of Anticipation. He should go away now but Thoma knows something is wrong. Dorai’s eyes had rested on him for a brief moment, and when they wandered away they had taken his image with them. That is not good.

Dorai takes his things from the table, and looks straight into Thoma’s eyes. He snaps his fingers and says, ‘Come with me.’ He stands outside the class and waits. Thoma goes to him. Dorai puts his face very close to Thoma’s.

‘Thoma,’ he says, ‘your father called me yesterday. Do you know why?’

‘I do not know, sir.’

‘He is asking questions about Unni. I told him I’ve nothing more to say, your father is asking a lot of people about Unni. Why?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘Why is he asking questions about Unni, why now?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘People tell me that he has found something about Unni. Do you know?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I have no information,’ Thoma says.

Mariamma opens the door for Thoma with an absent-minded smile that holds him in its affection for a moment before she drifts to the other people who are not present. They exist in another time, when she was young and people were so important to her that she still remembers everything they told her. She answers them back now, after all these years, and they probably respond to her, wandering alone in their vast rubber forests in a faraway place, smiling at her memories sometimes, returning her scowls sometimes.

Unni told Thoma that their mother had a Condition, and that it had a name, as if the fact that it had a name was very good news. Thoma has forgotten the name Unni had mentioned. It had sounded important, though very male. ‘It is not a serious condition, Thoma, a lot of perfectly happy people have it.’

She is in the kitchen. Her sari is hitched up on one side, the hem bunched into her waist, and Thoma can see a long sliver of her bare, formidable thigh. So much of a woman’s legs he sees only at home. Mariamma, her lips curled into her mouth, wags a finger at the overhead cupboard. ‘Annamol Chacko,’ she says, summoning once again Ousep’s mother. ‘So you didn’t like my tea. You and your nine dumb daughters, you sit and whisper among yourselves and giggle at my tea. You say to thin air, “This is a cup of tea made by Mariamma, this is the tea made by an economics postgraduate.” And all of you laugh.’

She sees Thoma staring at her and first smiles in embarrassment, then bursts out laughing. Her sudden happiness fills Thoma with a Sense of Wellbeing. Other days, her voice is loud and it trembles in the air like a wail; she takes the full Christian names of Ousep’s mother and all his nine sisters, and on rare occasions she talks in a formal way to her own mother and someone called Philipose. When she is that way, her lip is curled in, head tilted upwards, and her index finger wags. And she is unmindful of everything around her. Unni could change her mood just like that, make her laugh and extricate her from the Torments of Memories. Unni would crack a joke, and she would reclaim her pretty face from the angry scowl, and begin to shake with laughter. But Thoma does not have the gift.

His mother surprises him with a packet of cashew nuts, and says, ‘The doctor, Thoma, the man with the rose garden, he is dead. It was heart attack.’ They sit facing each other across the dining table and eat. She does not place the cashews in her mouth as economics postgraduates normally do, she flings them in. Unni used to call her ‘Village woman’.

As a girl, she tells him as if she has never told him this before, she used to walk down the banks of a narrow silver stream with her friends, collecting fallen cashews and pebbles, and when the laps of their skirts could take no more they used to throw away some of the cashews. She cannot accept now that she has to actually buy cashew nuts.

She repeats things. That is her nature. ‘Hunger is the best side dish, Thoma.’ And when he is desperately studying on the morning of an exam, she will say, ‘This is what you do, Thoma, you study just hours before a test. When you are about to shit, you search for your arse.’ She used to tell Unni almost every day how big boys should behave with girls. Boys must not harass girls, must not Pass Indecent Remarks, must not stand too close to girls, must not stand too close to even little girls, must not touch them. All that has stopped, of course, because Thoma is too young for the lessons. There is something else that she does not mention any more. When she heard that the child of a working mother had got hurt by falling or was hit by a bicycle or knocked down by a cow, she would gather Unni and Thoma and say, ‘See, this is what happens to the children of working women. You are safe because your mother is always around, don’t ever forget that.’ With Unni gone, she has lost the right to say this any more.

‘How come we are eating cashews?’ Thoma says. ‘Sacred Heart Family Store won’t give you cashews without taking money. It is not an Essential Commodity. Did you pawn another bangle?’

‘I don’t have any more bangles to pawn.’

‘Did you sell your blood?’

