The Illicit Happiness of Other People

4. Gentleman’s Cholesterol

THE TRUE NATURE OF sorrow is boredom. Ousep Chacko is more sure than ever as he stands on his balcony, in the stillness of the humid Saturday evening. The good husbands too are out on their balconies, half naked, their white sacred threads running between their loose undeniable breasts. Their wives keep serving them biscuits and coffee, lemon juice and water, or they disappear after obeying orders and appear with newspapers, bank passbooks or other objects that still belong to men here. Some couples are having long, conspiratorial conversations as couples do. On the ground below, children are playing a hectic game that is making them delirious. Can people really tell the difference between normal children and abnormal children? That somehow reminds him of the type of people who can tell the difference between good poetry and bad poetry.

Thoma is among the happy kids who are now running like a fleeing mob. Even in Thoma’s world, some days are good days. Girls in their late adolescence walk in packs from one wall to another, throwing sideways glances at the big boys sitting in line on the compound wall. In another time, on an evening like this, Unni would have been among the boys on the wall, sitting quietly and returning the looks of the girls.

Boys of Unni’s age in the colony are of two kinds, without exception since the exception is dead. The dejected, who failed to clear the JEE but have managed to enter the best of the second-rung engineering colleges, and the irreparably damaged, who attend third-rate institutes, some of them in faraway, gloomy industrial towns. The irreparably damaged flock together. They walk without the spring of life, their spines have lost their pride, and there is no light in their eyes. They become alert when they hear words like ‘idiot’ or ‘fool’ or ‘stupid’. Even when these descriptions are not about them, the words land painful blows in their hearts. The eight boys on the wall today are of the flock.

They are distracted by a girl walking down the road. Unni used to call her ‘Typewriter’ and that is what they call her here even now. Books pressed to her chest, oiled hair tied in a single fierce braid, she walks down this road every evening. She walks in great discomfort, as always, to the sounds of her silver anklets, with a distraught smile of excruciating shyness, her head bent, her baffled eyes gaping at the road, fully aware of the boys on the wall, boys on their balconies, boys behind windows, all the boys in the world. She loses authority over her tense legs often and veers to the side until she reaches the very edge of the road, sometimes a compound wall, when she gets mildly alarmed and veers to the other side, like the roller of a typewriter.

The boys on the wall, the men and women on the balconies, even the old who can see far, laugh as they see the girl go round the bend. She is a passing moment of joy. Like the Chackos, she makes people feel they are better.

After she vanishes, a numbing dullness returns to the world. The boys have nothing to laugh at, nothing to do. On occasion, their heads lift for a swift hopeful gaze at Mythili’s balcony, where there is no one standing right now.

She used to stand on her balcony and call out for Unni. Some days, when she was in the mood, she would yell out his name several times in the different accents of the elders in the block. Unni would then walk across his father’s bedroom with his tired arrogance, without fear or respect, and open the narrow door that leads to the balcony. He and the girl would then chat standing on their balconies, sometimes for over an hour. Unni usually said very little, she did most of the talking, chiefly complaining about her friends or teachers. Sometimes she whispered things about her mother to him and giggled. That was then, when she was allowed to talk to men.

Ousep decides he has had enough of the humid evening, he must now head somewhere affluent and have a quiet drink, maybe more. It is an inevitability that masquerades as a decision. That is the way of a drunkard. He grants himself the dignity of choice, as if there is another option. But then is there really any choice in the world? Could it be that every human action is merely an inevitability masquerading as a human decision, life granting dignity to its addicts through the delusion of choice?

He is about to leave the balcony when he spots something at the far end of Balaji Lane. He is unable to understand what is happening but everybody else appears to know what is going on. There is a stranger walking down the lane, a young man whose features are not clear. As he passes the other blocks, boys stop playing and stare, boys stand on the walls and stare. Girls appear on the balconies rolling their hair and look. Men and women point to the young man and talk among themselves, nodding their heads. A small swarm of boys, short and tall, is now following the young man. The news has just gone around Block A. The children run out to the lane, many climb the compound wall and stand on it to get a better look. The big boys, too, are standing on the wall. The entire length of the wall is now lined with boys of many heights standing and looking to their right. The balconies fill with people. The young man approaches in his swarm. He is unaffected by all the attention. And it is now clear what is in his hand — a red basket filled with vegetables. Miraculously, the apparition enters Block A. Even more incredibly, it speaks to Thoma, who is visibly dazed as he clumsily climbs down from the wall.

Ousep now recognizes the young man. He was in Unni’s class. Ousep met him once, three years ago, weeks before the boy became a celebrity. Balki had not just made it to IIT, he was ranked all-India second in the JEE, second among over a hundred thousand candidates. The meeting with him was very brief and largely useless, and Ousep decided that there was no point in meeting him again. But now it appears that Balki is coming home for some reason. Thoma, who has suddenly assumed the glow of importance, is leading the star. The swarm vanishes into the stairway tunnel. Is this the breakthrough Ousep has been waiting for?

