The Illicit Happiness of Other People

3. The Album of the Dead

MARIAMMA CHACKO IN THE mornings is a faction of sounds — of furious water colliding with stainless steel, the rain of spoons, the many omens of steam, and the murmur of the huge boulder mortar in which she annihilates grains with inhuman strength. In between, there are satanic whispers about his mother and thick motiveless footsteps outside his door, and sweet lullabies from another time. But it is Sunday morning and the house is in the stunned peace of her absence. She is in the church, her head probably tilted, pious eyes looking up, knees on thin rubber slippers. Or, maybe, she has finally found a way to desert him. Ousep will soon know. At the moment, though, he does not care where she is and only hopes she does not return any time soon. Unni’s cartoons are scattered on his desk. In the thick mist of smoke, with two forgotten cigarettes in his fingers, he stares hard at one particular work, a rare single-panel cartoon.

It is a scene in the confession box. A girl in a white dress is on her knees, her palms joined and her head bent. On the other side of the net partition is a sly priest, who is enjoying her confession, as evident from a remarkable bump in his crotch. As always in Unni’s works, the characters are carefully drawn, they are very real. So, the aspiration of the cartoon to be a farce fails, defeated by the potent body of the adolescent girl. A girl on her knees, her high heels removed and placed by her side, healthy legs bare, a girl humbled, revealing her secrets, seeking pardon from a man, asking to be punished. Did Unni, too, see her this way? Are sons and fathers stirred by the same thoughts?

The cartoon is part of a series that Unni created in a few intense weeks, probably when he was sixteen. In this period he started going to church. He would sit in the last pew for hours, absolutely still. Some people saw him draw, but mostly he did nothing. His unnatural stillness comes up often in the interviews, though Ousep himself had never noticed that about the boy.

Unni was probably not interested in sketching the giant stained-glass windows or the arches, or the high yellow spire, which is visible from Ousep’s desk. The spire does figure in a cartoon, but as a faint rudimentary backdrop. The focus of the scene is an electric wire where nine crows are sitting in line as crows do, their heads turned towards a luminous white dove sitting isolated at a distance on the same wire, an olive branch in its beak. One of the crows is whispering to another, ‘Kalia has converted.’

Among the other cartoons inspired by the church, there is a full-length portrait of a young man standing in the aisle. He is in an extravagant shirt with large flowers on it, and his black trousers have the glow of leather. He is dashing, but looks stiff and uncomfortable. His left cheek is fully puffed. Unni had told a friend that boys from the slums came in their best clothes for the Sunday mass, and they stood in a self-conscious way in the suspicion of their own good looks, rubbing their noses, constantly touching the sleeves and collars of their shirts, and puffing a cheek involuntarily. Some of them used to have their sunglasses on during mass until the parish priest banned them, making an exception only for those who were blind beyond reasonable doubt.

Around this time, a span of about two months according to some accounts, Unni developed an interest in the dead. He had a network of informers who contacted him the moment they got wind of a funeral mass. He would rush to the church, stand near the coffin, and stare at the corpse as the mourners in the pews behind him probably asked each other who the boy was. It was an uncharacteristically conspicuous thing for him to do, and it is not surprising that several people remember seeing his lone figure peering into a coffin. At least once he took his notebook out and attempted to draw the face of the corpse — in that case, an old lady in thick spectacles. A mourner went up to him and asked him to stop. Unni continued to sketch; soon other mourners joined the quarrel, and the priest had to interrupt the service to ask him to get out.

Seeing corpses in their coffins probably inspired his longest work, The Album of the Dead. As it progressed he showed it to several friends, who were disturbed by his idea of humour. In the Album, he imagined family, friends and other familiar people dead in their coffins.

Every person has a whole vertical page, and there are thirty-two caricatures in all, including a self-portrait. The Album of the Dead is his only comic that has been granted its own exclusive book. The portraits occupy only one half of the book; the other half is blank. He planned it as a continuing series that would keep growing as newer people came his way. He even wished to draw some of the people again as they slowly aged. He wanted to frame the passage of time inside unchanging coffins. If he had lived long, as he once certainly hoped, The Album of the Dead would have been an enormous work contained in several books.

It begins with his mother, drawn with a son’s bias. It is a top-angle scene, like the other caricatures. She is lying peacefully in a black coffin, a bit thinner than she is in reality. Her arms are folded over her stomach. There is a solemn dignity about her, which is how everybody is portrayed, except Ousep. He does not emerge very well from his caricature. He is lying in his coffin with his hands and legs hanging out of the box. He is bare-chested, and below the waist he is covered by a lungi instead of a white shroud. His left hand is connected to an intravenous fluid system that stands near the coffin. The fluid is in the unmistakable golden bottle of Honeydew Rum.

The humour of the Album lies in its entirety, in seeing page after page of people lying in their black diamond coffins. But not everyone found it funny.

Mariamma had seen her portrait soon after Unni had finished it, and she was hurt. She said no son in the world would draw his own mother in a coffin, especially when she was alive. Ousep remembers hearing fragments of the fuss one morning. Long ago, it seems. How would she react if she knew what Unni had told a friend about her? He had told the friend, in the middle of pumping air into a cycle tyre, that if his mother died the same evening he would not be affected. ‘I will have no problem using her skull as a pen-holder,’ he said. He surely did not mean it. He was probably trying to make a larger point by using the skull of the person he loved the most as an example, but the friend remembered the incident through moral outrage.

‘He was a good person, Unni was a good person, but some of the things he said were horrible. His own mother, the skull of his own mother. A pen-holder?’

‘Did he imagine her skull as anything else? Or was it only as a pen-holder?’

‘No. Only a pen-holder.’

‘Are you sure about that? Did he say “pencil-holder” or “pen-holder”?’

‘Pen-holder.’

Thoma must have been eight when he was included in the Album. He occupies less than half of the coffin. His hair is combed, and his face has an angelic radiance, which he does not possess in reality. Ousep accepts the general hilarity of The Album of the Dead, but not of Thoma this way. He feels the fear of losing this one too. When boys want to jump head first, who can stop them?