‘No, Thoma. A lot of women came to our home to watch the doctor’s house. And they decided that they wanted to phone their husbands, they wanted to know that their husbands were all right. They gave me a rupee each. When a man dies in the neighbourhood, women think of their own husbands. I too had a long loving thought about your father.’

‘So I am eating cashew nuts because the doctor died today.’

‘Yes.’

‘Strange Are The Ways Of The World.’

‘Strange are the ways of the world, my boy.’

‘The Lord Moves In Mysterious Ways.’

‘The lord moves in mysterious ways.’

Thoma goes to stand on the rear balcony and watch the doctor’s house. There is a crowd outside the main door, talking softly about the death as if they don’t want the dead man to know that he is gone.

He eyes the balcony to his immediate left, which is just three feet away. There is nobody there, but she may appear any time, tossing her hair and holding a clip in her mouth as she normally does. He can feel his heart hammer against his chest.

When girls toss their hair and hold clips in their mouths, when they run their hands down the back of their skirts before they sit, when they shift a lock of hair from their face and stuff it over their ears, or cover their mouths when they have to laugh, when they do these things that have no name, and when he hears a female chorus sing ‘I have a dream‘, Thoma’s chest fills with ache and he wishes them well in life. Is there a movement in his body that can fill a girl with such love? Do women long at all for men the way men long for women? The cold fear inside him at the sight of Mythili, are women capable of such agony inside them, do their throats go cold and do they feel a deep wandering sorrow?

Mythili Balasubramanium arrives the way he had imagined, tossing her abundant hair, bunching it high above her head as if she is about to pull herself up by her hair. And she is holding a clip in the scowl of her mouth. She has large clever eyes. Sometimes she draws her eyes standing on her balcony, making each eye bulge and underlining it with a fat pencil as if to say, ‘This is my eye, here is my eye.’ She does such things, including rustling her hair, only on the rear balcony. Her mother does not let her stand on the front balcony if her hair is not tied. She is still in her school uniform — green pleated skirt and white shirt with frills at the chest. She is much older than Thoma, she is sixteen. Like most people she does not have any respect for him, he knows that. He is after all from a weird, sullen home, the home of Unni, whose name she does not utter any more, though she used to be very fond of him. At the time of Unni’s death, three years ago, she was just a harmless little girl.

Thoma gathers the courage to say, ‘I am having cashew nuts.’ She does not react, it is as if she has not heard him. He is about to repeat what he had said when she turns and leaves. He stands there, shamed. A familiar gloom fills him. As Unni used to say, ‘Thoma, you are feeling low right now, as low as a dachshund’s balls.’

Thoma goes down to play and he is soon a part of a cricket match that often forgets he exists. A boy from another colony is setting the field and he, very rudely, tells Thoma where he must stand. Tony is a Sri Lankan refugee. How can a refugee tell Thoma where he must stand in his own country? But Thoma keeps his mouth shut, the refugee is much older and stronger. Thoma is more infuriated when Tony lifts his head and looks up. That is what all grown-up boys here do once every thirty seconds, all the boys on the playground, on the boundary wall, on the lane outside — they keep looking up to see if Mythili is watching. Her balcony has long become a shrine that pulls boys and men from faraway places. They come to strut up and down the lane for her. Even the Roadside Romeos come, with their hair wet, in their best clothes, all of them wearing dark glasses. They come on foot, cycles and motorbikes. The times she appears on the balcony, it is as if a circus bell has rung and the clowns below must now begin to perform. They start doing stunts on their bikes, the slum boys do Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk, all this as if it is not a performance but their Fundamental Nature. The boys of the colony, too, become brisk and happy in her presence, they run fast, bowl as furiously as they can, insult each other, harm small boys, talk aloud about intelligent matters — words like ‘perestroika’ and ‘GATT’ fill the air. They do this with swift glances upwards to check whether she is still there. But Mythili usually stands in an unseeing way, or she just vanishes. Mostly she never appears.

Thoma is unable to concentrate on the game, his mind wanders. Eight girls of his age are sitting on the wall and chatting. Padmini, in a rare careless moment, spreads her legs and he can see her red underwear. She sits that way talking, and he is hypnotized by the sight. He is unable to look away even though he knows he is committing a crime. Now that he has seen her this way, will she ever get married?

When the sun sets, the children vanish, except Thoma, who wanders around the playground. The twilight fear comes to him and he hopes that the night will pass without incident, which it never does.