He keeps the front door open and waits. That draws Mariamma’s attention; she looks puzzled. She waits with him. When she sees the crowd of boys at her door, she begins to tremble. ‘What happened, what happened to my boy? Is Thoma all right?’ she sings. When she finds Thoma in the crowd, she puts her hand on her heart and pants. Thoma leads Balki into the house. The swarm does not come in but it does not want to leave. A boy asks, nervously, ‘Balki, do you believe in God?’

‘Yes,’ Balki says in his surprising baritone.

‘What a coincidence. Even I believe in God.’

‘OK, all of you,’ Balki says. ‘Thanks. Now I need to speak to Unni’s parents alone. Bye.’

And they leave reluctantly, including Thoma. Balki shuts the door and faces Ousep and Mariamma.

Ousep tries to understand what has come home. Balki is tall, his shoulders broad, and everything in the house has shrunk in his presence. He has a large head, and a long, full neck, which is far more uncommon than people imagine. His movements are brisk and devoid of cultured caution, and his unfocused eyes gape without respect as if the Chackos have borrowed money from him. And he is chewing gum.

Mariamma holds the boy’s hand and tells him something about the passage of time. Then, for Ousep’s benefit, she mumbles a confused but flattering biography. He was always a genius, apparently. She says she has known Balki from the time he was a little boy.

‘We have met,’ Ousep says. ‘Briefly, a long time ago.’

‘Three years ago,’ the boy says.

Mariamma touches the boy’s cheeks with the tips of her fingers. ‘Nobody visits us any more, Balki,’ she says. ‘All his friends have stopped coming. One by one, they stopped. Then one day, guess who turns up.’

‘Who?’ the boy asks.

They look at each other, confused. ‘You, of course,’ she says.

‘I see. I don’t easily understand this style of speech.’

She feels his face again. Balki is not embarrassed, he even bends a little to make it easier for her to cup his face in her hands. ‘I don’t mind being touched now,’ he says. ‘When I was little, I did not like being touched, I would scream if anybody touched me. Unni used to put his arm around me. I used to hate it but I grew to accept that it is a sign of friendship.’ He hands her the vegetable basket. ‘Look what I’ve got for you. The vegetables are for you. I brought them from my house. My mother said, “Take some vegetables for Unni’s mother.” I told her, “I must take fruits.” But she said, “Don’t be modern, Bala. Take vegetables. It will make her happy.”’

‘She’s right,’ Mariamma says.

‘My mother asked me to bring the basket back.’

‘Will you eat here, Balki? I can make a quick snack for you.’

‘I cannot eat in a house where meat is cooked,’ he says in his precise, inoffensive way.

‘Oh, we don’t cook any meat here,’ she says, throwing a bitter chuckle at Ousep. ‘Meat,’ she says, and shakes with genuine laughter.

‘We don’t harm meat, son, by bringing it here,’ Ousep says.

Balki looks at them in incomprehension. ‘I don’t have much time,’ he says, ‘I have to leave as soon as I’ve spoken to Unni’s father.’

‘Is it something important?’ she says. ‘Tell me, Balki, do you know something about Unni?’

Balki’s eyes have been darting to the framed black-and-white photograph of Unni on the wall. They stay on the portrait now.

‘He looks so young,’ he says. ‘When was this taken?’

‘Just a few months before he died,’ she says. ‘It was a passport-size photograph. We blew it up as much as we could. That’s why he looks a bit pale in it. My boy was not pale at all, you know that.’

‘He is so young, which obviously he was when he died. But in my mind he is a man, like me. In my mind, he is ageing with me. But in that photograph he is just a boy.’

He goes up to the framed photograph for a closer look at Unni, who stares back with a knowing smile, as if he knew this moment would come. Balki, unexpectedly, joins his palms and shuts his eyes. A deep silence grows. Ousep uses the opportunity to point to his wife’s blouse, which is torn at the armpits. He tells her with a violent motion of his hand that she must disappear inside. But she stands there defiantly, even begins to imitate his actions. Ousep considers flinging his slippers at her. Balki opens his eyes after nearly a minute.

‘I think of Unni every day,’ he says.

‘What is it that you want to say to us, Balki?’ Mariamma asks.

‘I have to talk to Unni’s father. I have to speak to him in private.’

Ousep leads him to his room, and shuts the door on Mariamma’s face. He shows the boy to a chair across from his desk, which is by the open windows that frame the tops of a sea of coconut trees and the terraces of blue and pink and white homes, and the distant yellow spire of Fatima Church. He lights up two cigarettes and tries to look relaxed, even flaps his thighs. The boy is probably amused to see a man smoke two cigarettes at once but he does not say anything.

Ousep wonders what the boy wants. Nobody comes home with a story to tell unless he has a motive. Sometimes, the motive is the story. Ousep points to the church spire. ‘Unni is buried in the grounds of that church.’

‘I know,’ Balki says, ‘I’ve visited his grave twice.’

‘Were you at the funeral?’

‘I didn’t know for a week that he was gone. Most of his classmates didn’t know.’

‘We buried him a day after he died.’

‘I hear you are meeting them again, his classmates, you are talking to them.’

‘Yes.’