The others in the Album are Mythili from a different time, Somen Pillai, Sai Shankaran, and many of Unni’s friends, teachers and neighbours, including Mythili’s parents. There are four unidentified people, including a dignified old man who really does look dead. None of Unni’s friends have been able to identify these four.

It is a melodramatic coincidence that the final cartoon in the series is the self-portrait — Unni in his casket. And it is natural for his mother to wonder whether this was her deserved suicide note. Did the boy draw himself in the coffin the day he went to the terrace to jump? Is there a message here, a clue that has to be cracked? It is a reasonable thought, but Unni’s friends remember seeing the self-portrait months before he died, they are very sure.

Ousep, his chin resting on a palm, looks with affection at the portrait, which has acquired an aching sweetness about it. Unni, with his enormous head and high mop of hair, a clear handsome face, and the austere body of a rustic. This was how he had looked when he was taken to the church in a plywood coffin.

She has not returned yet, though it is time. What if she never returns, what if she has somehow found a way to desert him? But that is unlikely. Where will she go? Everybody wants to flee, but for Mariamma to flee her home, a lot must happen.

First, some socialists have to die. And the nation that they destroyed has to go to the very brink with all its reserve dollars slowly vanishing, a slide that has already begun. With no money left for imports, the government would do what Mariamma has done all her life. Pawn gold to buy oil. The surrender of gold would be a humiliation the whole nation would understand and the new young men would then craftily use the moment of collective shame to convince the old obsolete men that they have no choice but to open up the Indian market to foreign companies. In the liberation that would ensue, Thoma would have to play his cards right. Then he could take his mother somewhere far away and put her in a beautiful new house. For a woman to flee, a lot must happen.

So, in all probability, she is still in the church, together with the maids, the dandy slum boys and the other new converts who attend the Tamil mass. She prefers the English mass, but she feels too small when she stands among the rich. They in their sparkling ironed clothes and happy fragrances, and she in a tired old sari and rubber slippers. After mass, she will go to the confession box to perplex the priest once again by refusing to tell him her sins, demanding instead that she be handed the penance anyway. She will correct him if the punishment is too harsh or too mild, and help him arrive at the correct number of prayers she must utter. It was Unni who had discovered this about his mother. The undercover misanthrope could somehow charm the most insignificant information from the hearts of people. He would have probably solved his own death in no time.

Ousep shuts the Album more violently than he intended and puts it on top of the pile of cartoons on his desk. He stares without hope at the haphazard array of lampoons that grudgingly tells the story of a boy. He considers getting the other works from the wooden trunk and going through all of them one more time. He may spot something, a simple clue that was always in plain sight. Are not mysteries solved this way, through a moment of accidental discovery? No one ever solves a riddle by thinking too hard about it.

He opens the back panel of the radio and extracts the pages of How To Name It. He goes through the pages, not sure what he is searching for. The familiar scenes pass — the tough rustic man on a rubber farm who begins to run for his life, the journey of the mysterious narrator, the amiable middle-aged woman, the giant bra as suspension bridge over a river, the walk through the woman’s house, the rustic man now raising his thumb in triumph, and finally Mariamma Chacko in tumult, standing on the wooden stand, like a trophy, looking up and wagging a finger, her leg raised in a valiant leap.

Ousep goes through the comic again, then again, as he has done a thousand times. He stops on every page and tries to piece together the story. Most of the panels in the comic have blank spaces at the top, probably for the narration. The dialogue bubbles, when they appear, are all of the same size. Did Unni imagine that every piece of dialogue was going to be of the same length? And why are they blank? The same questions, every moment of Ousep’s life.

According to Mariamma, the fact that her son did not leave a note behind for her is a significant decision, even a vital clue. Ousep takes her far more seriously than she imagines. So, he wonders once again, can it be true? Does the absence of an explanation contain within its baffling emptiness a simple message that Unni presumed his parents would be smart enough to see?

THOMA CHACKO STANDS NAKED in the bathroom and asks himself whether he will remember this moment forever. Many years later, will he remember this Sunday evening when he was filling a bucket with water? Will he look back across a whole lifetime one day and say to the boy he once was, ‘Yes, I remember the moment. You were shorter than the fridge those days. It was a blue bucket, wasn’t it? And, Thoma, by the way, if you want to know. You made it, Thoma, you made it. You’re very famous and reasonably rich.’

The bucket is overflowing but he does not want to turn the tap off. He likes the roar of water, its ominous terror. In the bucket is the sea, about four kilometres deep. He stirs the water with his hand and makes a furious whirlpool, which leaves a calm eye at its heart. Thoma imagines he is in the eye of a giant ocean whirlpool. Ships and whales, mere specks on the enormous swirling wall of water, orbit him. He feels a deep fear in his stomach and screams.

But what is more terrifying than a whirlpool is a giant wave. Unni said that a powerful earthquake beneath the sea could create a sudden ocean wave one kilometre high. It could appear any time on the horizon. That is why Thoma sometimes looks carefully over the coconut trees and the building tops or as far as the eye can see. Such a wave would exterminate the entire human population. Millions of years later, new humans might rise and they might build a new world that would look very different from everything Thoma knows. But the pass mark in science and maths would still be thirty-five per cent. That is what Unni said. It astonishes Thoma that the human race will always arrive at a cut-off score that he can just about achieve. Unni said that there were many such things in the Universe that nobody could fully explain. For example, even though the sun is many times larger than the moon, they look the same size in the sky. How miraculous it is for a planet to be in a position in space where its sun and its moon appear to have the same size. ‘Is there a reason, Thoma?’ Unni would whisper, as if he knew the reason.

Thoma looks nervously at the bathroom window; through the iron bars he sees apartment blocks and the tops of independent homes and a distant forest of coconut trees. He looks carefully at the arc of land’s end. He has seen something; it seems the horizon has risen, a giant blue mist is approaching. The Bay of Bengal is coming. He screams, jumps into his underwear, remembering through an inescapable moment that it was once his father’s shirt. And he runs out of the bathroom. In the hallway he is stabbed by an old fear. Is he like his mother? Will he, too, go through life seeing great spectacles that others cannot see, will he live in the sorrows of the past, will he go through life talking to himself, crying and laughing, calling out the full Christian names of his relatives and asking them the same questions forever? He can hear his mother in the kitchen, her voice rising, and her words beginning to tremble.

