The Illicit Happiness of Other People

2. How To Name It

THERE ARE THINGS MARIAMMA tells Ousep, looking him in the eye and addressing him in the third person, which have a stinging literary quality to them that reminds him of what they used to say in his village — all wives are writers. His favourite is her description of the way he walks in the morning despite the shame of the previous night. ‘As if he is going to collect a lifetime achievement award from the president.’ It is true, that is how he walks in the morning. With healthy strides, feet landing with purpose, head held high. But he is more aware than she imagines of his disgrace. She may laugh if he tells her this but the truth is that, as he irons his shirt this morning, smoking two cigarettes at once, what is on his mind is an old question. Can he be a better person, a responsible man, a good father? Is it so hard to be all that, to be regular, to be everyman?

Through the bedroom window he sees her marching towards the gate in her thin rubber slippers, going somewhere earlier than usual. He does not remember ever seeing her from this distance. What happens to men when they see their wives from afar? Mariamma looks like any other person in the world. Small, harmless, unremarkable, which she is not. It makes him feel oddly triumphant that she does not know he is watching her — Mariamma, up to something, going about her day, resolute and solitary.

She is not part of the sisterhood here. She is not included in their evening chatter, no one tells her gossip. Women do not call out her name, they do not wait at the gates for her to come down so that they can go to the market together. No one gives her recipes. She is only a subject of their compassion, which is a cowardly form of self-congratulation. She makes them feel they are better than her. They pity her for her man, for the loss of her child, for the way she walks along the road talking to herself, scowling sometimes, smiling sometimes. And her poverty, who can understand her poverty?

She owns many volumes of hardbound books. Those she reads with great relish, though she moves a finger beneath every line as if she is semi-literate, which she is not. She has a telephone. She has a glowing fair peel of the high class, she is an economics postgraduate, and in her demented moments she evokes the name of Milton Friedman to complain to him about the imbecility of socialism. Yet, in that house, the life of Colgate is squeezed out of it until it is a flat strip of thin tortured metal. Then it is violated by toothbrushes and even index fingers for several days. The brushes are not thrown away until almost all the bristles disappear, and after the brushes do die in this autumnal way, the two postgraduates and their son use their fingers to clean their teeth until Mariamma somehow makes new brushes appear. Soaps are used until they go missing in the crevices of the body. Ousep has seen the strange sight of Mariamma staring at an empty oil bottle left standing inverted on a frying pan.

She said, without turning, ‘The last drop, Ousep Chacko, is not a literary hyperbole in your home. Apparently, it really exists.’

‘How grotesque this looks, Mariamma Chacko. I thought you had more class.’

That made both of them laugh, their laughter rising in pitch in competition, neither willing to stop and grant victory to the other.

The foam sofa in the hall, which is shrouded by an old bedsheet, has a giant secret hole in the centre. The landlord, who arrives every month and screams for his rent, was invited in by Mariamma only once; she made him sit on the sofa, and as he sank into the hole she laughed. Other men come asking for their money, including an enormous red-faced Afghan moneylender in his Pathani suit who twists Thoma’s hand only partly in jest. And there is a sad book salesman who begs to be paid for the books he delivered five years ago — a complete set of William Shakespeare, all the great Greek tragedies, fifteen volumes of the Encylopaedia Britannica and the best English short stories from an innocent age when short stories were really stories.

The Chackos are poor because Ousep is poor and too proud to live within his means, not because he drinks. People who do not drink do not understand drunkards. He does not have to buy his drinks, he has many friends who want to buy him liquor. That is the quality of drunkards, they have a lot of friends. Because what men find most endearing in other men are their tragic flaws. That is why alcoholics never run out of friends. In the light of day, Ousep is too strong, too clever, a solitary man. But when night falls he belongs to all men.

He takes the screwdriver, opens the back panel of the long-defunct radio, and removes the folded sheets of paper. This is Unni’s final comic, he finished it the morning he died. It is called How To Name It.

Ousep has not been able to make sense of the comic. Only Mariamma would be able to decipher it for him but the problem is that she plays a significant part in it, she is a part of the riddle, which is bizarre. She is probably hiding something about the boy, something important. But why? If Ousep is going to show her the evidence that implicates her in the mystery of Unni’s death, he has to do it when the time is right. She is a crafty woman. But he too is crafty. Equals, that’s what they are. To each other the only equals.

Three years ago, after Unni died, Ousep had set out to find an explanation. Through the memories of the people who knew the boy, he discovered a son whom he had not imagined. Unni Chacko, who appeared to possess a superior detachment, apparently also had an unnatural curiosity about the world around him, as if he could see something extraordinary hiding in plain sight. In the days that immediately followed the boy’s death, people opened up to Ousep and told him what they knew. But nobody could explain why Unni did what he did.

They said, in their lame ways, he had dark thoughts, he spoke a lot about death, he went to the funerals of people he did not know to see the faces of the newly dead and draw their portraits. Friends insisted that Unni must have had a deep secret grief though he never showed any signs. Behind the light on his face there must have been an ordinary sorrow. Find his sorrow and you would find his reason, that was what they implied. Even now, people want to believe in the theory of Unni’s sorrow because that is what they want his death to be about. The tragic defeat of the unusual, and so the triumph of the normal.

This is how people resolve suicides — by considering it a consequence of unbearable grief or by manufacturing motives. Or through the inordinate importance given to the final note of the dead, which is usually only a confused half-truth.

There is something comical about a suicide note, the only known penultimate act of a living thing, and Ousep is glad that Unni had the artistic arrogance not to succumb to a cliché. But Mariamma does fear that the boy must have explained himself on a piece of paper which might have got blown away. It is a reasonable fear. Ousep has always marvelled at the confidence of people in their final moments, leaving a note behind in the complete faith that it would be found by the intended recipient.

But the truth is that every suicide remains a mystery for ever because the only person who really knows all the fragments of the motive is gone. That was why Ousep had to give up three years ago. He had tried hard to piece together the circumstances of his son’s death but in the end he had to accept that he would never succeed. But about six weeks ago, something happened.

Ousep was going down the stairs when he saw the postman walking up, holding an envelope in his hand. It was a strange sight to see the postman so early in the day, and without his sack. The man was holding just one object — a large envelope. But Ousep would not have thought much of it if he had not seen the name on the envelope — Unni Chacko. The postman then told him the story of this mail, which was among the twelve letters he was returning that day to various homes in the area.

Three years ago, some boys had thrown firecrackers into the postbox attached to a lamp post on Pasumarthy Street. Most of the letters were burnt. But some were only slightly damaged and they lay in a cardboard box in the post office, until a new manager there finally decided to return some of the letters whose senders’ details were still legible. So, three years after Unni had posted a letter to someone, it was coming back. But that was not extraordinary in itself.

On the front of the envelope was Unni’s name and address, probably written by a clerk in the post office who had put the boy’s mail inside a fresh envelope. The front of Unni’s original envelope was badly damaged, its top half almost entirely gone, so nothing of the recipient’s details had survived. But the bottom half of the envelope was intact. Here, Unni’s name and address were written in his distinct extravagant hand. Inside the mutilated envelope was a bunch of papers that were in good condition, as if nothing had happened, like Unni’s face when his lifeless body returned from the morgue.

What Unni had posted was a comic, fourteen pages in all, not including a covering note written on a page torn in half. It is a brief scribble that does not address anyone. The note says: ‘Just finished it this morning. I know you will do it for me.’ The note is dated 16 May, the day Unni died.

The comic begins with a giant portrait of a smiling, bald, middle-aged man, whom Ousep does not know. He is a tough, rustic man. He is sitting in his armchair, on the porch of his home, in the shade of a jackfruit tree. The setting is clearly a village in Kerala. Unni was born in Kerala but was brought to Madras when he was still an infant. He had not visited the land since. He had no reason to because his parents had slowly broken away from their large complicated families, much to the relief of almost everybody involved.

The bald rustic in the comic now stops smiling and slowly turns serious, as if he has seen an apparition. He is clearly terrified. He begins to run. He runs down a winding path, through a forest of rubber trees. He falls down and looks increasingly terrified as the apparition approaches him. The comic then abruptly cuts to Egmore railway station in Madras. Someone, probably the narrator, who is not shown but from whose point of view the entire story is being told, boards the train and travels through the night. The next morning, the train passes through the green hills and the ancient villages of Kerala. Finally, it reaches Kollam station. The narrator, who is still invisible, now takes a crowded bus, then walks down the narrow paved lanes of a village. There he meets several people, and in some of the frames the characters are obviously talking because there are dialogue bubbles, but the bubbles are blank. Unni probably thought he would fill them in later, a future which he denied himself. The villagers lead the invisible narrator to the banks of a stream. The narrator finally approaches the house that was shown at the beginning of the comic. But the bald rustic man is not sitting in his armchair on the porch. There is no one here. A large, amiable, middle-aged woman appears. Something strange happens next. There is the image of a giant bra as a suspension bridge that spans a wide river, linking two mountains. The comic then returns to the amiable middle-aged woman. She leads the invisible narrator into the house, gives him or her a cup of coffee, shows a wall where there are several photographs of the bald rustic man. Then she takes the narrator through the house, through the long dark corridors and empty rooms and finally a storeroom, which is filled with jackfruits and bananas. She points to a bulb on the high ceiling. The next panel, the penultimate page of the comic, has a giant image of the bald rustic, now looking benevolent. This man clearly exists somewhere, he cannot be a work of fiction because his eyes have the certainty of a creature that has seen life. The man is smiling and peaceful, and he is giving a thumbs-up sign, which is uncharacteristic of his age and place. But he is evidently a man who has won, won something. The final page is shocking. It has a dramatic colour portrait of Mariamma standing on one leg, the other leg raised as if she is about to leap, and her right hand is pointing upwards. Her blood-red sari is hitched up and folded at the waist, exposing a bit of her thighs. Her thick black hair is flying in tumult. Her lips are curled in and her eyes are wide and angry. She is placed like a trophy on a wooden stand that has inscribed on it a string of Malayalam letters that make no sense. Obviously, the comic needs prose to convey its meaning. It even has blank bubbles for dialogue and narration. Unni’s works usually are not so dependent on prose.

So, what happened on the day Unni died? He completed the visuals of a comic, posted it to someone, went somewhere for three or four hours, got a haircut at noon at St Anthony’s Hair Stylists, as confirmed by the barber. He returned home, played a bit of cricket, went up the stairs, and twenty minutes later decided to die?

The intended recipient of the comic remains a mystery. And what is the meaning of the final window of the comic — Mariamma in full tumult? The covering note, which shows no hint of affection, suggests that the recipient is a male, but Ousep is not sure. Maybe it was meant for a young lady who told Unni that her fat unhappy mother reads all her mail.