He decides to delay going home by walking up and down the three stairwells and listening to the other homes. He likes to know what happens in the other homes. Once, he heard a man scream at his son for scoring ninety-five per cent in maths. ‘Where is the five per cent, where is it, where has the five per cent gone?’ Then, something happened that made the boy cry in total fright. The man’s voice said, ‘Here, these are your clothes. Take this money. Leave the house at once and go search for the five per cent. Come back only when you find it.’ The boy begged his father to let him stay. Thoma sat on their doormat and laughed, holding his stomach. Some days he heard the cries of friends whose fathers chased them with a heated spoon because the boys had not scored well enough in the tests. This was rare, though. Usually the boys only got belted. In the middle of one such lashing, a man said, ‘The only system that matters to an Indian?’

‘The decimal system,’ the boy answered.

One hard lash, and a boyish grunt.

‘The only system that matters to an Indian?’

‘The decimal system.’

But, most of the time, there were happy voices, families sitting together and talking and singing and laughing in the fragrance of their unattainable meals.

Thoma cannot ignore it any more, the fear grows in his stomach. Another night that he must endure. He goes home thinking of what Unni used to say, mimicking their sports coach: ‘Fight, Thoma, put fight.’ He used to say that when Thoma was trying to study maths at dawn, or when he walked to the stumps to bat at number eleven, or when he was learning how to ride a cycle. It is now Thoma’s anthem. Fight, Thoma, put fight. He likes it because it says what he must do but does not mention the outcome at all.

He has to first make a confession to his mother, and he chooses the time when she is doing the dishes in the kitchen. He stands near the stove and numbs her mind by mumbling many things, including the National Pledge and the first two stanzas of ‘Lochinvar’, and finally he arrives at a prayer, which is a form of silence to her: ‘Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name, I saw Padmini’s undies. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’

Mother does not turn from the plates, but as far as Thoma is concerned he has confessed.

In an hour Thoma is pretending to be asleep in the bedroom that he and Unni used to share. His father will come any time now. Thoma remembers a Tamil proverb that had once startled him with its simple truth — ‘You can wake up a man who is asleep, but not the one who is pretending to be asleep’. And that is what Thoma tries to do every night when his father comes to wake him up. But he never manages to pretend long enough. He always rises, but today he decides to lie there with his eyes shut, come what may. If he is pulled, dragged or kicked, it won’t matter. Thoma will lie like a dead dog.

Unexpectedly, he has fallen asleep. He is woken by the distant wail of his father’s gifted voice: ‘Good evening, dear bank clerk bastards.’ Ousep is probably at the gates of the block. Everybody must have heard it, but fortunately, Ousep had screamed in Malayalam and they do not know Malayalam. But then Ousep repeats the greeting in Tamil. Thoma feels the familiar shame. He hopes Mythili has not heard it, he hopes she is fast asleep. There is a long, terrifying silence, for about five minutes. He hears the main door open. His father is home. His mother, as always, comes to Thoma and says, ‘Be strong, Thoma, don’t be afraid. I am here. What am I, Thoma? Tell me, what am I?’

‘You’re the Rock.’

‘Yes, I am the Rock.’

He hears his father scream, ‘Where is my beloved wife, the beloved daughter of a rubber pirate?’ Thoma knows she is sitting in a corner of the kitchen floor, near the stone grinder. That’s where she sits in these circumstances. Ousep is standing in the hall, pointing to various objects and asking, ‘What is this? What is this?’ Then he falls quiet. He is now probably in his room, sitting at his desk and writing his own obituary as he usually does.

There is the sound of a loud crash. He has flung the Best Writer award again, the silver angel on the wooden stand. Father received the award from the Kerala chief minister many years ago, when he was very young. He was famous then, his mother says. She says that when the award first came home the silver angel was looking straight ahead, but as Father kept flinging her, the lady’s neck kept bending. Now she looks up at the roof, somewhat heroic.

Thoma can hear him grunting, he is walking down the hall, he is approaching the bedroom door, but then he walks past, into the kitchen, and it appears that he has gone to the rear balcony. Thoma hears him scream, ‘Doctor, I hear you are gone! Doctor, is that true? You asked me a question a month ago. Sorry I could not answer you then. Here it is, though. It is watery. You bastard, my stools are watery. Is that the question you ask the great Ousep Chacko when you meet him for the very first time? How are your stools, Mr Chacko? Moron, how are your stools today?’