‘They are stupid,’ Balki says, as if it is an unremarkable fact. ‘Most of them, they are very dumb. Did you find them dumb?’

‘They are like anybody else.’

‘Exactly. People are generally dumb. They are small petty animals, who want to do their small petty animal things. Unni was smart. I liked him.’

‘You were friends?’

‘I don’t know,’ Balki says.

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know, that’s what it means.’

‘After his death, I came to meet you in your house,’ Ousep says. ‘I remember you were very surprised when you saw me at the door. You were probably unhappy to see me.’

‘I was surprised, not unhappy. I was a bit confused, I could not understand why you were asking me questions about Unni. I didn’t know then that Unni’s death was not an accident. I heard it from you first, and you revealed it to me towards the end of our conversation when you felt I was not saying anything useful. I remember your words. I will always remember those words. “Unni jumped. He knew what he was doing.” I could not believe it. It didn’t make any sense. After our meeting I went to meet some boys from the class and they told me exactly what you had said. Two days ago I met someone at the bus stop. He told me that you are meeting Unni’s friends again, you are …’

‘I am embarrassed to interrupt you, Balki, but it is important that I say this. Unni’s mother is the curious type. As you can see, if you look under that door, she is standing right behind it. With her ear stuck to it. I am not saying this in a metaphorical way, Balki. She really is standing there with her ear stuck to the door. You have a loud booming voice, and both of us want to be discreet. I don’t have a radio or a two-in-one that works. So we may have to speak softly.’

‘I understand.’

‘Softer than that.’

‘Is this better?’

‘Why do you want to speak to me and not her?’

‘I want to speak to you and not to her. That’s all there is to it.’

‘What has Unni told you about his mother?’

‘Nothing much really. But I got the feeling that he was very fond of her.’

‘He was very fond of her, which is not unusual.’

‘I want to know,’ Balki says, licking his lips, ‘what you have found out about Unni.’

‘Nothing at all, to be honest.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Does it surprise you?’

‘I expected it. But why have you started investigating his death now? After three years, why now?’

‘My health is bad, I may not last very long. I thought I must solve the only riddle that matters to me before I begin to sink.’

‘People say you’ve discovered something.’

‘I’ve heard that too.’

Balki stares at Ousep with a hint of mistrust. ‘Is your health bad in a specific way? Do you have a terminal disease?’

‘It’s never that simple. There are things a drunkard knows about his body. Most of Malayalam literature was about that until women started writing.’

Ousep tries to achieve a wounded smile, anticipating the discomfort of compassion in Balki, but the boy is all business. ‘You don’t have much time, then,’ he says. ‘Do you have a hunch about Unni at least? Are you following a particular line of investigation?’

‘Balki, why are you here?’

‘I am here to help you.’

‘Then help me.’

Balki looks with great concentration at the surface of the desk. He takes his time to form the words. ‘Unni had ideas, powerful ideas. He believed something is going on all around us. Have you heard about that? He told the whole class this, he said something is happening and if we looked carefully we would be able to see it. He believed that something very ancient has survived and that it lives among us. Has anybody told you this?’

‘What was it that he thought was going on?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Could it be that he had got obsessed with an idea — the great awakening, everything-is-an-illusion, rubbish like that? It happens to some adolescents. They usually come back to their senses.’

‘I don’t think he was talking about those things,’ Balki says.

‘Why not?’

‘Somehow I feel that a person who thinks he has discovered the absolute truth will not be someone I know.’

‘Why couldn’t Unni just say what was bothering him?’

‘I don’t know. I think he could not explain it. I think he only suspected that something was going on, he was not sure. Then one day he saw something, and somehow that meant he had to die. It is possible that the reason why he died is linked to what he knew, what he discovered. Does that make sense to you?’

‘No.’

‘It doesn’t make much sense to me, either.’

‘Balki, we don’t have to sit here and try to figure out why Unni chose to die. That would be mere speculation. What we must do is talk about him, talk about him without a motive.’

Balki nods; he toys with the marble paperweight on the desk. He looks around the room, at the bed behind him, and at the bookshelf in a corner, probably searching for a spine he recognizes. He even looks at the ceiling fan, for some reason. When he finally speaks, he remembers Unni in a neat, chronological way.

Unni and Balki entered St Ignatius Boys’ High School the same year, when they were six. Balki’s first memories of Unni are of a boy who was not exceptional in any way. Unni was a moderately gifted student who was not considered bright until many years later. Balki, on the other hand, was always a clever freak, and for that reason he did not have friends. Even the teachers hated him. But he had Unni, who put an arm around his shoulder, who took him by his hand to include him in the games that the boys played. When Unni was eight, he gave Balki a memorable reason why they were friends. He said that Balki reminded him of his mother. Two days later Unni would explain, without being asked, ‘My mother, too, is very smart, but a bit nutty.’

When he was around ten, something happened to Unni. Ousep has not heard this before. He is not sure whether the boy’s mother knows about this. At least twice in the classroom he held his head and doubled up in pain. On both occasions he got back on his feet in seconds. And on both occasions he told his teachers that he had felt his brain move, as if it was changing shape within his skull. Balki is not surprised that no one from their class has told Ousep this. ‘It happened a long time ago and people have very ordinary powers of retention. People usually remember what happened to them, and not the world around them.’