From the day Unni’s mail returned, Ousep began to haunt the same boys he had interviewed three years ago, and some newer ones. He does not tell them about the mail, he lets out only stray hints. He wants to be careful with the information he holds until he fully understands what was going on in Unni’s life.

The boys Ousep had met three years ago are almost men now, they are around twenty. That would be Unni’s age if he were alive today. Twenty. A handsome young man whose narrow, interested eyes might have surveyed the world with restrained amusement, a young artist with the opaque seriousness that cartoonists usually possess. Unni Chacko, if he had allowed himself to live, would have grown into a formidable man.

Ousep thinks of the day ahead, the strangers he has to question. He finds it tiring to talk to people. That has always been his flaw as a journalist, his secret weakness. It makes him uncomfortable, especially when he is not fortified by good rum, to stand in front of a person, to be seen, judged. How nice it would be if he could sit in the confession box of the Catholic priests, behind its ecclesiastical mosquito net, and listen to the old friends of Unni — those intimidating new men who are boys one moment, adults the next. Some even have fully grown moustaches, their voices have changed, and there is something about their manliness that makes his heart ache for Unni. Unni, who will never shave, who will never stuff his wallet in the back pocket of his jeans with all the preoccupation of a man. What is it about life that even Ousep Chacko believes it is a lottery?

On his way out, he sees Mythili Balasubramanium going down the stairs. Does she know why Unni died? He has asked the question many times but without conviction. The way she is now, with her adolescent reserve, and circumspect walk, and breasts whose time has begun, it is easy to forget that she was just a child when Unni died. That child still survives as a dark portrait by Unni. In the portrait, she is in a coffin, her large interested eyes shut, her hands clutching an unidentifiable flower resting on her chest.

Almost every day, all through her entire childhood, until the day Unni died, she spent hours with the two boys. She was Mariamma’s imagined daughter, Unni’s assistant, Thoma’s matron. She used to pretend to be frightened of Ousep, she would never meet his eyes. Some days, in the mornings, she would stand outside his room and peep in, and when his head turned she would run away. But when he managed to meet her eyes and smile, she always returned the smile. She did not hate him as others did. But that was then. A little girl who probably believed all fathers must be nice.

The girl whom he imagines this way is a bit younger than the one in the coffin. She was twelve or thirteen when Unni drew her in the Album of the Dead. In the black diamond coffin, she lies in a blue frock that reaches to her knees, her hair is tied in two flying plaits by red ribbons, and she is wearing silver anklets around her wrists, as she used to then because her mother did not let her wear them around her ankles. Her mother said Mythili was too young to wear anklets. Even now the girl is not allowed to wear them. Mythili’s mother, like the mothers of all daughters, has the same pornographic eye as men. They see sexual omens in anklets and skirts and flowing hair and long earrings that nod in the wind. They imagine, correctly, that the sex of their daughters is hidden in innocent places, as the soul of a vampire is stored in improbable objects.

IT IS THE FIRST day of the ‘fast-unto-death’, and not many people have turned out to watch, but if it lasts another two days there will be great crowds on the road — men screaming and laughing, alcoholics singing, women weeping without sorrow, boys hurling stones in the air. But now there is peace, and a deep sullen silence that has the quality of a mishap. Ousep scans the area for a sturdy young man, smartly dressed and not very clever.

Not more than fifty people stand behind the wooden barricades and gape at the ten men on the pavement, who are sitting in line on the mats they have brought from their homes. One of them is special, there is a table fan by his side. They claim they will starve to death unless the state government clearly spells out how it plans to protect the Tamils of Sri Lanka. The men are in starched white shirts stitched for the event and veshtis that are bunched in a way that magnifies their groins. There is a long silver torch beside every fasting man. The reporters know that the torches contain stuffed bananas instead of batteries, which will be consumed when the martyrs go to urinate.

The fasting men return the stares of the spectators through a distant blank gloom, and when they grow tired of looking sad they take sips of water from plastic cups or join their palms for the photographers. Behind these men, young subordinates stand nervously, as if they are afraid that if they sit they too would have to fast.

Two large muscular goons are setting up a sound system, stringing a Casio keyboard to loudspeakers. The goons are in lungis, which are folded over their knees, and the hems of their long striped underwear are visible. They have a problem, it appears, as the man who knows how to play the keyboard has not turned up.

‘Do you know how to play this thing, you motherfucker?’ one goon asks the other, somewhat fondly, as he extracts a wire from his sack.

‘No.’

‘Doesn’t matter, motherfucker,’ the first goon says, looking at the keyboard without fear. ‘You play white. I’ll play black.’

The fasting men and their supporters have occupied a fifty-metre stretch on the pavement, between a public urinal and a giant five-storey-high plywood cut-out of superstar Rajinikanth, who looks over the city in a golden leather jacket and tights, and dark glasses, his face pink because hoarding painters do not have the courage to paint him black. Vehicles have been diverted from this section of the road, and policemen are lingering on the deserted stretch, wondering, as always, what they must do to kill time. On the other side of the road, facing the fasting men, a row of crude food stalls has sprung up on the pavement, where reporters and photographers and some of the curious spectators are stuffing hot food into their wide-open mouths.

The voice of Ilango comes from behind. Ousep barely recognizes him; he had met Ilango three years ago. How boys grow. As Unni becomes soil, the sons of other fathers, how they grow.

He is a healthy boy with new powerful muscles and he sways in his own private gale of youthful forces inside him. Somewhat happy, unlike the other vanquished boys like him who go to third-rate engineering colleges. His little, exaggerated gestures have a phoney rustic servility about them, as if he is about to ask for a loan. It is tiring just to watch him, and Ousep feels a great relief at the thought that he will probably never meet him again.

‘I am sorry I asked you to come here,’ Ousep says.

The boy puts his hands on his mouth, and says, ‘How can you say “sorry” and all that. You are Unni’s father. You can ask me to come anywhere.’

‘I am working, Ilango. I have to file a story about the fast. That’s why I asked you to come here.’

Ilango looks at the fasting men but he has no curiosity about what is happening here.

Ousep lights two cigarettes and leads the boy to a tea stall on the concrete pavement, where they sit facing each other on wooden stools that have unequal legs, a rugged aluminium-plated table between them. For a while they stare in silence at the fasting men on the other side of the road.

‘You know why I wanted to meet you,’ Ousep says.

‘Yes. Please ask me anything you want, Uncle. But I am very curious. What happened? Why are you asking questions about Unni? I hear you have spoken to almost everybody in the class. I hope everything is all right.’

‘Everything is fine. Let’s imagine it is not important why I am asking about Unni.’

‘I don’t know why he did that,’ Ilango says, ‘I really don’t know. After the twelfth-standard board exams I was not in touch with him. He did what he did a few weeks after the exams. I heard about it much later.’

‘I didn’t come for that. I want to know more about Unni. That’s all there is to this. Tell me what you remember. When he was in the twelfth standard, the final year of school, just months before he died, that’s the Unni I want to know. When he was seventeen, how was he in class?’

Ilango’s eyes focus on a spot on the road. He is probably trying to extract something important from his memory, something significant. Everybody wants to tell a good story. That is the problem.

When Ilango speaks, his voice has lost all its elaborate modesty. He speaks with a severe fondness for a friend who was shy, who liked to sit in a corner and sketch, but could be interrupted any time. Ousep has heard this many times. The reserve of Unni that yielded to the faintest tug of friendship.

‘Unni didn’t talk much,’ Ilango says. ‘I think he liked to be left alone. But if you went to Unni and if you talked to him, he would let you talk. And he would listen carefully, like a girl. He was interested in what you were saying. When you spoke to him you knew he was imagining what you were seeing in your head. And you would wonder, what’s so important about what I am saying?’

‘Can you recall a conversation?’

‘Once, I told him about a cat on my street that did not have a tail. He asked me a lot of questions about the cat. How it behaved, how it ran, stuff like that. I don’t know why. He asked me if I thought the cat knew it didn’t have a tail. How can I know something like that? That was the way he was.’

‘Why do you think he was that way?’

‘I don’t know. I think he liked to collect a lot of information. And he did know a lot of strange facts. Actually, I don’t know if they were really facts. One day he told me that the most powerful booze in the world is found in Kerala. He said it is called Jesus Christ.’

‘It’s true,’ Ousep says.

‘Why is it called Jesus Christ?’

‘If you drink it you will rise only on the third day.’

Ilango scratches his chin with an open mouth, and looks around.

‘Sometimes he did say things that were totally strange, which simply cannot be true,’ he says.

‘Like?’

Ilango rubs his nose. He is not trying to remember, he is probably coming to a decision. ‘One day he came up to me and said, “I know a corpse.” I asked him what he meant by that and he just laughed.’

‘What did he mean?’

‘God knows.’

‘He said, “I know a corpse”?’

‘Yes.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

Ousep is startled by the laments of women. There are about twenty of them, village women, who stand in a swarm on the other side of the road, behind the wooden barricade. They are facing the fasting ringleader, the man who has the table fan beside him. They are beating their breasts and wailing, but they also show the mild wonder of recent arrival. They cry in a distracted way, throwing glances all around, even looking up at the sky, though they know it very well. They are in tattered saris, blouseless, their hair tangled in brown dirt. Most of them are old, some are very young, but in a bestial way. Their wails are composed of the same three words, which probably have no meaning when not delivered in a dirge. They keep kissing the tips of their fingers. It is as if they are begging for food from a man who is fasting to death. But then a woman shows him a banana and it is now clear that they are asking him to eat, they are begging him not to starve to death. They are probably from his village. Someone must have told them that a son of their soil has decided to sacrifice his life for the Tamil cause. So the gang of malnourished women have descended to dissuade this man, whose full belly sits on his lap as if it is something dear to him. He looks at the women with valiant gloom, and their laments grow. He is probably trying to suppress a laugh now, so his face turns more serious. Then, in a master stroke, he turns the table fan towards the women. In the burst of air the women break into giggles. They try to cry again but their lungs are tired now, and they soon fall silent. They sit on the road and start chatting among themselves.

All this will go one day, this animal poverty, it will vanish. And future generations will not know, will not even guess, the true nature of poverty, which is the longest heritage of man. Shouldn’t this be preserved somehow, like old colonial buildings, shouldn’t abject poverty be preserved as historical evidence? That is what socialists are trying to do in this country. Everybody misunderstands their intentions. They are noble conservationists, working hard to preserve a way of the world.

Ousep and Mariamma were socialists once, like all the informed young men and women of the time, slim people in love who thought they knew how to make the world a better place, a place as happy as their beds. But Mariamma was not as naïve as him. One night she told him, her head on his bare chest, her hair all over his face, ‘But an idea that overrates human character is bound to fail. Look around, Ousep, in every way of the world, only ideas that do not overestimate human nature succeed.’ Ousep quoted her in his popular Sunday column. Not many young journalists could get away with quoting their own wives, but then every odd thing that Ousep Chacko did in those days was heralded as ‘Style’. Other writers started quoting their wives in their serious political columns, and that became a brief journalistic trend. Until, inevitably, it became a farce and died.