He stands in the kitchen doorway and looks as Unni used to. ‘Annamol Chacko,’ she tells the exhaust fan. ‘You and your nine daughters come to visit your son, Ousep, when we are living in Kottayam. I am eight months pregnant with Unni. Still I make tea for all of you. And you say I am too learned to make good tea. And all of you laugh.’

Thoma has never understood why this moment means so much to his mother. Criticism of tea is hardly a matter that should affect a clever woman like her. But Unni did tell him one day that in the words of some women there was great injustice that only other women could decipher. ‘It is not about the tea, Thoma, it is never about the tea.’

Thoma has a hazy memory of his grandmother, who used to visit every summer. He remembers her as a tiny woman with the face of a pony and cruel eyes that had an opinion about all that they saw. And she was usually in a white blouse, shrouded in an expensive white cloth that had a cross pinned on it. Below the waist she was bound tightly by another white cloth that was bunched behind her like a bird’s tail. ‘Like a hand fan to cool her arse,’ Unni said. She used to come by the night train from the village with her silent husband, who carried on his shoulders at least two jackfruits and all the fearless flies of Kerala. For some reason, she always walked ahead of him.

Unni said that their mother’s enemy was their enemy, so Thoma decided to hate his grandmother, even though she appeared to love him very much. There was a reason why it was easy for Thoma to dislike her. In the first few minutes of her arrival, Mariamma would cane Thoma’s legs for no good reason, then take him inside to kiss him and say she was sorry. She never hit Unni, probably because he was one of those people nobody wants to hit, or maybe she treated him differently because he was older than Thoma. Though, sometimes, she did chase Unni with a broom in her hand, both of them laughing. It disappointed Thoma that his mother, who was usually very kind, would behave in this puzzling manner with him every time Grandmother visited. But Unni told him one day that it was a Village Tradition. One way of insulting the mother-in-law was to beat up your kids in front of her. He was probably right because Annamol was deeply affected by the caning and it could not have been out of love for him. She would look sadly at the floor and weep with an occasional shiver of her nostrils.

Thoma is amazed at the telepathy of women. How miraculous it is for one woman to do something weird and another woman to extract its intended meaning. One morning, his mother told him, ‘Thoma, when I am old I’ll go to an old-age home so that I am not a burden on you.’ Thoma could not understand why she was saying this when there was a lot of time to decide the matter. But then Unni told him, ‘That message was not for you, Thoma. It was meant for Annamol Chacko. Mother is hinting to the old woman that she is a bloody nuisance.’

Thoma is glad he is not a woman. He is not good at deciphering clues and if he were a woman he would go through his entire life missing all the insults hurled at him by other women. Which is not such a bad way to be, when you think of it.

Despite everything, Annamol continued to visit every summer of Thoma’s life, until he was seven. He would always remember the dawn when he woke up to her terrifying screams. She was in the bathroom by the time Thoma arrived but the door was not locked. He opened the door nervously and the sight of an old woman wailing at the mirror was so terrifying that at first he did not see what was wrong with her. Then he realized that most of her hair was gone. Someone had cut her long silver hair when she was sleeping. The whole day she sat in a corner, her head covered, looking wicked, holding her broken hair in her fist. Father was not in town that day. He was in Sriharikota to report the launch of an Indian rocket. Mother was silent that day, but not unhappy. Finally, Annamol told her husband, ‘I want to leave.’

The old man was sitting cross-legged in just his underwear, a lit cigarette in his hand, elbows resting on his thighs, his whole body glistening with sweat.

‘I want to leave,’ she said again.

‘India is about to launch a rocket,’ he said.

‘That’s all very nice, but Annamol is happy to take a train,’ she said.

‘You don’t understand, woman, the government says that people should remain indoors because the rocket can fall anywhere.’

So Annamol left in the night, after the newsreader announced that the rocket had fallen safely into the sea. When she was at the door she raised a hand and flung a fistful of air at Mariamma. ‘I curse you,’ she said. ‘As I cry, so shall you.’ Mariamma looked up at the ceiling and mumbled a Hail Mary. Grandmother stared hard and said, in a whisper that had the hiss of a snake, ‘Mary can’t save you. Just because men like virgins, it does not make them gods.’

Mariamma looked at the ceiling again and she whispered, ‘My Lord, my God, there are Protestants among us, it seems, forgive them their sins.’

Thoma has not seen his grandmother since. She was not present at Unni’s funeral. None of the relatives had come. The funeral was a day after he died; there was not enough time for people to come from Kerala.

Thoma wonders whether on a vast field far away Annamol wags a finger at a jackfruit tree and accuses his mother of cutting her hair. Grandmother probably still does not know the truth.

It was Unni who had cut her hair. He was just fifteen then but he was brave, he was always brave. The night Annamol left, he said with terrifying hatred in his eyes, ‘Justice for our mother, Thoma. The worst thing that can happen to a person is a tragedy that is also funny. And that has happened to Grandmother.’

Every time Mariamma spoke to the walls, Unni used to listen very carefully, usually standing out of sight, staring at the floor, hands on his hips. When Thoma came to him to chat, Unni would raise a finger asking him to shut up. It was very important to Unni that he heard every word that she uttered. It was as if he were trying to piece together a riddle from the strands of her many conversations with herself. Some days, when Mother seemed particularly disturbed, he would go to her and crack a joke about the way she was or stand beside her and imitate her perfectly. Or he would make her tell him the family stories that lurked behind every grouse, and she would become very happy as she told him her stories. Sometimes she would laugh in the middle of her tales and say, ‘You are like a daughter, Unni.’

He once pointed out a fact that Thoma might not have figured out on his own. It might appear that their mother’s grouses were endless and the persons who once harmed her numerous, but the truth was that there were not more than a dozen names she uttered, and against every name she repeated the same set of two or three incidents. It comforts Thoma that there are not too many bad things that happened to his mother when she was young. And that if you had the time to do the maths you could actually arrive at the exact number of grouses she has. He hopes there is a way he can calm her forever and make her a woman, like any other woman, who does not talk to the walls.