Around this time, there was another development. Unni began to spend a lot of time by himself in a corner of the playground. He would sit in a hypnotic trance as if he was watching something captivating before his eyes, and he would not hear people right next to him calling out his name. He would stir back to life only when shaken, and he would behave as if nothing had happened. He claimed to have no recollection of what he was thinking about or what he saw in his mind.

It is possible that these are ordinary events whose significance is exaggerated because Unni chose to die. Children do strange things, which are usually forgotten because they turn out all right. Most of them, at least. But some don’t make it, do they? Everything else about Unni, when he was a little boy, was unremarkable. Ousep does not like it when Balki uses the word ‘ordinary’. But then he knows what Balki means. Balki means ‘ordinary’.

When Unni was around fourteen, he began to draw outrageous caricatures of his teachers, which quickly became an underground sensation in the school. Soon, he found legitimate fame when he released what was probably his first comic story. It was drawn in watercolours over six pages.

Ousep lights up two more cigarettes and, as the first cloud of smoke leaves him, asks with a sporting smile, ‘You actually remember the number of pages?’

‘Six pages. Held together by a safety pin,’ Balki says.

‘Could the number of pages have been five, or seven?’

‘Six,’ Balki says.

‘Do you remember the story of the comic?’

‘Of course.’

The comic begins with a boy, who is probably fourteen, as old as Unni was then. The boy is going somewhere. A man is walking ahead, holding something in his hand. A bus goes out of control and hits the man from behind. The man’s wallet, oddly the object that he was holding in his hand, flies into the air and lands near the boy. A great crowd gathers quickly around the man, and they block the boy’s view. The comments of the crowd fill the air. ‘Is that his face?’ ‘Is that his ear lying there?’ ‘There is something white coming out of his head.’ The boy picks up the dead man’s wallet and walks away. In the wallet is some cash. It also has the address and the photograph of the owner. The boy spends the cash and lives happily for several days, but then he begins to see the dead man in his dreams. Later, he begins to see the man in his waking hours, standing in unexpected corners and staring hard at him. Finally, unable to bear his hallucinations, the boy decides to return to the family of the dead man the money he had taken. He steals some cash from his grandmother’s cupboard, puts it in the wallet, and goes to return it. He reaches the door of a flat and rings the doorbell; he waits. When the door opens, the boy is shocked because it is the corpse from his hallucinations who is at the door. The boy is so terrified that he is unable to move. The man sees the wallet in the boy’s hand and he begins to thank him for his honesty. It turns out, the man’s pocket had been picked earlier that week, and it was the thief who had died.

The comic, which was untitled according to Balki, passed from hand to hand for days. Jealous boys went about revealing the twist in the tale to those who were yet to read the story, but Unni’s fame rested not only on the story but also on his exquisite images. The comic finally reached a teacher, who decided to stick the six pages to a wall outside the principal’s office. Small crowds of boys, and on occasion parents, gathered every day to read the comic. The success of Unni’s first comic must have created a small stir in the house, but Ousep was kept out of it all. He cannot blame anyone for that, but he does wish that he had been told about Unni’s first-ever comic story and what a hit it was in the school. Ousep would have put his hand on his son’s shoulder and told him, honestly, ‘It’s a great story, Unni, I am proud of you.’ And Unni might have smiled in his shy way, shy but fully meeting the eye.

Around this time, Unni became immodest about his erections. Balki reveals this without any embarrassment or even an inflection in his steady voice. At the end of the class of an English teacher who was slim, whose sari was not tamed, and whose deep navel showed, Unni would sit in his place and invite all to feel his hardness, which in general opinion was so extraordinary that many refused to believe it was a part of his body. Unni was crafty, he was magic. Some said he was trying to pass off a raw plantain as his penis.

‘What did you think?’ Ousep asks.

Balki says in a severe way, ‘How could it have been a plantain? People are so stupid.’

Nothing about Unni, when he was fourteen, even hinted at what he was to soon become, except for a brief comment one evening. After the final bell, the two boys were walking down the second-floor corridor from their class to the stairway. From that height they could see many streams of children emerging from their classes and joining a sea of uniforms, all going home.

‘So many people in this world,’ Unni said, ‘so many many people. Nature has to keep making billions of people so that by pure chance, finally, one person will be born who will make it.’

What he said appeared nonsensical and Balki did not think much about it. ‘Two years later Unni asked me if I remembered that moment, if I remembered what he had said. I said “yes”. And Unni said, “There is a reason why you did not forget it.”’

‘But what did he mean when he said one person will make it?’ Ousep asks.

‘I didn’t ask him.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘At that time I didn’t know he was going to die. So I didn’t attach too much importance to everything he said. But I can guess what he meant. He probably meant that the birth of every human is nature’s blind shot at achieving something grander. It constantly fails but by producing billions of people nature is improving its chances of attaining a mysterious goal.’