Ilango is not affected by the women, he sees nothing in what has just happened. But he says, pointing to the women, ‘According to Unni, those women are not as sad as we think they are. They are happy. According to him, everybody is happy. And people who are unhappy are only fooling themselves. For someone as clever as Unni it was a weird view.’

Ilango’s eyes grow feeble as he quietly sips his tea. He does not speak for a while, then he begins to chuckle. Still he does not speak. Ousep does not push, he waits.

‘There was something Unni started doing in the final year of school which he had never done before,’ the boy says. ‘If a teacher was absent, or during the lunch break, any time the class was not guarded, he would quietly go to the teacher’s table, climb on it and stand in total silence, until all murmurs stopped and all eyes were on him. Then he would tell us stories, his own stories. And when Unni told a story … now how do I say it? I am not a smart boy. I don’t have the words to describe what I felt. When Unni told a story standing on top of that table, it was as if there was no other sound in the world. As he spoke you saw pictures in your head, you saw faces, and you could smell things that you did not know had smells.’

This, Ousep has heard many times. The class of adolescent boys falling quiet as Unni approached the table, his smooth athletic leap on to the table, and then his dramatic silence, which infected all and killed the final chuckles. But what is odd is that several boys claim this never happened, or that they do not remember seeing Unni do this. That is strange. An act of this nature would have many witnesses, and it did happen in all probability. Then why would many boys want to deny it? What is even more odd is that the boys who describe Unni’s storytelling do not remember any of his stories.

‘Do you remember one of his stories?’

‘No.’

That was quick.

‘You remember the little details of how Unni told his stories, but you don’t remember any of the stories that he told?’

Ilango’s large, expressive Adam’s apple rolls, as if it has become self-aware.

‘I don’t remember. I wonder why.’

Ousep lights his cigarettes. ‘Do you smoke?’ he asks.

The boy shakes his head, almost wounded for being asked.

‘Why do you smoke two cigarettes at once?’ he asks with exaggerated respect in his tone.

‘Because three is too much,’ Ousep says.

The boy is not sure whether it is a joke; he nods. He looks away for a few seconds, then asks the inevitable question. ‘People say you have found something about Unni, is that true?’

‘I’ve always been searching, Ilango, I never stopped. Now I come back to you after three years because I thought age might make you see a few things differently.’

The tea arrives in the filthy hands of a bare-chested waiter, who is humming a film song about the relationship between flowers and honeybees. Ilango drinks in thoughtful sips. And he begins to describe a residential colony, he gives directions on how to get there, which is the Tamilian way of telling a story — describe a place by almost giving its postal address. Several film directors live in this colony. ‘Some of them have mistresses,’ he says. Ilango pauses in a moment of embarrassment. He feels ashamed for using the word ‘mistress’ in the presence of a friend’s father.

‘It’s all right, you are not a child any more,’ Ousep says. ‘We are men. You and I. We are men. What about the mistresses?’

‘Unni said that the mistresses always lived on the ground floor. They were never on the higher floors. He used to wonder why. He really wanted to know why. That’s it,’ the boy says meekly, as if conceding that what he has just said does not deserve the tea Ousep has bought him. ‘I know it does not mean anything. Such an ordinary thing, actually. I don’t know how useful something like this is to you.’

‘It’s good. It’s very good. What I need are bits like these.’

‘Really?’

‘The other boys I meet, they just don’t understand what I want. They try to give me their opinions. But you are a smart guy. You have an interesting memory.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Did Unni find out why the mistresses are usually kept only in the ground-floor flats?’

‘I don’t know. But he was sure there is a reason.’

The boy sets his cup down, and wipes his mouth with his fingers. ‘What else do I remember about Unni?’ he says, and looks lost for a while. He is distracted by a memory, he is probably wondering whether he should give voice to it. He stares at the fasting men without looking at them. Then he makes his decision. ‘There is something else I remember,’ he says. And he speaks slowly, clearly.

One evening, he is at a friend’s house with a few other boys, including Unni. It is a small house with an unpaved walkway that runs from the gate to a high boundary wall. The boys are on the terrace, which is not very high, just about twelve feet above the ground. The gate is locked, but a stray dog slips through the bars. It does not see the boys on the terrace. ‘Dogs usually don’t look up,’ Ilango says. ‘Unni used to say that often, I don’t know why. Animals usually don’t look up.’ It wanders in, and goes down the walkway. The narrow path is about sixty feet long, and it is hemmed in by a high boundary wall on one side and the wall of the house on the other. So the gate is its only escape if a situation arises.

Unni jumps down and picks up a stone. He stands at the gate, blocking the dog’s path, and flings the stone. The stone is not intended to hit but the dog does not know that. It runs to the back wall and tries to climb but the wall is too high and this dog has probably never climbed a wall before. It stands there with its tongue out, wondering what it must do. Unni flings another stone, which hits the wall. The dog tries to climb the wall again, it slips and falls. It runs towards the side wall, runs in circles, runs towards Unni and then away from him, confused and terrified. It finally goes to the boundary wall and stands facing him, awaiting its fate. The other boys now jump down and pick up stones. Their stones miss, they hit the wall, but the dog is terrified. It makes sounds that are normally not associated with a dog. It leaps at the wall, leaps in the air, it begins to behave like an alien beast. Some stones now hit the dog. It cries, running up and down the walkway. At this point Unni says that they should let the dog go. All go back to the terrace. The dog charges to the gate and escapes. It runs down the road, it keeps running until it vanishes round the bend. That is it. That is what Ilango wants to say.

‘How did you feel about it?’ Ousep says.

‘About what?’

‘The dog. The way it ran, the sounds it made, the fear in its eyes.’

‘It was terrible.’

‘Terrible, yes.’

‘There is no other way of looking at it.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Yes. I don’t know what had happened to us. We behaved like urchins who stone chameleons just for fun.’

‘Did Unni’s stones hit the dog?’

‘No. After all of us came down from the terrace he didn’t throw any more stones.’

‘Interesting that you remember that. A minor detail in a minor incident, after so long.’

‘I don’t know why I remember that.’

‘Did you hit the dog?’

‘Just once. I aimed at the wall but the dog got in the way.’

The dog got in the way, he says. A stray dog, probably very ugly, which is a bad thing to be in such a situation, is trapped. It is powerless, comically terrified, almost singing. What would a bunch of boys with stones in their hands want to do? This boy says he aimed at the wall. He only wanted to see the dog react, he did not want to hurt it, he did not want to hear the sound of stone against its flesh and its brief responsive shriek.

‘Why do you think he did that, the whole game, why do you think he started it?’ Ousep asks.

The boy studies his cup. For a moment there he looks intelligent, the way he looks with unhappy eyes at the cup, the way he lurks in his own silence. He says, ‘You used the word “game”, why did you use that word?’

‘I think sometimes Unni did things just to see how others reacted.’

‘Yes,’ the boy says, relieved for some reason. ‘That’s what I think. He had an abnormal interest in how people reacted. It was a game for him. Yes, that’s the word.’

‘The day the dog was stoned, were the other two present?’

‘Which two?’

‘Somen Pillai and Sai Shankaran.’

‘They were there, yes. Those three were always together. Always whispering and laughing among themselves. As if they were playing a secret game and the others were just fools who didn’t know what was happening. Unni had that attitude more than the other two. He could make you feel small and silly.’

There is a surprising strength in the boy’s tone now, the impotence of nostalgia is gone, and in its place is the force of contempt, the contempt of a male for a smarter friend.

‘People used to say that those three were up to something,’ the boy says. The way he says ‘those three’, it is as if he has forgotten that one of them is Ousep’s dead son.

‘Those three,’ Ousep says in a soft voice. ‘What exactly was it about them? What do you think they were doing?’

‘It was as if they were a part of something, something others won’t understand. Like that day. After we went back to the terrace and watched the dog run down the road, they looked at each other, made eyes, smiled. There was always something going on between them.’

‘A lot of people have told me this but nobody is able to say what exactly they were up to.’

‘Even I am not clear. They spent a lot of time together just talking, going somewhere, doing things. I don’t know what they did. Someone told me they were involved in betting.’

‘Do you remember who told you this?’

‘No.’

‘What kind of betting?’

‘I don’t know. I think they bet among themselves that some events were going to occur in a particular way.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’m not clear myself. We were not very close, actually.’

‘Are you in touch with them?’

Ousep feels stupid for a moment because when he said ‘them’ he had seen the faces of three boys. But one of them, of course, nobody is in touch with.

‘No,’ the boy says, ‘I’ve not seen them in a long time.’

‘Tell me what you know about Somen Pillai.’

‘There is nothing that I remember of Somen Pillai. It’s funny, actually. You know, some guys are like that, they are so silent, they are invisible. They don’t talk, they don’t do anything in the class, they just sit and watch.’

Ousep has heard this before. Apart from the fact that he was Unni’s friend, Somen Pillai has no claim to the memory of his classmates. In the ten years that he studied in St Ignatius, there is nothing that he said or did that anybody can recall.

‘Have you met him?’ Ilango asks.

‘Yes, once. Very briefly. I’ve been trying to meet him again but he is refusing to meet me. Would you know why he would refuse me?’

‘Maybe he doesn’t like talking,’ Ilango says. ‘Some boys are like that.’

Ilango wants to leave. He takes one large decisive gulp of the tea, which is surely cold now. Ousep looks at him carefully, now willing to take a chance.

‘Did Unni ever send anyone his comics, did he ever post his comics to someone, maybe for a reaction or something?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did he have a girlfriend?’

Ilango lets out a shy chuckle. ‘I don’t know, I was not that close to him. But I heard these Fatima School girls, they used to talk about him, I heard that from my cousin.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ilango, I know you’ve already answered this question but I can’t help asking this. Why do you think Unni killed himself?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Can you guess?’

‘I don’t know. I really have no idea. But since you ask me to guess, I think he was probably not as happy and confident and superior as everyone thought. He was not good at useful things, you know, he was not the type who would have got into IIT or any engineering college. All he did was draw. You asked if Unni sent his cartoons to anyone. Now that I am talking about it, yes, I think he used to send his cartoons to some magazines. But he got rejected, I heard. Got rejected by all of them.’

‘His works were rejected?’

‘Yes. I heard he sent some stuff to an American magazine called New Yorker. And they sent it back to him. Unni said they wrote him a nice long letter, but they didn’t want to publish his cartoons.’

‘And you think Unni was depressed because of all this?’

‘Yes. Just think about it. What would Unni have done with his life?’

‘What do you plan to do in your life, Ilango?’