Mariamma is a bit louder than usual right now and he knows that everybody on the floor and even below can hear her. At some point, as always, she catches him looking at her. She wipes her tears and lets out an embarrassed chuckle. Swings her arms in the air like a wrestler before a bout and says, ‘I was just exercising, Thoma. Don’t worry. I’m just letting off some steam.’ She begins to march like a soldier now, swinging her arms. ‘Left, right, left, right,’ she says, trying to make him laugh. She gives up, leans against the kitchen counter, and smiles in an ingratiating way. She probably wants him to leave so that she can let off more steam. Thoma decides to make her laugh. He feels a cold fear in his throat because what he is about to do is risky. He has never tried this before, though he has thought of it many times.

‘Jesus is sitting with his disciples for the Last Supper,’ he says.

‘What did you say, Thoma?’

‘There is a really foul smell in the air. Jesus looks a bit worried. He says, “Tonight one of you will betray me.”’

Mariamma searches for something on the floor. Thoma is surprised that his mother has lost interest in his joke so fast.

‘Judas gets up holding his nose and says, “It was Jesus, it was Jesus.”’

Mariamma finds the broom in a crevice above the gas cylinder.

‘You didn’t get it?’ he says. ‘It was Jesus who had farted and Judas betrayed him.’

‘I got that much, you little rat,’ Mariamma says, and charges at him with the broom.

He flees, wondering why the joke sounded so funny when Unni used to tell it. Mariamma runs behind him, screaming, ‘That’s all this house needs, another God-abusing fool.’

Thoma runs to the bathroom and shuts the door. He screams from inside, ‘I was only trying to make you laugh.’

‘I don’t need help to laugh, I don’t need help to cry. Don’t you know that?’

‘I won’t try again.’

‘Open the door.’

‘No.’

‘I have put the broom down.’

‘No.’

‘What you should be doing, Thoma, is having your books in front of you. We have to do something about your marks.’

‘I pass in all the subjects all the time, don’t I?’

‘That’s not enough, Thoma. That’s not enough. You have to score in the late nineties. Otherwise there is no hope for a boy in this country. I ask you again, do you want to become a writer?’

‘No.’

‘Then what do we do about your marks, Thoma? I can’t afford tuition. I can teach you but I am not good at teaching kids.’

‘I don’t understand anything when you teach me.’

‘So what do we do about you, Thoma? Come out, first.’

‘I will work hard. Don’t worry.’

‘I was thinking, Thoma. Maybe we should ask Mythili again.’

‘Don’t do that. She has not come here since Unni did what he did. She has become like the other people. She does not like us any more.’

‘Don’t say that. Nobody dislikes us.’

From the way her last sentence ends, Thoma realizes that she is probably crying. He begins to cry, too. Both of them stand on either side of the shut bathroom door and cry as silently as they can.

‘Why did Unni do it?’ he asks. ‘Of all the people in the world, Unni.’

‘That’s what even I ask myself every single moment of my life. Of all the people in the world, Unni.’

Thoma opens the door and steps out. He wants to stand next to his mother and hug her with one hand, without feeling her breasts, the way Unni used to hug her. But then Unni was tall and strong. He would hug her with one hand and lift her off the ground.

‘Don’t cry,’ he says.

‘You don’t cry,’ she says.

‘I’ve stopped.’

‘Then I’ve stopped, too.’

‘What is it that Father has found? People say he has found something about Unni. He is meeting Unni’s old friends again.’

‘I’ve heard,’ Mariamma says. ‘But your father is not telling me anything yet.’

‘Why isn’t he telling us?’

‘He is not telling anyone what he has found, that’s my guess.’ ‘Why, do you think …’

‘I don’t know. But sooner or later he has to tell me. Your father wants to tell me. He is just waiting for the right time.’

‘You really don’t know why Unni did what he did?’

‘I don’t know, Thoma. I don’t know what got into Unni that day.’

‘People say he had a lot of sorrow in his heart.’

‘We know that’s not true.’

‘Will I become like him? Will I decide to jump off one day?’

‘Don’t talk like that, Thoma. Have you ever felt like doing something like that?’

‘No.’

‘Tell me the truth.’

‘I am telling you the truth.’

‘Now don’t think about all this. These are not happy thoughts.’

THE DAY HER SON died she was woken up at dawn by a dream. She does not have the gift of reading meanings in her dreams but she believes it was an omen. At least that much respect she expects from the supernatural. What she had seen was a memory from her childhood, an uncorrupted memory without any magic or the other inventions of sleep. An old wound that does not have a clear perpetrator, like the other wounds of childhood.

She was twelve years old when it happened. She was sitting in a coracle with her mother, both of them looking away from the potent groin of a man in a loincloth who was rowing the boat. She remembers the man only as a pair of powerful dark legs; from the waist up he was merely sky. The river was wide. It was calm and forbidding, and the air was still. She wanted her mother to speak, say something loving or even ordinary because of what had happened earlier in the day, but this was not a woman who talked to her children unless it was essential. She was a farmer not given to small talk, who managed a vast land almost by herself because her husband was a good-natured simpleton whom everybody tried to fool. So she was the one who walked among the bleeding rubber trees and monster rocks, heckling labourers, murdering serpents, and some days driving away sand poachers by raising a sudden army of young men. But she did not speak much to her children, daughters especially.

Mariamma was being returned to her foster home downstream, to the ancient blue house of her mother’s sister. She was only two when she was donated to the aunt because her mother had eleven other children to feed. Mariamma was the youngest, and by the time she had arrived her mother had probably grown tired of pretending to love so many. Mariamma visited her mother once every two months. She was happiest when she was with her, and every time she had to leave, as she walked down the hill to the banks of the river and sat in the coracle that would take her to her guardians, she was miserable.

The bank approached, and behind the raised coconut grove the tiled roof of her foster home was now visible. The boat headed towards the high stone wall, startled as always by the submerged rocks. It stopped a few metres from the steep flight of red stone steps that led up to the rear of the house. She struggled to get out of the boat. The black legs, they might have had hands too, but they were not allowed to touch her. She waded through the water with footwear in hand, and jumped on to the foot of the moist steps. When she turned to look at her mother, the boat had already left with her. Mariamma waited; she hoped her mother would turn back at least once to look. She stood there as the boat slowly floated away so far across the river that a human face had no meaning.