‘Does it make sense to you?’

‘If you eliminate that bit about nature having a goal, what Unni said is just a layperson’s description of the theory of evolution. Nature keeps producing millions and billions of nearly identical organisms for ages, then something happens to one creature by chance and a new species is born.’

‘But that’s not what Unni was talking about. He said, in your own words, one person will make it.’

‘That’s what he said.’

‘What exactly did he mean?’

‘We will never know.’

The door bursts open, startling Ousep and the boy. Mariamma walks in with a calm phoney smile, carrying two cups of coffee on a plastic tray. She sets the cups on the desk and lingers. Ousep glares at her but she decides not to meet his eye. So he walks her out of the room, shuts the door on her again and latches it.

Balki sips his coffee, ruffles his hair, lets out a deep yawn, squeezes his penis for a moment as if to unknot it, looks in the direction of the church spire. Ousep waits without a word, flapping his thighs. Balki, too, begins to flap his thighs. They sit this way in silence, flapping their thighs.

Balki pulls the Indian Express towards him and begins to read. He turns the pages, even folds the paper and gets down to reading a short item about a flyover that will soon be built. He takes far too long to finish the article, and it occurs to Ousep that the boy is probably here to say something and is not sure whether he should. He is making up his mind.

When Balki finds his voice again, it is as if he had never paused. But it is not clear whether this is what he has come here to say or whether he is just buying time. ‘Nobody noticed it at first,’ he says, ‘but when Unni was seventeen he began to transform. We had just entered the twelfth standard. I don’t know how much you know, some bizarre things happened in the class.’

Most of the boys in the class had been together from the time they were children, and the twelfth standard was a foreboding lodged in their minds all through the years of their childhood. Innumerable times, on good days and bad, they had sat together and wondered what would become of them when they sat the inescapable board exams at the end of the twelfth standard. They spoke in whispers about the fathers who had killed themselves in shame because their sons had failed. And when they finally entered the last year of school, they were filled with the deep melancholy seeded in them long before their memories began. The time had come. That was what everyone in Madras told them. The time had come. Their fates would be decided in a few months in the board exams and in the toughest engineering entrance exams in the world. Every teacher, even the language teachers, told them that they were ‘at the crossroads of life’.

Every boy in the class became increasingly obsessed with his study material, except Unni, of course. He spent his free time drawing the portraits of boys engrossed in solving sample problems, their desks filled with fat books and their fingers tapping the Seiko calculator. This was what they did most of the time. They did that even in the sliver of time between classes, and during the lunch break, and in their homes as well, into the night and at dawn.

It was inconceivable that anything could distract them. But Unni did something in the class one day that made almost everyone go crazy for over ten minutes. It is only now that the boys talk about the incident freely, according to Balki. And they talk about it only among themselves. But even now, no one fully understands what exactly happened or how Unni got everyone involved in the moment of madness.

‘There were thirty-two boys in the class when it happened,’ Balki says. ‘Everybody saw it, everybody was a part of it, but nobody can explain it. Has anyone told you about Simion Clark?’

‘No.’

Balki begins to rock gently in his chair. ‘I was sure nobody would have told you this. Maybe they didn’t want to say anything bad about Unni to his father. People are so small. The way they think, they are so small. Or, maybe, they are still afraid. They still want to believe it never happened.’

‘But what happened?’

Balki drags the paperweight in a circle over the desk. ‘Let’s say you want to commit a crime,’ the boy says, ‘but you know there are going to be witnesses, what do you do? How do you go ahead with the crime when you know that there are going to be witnesses?’

‘How?’

‘You make the witnesses participate in the crime. What happens when the witness is also the accomplice? There is silence. That is how Unni guards some of his secrets long after he has gone. That is why you will never know everything he did. And that’s one of the reasons, I guess, why nobody has told you the story of Simion Clark.’

SIMION CLARK WAS AN Anglo-Indian physics teacher whose sudden appearance in the cheap cement corridors of St Ignatius had all the enchantment of a Rolls-Royce passing through a narrow Madras lane. Simion was a legend even in his time. He sat erect among the dark slouched rustics in the staff room, he was much larger than all the men in the school and he was large in a way that made those who were smaller than him look like gnomes. He was lean and fit compared to the other teachers, who had been irreparably starved in their childhood; his perfect shirt was tucked inside fitted trousers while the polyester shirts of his colleagues, some days, showed white deltas of old sweat. And the way he pronounced ‘screw gauge’, ‘Ptolemy’ and ‘relativity’, it was as if these were words of his invention. He played the guitar and the piano, and laughed at the harmonium. And he always sang a sad Spanish song during school festivals. He bowed his head to the lady teachers even though they looked like his maids. But he had darkness within. He was merciless with the boys, even by the standards of St Ignatius. He slapped and caned them, hit the soles of their feet with a rod, and landed thuds on their bent backs that echoed, and when they cried, a smile quivered at the edges of his lips.

Unni was thirteen when Simion arrived and was taken to every class as a showpiece by the headmaster, whose own English had become confused and tortured in the presence of the exotic new teacher.