‘Me? I am going to become an engineer. Then I will write my GMAT and go to the US. Why do you ask?’

‘Just curious.’

‘I will work in the US, I will get a Green Card. I have planned out my whole life. I will get married at twenty-eight.’

‘Good, good. Any other reason you can think of? Any other reason why he chose to die?’

‘I’ve nothing more to say. The truth is I didn’t know him that well.’

‘Everybody tells me that.’

‘Because the truth is that nobody knew him well.’

‘Except those two boys?’

‘Yes, except those two. Somen Pillai and Sai Shankaran.’

‘Ilango, do you know that the three of them used to go to meet a nun in St Teresa’s Convent, who had taken a vow of silence?’

‘No,’ the boy says with a chuckle, shaking his head. ‘I am sure they did many such things that have no meaning.’

A man appears on the road, stark naked, holding a can, and walking as if he is just passing through. When he is sure that all eyes are on him he empties the can over his head. It must be kerosene. He is gleaming now in the sun. He begins to jog, screaming that he will set himself on fire if the Tamils in Sri Lanka are not saved today. He runs through the small crowd asking for a matchbox, scattering the people, who are not sure whether they must flee or stand there and watch. ‘Matchbox,’ the naked man says as he jogs in large circles. When he approaches, Ousep, with great lethargy, hands him his matchbox. The man ignores him and runs ahead asking for a light. And he looks ecstatic when the policemen finally carry him away.

FOR THE FIRST TIME in his life, Ousep Chacko waits for a nun. He is in St Teresa’s Convent, sitting on a wooden bench in the visitors’ gallery, which is deserted. There are ghostly echoes in the air, and they have a dark antiquity about them, as if they are from another time, the violent ages when religions were born, when evil finally defeated good, and in an ingenious trick split itself into good and evil.

At the far end of the room is a small door, as if little people live inside. The door is so defiantly shut that it is hard to believe that it ever opens. But it does, without a sound, and six black cassocks emerge and stare at him. One nods to the others, and walks towards him. The others go back in and shut the door. He is all right, they have decided. A harmless man from long ago. That offends him somehow, to be considered innocuous in a fraction of a second by a sisterhood of virgins.

The middle-aged nun is holding a notebook and a fountain pen. She sits on the bench with him, one foot farther away than necessary. He has not seen her in twenty-four years, but there are still fragments he can see from her youth. He wonders how she sees him now.

She is from his village. He remembers her as a sleepy girl with eight younger sisters who used to walk behind their mother like piglets, passing by his house on their way to the Sunday market. Then she flowered into one of those young girls, their thick dark hair still wet from a long bath, who stood at the bus stop holding college books and giggled at bus conductors who had fair skin. One day, her father decided to make her a nun to save her from poverty. Days before she left for the convent, as she walked down the alleys of the village, men had only one thought, even the pious had only that thought — the wasting of a firm young body so far untouched by any man. After she was sent to the convent, she ran back home twice. But the third time she was deposited in the convent, she accepted her fate.

Now she has a vacant peace on her face that does not look like defeat. She is fine, she is happy, they all are. That is Unni’s hypothesis — the inevitability of happiness, the persistence of happiness. Happiness as an inescapable fate, not a pursuit.

She was at Ousep’s wedding, the only nun present that day, pretty by the standards of nuns, and as famous for fleeing the convent as some legendary girls who had eloped with Hindu men. He has not seen her since. But Mariamma used to write to her and even meet her, probably with the insane caution of a woman encountering her husband’s family circle but also with the eager nervousness of a good Christian in the presence of a habit.

The good thing about the nun’s vow of silence is that she and Ousep do not have to endure the warming up, and the imagined hilarity of calling each other old.

‘You can speak,’ Ousep says in a good-natured way. ‘Nobody is watching, and both of us know there is no God.’

Her smile informs him that she has already forgiven him. He tells her what he wants. She looks as though she knew he would come for this one day. She writes on her notebook in good Malayalam, and in a beautiful miserly hand. She writes that she will go to a far corner and write down everything she remembers. That is exactly what Ousep wants from everyone. People liberating him from their company, and going away to a far corner and writing down everything they remember of Unni in small precise paragraphs.

She gives a quick written apology for not offering him tea because that is not a privilege she has. She goes about twenty feet away and sits on a bench, which is attached to a desk. After thirty minutes, she gives him a bunch of papers.

Unni Chacko, Somen Pillai, Sai Shankaran — that is the order in which she has named them. He asks her why she wrote Somen’s name ahead of Sai’s. She curls her lips to suggest the order is not important. She sits staring at the floor. It does not appear that she wants him to leave yet. She writes in her notebook, ‘Why did he do it?’

‘I want to find out,’ Ousep says.

‘Can you take a guess?’ she writes.

‘No. Can you?’

She shakes her head.

‘Unni told his friends something very odd,’ he says. ‘He told them that he knew a corpse. Does it make any sense to you?’

She shakes her head. Then rises, joins her palms and leaves. As she walks away she rubs her eyes like a child.

Ousep reads what she has written. About fifteen years ago, she was transferred to Madras from Kerala. She had not taken the vow of silence then. Somehow, Mariamma came to know that the nun was in Madras, and she began to visit her at least once a month, and they would chat about the people they knew. At some point she started taking Unni along to meet her. The first time Unni came to the convent and sat here in the same hall, he was probably eight years old. He was ‘an extraordinarily beautiful boy with soft, curly hair’. He was probably fascinated by her, he would keep staring. As he grew older, and taller, his visits grew rarer, though Mariamma continued to visit every month. He would accompany his mother only in the rains, to hold her umbrella on their way to the convent. Once when Mariamma came to visit, the nun gave her a note saying that she had taken a vow of silence as her sacrifice to Christ. Mariamma understood that there was no point in meeting her any more, for what use is a silent nun? But, two years later, when Unni was seventeen, he came here with the other two boys. They met her six times, and every time they came unannounced. They asked her many questions but all their questions had only one objective. They wanted to know whether anything extraordinary happened to her because of her silence.

She presumes that they expected her to make startling revelations but she had very unremarkable things to say. ‘There is a peace in your chest when you are silent for vast amounts of time, a sweet sadness, but nothing beyond this.’ They were very disappointed when she wrote on a piece of paper that she did speak, though rarely, when demanded by the Mother Superior. It was very tiring to write down answers to their questions, and her meeting three adolescent boys did not go down very well in the convent. Eventually, she asked them not to visit her.

‘There was something about them, there was the light of God on their faces, but still there was also something odd about them. They were searching for something and it seemed to me I could not show them the path. Unni was relaxed, polite. He asked very few questions but he listened very carefully. I think he was very amused by me. Once, he asked me if I was happy. Strange, nobody had ever asked me that question before. “Yes,” I told him. Somen Pillai seemed to be a serious boy. He never spoke. I found his eyes very disturbing. He seemed to believe that he knew something deeper about the world than the others. Sai was simple, excited and very curious. He spoke in quick short bursts.’

SOMEN PILLAI LIVES IN a stout independent house with a pink front. It stands at the end of a narrow mud lane, which is flanked by similar homes. From their dark windows and doorways people stand and gaze, looking bored, expecting a greater boredom to reach them; it is as if they know that the extraordinary does not exist.

Somen’s home is one of those houses that have eyes — the guest is fifty feet away, a cheap unchanging blue curtain behind the large front windows moves an inch, and the main door opens slowly, as if much thought has gone into the act. The hosts then emerge to greet or repel. Behind the squat house, tall apartment blocks loom.

After the return of Unni’s comic, Ousep has been here probably eight times. And every time, before he can reach the gate, the door would open and Somen’s father would step out or the boy’s mother would, or the two of them together, or the door would not open at all. When they do appear, they step on to the porch and stand with their elbows on the short iron gate, and wait for him. But the only thing they have to say to him is that Somen is not home, and that he does not want to meet anyone.

Ousep has met the boy only once — three years ago, a week after Unni’s death. Somen, with a mop of accidental stylish hair that rolled dreamily, large moist eyes, a deep dimple on the right cheek and a smile of discomfort, listened with a piercing stare, but when he spoke it was as if he had not been listening. He spoke slowly, carefully, with an inarticulate superiority, as if his thoughts were too complex for words. And he had the same complicated self-regard when he said something as excruciatingly ordinary as ‘We were just three friends who lazed around and talked.’

The door opens before Ousep has reached the gate. Somen’s parents step out, amble to the gate, looking in many directions, and stand with their elbows on the gate. They do not speak a word but they look conspiratorial, which is what man and wife truly are; when they stand together that is what they are — accomplices.

They have never called him in, and in return they give him their honest shame. They are Malayalees and they know Ousep Chacko as the promising young writer from long ago.

‘He is not home,’ the father says with a feeble glance from behind thick spectacles. He is in his formal office trousers but is bare chested, and there is a small towel on his shoulders. He is a manager in Canara Bank, and his wife is a teller in the same branch. She is looking grim right now, as if she is counting cash. A tidy, dignified woman, like most women in the world. She may have never stood even for a moment in her life in any of the gymnastic ways of Mariamma. What is it like to sleep with a calm, feminine woman, who does not address the walls?

Ousep is distracted by someone who has appeared at the doorway. The boy’s parents panic for a second, they turn to the door and seem relieved when they realize it is just the maid. She is mopping the doorstep, her slim fair back fully bent from the hip. Ousep feels a stab of longing. Her face has an austere diminished beauty about it, as if it is not her place to be any prettier. How could she be allowed to be? A maid in Madras has to be ugly because that is her assurance to the mistress that she will not awaken the egalitarian muscle of the man in the house.

‘What must I do to meet your son?’ Ousep says.

‘Maybe you should call first,’ the father says.

‘Nobody ever picks up the phone.’

‘You say that, Ousep, but that is so strange. We are at home in the mornings and evenings.’

‘When exactly is he home?’

‘I don’t know, Ousep. He has his ways.’

‘You say he does not go to college.’

‘That is what I say.’

‘How can a boy not go to college?’

‘Some boys don’t and that is all there is to it.’

‘Something is wrong, I can see that much,’ Ousep says.

‘You see stories in nothing, Ousep. That is your way. You are a storyteller.’

THOMA CHACKO DROWNS HIS head in a bucket of water and keeps his eyes open so that they become red. He holds his breath and stares at the blurred bottom of the bucket. He imagines a world in the aftermath of a giant sea wave, a world that has been engulfed by the sea as foretold by Unni, he imagines these to be the final moments of his life. His lungs are about to burst but he holds on. How terrifying it is to drown. He hopes a fall from the building’s terrace is less painful. The cracking of the skull is a very different form of death, it is faster. Though the best way to die is to be shot in the head. That is what Unni said. ‘The explosion of the skull, Thoma, that must hurt but only for a moment. Once the bullet reaches the brain, there is no pain. That is the beauty of the brain. It is the brain that makes you feel every inch of your body, it is the brain that makes you feel pain, but the brain itself has no feeling.’