A girl waiting on moist stone for her mother to look back just once — that had happened many times. But what she saw in her dream was a particular day. How could her mother not turn back and look, just look, on a day like that? Some things that even good people did were beyond comprehension. That was the thought in her head when she rose that dawn. But how foolish she was to think that was sorrow. In a few hours she would know what grief really was. Unni would be dead, and the next day she would see him lowered into a hole. And watch without anger as two labourers chatted among themselves while they shoved fresh soil on his coffin. And she would walk back home feeling strangely empty-handed. That is what she remembers the most about the evening — a feeling that her hands were empty.

But, on the last morning of Unni’s short life, her grouses against her mother seemed very large to her. She stood in the kitchen, thinking, triumphantly, how different she was from her mother, how much she loved her own children, and how fierce her love was. She would never abandon them. That was a right only children had. When she crossed the main roads with them she always held their hands tight and sprinted. Unni would burst out laughing. He was almost a man but he would let her hold his hand and run across the road. He was never embarrassed. That was another odd thing about Unni. His lack of shame. He was not ashamed of his home, of his mother. If he had been ashamed she would have forgiven him, but he was not.

As she was standing there in the kitchen, she might have said something aloud, though she does not remember what she might have said. The voice of Unni made her jump. He looked at the wall and muttered something to it, wagged a finger at the ceiling and whispered, ‘Mother, you abandoned me, Mother. Mrs Leelama John of Baptist lineage, you abandoned me.’ He imitated her so well; the tilt of his face, the pout of his lips, the shudder in his voice were all perfect. How could she not laugh?

He must have been lurking around the doorway as he usually did, waiting patiently to hear everything she said, everything she did. He had been working through the night on a comic, he said. He had almost finished it but he was not getting something right. He asked her to pose for him, he wanted her to stand in her furious way, her sari hitched up, her face breaking into a menacing scowl and a finger pointed upwards.

‘Are you drawing me?’

‘Don’t ask questions early in the morning. Just stand that way for thirty seconds. That’s all. I need to just look.’

‘I’ve better things to do, Unni.’

‘Just twenty seconds.’

She tried to stand the way he wanted but she would start giggling.

‘I can’t do it, Unni. I find it ridiculous,’ she said.

‘Just ten seconds.’

‘You can’t make fun of me this way. It is not funny beyond a point.’

‘I am not making fun of you. Trust me.’

‘I am not doing this, Unni.’

He held her hand in his and studied her fingers. ‘Do you like your fingers?’ he said.

‘I think they are pretty. As good as yours.’

‘I have good fingers?’

‘Yes you do. They are long and strong and one can trust them.’

‘I wonder why fingers are so hard to draw,’ he said. ‘So tough, so tough.’

‘That’s because you don’t really believe they are important. That’s why you can’t get them right.’

He looked at her with his narrow teasing eyes, in son’s condescension. Then he went away to his room without a word. That was the last time they ever spoke. Two hours later, when she left for mass, he was still at his table. She looked at him and thought what a beautiful sight he was, how calming it was to see a creature so young and gentle and clever. He did not have the quick movements of the other adolescents. Even when he was not working, he could sit still for hours. That is how she remembers him — through his paranormal stillness.

She wanders around her home remembering that morning once again, and the last time she had seen the force of life in her child. Whatever it was that Unni was drawing, it has gone missing. She has searched the house a thousand times, and she probably searches for it every day without realizing that she is doing so. Her search is always futile but it yields many other things — small photographs of serious people she does not know, several buttons, letters to her family on the giant hill that she had not posted for some reason, and the replies that came anyway, several little keys.

She has asked Ousep on several occasions what has made him start looking for clues again. He never answers. It is to get him to talk that she finally told him one morning, two weeks ago, ‘The day Unni did what he did, he was working on a comic. I know that, I saw him. He was up all night trying to finish it. But what he was working on is missing. I know it is there somewhere in this world, but it is not in this house.’

Ousep looked at her with interest, which is rare when he is sober, but he left for work without a word. Two hours later he called on the phone and asked her an odd question. ‘Do you know if Unni had finished the comic? You said he was working on the comic, but do you know if he had finished it?’

‘There is no rice in the house,’ she said. ‘There is no oil. There are no vegetables. Not one onion.’

She heard him exhale. ‘Woman,’ he said, and let out more air. ‘Did Unni finish the comic or did he plan to finish it later?’

‘I can’t go to the store any more,’ she said. ‘The man in the store is a good Christian. He is a convert but he is a good man. But even a good Christian cannot do charity beyond a point. We owe him too much money, he is not going to give us even a single grain until we pay at least a bit of the outstanding.’

Ousep was probably in his office, so he whispered, ‘You are a horrible woman.’

‘What does it matter if Unni had finished the comic?’ she said.

‘Just answer my question.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But in a way, that comic has ended, hasn’t it?’

IT IS A HOT morning, and the day is lit as if it is the afterlife; faraway windows and the metal poles of bus stops glow. Ousep’s walk is brisk, even fast, but then he stops. He would always remember this moment, its stab of cold fear. He realizes that he does not know where he is going. There is no appointment, there is nowhere to go. He has been walking for over an hour, imagining a meeting with a newly discovered acquaintance of Unni. He knows the acquaintance, the face is clear in his head. But the young man does not exist. Ousep does not remember how he ended up on this road. He was thinking about Unni, and somewhere along the way he had started imagining an amiable person waiting to tell him something more about Unni. It is not the delusion alone that scares Ousep. It is the final realization that he has probably met all the people who knew the boy. He has met many of them at least twice. There is none left to be interviewed, except Somen Pillai, whose importance anyway rests purely on his unavailability. That is how small the life of an adolescent is. A persistent father can get to all of them. What must he do now? Where was he going so fast, what was he thinking? A man who does not know where he is going, what kind of a man is that?