Simion began to walk down the school’s corridors, enjoying the deep fearful silence he cast all around him. Sometimes he stopped and surveyed the boys in a class through the window, waiting for a wrong move, a conversation that was not in English, a shoe that was not black enough.

In Simion’s class, naturally, nobody spoke. If anybody coughed, he had to say, ‘Excuse me, sir’, which imposed considerable pressure on the boys to control their coughs, which sometimes transformed into loud alien yelps. It was inevitable that Unni and Simion would clash, but strangely Simion never hit the boy, or even spoke to him. The day of conflict came four years after Simion had arrived at St Ignatius. Simion was at the height of his powers. Unni was seventeen.

The class began the way it always did. Simion’s entrance was preceded by a nervous calm. Into the familiar silence he walked and settled in his chair, the axis of his upper body slightly tilted as always. He arranged his things on his desk and flipped the pages of a book. There was an absolute stillness in the room, which was not unusual. A physics teacher facing the twelfth standard in any school in Madras would normally have some of the powers of God. In the case of Simion Clark, he was God.

So all hearts stopped when Unni stood up and walked to the blackboard. ‘I did not understand what was happening,’ Balki says. ‘What was Unni doing?’ Simion raised his eyes and looked at the class, and slowly turned to his right, where Unni was standing. Unni stood facing the boys for a while. Then he started singing a comical song, which sounded a lot like Simion’s Spanish song. The song was brief. Unni then went to Simion’s desk. ‘And it happened. Unni slapped him. Simion did not move. He sat there, looking at Unni without an expression on his face, as if he had expected it. Unni slapped him again and withdrew his hand into his trouser pocket.’ That was Simion’s style, that was how Simion slapped the boys — with a quick movement of his hand and a ponderous withdrawal of the weapon into his pocket. Unni kept slapping him in this manner. Simion now stared at a distant spot on the wall and endured the slaps. Unni went to the door and shut it. He faced the class and said, ‘Your turn.’

‘Nobody moved, naturally. We were too shocked. So he dragged a boy called Kitcha to the head of the class. Kitcha was an idiot who was routinely thrashed by Simion. The guy begged, “No, Unni, I don’t want to do anything, Unni, no, Unni.” But when Unni put him in front of Simion, Kitcha suddenly began to look menacing. Simion swallowed. I clearly remember that. It was the moment, at least for me, when the myth of Simion Clark was broken. He looked afraid and fragile. I think Kitcha saw that too.’

Kitcha kicked Simion’s legs, and looked at himself in disbelief. He was so scared he lost his mind. He went berserk. He slapped and kicked Simion a few more times. Now something even more bizarre happened. A few boys stood up, ran to the head of the class and joined Kitcha. They slapped and kicked Simion. Unni was standing near the door and watching carefully. It was strange that Simion did not move from his chair. Just once he spoke and that was to say, ‘Please don’t.’ Now everyone was going crazy. Almost everybody in the class was around his table. ‘I saw a boy jogging up and down in the aisle screaming, “I want to, I want to, I want to hit the bastard.”’

Someone then went up to Simion and spat in his face. That showed an option for others who did not know how to hit a person. They went to his table and spat on him. Most of them had probably never spat at a target in their lives and they ended up spitting on themselves. ‘Spitting on a person is more difficult than it seems. I sat there watching all this. I don’t know what happened to me. I could not control myself. I went and punched him on his ear. Just once. It was the first time I had hit someone. I don’t know why I did it. It was a magical moment.’

The whole class was now around Simion. Some punched him, many spat. His eyes were still fixed to that spot on the wall. Then, suddenly, his body began to shake, he bit his lips and started crying. The beatings stopped. Unni went back to his seat; that made everyone go back. Simion did not move. He was bleeding from his nose. He took out his handkerchief and wiped himself, all the spit and a trickle of blood. And he got up from his chair and left.

‘We went to the door and saw him walk down the corridor, then across the playground below, all the way to the gate. He did not pick up his things from the staff room. He just walked away, he left, just like that. No one ever saw him again.’

The boys were delirious and, naturally, they wanted to discuss what had happened, but Unni refused to be drawn in. Every time someone asked him a question he would put a finger to his lips. It was as if he was saddened, even ashamed, by what had happened.

By the end of the day, a rumour was spreading through the school that Simion had hanged himself from a fan in his house. Only Unni’s class knew what might have been the cause and they decided, without having to discuss the matter, to guard their secret. None of the teachers had any social contact with Simion. They did not believe they were good enough to be his friend. They did not know where he lived, where he came from. The administration tried to reach him but all his details in the school records turned out to be false. The phone number he had provided belonged to a parish in Tambaram twenty kilometres away, and his address simply did not exist. He was obviously not what he said he was. Simion Clark was probably not his real name even. With his affluent bearing and British English he had secured a job in the school with ease and worked there for four years. Nobody knew why he had lied about who he was or what it was that he had hoped to achieve. He remains a mystery even today.

‘Do you think he is dead?’ Ousep asks.