What might have gone through Unni’s mind in the final moments before he jumped, what was he thinking? That afternoon three years ago, Thoma was asleep, but he had sensed the presence of Unni in the bedroom. He knew his brother had walked in, even stayed for a while before leaving the room. He remembers that. That, and an unfamiliar dream in which a woman is screaming, and running away from a giant tsunami. If Thoma had been awake, Unni would have sat down on the bed for a chat and even the thought of ending his own life might not have crossed his mind. Everything would have been different. But Thoma had slept.

He wants to know whether making his eyes go red is a good excuse for wearing his father’s old sunglasses. It is important that Thoma finds a reason to wear sunglasses. His mother has just suggested that they ask Mythili Balasubramanium if she will teach Thoma in the evenings, maths especially. They are going to knock on her door and ask. Thoma wants to wear sunglasses when he meets her, she may respect him if she sees him that way. He does look dashing in wet hair and sunglasses, several people say that. They say, ‘Thoma, you look handsome right now.’ But would Mythili think that he has got conjunctivitis? Is it absurd to get the Madras Eye on a Saturday? And why does he suffer so much for her? When Unni was alive and they used to spend hours with her, he had thought she was an unbearable, talkative girl. But now that he is what he is, he thinks of her all the time, and the best thing about life and the worst is that she exists.

His eyes almost blood red, he goes to his father’s bookshelf and searches for the old green glasses, which are usually left on top of a stack of books. But he can’t find them now.

‘Why are your eyes red?’ his mother asks.

‘I’ve got Madras Eye,’ he says.

‘You were fine one minute ago.’

‘It always happens suddenly,’ he says. ‘Surely you don’t think my eyes would first turn violet, then indigo, then blue and the other colours of the rainbow spectrum before they finally become red.’

‘What are the other colours of the spectrum, Thoma? Let’s see if you know.’

‘I know. I know everything. I just don’t tell.’

‘Can’t you memorize it, Thoma? It is so simple. Just stick inside your thick head the word VIBGYOR. And you’d be able to name the colours of the rainbow any time.’

‘Don’t irritate me.’

‘Someone is angry with his mother today. What are you searching for, Thoma?’

‘Where are the sunglasses?’

‘I sold them,’ she says. ‘Come here, let me dry your hair.’

‘Why did you sell the glasses?’

‘There was someone asking on the church noticeboard.’

‘How can you do something like that, how can you take something from our house and go and sell it?’

‘I’ve done that all my life, you know that. All my gold bangles, they have become your shit, haven’t they?’

‘But you should not sell everything,’ he says. ‘Some things, you should not sell.’

‘How do you think I put food on the table some days?’

‘Always ask me before you sell things.’

‘I’ll only ask you if you’re hungry, Thoma.’

They walk out together, leaving the door open. Across the short corridor is Mythili’s door. There is something about that door, something arrogant. Another happy home shut to the Chackos. They stand at the door and wait. Thoma hopes Mythili will open the door holding a newspaper and ask, pointing to a headline, ‘Thoma, I wonder what KGB stands for?’

‘It’s been three years since we went to their home,’ Mariamma says, the way she usually announces a fact. ‘Neighbours right next door, good people, but we have not been here in three years. It didn’t strike me until now how strange that is.’

‘Obviously they don’t want us to go there,’ Thoma says. ‘Nobody wants us, can’t you see?’

‘That’s not true, Thoma. Mythili smiles at me when she sees me.’

‘It’s a half-smile, can’t you see? She used to love you. Everything has changed now.’

‘She loves us still, Thoma. She is a grown girl now, that’s all. She can’t behave like a little girl any more.’

‘Her mother definitely hates us. Elephant woman.’

‘Don’t say that, Thoma. She talks a lot to me from her balcony.’

‘She doesn’t talk to you, you talk to her. She just nods and hangs her underwear on the wire. She doesn’t even look at you.’

But Mariamma is not listening any more. She smiles at Mythili’s coir doormat, thinking of something, probably something entirely unconnected, maybe an unforgettable bird she once saw in her childhood. That is how Mother is. Her mind wanders. But at this moment she does look normal, more tame and womanly than she is at home. She looks prettier this way, even happy and wise. Which she is, though not many people know that.

‘Mythili was just thirteen then, three years ago she was just a kid,’ she says. ‘She is a big girl now, Thoma. A child yesterday, almost a woman today. In the blink of an eye.’

Thoma feels a warm ache when his mother mourns the passing of an age. How time flies. The lost years. Those were the days. He has heard these all his life, but only after Unni’s death did something in him stir at the sound of such phrases. The hurting sweetness of memory, it has no name in Tamil or Malayalam. That is what Unni said. But he said there is a word for it in English, which Thoma has now forgotten, a word that sounds like an ailment.

Unni said that there were thousands of Human Sentiments and many of them had not been named in any language. He said every person had at least one emotion that only he or she felt and no one else in the world could even imagine the feeling. ‘Even you, Thoma, among the many things you feel there is one that only you can achieve and no other person in the world.’

‘I know what it is, Unni, but don’t tell anyone,’ Thoma had said in a whisper.

‘What is it, Thoma?’

‘In the mornings, soon after I wake up, my penis grows on its own.’

‘My God, Thoma, are you serious?’

‘I promise.’

‘Thoma, you are one of a kind.’

‘I am?’

‘You are a mutant, Thoma.’

‘What do mutants do?’

‘A mutant has abilities other humans do not have. You are a mutant, Thoma.’

It was the happiest moment in Thoma’s life, even though Unni did say, ‘But it is a talent, Thoma. It is not a sentiment.’

‘That’s what even I thought, Unni. It is a talent. But I do have feelings that others may not feel. I can smell the earth after it rains.’

‘Many people can, actually.’

‘Really? There is something else, then. Nobody else can even imagine it. Sometimes when I feel sad, when I think of the way our mother talks to herself, how our father comes home drunk, how we never go out as a family because we don’t have any money, when I think of all that I feel a sorrow in my throat, it becomes a ball, and you know, Unni, I actually enjoy it. I like the pain in my throat and the way tears flow from my eyes. Someone who is looking at me may think that I am suffering. But I am enjoying it, too.’

‘Thoma, you are really very different from others.’

‘I am a mutant.’

‘No. What you told me, that makes you a Unique Person. People go through their entire lives not knowing what is special about them. But I think you’ve found it at such an early age. What you told me about how you feel, nobody has that feeling, Thoma.’

‘Can you think of a name for it? I don’t want it to be unnamed. I want people to know that there is such a sentiment.’

‘Only the Oxford dictionary is allowed to decide on new words, Thoma.’

Unni went to the phone and dialled a number. ‘Is that the Oxford Dictionary Limited?’ Unni said. ‘I want to speak to the editor, please … Sir, good morning. My brother Thoma Chacko appears to have discovered his Unique Emotion …’

Thoma was so excited he was jogging on the spot and trying to get Unni’s attention by waving his hand.

‘What is it, Thoma?’

‘Tell him, I am from St Ignatius School.’

Unni said into the phone, ‘I am sorry to keep you on hold, sir. As I was saying, my brother Thoma Chacko, a day scholar at the St Ignatius High School for Boys, has discovered an emotion that is unique to him and he proposes that it be named. Yes … yes … of course. What happens to him is that on some days his sorrow feels like a ball in his throat and he begins to enjoy the whole thing.’

Many weeks later, Unni brought him a pocket Oxford dictionary that was so new that it was still in its plastic casing. Unni opened it and showed him the word ‘Self-pity’.

‘That’s the word they made for you, Thoma.’

Thoma held the dictionary in his nervous hands and saw with a shudder in his heart what he had done. He had created an English word even though it was borrowed from two existing words.

‘They have not mentioned my name,’ he said.

‘They don’t mention names, Thoma.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s the way they are.’

Thoma is not a kid any more, he knows what Unni did, but he still remembers the excitement of the day and he remembers it through a happy scent.

His mother is probably nervous. ‘Wonder what is taking them so long to open the door,’ she says.

‘You’ve to ring the doorbell,’ Thoma says.

‘I didn’t ring the bell?’

‘No, you didn’t.’

She begins to shake with laughter, and that makes him laugh too.

Mythili’s mother opens the door and is surprised by what she sees. She does not realize it but she is slowly shutting the door. She stares with a sullen face, and if she stays that way for a second more Thoma and his mother will be shamed. She manages a smile just in time. ‘Come in,’ she says, but she moves back only two feet. She is still holding the door. Mariamma launches one leg in; the other is still outside. The door is ajar and there is no way Thoma can enter.

‘He is having his coffee,’ Mythili’s mother says. The word ‘he’ from her mouth has always referred to Mythili’s father, who is in the hall, minding his own business. Mythili is sitting beside him, on the sofa. She is in a sleeveless pink top that reaches to her knees, and her bare legs are together. She is careful that way, she was always womanly even when she was a little girl. Some girls, they are careless when they sit. They don’t know that boys, especially the older boys, are always searching for ‘The Gap’, they are always on the lookout for it. Mythili probably knows, she is very shrewd.

But she seems somewhat naked right now. It is not just her legs, Thoma can see most of her shoulders and arms. She is this way only when she is indoors. If she wants to go to the front balcony she has to wear other clothes and tie her hair in a ponytail. The thought of Mythili being forced to obey the rules pleases Thoma. He imagines giving an instruction to her and she meekly obeying. That may never happen, but he enjoys the thought.

‘I’ll come later,’ Mariamma says.

‘But what is it?’ Mythili’s mother asks.

‘I was wondering if Mythili can teach Thoma for an hour three days a week. He needs help, it seems to me.’

She catches Mythili’s eye, and the girl smiles in a distant way, as if she is a stranger. That is unfair. There was a time when she used to shadow his mother, and say that she liked Mariamma more than her own mother.

‘But she is going to be very busy,’ Mythili’s mother says. ‘You know the exams are coming.’ She turns to her daughter and says, ‘You are going to be very busy.’

‘Yes, I’m going to be very busy,’ Mythili says.

Mythili’s mother then steps out of her house and shuts the door. ‘There is something I’ve to tell you, Maria,’ she says. She has never been able to accept that Mariamma’s name is not Maria. ‘The money I gave you two months ago, just two hundred rupees, I know, but it would be nice if you could return it soon. Things are a bit tight right now.’

A jolt of shame runs through Mariamma. She does not realize it but her lips have vanished into her mouth. She smiles sheepishly at the floor, like a moron. ‘I was going to return it in just a few days, meant to tell you that,’ she says, and heads back home.