Ousep goes to a bus stop, sits on the aluminium bench. He does not know how it happens, he begins to cry, pressing his wrists to his eyes. Why, Unni? Strangers look at him far longer and more intently than they do when he walks drunk on the road and stops the Madras traffic. He thinks of the time when Unni was an infant and he used to look up at his father and extend his arms. But Ousep never carried him. They would stare at each other in silence and unequal love.

What is Ousep searching for? An honourable reason for Unni’s death, a happy reason? The truth?

He realizes that there is someone standing by his side. A scrawny man with a file under his arm is holding out a bottle of cold soda. ‘Take it, sir,’ the man says. The marble-bottle soda, the panacea of Madras for people hit by trucks, stunned by sunstroke, for men who are having an epileptic fit on the road, and even for the dead. It is a bottle that reminds the fallen that something bad has happened to them. Ousep Chacko, finally, a recipient of the soda.

But by the evening he has recovered. His lungs are clear and his eyes clean. He is even happy, and somewhat ashamed of his ordinary everyday happiness, as if fathers of dead sons do not have that crass right.

With nowhere to look, Ousep abandons his investigation as he has done many times before, and sinks into the banalities of city reporting. He eats with apprentice politicians, whispers with disgruntled bureaucrats, drinks with cops and friends. He fills his days with work he need not do. He visits crime scenes, covers interminable second-rung cricket matches, attends the lectures of space scientists, who never tuck their shirts into their trousers. He even goes to Koovagam to cover the annual festival of amiable eunuchs. They come in thousands as spectacular brides in glittering saris, stand in long queues to get married to a minor god, offer free or discounted sex all through the wedding night to the hordes of desperate men who have come to stand in for the divine groom. Next morning, the joyous brides become wailing widows in white saris, who break their bangles and pray with eyes shut tight that in their next lives they are born as complete women. But even they are happy, Ousep can tell, they are much happier than people imagine. Everybody is happy, Unni, everybody is fine.

At the chief minister’s press conference, Ousep asks, out of boredom and disrespect, ‘Are you happy?’ The chief minister, a frail poet who never suffered the indignity of being young, a man with two living wives and several worthless squabbling sons, is puzzled only for a moment. ‘Yes, Ousep, I am happy that the Indian government has ceased all military activities in Sri Lanka and that we are not at war with our own Tamil brothers.’

Ousep begins to spend more time with his friends, sitting with them in the cheap bars long after midnight, and together they sing about their own obsolescence, and the approaching end of a type of man, a type of alcoholic male writer. ‘We are the last of the real men, the kings of our times, and our stories will never be told.’

But, despite his best efforts, despite doing all that he can to clog his time with mindless things, one morning he walks to the Liberty bus stop to confront Sai Shankaran again. There is something this bastard is not telling, and Ousep wants to break him.

As always, Sai pretends that he has not seen him, but his unhappy face grows tense. Ousep stands with him. For some reason there are more people than usual at the bus stop this morning and they spill onto the road. A yellow autorickshaw skids to a halt in front of the bus stop. The driver searches the crowd without conviction for someone who may want to sit in his auto. His eyes fall on a striking young girl in a dark-green half-sari, her oiled hair braided, standing at the front of the crowd and waiting meekly for her bus. The auto driver stares at her breasts and smiles, and slowly squeezes the air horn, and laughs. She hugs her books to her chest and looks away with a quick turn of her head, like a sparrow, exactly the way Sai looks away every time he sees Ousep. The auto leaves with a laughing man.

‘Have you made up your mind, Sai?’ Ousep asks. The same pointless question. Sai takes a deep breath. As expected, he does not say anything. He looks into the distance. ‘Sai, there is something you are not telling me. I know that.’

Ousep takes the folded pages of How To Name It from his trouser pocket and gives it to Sai, but the boy does not accept it. So Ousep unfolds the pages and holds them to Sai’s face. ‘This was Unni’s final comic. Does this make any sense to you?’ he says. Sai’s large obtuse eyes stay on the comic for a moment but he does not react.

Ousep stalks him every day, boards the bus with him, stands close to him all the way to Loyola College. When Sai returns from college, Ousep walks him home. But the whole time, Sai maintains his unhappy silence. On the evening of the eighth day of the relentless stalking there is, finally, a scene.

Ousep is walking a foot behind the boy. Sai is going home. He has the walk of slow cattle. One of those people whose feet are pointed outwards when they land on the ground, and there is something barefooted about him even though he wears shoes.

Sai stops walking, and pants heavily. He has had enough, which makes Ousep glad. ‘Look,’ the boy screams, ‘there is nothing I have to say. Nothing. You have to believe me. Unni died because he was sad. There is no deeper reason. If there is a reason, you are the reason. Think about it. There is no food in his house most days. His mother begs for money from everyone. The only reason Unni made friends was to eat in their homes. His whole schooling was sponsored by the church. His mother is a nut, and his father is an alcoholic who makes an ass of himself every night. And on top of all this, Unni was not very good in MPC. He had a useless talent, which was to draw cartoons which were not so funny actually.’

‘What is MPC?’

‘Maths-Physics-Chemistry.’

‘I see.’

‘He had no future, he had no hope. So he jumped. It’s time you accept it. Three years have passed. You’ve got to accept it. Go and take care of your other son before he too jumps off the building.’

‘Sai, all I want to know is this. What is it that you, Somen Pillai and Unni used to do together?’

‘For the last time I am telling you. Nothing. We were just three guys who used to chat about this and that.’

‘What did you chat about?’

‘Nothing, nothing.’

Sai walks away. Ousep shadows him until the boy reaches the gates of his building, where the guard has been instructed not to let Ousep in.

Ousep is at the bus stop next morning. Sai arrives in a few minutes, pretends that he has not seen him, and stands at a distance. Sai, the error in nature’s trial and error. Ousep does not go to him as he usually does. He stands where he is and stares. Sai is probably thinking of the great abbreviations that define his life — GRE, GMAT, CAT. Without exams that have multiple-choice questions his life would not move, without them he does not understand himself. Even to accept that he is a worthless piece of rag he needs the exams to inform him.