‘Nobody is sure,’ Balki says. ‘That is the scariest thing. The moment we heard that he had died, something happened inside all of us. We felt sick and afraid. We were regular guys. We had been trained by our parents to fear anything that was remotely dangerous or abnormal. And now suddenly we were responsible for a man’s death. That is why nobody talks about Simion. We suspect we killed him.’

‘Why did Simion endure all that? He just had to leave his chair to get Unni expelled from school.’

‘That’s exactly what we wanted to know but Unni refused to tell us anything. Anyway, after we heard of Simion’s death we didn’t want to discuss that man. Everybody decided to forget about him and get back to work. When you are preparing for the JEE, you focus. You don’t play cricket, you don’t watch TV, you don’t even masturbate. Abetting suicide is simply out of the question. So we wanted to just forget about what had happened.’

‘Is he dead?’ Ousep asks again.

Balki, surprisingly, removes a cigarette from Ousep’s fingers and takes a drag. ‘Is this disrespectful?’ he asks.

‘Do you want a cigarette?’

Balki shakes his head, inserts the cigarette back between Ousep’s fingers and says, ‘If nobody knew where Simion came from or where he lived or what he was, I wonder who first received the news that he had died.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Do you think Unni started the rumour?’ Ousep asks.

‘It achieved exactly what he wanted. Simion became a secret,’ Balki says. ‘It was in everybody’s interests to keep him a secret.’

‘Why was Unni doing all this?’

‘We come back to the original problem. Why did Unni do everything that he did?’

Balki arranges the newspapers on the desk in a neat stack. He gazes at the church spire, nods his head almost imperceptibly at a private thought, gapes again at the objects in the room. ‘Or,’ he says, ‘Simion is dead and I am trying to fool myself into believing that Unni started the rumour. Everyone else who was present in the classroom that day thinks that Simion is dead. The rumour was very strong when it began.’

‘Did Simion have a scar on his face?’ Ousep asks.

Balki, as expected, considers the question strange. ‘No,’ he says.

‘Any cuts, any old wounds on the forehead, on his lips?’ Ousep asks.

‘No,’ Balki says. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Just curious. Was he always a physics teacher or was it something he became later in his career?’

‘I have no idea,’ Balki says. ‘Your questions are strange.’

‘They are.’

‘Do you know someone who might be Simion?’

‘No,’ Ousep says, which is the truth. But there are many Simions in the world. They have scars from old injuries, and they like labs. Ousep knows where to look.

He thinks of the time when Unni had influenced a gang of boys to almost kill a stray dog by pelting it with stones. Simion Clark reminds him of that mongrel, who probably still lives.

After the disappearance of Simion, a myth grew around Unni. Some boys said that he had paranormal powers, that he could control the actions of others, that he could read minds, that when they stood close to him they felt a magnetic pull. It was around this time that he walked into the class one morning, sat in his place and waited for a moment of silence to say, very softly, as if to himself, ‘Something is happening around us.’ Ousep has heard of this moment from several boys and all their descriptions are the same.

Unni looked disturbed. Nobody had ever seen Unni that way before. He was abstract and incoherent when he tried to explain. Balki says, ‘It was as if he had seen something. He said things were not what they appeared to be. Everything that we knew about the world was wrong, everything was a lie. Nature guarded a dark secret, a secret that would stun us if we knew it, and it guarded it in incredibly clever ways. He didn’t make sense but as he was talking I felt such a cold fear in my heart I turned to look behind me. It was a strange thing to do. I looked back to see if there was any danger coming towards me. Why would I do that? What is even stranger is that I saw three other boys look back, exactly the way I did. We didn’t know why we did that.’

A few weeks later, Unni started telling stories standing on the teacher’s desk. ‘Has anybody told you about his stories?’ Balki asks.

‘Yes. But some deny this ever used to happen.’

Balki laughs; he leans forward and asks in a teasing whisper, ‘Those who did not deny it, did they tell you what his stories were about?’

‘They said they don’t remember.’

‘That’s what I thought they would say.’

Balki releases a hiss of air from his lungs. ‘You have met so many boys from our class, you went to them as the father of a dead boy, not just any dead boy but Unni Chacko. Yet they hold back information because they are afraid, they are afraid of everything they were, everything they are. People are such cowards, people are so pathetic.’

Ousep realizes why he has been feeling hopeful in the presence of this boy who has a reasonable contempt for the world. It is the misanthrope alone who has clarity. By standing outside the huddles of man, he sees a lot, and what he often sees is the evidence that people are not as smart as dogs think they are. And he wants to see it time and again. In the fog of ambiguities and mysteries, he desperately searches for truths because truth usually shows humanity in a poor light. Balki and Unni are similar in that way. Unni, too, was exceptional, he was strong, so he did not need to belong. Unni, too, stood beyond the bonds of people because that was a good place to stand and watch. And Balki does not want to concede that such an endearing foe of the ordinary was ultimately defeated by the world. For that is what Unni’s death is until proven otherwise — a defeat. Balki will do all he can to take Ousep closer to the truth.