She wanders through the vacant rooms of her house, tossing a ball of crumpled newspaper in the air and catching it with one hand, whispering to herself what she has become. ‘Girls who were village idiots when Mariamma was something, they are proud women now and Mariamma a beggar.’ Occasionally, her voice rises and Thoma finds it unreasonable that in the middle of all this she should remember his grandmother, who has nothing to do with the day’s humiliation. ‘I have better things to do, Annamol, than make tea.’

She whispers a question a teacher had once asked her about the gold bullion, and how her answer was so brilliant the class was stunned. She walks this way, up and down the rooms, tossing the ball of paper and muttering compliments to herself.

Thoma imagines a day many years in the future when he would arrive in a black car so broad that it would have to be parked outside Block A, and all the people of the building would assemble on their balconies to take a look at the car. He would emerge from the car wearing dark glasses. His tight white shirt and white trousers and pointed white shoes gleaming in the sun. Then Mariamma would slip out of the car in a sari made of gold. And he would look up at Mythili’s mother and throw a huge quantity of notes at her, most of which would somehow reach her third-floor balcony. She would look down at her own belly in shame. Then, for some reason, he would run in slow motion, his hair flying.

Thoma follows his mother as she now walks a bit faster through the rooms, her hands beginning to flay, her fingers stiffening to point at things. The ball of paper falls from her hand. He picks it up and gives it to her. She takes it without looking at him and resumes her march towards another yellow wall. He walks behind her, very close.

‘Tell me a story from your village,’ he says.

‘Later,’ she says without affection, as if it were just another voice inside her that had made the request.

He wonders how Unni used to do it. He could make her snap out of her grouses. He had Technique, that was what Unni had, but Thoma is not as smart. He tails her, wondering what he must do to make her laugh. She is slowly getting louder, she is remembering the same old grudges, the subject of her anger is not the humiliation of the morning any more.

She goes to the kitchen and wags a finger. Her lips curl in, her head tilts, her jaws stiffen in the fury of the words that do not emerge out of her mouth, and she points a finger at the ceiling. Thoma stands with her, he mimics her scowl and points a finger at the ceiling. Both of them stand this way for a few seconds. Until she relaxes her arm and looks at him with a hand on her hip. And she shakes with laughter. Thoma feels the relief of happiness, and for the first time in his life the air of triumph in his chest. What he had intended to achieve he has attained. That has never happened before. That a motive is followed by its realization may seem natural to most people but not Thoma. When Unni wanted to draw a cow, he drew a cow that was almost alive. Thoma cannot do that. His cows look like white sofas. When Mythili used to say that she was going to sing a song, she would shuffle a bit, swallow and sing exactly the way she had intended. And long after she stopped and looked shyly at Unni, there would be the silence of joy in the room. But the melodies that play in Thoma’s mind, when they come out through his throat, even he does not recognize them. And down there on the playground nobody ever asks him to bowl because the ball can go anywhere in the world. They let him bat only because it does not make a difference to anybody. But today, Thoma had wished to do something, he had a goal, and he achieved it. Carried away, he continues to stand with his lips curled in and a menacing finger threatening the ceiling. She laughs again, but not as much.

MARIAMMA IS WAITING IN the dark, her back against the wall, legs spread out straight on the floor, her big toes interlocked. Ousep will come any time, swaying and stumbling, screaming his laments. If she is lucky he will come quietly on the arms of strangers, like a new cupboard. Once, the men had carried him straight into the flat below. That woman had shrieked as they tried to walk in with him. They tried to calm her down, saying that he was not dead, and they asked her the location of his bed. How that woman screamed.

After the incident, which was a few months ago, Mariamma sees a recurring dream. Ousep on the arms of able men being taken into an orderly home; the tidy woman of the house, with jasmine flowers in her hair, opens the door, then screams in fright and asks them to get out. The men carry Ousep to another home and ask the woman there to show them where his bed is. That woman, too, yells uncontrollably and throws objects at them. They go on this way, carrying Ousep to every home in the world, to be turned away by indignant women. Finally, the bearers of Ousep Chacko arrive at the door of Mariamma, who quietly shows them his bed. It is a dream that makes her sad sometimes, but at other times she shakes in her sleep with laughter.

Every time she sits this way waiting for him she feels a familiar fear in her stomach, though what is about to happen is a scene that occurs every night. The rosary moves between her fingers, but her lips mumble other things. One night, a night like this, she will be waiting but Ousep will not arrive. The phone will ring and a policeman will tell her, ‘A man has been found dead on the road.’

‘Then it is him,’ she will say. ‘That is how Ousep Chacko would go. Like a dog.’

‘What must we do with the body?’

‘In his wallet you will find some cash. If you bastards steal it, you and your children will suffer till the very end of time.’ That is what she will say, she has enough strength inside her to say that. But when she thinks about the matter more calmly, she decides to exclude the policeman’s children from her curse.

But will the call ever come, will Ousep ever fall? Drunkards do live long. They are careful people, especially when they walk on the road. No man has greater purpose than a drunkard.

The thought comes to her, not for the first time, that she could burn him when he is asleep. She could pour kerosene on him and light him up. Men burn their wives all the time and get away with it, don’t they? Burning girls, this country is full of burning girls, full of accidents in the kitchen. It is time a man went this way. She tries to think of the details of the plot but it fills her with gloom, which is a type of sloth. She tries to concentrate but as always her mind wanders. She thinks of her hill, the rubber trees, the plantain groves, and the birds that did not have names. She thinks of Unni, from his infant stare to his calm adolescence, and his tireless search for rogues among animals.

When he was six or seven, or maybe younger, she is not sure, he used to pretend that he was blind or that he was deaf. He could play it so well and for so long that she would get worried. The days he claimed he was blind he would walk to school exactly like a blind child, holding her hand all the way and stumbling on things. And when he said he was deaf, he would not flinch even when he heard a sudden blaring horn on the road. Some days his teachers complained about this. But surely he was pretending, it was a game. What else can explain it?

The thoughts of Unni, strangely, remind her of a screwdriver. She wonders why. Why would Mariamma think of a screwdriver? Is it something Unni had told her? And she realizes that earlier in the day she was thinking about the screwdriver on Ousep’s bookshelf. It is an odd object to find in his room, it was not there before. Ousep is not a man who fixes things, he has probably never struck a nail on its head in his entire life. So why is the screwdriver lying there in the room of a man who never fixes things? Because he wants to dismantle something. But what?

She thinks she has heard him but she is not sure. A moment later his heart-stopping scream eliminates the comfort of doubt. He is somewhere below, probably at the gate. She clenches her fists and mumbles a Hail Mary. She can hear him announce the name of every man in Block A. She goes to Thoma’s room. He has heard his father but he pretends to be asleep. She whispers to him, ‘Don’t worry, Thoma. It is just for a while.’

‘Can’t we run away?’ he says.

‘One day, maybe.’

‘What are we waiting for?’

‘There is a time for everything. We are waiting for the right time.’

‘I think we have reached the right time.’

‘Not yet.’

‘I am afraid,’ he says.

‘Don’t be afraid, Thoma.’

‘It’s not that simple.’

‘Don’t be afraid. I am the Rock, Thoma, and I shall never fall.’

She goes to the front balcony, and from behind the limp clothes hanging from the wire, she looks. Ousep is standing near the gate, lit by a street light, his hands spread. He is barely able to stand. He is still calling out the names of the men who live in the block. He mentions their names, their door numbers and where they work. Even in this state the man’s memory is sharp. The guard emerges from the darkness in his underwear, hopping as he puts on his trousers on the move. Ousep looks at him and makes a face, holding his chin with his fingers. The guard zips his trousers and stands erect. He is nervous, he does not know what he must do, so he takes his whistle out and whistles. That makes Mariamma laugh. Ousep walks a short distance and picks up a large stone from the ground. The guard looks at the stone very carefully for a moment, and runs, in a clever zigzag way. He goes to the far corner of the playground, near the swings that are too still. Swings that have no children in them; she cannot bear to look at them for some reason.

Ousep aims at a window, then at another, but he does not throw the stone. ‘Sleep, my friends, sleep,’ he says as he walks unsteadily to his left, his arms dead, back stooped. His deep voice, whose tremendous strength surprises even her, rips through the sullen calm. ‘In your conjugal beds, you sleep. There you commit unspeakable acts. Comical acts. Failed acts. Man does many things with wife as witness. The stories that must not be told. Despite everything, man is safest beside his wife, isn’t that true? Who can deny that? Man is safest beside his wife. Far from the treacheries of orphaned women and their wild love. Never stray too far from home, my friends. Quietly, men must pass through life. Great dangers lurk in the paths of men who live like men. Quietly. We must pass.’

Ousep drops the stone and covers his mouth with both hands. He walks with exaggerated stealth in what he believes is a straight line. He looks at the brown earth and begins to laugh. ‘Can I tell your dumb adolescent sons something?’ he says, looking up at the windows. ‘As the semen dries in their hands, can I tell them something? Can I give them some news from the future?’ He lets out a long escalating laugh that awakens the crows. ‘Boys,’ he screams, ‘you will become men in the age of women.’

The voice of a man from one of the top floors says, ‘Is there a watchman in this place or is it a eunuch that we have hired?’ Ousep throws the stone in the direction of the voice. The stone crashes against the concrete. The dissent perishes. The guard appears again in the circle of light, tries to wrestle with Ousep. In the scuffle he tears Ousep’s shirt. Ousep looks at his torn shirt and fixes the guard with a severe stare. The guard looks frightened but stands his ground. ‘What do you want to see?’ Ousep screams. ‘Do you want to see what I am made of?’ And he tears open his shirt. And it looks as if he is about to take his trousers off. Will Ousep do that?

Mariamma runs into the bedroom, not knowing what she wants to do. She takes the Best Writer award standing on Ousep’s table, holds it by the silver angel, and runs to the balcony. She flings it at him with all her strength. It lands a foot away from Ousep. He looks at the award, and at the sky, the award again and the sky. He picks it up and shows it to the world. He says, in a calm voice, ‘Once upon a time.’

She goes to sit on the kitchen floor, near the black mortar from where she can see him enter. When he arrives he stands in the hall, holding his shirt and the award, and stares at her. But he does not say anything. He walks to his room and shuts the door.

She sits there, staring at Unni’s portrait on the wall and mumbling things. ‘I didn’t get away, Mariamma didn’t get away,’ she tells the cat. She is remembering a crime she committed when she was seven years old. She was playing with a black kitten on the riverbank. She buried it in a shallow hole and covered it with soil. She was about to dig it out when she heard someone scream that a girl had jumped into the river to die. She ran to see what had happened. Five strong men swam to the girl and pulled her to the other side of the river. In all the fuss that followed, Mariamma forgot about the kitten. It was evening when she remembered. She knew the kitten’s mother, she saw the cat every day of her life. ‘Mariamma didn’t get away,’ she says. ‘Her son, too, is buried in the soil.’