You must see this, Unni. In a world full of Sai Shankarans, you would have become king, if only you had waited. Look at Sai, he does not know why he lives but he lives, and he lives because he does not know why he must die. He will go on this way, doing his little things, enjoying the little victories, adopting morals invented by other people, secretly supporting the ideologies of third-rate men and, at dinner time, quoting the philosophies of the extraordinary whom people like him have never allowed to live in peace. How can you, Unni, let Sai Shankaran guard your secrets, let him keep a fragment of your memory in his dim head where he waits for it to rot away?

MYTHILI DOES NOT DENY that she has made an extraordinary request but must her father begin to tremble and yell out for his wife? ‘How are you bringing up your daughter?’ he says.

‘What did she do?’ Mother says, faking wifely fear, spreading her sari over her 36Ds.

‘Ask her yourself,’ he says, and goes to the bathroom with the newspaper, as if the key to good upbringing is having a quiet fatherly shit.

Mother wears her peacemaker mask. She is enjoying this. Something to do.

‘What did you tell your father?’

‘I want to go to Marina Beach tonight with Bindu and Gai.’

‘Why?’

‘To see Olive Ridley.’

‘Who is he?’

‘Olive Ridley is a turtle.’

‘A turtle?’

‘Endangered.’

‘Why must you go to a beach at midnight to see a turtle?’

‘The turtles swim in from the sea and walk on the beach at midnight to lay eggs.’

‘Why are you interested in turtle eggs?’

‘We have to ensure the eggs are safe. Or Olive Ridleys will become extinct.’

‘Do boys, too, want to save the Olive Ridleys?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mythili, just think about it. You. Midnight. Marina Beach. Boys. How could you even ask your father?’

Mythili storms out of the house, which is a moment of comic rebellion because it contains within its drama the indestructible promise that she will return before the sun goes down.

She has to take a walk to release her rage. The option of shutting herself in her room is not available any more. The latch on her door was removed after Mother complained to Father that she was spending long hours locked up in her room. After Father removed the latch with a screwdriver, Mythili started blocking the door with her table. So Father held four sizes of screwdrivers in his hand and said, ‘If you continue doing this I will remove the door.’

Maybe Mythili should find a sweet boy and fall in love, and have plentiful foreplay in vengeance. She decides to go to the Circular Road, gather two friends and discuss the matter, walking in large circles around a park filled with cheap bougainvilleas.

But right in front of her appears a familiar sight that puts her off boys for the week. A tall lanky thing, must be around fifteen, is flanked by his papa and mama, and they are going somewhere important, probably to a temple far away. He is much taller than his parents but they are, at this moment, giving him a good shaft up his arse. The boy is silent.

Father says, ‘What is ninety-four per cent, what is ninety-four per cent these days? That, too, in maths. In Madras. What is ninety-four per cent? How can you come home and look into our eyes after doing something like this?’

Mother says, ‘You are not working hard, look at all your friends, how hard they are working.’

Father says, ‘And your JEE scores. What’s happened to you? Do you want to go to IIT or not? Do you want to go to America or not? That is the decision you have to make. Do you want to rot here?’

‘Do you want to be a failure?’

‘You don’t have the option of failure.’

The boy will not be a failure, Mythili knows. She has seen the generations before. The boy will make it. As his father has said, he does not have the option of failure. He will crack at least one entrance exam, and he will one day have a nice house in a suburb of San Francisco, or in a suburb of a suburb of San Francisco. He will find a cute Tamil Brahmin wife and make her produce two sweet children. He will drive a Toyota Corolla to work. And there, in the conference room of his office, he will tell his small team, with his hands stretched wide in a managerial way, ‘We must think out of the box.’

Her future husband must be something like this boy. He would have endured the same endoscopic bamboo up his arse, and emerged more resolute about cracking life. Her husband, her man, he is probably somewhere in Madras at this very moment. She wonders what he must be doing right now. Is he sitting at home, with a pile of IIT study material and a calculator on his desk? Does he, too, call his calculator ‘Calcy’? Is he taking breaks to jerk off, thinking of Silk Smitha. What are you doing right now, my lord?

Would he measure up to Unni? It is a question she does not want to ask, she does not like it. She wonders whether Unni will always haunt her. Or will she forget him in time, will he become just another tame memory? As of this evening, what she believes is that she will always remember him through the myths of a thirteen-year-old girl. And the men who will come her way, men who will be dull software engineers by the laws of probability, may not have a chance when set against Unni Chacko.

A surprising memory comes to her. She has not thought of this moment before. Since Unni died she has remembered him through the same set of images and events. It is as if the shock of the day had wiped clean many of her memories of him. But now and then some scenes come back to her and she wonders why she is being made to remember those ordinary moments, especially this. Even when she was thirteen, when it happened, she had not considered it important. But now that she remembers, now that she is older, she wonders whether there was more to it.

What she remembers is an evening in his house. She has been there for a few hours but Unni is busy at his desk, his bedroom door shut. So she is in the hall, sitting on the floor with Thoma and teaching him how to mix watercolours to create other colours. At some point she realizes that Unni is standing in his doorway and watching. She smiles at him.

‘What are you thinking?’ she says.

‘I was thinking, you may never see what I see.’

‘What do you see?’

‘I see things that are very beautiful. And I was thinking, Mythili will go through her entire life without ever seeing what I see. Mythili will never know what she is meant to see.’

‘You are mad, Unni.’

‘What if I am not?’

THOMA CHACKO WAKES UP earlier than usual and tries to understand what has happened to him. His head is fully tilted to his right, as if he is looking at the world with affection. He walks dreamily to the kitchen, feeling like the ghost of a boy who has been hanged, who is searching for his mother to tell her what they have done to him.

His mother is washing the dishes, her sari hitched up well above her knees. She stops for a moment, stands absolutely still, the lid of the pressure cooker in one hand and a wet scrub in another. A smile crosses her face as her hand circles the bottom of the lid very slowly, and she sings a lullaby.

It is dawn and the world is otherwise still. The lullaby is sweet and sad, like all lullabies. It was Unni who introduced him to the true nature of lullabies. ‘If you listen carefully, Thoma, you will realize that a lullaby is a sad song. That is the secret of the lullaby.’

‘Why is it sad, Unni?’