Thoma feels an irresistible urge to laugh, but then he hears him screaming at his mother — ‘Buffalo woman,’ he says. Thoma wants to be by her side but he is afraid. Ousep has never hit his mother, but what if he finally decides to? Unni was brave. Thoma does not remember a single moment when Unni was nervous or shaken. He never pretended to be asleep when Ousep came home drunk. In fact, when their father stood too close to their mother, seething like a fool, Unni would stand between them. Ousep would push him away but Unni would always regain his position, fists clenched. Unni usually went about life at a leisurely pace, his movements slow and gentle, but when he was angry he became alert and menacing. Sometimes Thoma got the feeling that there were two people inside Unni.

One night, Unni slapped his drunken father. Ousep just fell to the floor as if he had no strength in him and he did not rise. His head began to bleed but he lay there quoting from King Lear. Unni calmly put a thread through a needle and stitched the cut on Father’s forehead. A whole week after that Unni looked a bit sad, and he did not meet anyone’s eye in that period.

Thoma hears heavy footsteps approach, the door opens, he gets the sweet sugar-cane smell of liquor. Ousep is very close, probably standing right next to him. Thoma is on the floor, lying on his stomach, his head buried in the pillow.

‘Get up,’ Ousep says. ‘Get up, my idiot son.’

Mariamma walks in. She does not say anything yet. The Rock waits.

‘Get up,’ Ousep says.

He lifts Thoma’s head by the ear and holds it that way for a few seconds and then drops it. But Thoma pretends to be dead. Ousep pokes his back with his finger. ‘Get up,’ he says. Mother decides to scream, she has had enough. She wrestles with Ousep, saying, ‘Leave him alone, leave him alone.’ So Thoma wakes up, he is afraid his mother will get hurt. Ousep leads him out of the room.

Thoma sees his father walk in front of him, swaying unsteadily, his hair like Einstein’s halo, shirt dirty and wet, trousers sagging. This is not the man he sees in the morning, the strong, tidy and fragrant writer, his long hair neatly combed, so elegant and handsome, who reads four newspapers in three languages with such indestructible clever eyes that Thoma feels scared for the reporters whom his father is reading. In the mornings the man looks exactly like the Great Ousep Chacko of his mother’s fables.

In Ousep’s room, the noose is ready. It is his lungi, which is dangling from the fan, his chair placed ceremoniously under it. Ousep kneels on the chair and pulls himself up. He puts the noose around his neck. Thoma sits on the floor, by the wall, with a paper and pen. He has already written the words, ‘The Obituary of a Failed Writer’. Mariamma watches, leaning on the bookshelf.

Ousep says, in a calm, serious way, ‘The Obituary of a Failed Writer.’

Thoma pretends to write.

‘By A Staff Reporter,’ Ousep says. ‘A man was found hanging from the ceiling fan in his house.’

For some reason that brings a terrifying burst of laughter to Thoma’s chest. He holds it, but then his mother, too, begins to chuckle.

‘… Enquiries reveal that the man’s name is Ousep Chacko, the greatest writer the Malabar Coast has ever produced, greater than all the no-talent effeminate bastards who masquerade as writers today.’

Ousep loses his balance somewhat and wobbles for a moment on the chair. Thoma is shaking with laughter now. He begs his mind to bring sadness to his throat. He tries to think of Unni, but it is his brother’s comic that appears in his mind. It is set in a beautiful park with four children sitting on the swings. Among them is Ousep, hanged by the neck with his own lungi, swinging happily with the children.

‘You bastard, Thoma, you find this funny,’ Ousep says, gently touching the noose. That makes Thoma burst out laughing, but in the hysteria of a deep terror he is also crying. Mariamma comes to him and leads him out of the room by his hand. They go to the other bedroom, laughing, wiping their tears. ‘Now sleep,’ she says. ‘You have school tomorrow. I promise he won’t come here again. He is done for the night.’ And she shuts the door.

Mariamma leans on the bookshelf in the bedroom she has not shared with the man in years. He is still standing on the chair with the noose around his neck. She inspects the chair. It has grown weak over time but a chair never collapses like a table. That is the true nature of a good chair. At best, it becomes lame, it tilts. That won’t be enough to kill Ousep. She can go and snatch the chair right now from under his feet. It would be a perfect murder. She has considered it before but she is not very sure about the strength of the lungi or even the fan. Ousep is heavier than he looks.

‘Ousep Chacko is survived by a wife, who is a buffalo woman, and an idiot son. His elder son Unni Chacko died three years ago in mysterious circumstances.’

‘Get down,’ she says. ‘And go to sleep.’