Her hand rises, a finger wags at the ceiling. ‘But Philipose,’ she says, ‘you got away, Philipose.’

Ousep is slipping into deep sleep; he has a feeble, dying thought, an old unsettling thought that surfaces now and then. There are people in this world who wander through their entire lives searching for meaning, searching for an answer. For all his humour, Unni was probably among them. Could it be that Ousep, too, is searching, seeking an end that probably does not exist? Is he, too, searching for an illusory truth? Maybe the others are right, the regular people, they are usually right, aren’t they? They know the ways of the world better because they are the world. Unni died for the same reason that people usually kill themselves — he was miserable. There is nothing more to it perhaps.

Ousep asks himself why he smells kerosene in his room. The smell approaches and grows strong. Then it recedes and vanishes without a trace. And he is surprised by another question that he asks himself. He wonders what has made him ask this now. He has never asked this before. ‘Who is Philipose?’

SATURDAY MORNING, THOMA IS on the floor of the hall with his mother’s thick hardbound books, which are all about Very Serious Matters. As usual, he is searching their pages for a mention of India. Not ‘ancient civilization’ or ‘second-most populous country’ or ‘agrarian society’, but something clearly complimentary. ‘India is full of clever people, who are secretly very rich, and the naked lepers you see on the roads are all actually Pakistani spies. And Indian boys are very handsome, though they do not know that.’

He sees his mother emerge from the kitchen with a blue bucket filled with water. She looks resolute and composed. ‘No,’ he says, ‘don’t do it.’ She does not do this every morning. ‘I must choose the days, Thoma, because of the law of diminishing returns,’ she once told him. Thoma does not fully understand the Law of Diminishing Returns, but he knows that she decides to enforce the morning justice only if Father has crossed a line the previous night.

‘No,’ Thoma says, sitting up. ‘Don’t do it.’

She flings open the door of Ousep’s bedroom and goes in. Thoma hears her scream with an evangelical shiver, ‘Reform this drunkard, my Lord, my God, he is the lost sheep, and you are the shepherd.’

He hears the explosion of water landing on his father, who rises with a deep moan. A moment of peace, then Thoma sees his mother sprint out. In these circumstances she does not merely run, she really does sprint, her arms oars in the air. Nobody in Madras has ever seen a woman of her age run this fast. ‘Thoma,’ she says, with a finger pointed at her bare feet as she races past him towards the front door and vanishes down the stairs.

Ousep emerges from his bedroom, tired and fully drenched and very angry, his fist on his forehead. He almost sings to the open front door, ‘You bitch, you mad bitch.’ And he walks in a daze to the bathroom.

Thoma takes his mother’s thin eroded rubber slippers from under the dining table and goes to the balcony. She is standing on the playground, looking up, expectant. He throws her slippers down. She gives him a smile, raises a thumb, and marches to the church.

Other mornings, she tiptoes into Ousep’s room, puts her face very close to his and screams the Lord’s name into his ears. Or she hides behind the cloth screen and waits until he wakes up to scare him with a sudden howl. Thoma suspects that what she secretly wants is to give him a heart attack so that she can start her life afresh in peace, even if it is in greater poverty.

When Unni was alive she never used to sprint out of the house after the water treatment or the ghost scare. They used to stand together in the hall and laugh with their bodies arched until they were on the floor holding their stomachs. But with Unni gone she is not sure that she is safe. What if Ousep finally decides to hit her? He has never done that but what stops a furious man from losing control?

Ousep Chacko makes peace with the punishment, completes his bath, even shaves. When he walks into the hall, he sees Thoma facing the main door, which is now shut, and whispering to it. The boy has not heard his father. Ousep has a feline walk, unlike Mariamma, who shakes the air around her.

Thoma’s fists are clenched and he is looking fiercely at the door. He is mustering the courage to open it and step out, to face the world after the night of shame. His father, almost naked in front of all, drunk and loud and pathetic. ‘You can do it, Thoma, you can do it,’ the boy is telling himself. ‘Fight, Thoma, put up a fight.’

How cruel it is for this sad boy in darned shirt and born-again shorts, and rubber slippers held together by safety pins. How cruel all this. Ousep knows, but then he is what he is, he cannot be a better person. Survive these years, Thoma, somehow hold on. Life is far easier than it seems. A day will come when you will finally grow muscles in your arms; then you can take your anger out. You, too, can slap your father, see him fall. Your father would forgive. And many years later you can tell your woman about him. As you lie naked in the dark you can tell her about your bastard father. With some literary exaggerations, of course. That is allowed, a bit of colour is all right. And she will hold you tight and stroke you gently to heal your rare sorrows. But you must also know this, Thoma, you must accept the inescapable truth. Even an alcoholic gives his son a gift. A precious gift, in fact. You will never ever be a drunkard. That is how it is, that is how it goes.

The happiest men in the world are the men who swore that they would never become their fathers. That is how the alpha males became endangered. Their sons decided that they would not become their fathers, they would be decent men, they would not sleep with strangers through the night, they would instead wipe baby shit, they would know at all times the ages of their children and the names of their teachers, they would buy curtains, they would transfer food from large bowls into smaller bowls and put them in the fridge, they would not be their fathers. In a world full of new men who did not want to be their fathers, what chance did the alpha males have?

People like Thoma will create a similar world, a world where there is no place for drunkards and others like them. And the wild among men will have to seek refuge in failure to remain truly free.

Thoma is still deciding, he is still not sure whether he has the strength to go out in full public view. ‘Fight, Thoma, put fight, put fight,’ he is saying. He probably does a version of this every morning when he has to open the door and leave for school. It is a bit like a cold-water bath at dawn — the first mug requires courage, what follows is not so bad. If Thoma can step out into the corridor he will endure the rest. But first he must have the courage to open the door. The boy takes a deep decisive breath. And gives up. Last night was probably a bit too much.

Thoma turns to go to his room and is shocked to see his father staring at him. ‘Did Unni ever talk to you about a corpse?’ Ousep asks.

‘No,’ the boy says without meeting his father’s eyes.

Thoma now has a good reason to open the door and step out, which he does. At that moment the neighbour’s door opens and Mythili appears in a blue salwar-kurta. Thoma does not look at her, he looks at the floor and runs down the stairs.

‘Mythili,’ Ousep says on an impulse. He does not remember ever calling out to her. He wonders whether she even knows his name. Somehow that would be flattering. She looks at him with a shy, stranger’s smile. What a dignified farce this girl is.

‘I want to have a word with you,’ he says, walking into the corridor.

‘I am going to the library,’ she says.

‘This will take just five minutes,’ he says. ‘I have to ask you some questions about Unni.’

Her mother appears, as expected, and stands with her hand on the door frame. She quickly surveys her own breasts as if to confide in them her suspicion of all men. With that bunch of steel keys hanging at her waist she looks the part of the sentinel of her girl’s treasures.

‘Mythili is going to the lending library,’ she says unhappily.

‘I need to talk to her,’ he says, looking at the girl. He tries to lead her into his house. ‘Come,’ he says, like an innocent, respectable man.

She looks at her mother, who glares as if it is all her fault. Ousep tries to achieve the gentle vulnerable stoop and wounded eyes. ‘What happened, Mythili? You don’t like us any more? You spent your whole childhood in our home.’

‘You can talk in our house,’ her mother says.

Ousep was worried about this but now that the woman has said it he has no choice. She moves aside for him to walk in, and for the very first time he enters their home. It has the fragrance of all good homes, the smell of steam and herbs and invisible jasmines, and the faint memory of incense. The smell of moderate people. These are people who do everything that they are supposed to do. It is, in fact, bizarre that they have only one child and not two.

The girl’s father stands in the middle of the room, maintaining the impassive stare of disturbed authority. He points to a chair. Then he points a finger at his wife, and she disappears. How easy it is for some men. The man now points Mythili to a chair. As she sits, Ousep’s eyes rest on her slender body, and her father’s hard face registers a passing moment of defeat. He sits on the leather sofa and waits. Nobody utters a word for a while.

‘You work at the State Bank?’ Ousep asks.

The man nods.

‘Can I ask your daughter some questions about Unni?’ he says.

The man nods again.

This is the first time a young girl will tell Ousep her memories of Unni. He had always hoped for this but he does not know what he must ask.

‘Mythili, it is strange that I ask you this after three years. You were just a little girl when Unni died, so I could not talk to you then. Do you know why Unni did what he did?’

She looks at the floor and says, ‘I don’t know.’ She is sitting at the edge of the chair, her knees pressed together, her back meek and bent. Her nails are painted in a pale colour that certainly has a name. Her large blue earrings are the two hemispheres of the globe.

‘I am sure you have an opinion,’ Ousep says. ‘It seems everybody has an opinion about what happened. But your view is more important because you and Unni were good friends. You spent a lot of time in our home. He spent a lot of time here.’

‘I have no opinions,’ she says.

‘What kind of a person was he, how do you remember him?’

‘He was nice,’ she says, and waits for the question to go away. But Ousep waits too. She relents. ‘He was not serious about anything. He was full of pranks. He used to do a lot of crazy things.’ She lets out a chuckle. Finally, the chuckle of a girl at the memory of Unni. He deserves at least this much.

Does she think of him every day, does his memory make her heart ache? Or is she one of those tough pretty girls who would have no time for dead cartoonists? There is nothing about her, at least from what she has shown, that even hints that she attaches any importance to Unni’s memory. But if the boy were alive, would they have been covert lovers talking through signs from their balconies in the middle of the night?

‘What crazy things did he do?’

‘Just silly things.’

‘Like what?’

‘He would draw me the way I will look when I am an old woman. Things like that.’

‘Did you ever feel he was sad?’

‘No.’

‘So, why do you think he decided to die?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says, still looking at the floor.

‘Were you surprised?’

‘Everyone was shocked.’

‘Were you surprised?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘Did you see him the day he died?’

‘I don’t remember really. It was a long time ago.’

That is odd, for Mythili not to remember if she had seen Unni the day he died. But she was thirteen then. From there, three years is truly a vast expanse of time. Also, why should she lie?

‘Can you tell me something about him that was unusual, anything strange that you remember, anything extraordinary?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Both of you spent so much time together, there must be something you can tell me.’

‘I was a little girl then and I spent a lot of time with many people.’

‘Did he ever talk to you about a corpse?’

She looks up. She has the large amiable eyes of a good person. ‘A corpse?’ she asks.

‘Yes.’

‘No, he never said anything about any corpse.’

Her father stands up, and that ends the interview. Mythili rises and walks out of her house. She is going to the library.