‘I cannot tell you, Thoma. You’re too young. But I have information that when mothers first began to sing lullabies they did it to mourn the birth of their babies. It was a tradition. Some people will tell you, Thoma, lullabies only sound sad because they are sung softly to lull babies into sleep. But the truth is lullabies are sad because they are meant to be sad. Do you know something, Thoma, even today, in some African tribes, lullabies and funeral songs are the same.’

Now that Thoma is older, he knows that when people want to con you they bring in the African tribes. Unni, especially. But as he stands this dawn, listening to his mother, how can he deny that there is a stirring sorrow in the song that he hears, a song that is among his earliest memories. When she finally sees him, she says, ‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘My neck is broken,’ he says.

She approaches him with her strong open arms. ‘You’ve got a crick in your neck, Thoma. It’s nothing. Let us fix it the village way. One swift jerk of your head and you will be all right. You won’t feel a thing.’

He screams, ‘It is not a sprain. I promise you it is something more important.’

She looks at him carefully and gives him the benefit of doubt. She used to be very confident about her ways once, but after Unni’s death she has become unsure of all her opinions about the world.

She grabs the coconut oil bottle from the shelf and before Thoma can react she pours some of it in his raised left ear. There is nothing he can do but just stand there as if his ear is a vat. He never lets her do it normally, but this morning she has grabbed her chance. ‘Too much wax in your ear, Thoma.’

‘Do we have any money to go to the clinic?’

‘We must go to the clinic, Thoma. And for that we must first go quietly into Iago’s chamber.’

They tiptoe into Ousep’s bedroom. His lungi hangs from the fan as a noose. He is sleeping fully naked, his mouth open, legs spread wide, his balls lying on him like an extraterrestrial pet. She covers him with a bedsheet, and they stand there and stare at him. There is no sign of life in him, his breath is imperceptible, his eyes are half open. But then a toe wiggles, which makes Mariamma and Thoma leave his bedside.

She gently opens the table drawer and extracts Ousep’s thin leather wallet. She pouts her lips at Thoma, which means there is some cash in it. She usually does not steal money from him because he gets furious and creates a big scene when he finds out.

They walk to the clinic on Arcot Road, which is not very far. The coconut oil is still in his ear because there is no way he can move his head to empty it. ‘Let it stay there for a while, Thoma,’ she says when they leave the house.

On the way she gets into one of her moods. She holds Thoma’s hand in a fierce grip and starts marching furiously, thinking of her old foes, her lips curling into her mouth, her eyes looking insanely at the road. Occasionally, she wags a finger in the air. She does this in short bursts. She will mumble something, bite her own lips, wag a finger, and the next moment she is all elegant and sharp, her eyes alone preoccupied, lips smacking in preparation for the next bout. A man walking in their direction almost jumps in fright when she suddenly chews her lips and wags her finger. There are not many people on the road fortunately, because it is still very early in the morning, but the few who pass them by look at them curiously.

Thoma endures the shame, his head tilted, his left ear filled with coconut oil. Now and then, he tells her softly to behave like a normal person but she ignores him. There is a moment when her head, too, is fully tilted, and she raises her right arm as if she is doing a warming-up workout. People look at them in incomprehension. A woman and a boy going somewhere, both their heads fully tilted. Nobody knows why.

In Sai Polyclinic, there are only three doctors at this hour and they are busy with an emergency case. Thoma and his mother do not want to know what the case is, they wait for a while and decide to leave. They walk back home, the way they had come — Thoma’s head almost horizontal, Mariamma in occasional fury.

That night, Thoma is woken up by his father to write his obituary. Mariamma says, ‘Leave him alone, his neck is broken.’ But she has decided not to fight. Thoma follows his swaying and stumbling father to the bedroom, where there is a lungi noose ready and hanging from the ceiling fan, and a chair below it. Ousep takes his position on the chair and puts the noose around his neck. Thoma stands with his head tilted. They stare at each other. ‘Bastard,’ Ousep says. ‘Are you making fun of me, you bastard?’

‘My neck is broken,’ Thoma says.

Ousep tries to step down but is pulled back by the noose. He extricates himself, gets down, and takes Thoma by his hand. ‘I will take care of you, my son, I am your father.’

So Thoma walks to Sai Polyclinic once again; this time he is led by a man who can barely walk. It is late in the night and the long straight road to the clinic is deserted, but occasionally, a taxi or an autorickshaw passes by and people stare at the strange sight of a drunken man leading a boy with a tilted head. Thoma wants to cry. In the morning, he goes somewhere with a mad woman, in the night with a drunkard. What a life. He feels a ball of warm sorrow in his throat.

When they reach the clinic, the guard sees the state Ousep is in and will not let them in. Ousep throws his press card at him and says, ‘Do you know who I am?’ The guard screams to another guard inside, ‘A man here has forgotten who he is. Is the psychiatrist on duty?’ And the guards laugh. Ousep threatens to call the chief minister. The guard says, ‘Call the president.’ Ousep shakes his head at Thoma and says, ‘This moron does not know the president has no powers in this country.’

Eventually, the guard wins. So they walk back. This time, Thoma has to lead his father, who stumbles many times and can barely stand. They go this way down the abandoned road — the boy with the tilted head leading the drunkard.

Thoma sees two shadowy figures approach. An urchin girl of his age is leading her drunken father. As their paths cross, Thoma and the girl look at each other, and they smile as if to give the other the strength to survive the times. Many years later, Thoma will think of her and hope with all his heart that she, too, has somehow made it across.

Thoma leads his father carefully to the stairway of Block A. Ousep is too drunk and sleepy to scream, which is a blessing. They walk up the steps quietly. Ousep stops. ‘Thoma,’ he says, ‘do you hate your father?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t hate me, son. There are people in this world who set out to make an omelette but end up with scrambled eggs. I am just one of them.’

They resume their walk up the steps. They walk in silence. When they are about to reach the landing on the third floor, they see a strange sight. Mythili walks across the short corridor, like a midnight ghost, towards her door. She throws a look at Thoma but does not say anything. She slips into her home and shuts the door.

‘Did that happen, Thoma?’

‘Yes.’

Ousep studies the front door of his house carefully and looks up at the short flight of steps that leads to the terrace door, which is locked. Just for a moment he looks strong and clever, the way he is in the mornings.