Ousep removes the noose, somewhat gloriously, as if it is the garland of his fans, those garlands he used to receive when he was much younger. She helps him off the chair. He drags his chair back to the table.

‘Why are you looking so sad, Mariammo,’ he says. ‘Don’t look so sad.’

‘I am not sad.’

‘The secret to happiness is not to have any expectations from people.’

‘I know that.’

‘Especially from the people who matter most to you.’

‘I know that, too.’

‘Go away, go.’

She leaves quietly. He changes, turns off the lights, bangs the door shut, and goes to sleep.

Mariamma stands facing the large portrait of Unni in the hall. She runs her hand over its surface, though he seems more lifeless when she does that. He surveys his mother with a knowing smile. He has her beautiful nose, her skin of high pedigree, her colour. He has his father’s high forehead. Some people think Unni was arrogant, which is not such a bad thing, not as bad as people make it out to be. But people have their way of thinking. So they have a faint triumph in their voices when they speak of Unni’s death, his fall from the height. It is such a defeat, it seems, to die.

There is nothing that she understands about his death. People say something must have happened in those twenty minutes when he was home, or something must have happened on the stairway. Or maybe he got a phone call. Maybe he saw something. But what could have happened, really? Nothing makes sense. Some people say he was not normal, he was drifting towards dark thoughts, he was too clever for his age.

In the days that followed Unni’s death, his father tried his best to find out what had happened. He spoke to almost all the classmates and friends of Unni, but in the end nothing could explain what the boy had done. And Ousep gave up. ‘Some boys don’t make it, that’s all there is to it,’ he said, and closed the chapter.

So what has happened now? What has landed on Ousep’s lap? ‘An unexpected message,’ he tells the walls in his drunken moments, ‘provided by the unnatural level of incompetence of the Indian postal department.’ He does not say anything more, she has asked him several times, she has even asked him through crafty whispers during his deep sleep, but he does not say what he has found. Whatever it is, it has made him knock on doors again, he is asking questions again.

There is only one clue that Mariamma holds, and she knows it is not as insignificant as Ousep imagines. Unni left without leaving a note for his mother, he left without explaining his action to her.

She turns off the lights and wanders in the hall, wanders in the darkness, feeling the peace of the quiet, imagining that she sees the same emptiness that Unni sees. What is so great about the light that falls on the world, what is so great about what we see that a woman must mourn her son? But then she cries.

She wakes up early in the morning, to the fragrance of paradisiacal breakfasts and the long whistles of steam from the kitchens of happy people, and the monologues of children memorizing their lessons. And Subbulakshmi’s morning chant from a thousand bad radios, which sounds like a medieval woman’s list of complaints in Sanskrit about the men of her time.

THOMA AND HIS MOTHER tiptoe into Ousep’s bedroom. His lungi is still hanging from the fan as a noose. Ousep is sleeping fully naked, his mouth slightly open, legs spread wide. They can see his large luminous testicles, which look rough and industrial. ‘Like something the Soviets have made,’ Mariamma says. She covers her man with a bedsheet, muttering, ‘He has no shame even when he is asleep.’ Thoma wonders whether one day his own organ will be so large, and assume this weird asymmetric shape that has no name even in Euclid’s geometry. He is too shy to ask his mother whether this is the fate of all men.

He has seen his father this way many times. He goes into the bedroom often to see whether he has had a heart attack. Lots of fathers have gone in their sleep, and Thoma is afraid that his father, too, will go that way. When Ousep is asleep he looks dead. He does not move and you have to concentrate on his stomach to see if he is breathing. Thoma’s mother, too, goes often to his bed to check if the man is alive. She usually stands with her hands on her hips, and stares, waiting to see a hint of breath in him, or a toe move.

That was exactly how the three of them had stared at Unni’s body when it lay in the hall under a white shroud. They stood around him for an immeasurable amount of time, in a deep hopeful silence, and waited for him to wake up any moment and burst out laughing. He really did look as if he was just sleeping. They waited, until the hearse driver came and rang the doorbell.

Ousep rubs his nose. He is alive, today. Mariamma climbs on a chair and removes the noose. An hour later, Thoma stands with his school bag strung on his tense shoulders. He wonders how many people heard the commotion in his house last night. Probably everyone. He stands facing the front door, too ashamed to open it and step out for all to see. But he has to endure the shame, as he does every morning. ‘Fight, Thoma, put fight,’ he says. And he opens the door.