MYTHILI BALASUBRAMANIUM KNOWS HER mother is watching — from the balcony or through a dark gap in the window curtain or from the other places that mothers find. Daughter has behaved in a suspicious manner all morning. A long shampoo bath followed by a bout of general happiness as evident from the humming of a love song, then the sudden decision to go to the library, allegedly. The girl was about to slink out of the house into the light of day without wearing the shroud of the opaque slip over the cheap native bra. Daughter not embalmed as an Egyptian mummy. Why, Mythili?

‘It’s too hot.’

‘When was it not hot in Madras, Mythili?’

‘My top is not transparent. So take it easy.’

‘Men have X-ray vision, Mythili.’

Also, the visit of the town alcoholic asking questions about a gorgeous boy has shown the otherwise virginal daughter as a girl who might be acquainted with several gorgeous boys, even live ones. So mother will keep a watch on daughter as far as the eye can see. Is she walking with her head subdued, eyes unseeing, hair still in a ponytail, chest deflated?

It is after Mythili leaves the spinal lane of the colony that she feels her mother’s ethereal inspection lifting. It is then that she finds the comfort to release her memories of Unni. She wonders what it is that Mr Ousep Chacko has discovered now, why he has started probing Unni’s death all over again.

There are many things she could have told Mr Ousep Chacko about his son. She could have told him that she remembers Unni as if he were yesterday. Unni standing bare chested on the balcony like a tribal prince, his body lean and strong, long severe fingers holding a coffee mug. Unni smiling. Unni carrying his brother on his shoulders and drawing a star on her forehead with a black pen. She sees him clearly, she sees him every day. He is carefully rolling a matchstick over her eyelashes to remove a spore. He is sitting with his legs crossed, head bent, hand moving in swift strokes over a notebook, looking up at her occasionally with a serious face. He is looking into her eyes, about to divine a playing card in her mind. He is sitting on the compound wall, and watching the world go by. He is running in the cyclonic rain, in smooth strides, like a wild beast inside a taut expensive skin.

She sees herself, too, as she was then. She is trying to smile at him without showing her teeth. She is showing off. ‘Bonjour, Unni, comment allez-vous?’

She remembers the evening when she is walking in the playground. Unni comes from behind and puts his arm around her shoulder, as he sometimes does. Her hawk mother must have seen it or her hawk friends must have told her. Mother walks in concentric circles all evening in the kitchen until daughter returns home. She says, ‘Why are you still wearing frocks, Mythili, like an Anglo-Indian?’

‘Girls wear frocks. That’s why.’

‘Only little girls wear frocks.’

‘Is that true?’

‘And why was that boy putting his arm around you?’

The next day, Mother starts a conversation purely to find a reason to say, ‘Unni is like your brother, he is like the brother you never had, Mythili. What a nice boy even though he has insane parents.’ Unni as brother is a repulsive thought for some reason, but Mythili keeps her mouth shut. Finally, one morning, in the middle of chopping tomatoes, Mother tells her what she really wants to say. ‘You can’t go to that boy’s house any more. And I don’t want him coming here. People have started talking.’

‘What are they saying?’

‘Doesn’t matter what they are saying, you can’t go to his house.’

‘Why?’

‘He has grown like a mountain.’

‘So?’

‘You are not a little girl any more, Mythili. A thirteen-year-old girl is a child only to her dumb father. You and I know you are not a child.’

But Mythili defies her. She has sat in the Chacko home almost every day of her life, even before her memories began. She has crawled across the short corridor to their door and wailed until Mariamma appeared. She still remembers the day Thoma was brought home, an infant with the odour of a raw egg. She was four. Unni was eight and ecstatic at the idea of owning a baby. She has eaten with Unni and Thoma, she has slept there some nights, brushed her teeth with the boys. She has listened to their mother tell them the stories of her village, and even the brief history of the Indian rupee. When Mariamma used to get into one of her moods, and Unni tried to make her laugh, Mythili was part of his plots. She has sat with Mariamma on quiet afternoons and tried to understand why she went nuts sometimes. ‘I am only a bit more energetic than other women,’ she said once. ‘If I was in a country where a woman is allowed to run a mile now and then, I think I would be all right.’

Mariamma used to run, a long time ago, when she was an adolescent. She used to run across hills and river bridges and tiny villages that were silenced by the apparition of a barefooted young girl in full skirt running as if an invisible mob were chasing her. Some days, Mariamma used to hear people say, in a good-natured way, ‘Run away if you must, but haven’t you left your lover somewhere behind?’ or, ‘It’s all right, if your mama does not want you, we will adopt you’. But, eventually, she had to stop running. People talked. Girls had to walk, apparently, holding colourful umbrellas and handkerchiefs in their fists.

Mythili fought every day with her mother to retain her right to go to that house. It was worth it. So what if Unni was almost a man. She even liked the idea of Unni as a man. She still likes the idea of Unni as a man. Or, maybe, what she really wants to say is that she likes the idea of a man as an artist, a man who is beautiful, who is somewhat unaware that he is beautiful, who smells like ginger on very hot days, and whose conceit is that he would never be afraid.

That is a seventeen-year-old boy next door as remembered by a thirteen-year-old girl. At the heart of her memory of Unni is the stillness of time — he is always seventeen, she is always thirteen. Even though she has known him for most of her life, it is Unni at seventeen, Unni in the final year of his life, that is her central memory of him. The boy before that time was a very similar person, as endearing and important but another person. She does not know why she feels that way. She is not sure whether he changed in the last months of his life, changed physically, became a mountain of a boy as her mother accused. Or was it just that Mythili had newly arrived, as a thirteen-year-old, to the outer edges of womanhood? It could be both. Unni and Mythili had come to their own crossings at the same moment in time.

An enduring memory from this time is of ambiguous innocence — a moment on Pasumarthy Street, where in the mornings there is the confluence of the boys of St Ignatius and the girls of Fatima Convent on their last lap to their schools, and with them a swarm of Romeos — malnourished young men, their groundnut arses in tight jeans, all of them in black sunglasses, all of them clones of film actors, saying things, singing songs, offering eternal love, marriage in faraway temples and exactly two healthy children each.

She has walked with Unni down this road for years. She in white shirt and olive-green skirt, he in white shirt and khaki trousers. In time, as they walked, their bodies slowly grew apart by inches. They have walked holding hands, they have walked with Unni’s arm on her shoulder, he has carried her in his arms and run the entire stretch of the road, they have walked without holding hands, and finally they have walked with an arm’s length between them, as mandated by her mother.

‘My arm or his arm?’

‘Shut up, Mythili.’

The moment that endures is from the period when they were separated by the phantom arm. She saw a boy by the wayside, a half-naked labourer digging up the pavement to lay pipes. He was lean and powerful, and she could see the ripple of muscles on his abdomen. She thought what a beautiful sight he was, and she thought, a moment later, he has almost the same body as Unni. That made her feel shy and very aware of Unni, and she felt the stab of a nameless longing, but then the moment passed and she was a child again.

By that time, Unni was some kind of a folk hero on Pasumarthy Street, who caused a small flutter among the olive-green pleated skirts walking to school. Even the Romeos studied him through long unhappy drags on their cigarettes. One day a Romeo stared hard at him and said, ‘Hero, come here, hero, I want to talk to you.’ That made Mythili laugh. ‘He just Eve-teased you, Unni,’ she said. And Unni laughed so hard, it made her proud. It was the first time she had made him laugh through her own joke.

The seniors in her school began to draw her into quiet corners to ask questions about him, his postal address, his telephone number, the character of his mother. They called him ‘cartoonist hottie’. Mythili scrutinized the seniors carefully because if he must have a girlfriend it had to be a girl she approved of. She was unhelpful to the fat, excited ones with moustaches, and more generous with the pretty, modern girls whose skirts were two inches shorter than the school average.

Mythili is in the Reading Circle Lending Library. She checks the spines of the books on the shelf but what she is thinking is that Unni used to have an account here. She wonders whether there is a register somewhere in the drawers that still bears his name, she wonders what the last book he borrowed was. Did he return it?

She disliked what he read. She used to see the pile of books on his desk and feel repulsed. He never read fiction, never read anything that people generally read. He read a lot about the brain — not just the human brain, all kinds of brains. Even about the future of the brain. His books were a part of his life she did not know much about, the only part of his life that she thought was boring and dreary.

‘What is it that you’re reading, Unni?’

‘This.’

‘Folie-à-deux by Philippe Boulleau?’

‘That’s correct.’

‘Vous lisez Folie-à-deux par Philippe Boulleau?’

‘Oui.’

‘It sounds like a French book, Unni.’

‘I can’t read French, Mythili. It’s in English.’

‘I know. But what does Folie-à-deux mean?’

‘The Folly of Two.’

‘And what does that mean?’

‘It is a neuropsychiatric phenomenon.’

‘You look funny when you use big words, Unni.’

‘Neuropsychiatric phenomenon.’

‘But what does it mean?’

‘A mad person transfers his delusion to another person, and both of them begin to see the same delusion. And they mutually corroborate what they see as true. That is the Folly of Two.’

‘Do you think that is really possible?’

‘All around you, Mythili, is the Folly of Two.’

‘“Folie-à-deux”. I don’t like this word.’

‘I was thinking, Mythili. All those syllables at the end of French words, all those syllables that are wasted because they are not pronounced by the French, where do they go?’

‘Where do they go, Unni?’

‘They join the underground Union of Insulted French Syllables.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘What does the underground union do?’

‘The syllables try to influence mankind. Over centuries, over vast ages, they try to influence man. They give humans ideas, thoughts, doubts, eureka moments. All this to help man create something, a machine probably, that would have such a name, such a word that all the syllables in the Union of Insulted French Syllables would be included and pronounced. Humans think all of science is their creation, but no, Mythili. The insulted French syllables are the ones who are giving us those ideas.’

‘You are mad, Unni.’

‘The leader of the union is X.’

‘X?’

‘Yes, the most humiliated letter in French even today. There was a time when nobody in France used to pronounce it. Don’t laugh at X, Mythili. He waited for centuries and patiently fed ideas across many generations. And finally mankind discovered the X-ray. Now the French have to pronounce X. They have no choice.’

‘You’re mad, Unni.’

‘What if I am not?’

When she leaves the library she tells herself that she will go home but she knows where she is going. She walks down the school lane, which is quiet today because of the weekend, turns right towards the church and heads to the graveyard that lies in the scented shade of eucalyptus trees. Nothing unusual about a decent Brahmin girl walking down a narrow path through a pretty ancient Christian graveyard. Nothing odd about the girl casting a glance at one grey tombstone, and nothing wrong at all if she clears a speck of dirt from her eyes.

The afternoon he did what he did, she was having a shower. She heard the faint murmur of people, then the yells and screams. She turned off the shower and listened to the sounds more carefully. She heard snatches of what people were trying to say, and she began to shiver. She put on her clothes and ran to the front balcony, and she saw Unni lying in a small pool of blood, his eyes shut. Unni, what an idiot you turned out to be.