The boy says, ‘What is more important than Unni’s stories is what happened in the days that preceded them.’ After what Unni did to Simion, he exerted considerable power over the class. When he spoke people listened, when he asked a question they answered. And, for some reason, he slowly influenced many of them to confess to their sexual acts and fantasies. ‘Those days we had more fantasies than acts. He asked me too. I told him I have nothing to say. Then he asked me, “Have you ever committed a sexual crime?” I said, “No.” He looked at me in disbelief. That was the only time I thought he looked dumb. Did he really expect all schoolboys to be rapists?’

After Unni had collected all the confessions he could, he converted them into true stories that he would deliver from the teacher’s desk. ‘That’s what he did, those were his stories.’ He protected the identity of the boys but gave broad hints. He described the setting and the characters involved in great detail. ‘Now, these were true stories, sex stories,’ Balki says, ‘stories of the boys in our class. Some really dark stuff was coming out. I was very surprised by the kinds of things boys did. Everybody was hooked, they got addicted to the stories, and everybody tried to guess who was who.’ Some begged Unni not to reveal their confessions, which were told to him in good faith, of course. They feared they would be identified. But Unni assured them they were overreacting.

‘His first story was about a boy whose identity we could guess through the descriptions. He had molested the servant maid when she was sleeping in his house. She did not complain because she feared she would be sacked. So he did it again. Some stories were sad and infuriating, some were funny. There was one about a boy who used to take his sister’s school uniform, put it over a pillow and do things to it. Another guy took a pomegranate from the kitchen, made a hole in it and made love to it, and actually returned it to the kitchen.’

‘Were there any stories in which the protagonist was probably Unni?’

‘No.’

At some point in the final year of school, Balki had distanced himself from Unni. He says that in an uncharacteristically obtuse way, with a hint of lame pride about his decision, about his discipline, the way some people would say, expecting a compliment in return, ‘I don’t eat meat.’

‘There was something about him,’ Balki says. ‘Obviously, there was something going on inside his head. And everything he said, everything he did, somehow affected me. He distracted me. And the exams were just a few months away. So I thought it was best to keep away from him. Actually, he didn’t care. He probably didn’t even notice. He was the star, I was just the brilliant guy.’

Unni was increasingly drawn to the shadowy Somen Pillai, and the unremarkable Sai Shankaran. The three spoke in whispers in class, they were rumoured to meet in Somen’s house every evening, they went places together, they had a mysterious purpose. They were on to something, everybody said. Ousep has heard this many times in different forms.

This answers a question Ousep has been waiting to ask. Why did everyone describe Somen and Sai as the closest friends of Unni and not mention Balki at all? The Unni that everybody remembers is the indecipherable boy of seventeen, and it turns out that in this period Balki was not around Unni.

Balki dismisses Sai as an idiot who was perpetually unhappy because he was afraid that he was an idiot. ‘You know the kind of guy who would not play chess with you because he is afraid that he would be exposed? That’s Sai. Actually, that’s most guys in the world, but you know what I mean.’

Somen Pillai, on the other hand, is more complicated than Ousep had imagined. He had first walked into St Ignatius when he was six, the same year as Unni and Balki. Through a huge expanse of time, his entire boyhood, Somen sat quietly in his place, spoke only reluctantly, did nothing memorable — he never ran, never played, never sang, never danced or acted in a play, and he barely managed to pass every test. He hopped from year to year in a shroud of silence and insignificance. There is a Somen in every class, in every room of the world where men congregate — the quiet one whose opinions are never known. Wherever he exists, he creates a dim corner out of his space. It is not surprising that when Simion Clark was being assaulted by the entire class, Somen was the only student who did nothing. He sat in his place, in his safe corner. In the ten years that they were together in the class, Balki does not remember a single conversation that even mentioned Somen in passing.

‘But he is the key,’ Balki says. ‘Somen Pillai is the person who knows what happened to Unni in the months before he died. The question “why did Unni do what he did” has an answer. I think Somen Pillai knows the answer.’

‘What about Sai?’

‘I think the other two used him as an errand boy. Sai might know something more than he lets on, but I don’t think he is important. Somen Pillai is the person who can help you.’

‘I can’t find him.’

‘I’ve heard.’

‘How do I meet him?’

‘I don’t know.’

Balki rubs his eyebrows, glares intensely at the desk. Unexpectedly, he rises. He says, ‘I have to go now.’ But he stands there, lingering, which is odd. He pouts his lips and stares at Ousep, who decides to say nothing, but he gets the sense that it is important not to take his eyes off the boy as he struggles to make a decision. There is nothing Ousep can do but wait.

The boy, finally, makes the decision.

‘I’ve something to say,’ Balki says.

Ousep points to the chair; the boy lands hard on it. He looks nervous and his breathing is perceptible. He appears his age now. ‘I’ve to get it out of my head. I think I trust you, I don’t know why, but I trust you. I have to say it now or I’ll never say it.’

‘Tell me, Balki.’

‘Unni used to wander in the night,’ Balki says, ‘late in the night, sometimes he would get back home at dawn. You may know this.’

Ousep knows, though he learnt about this long after the boy died. Unni did it only on some nights. He would wait for his father to come home, wait to stand with his mother, and for the storm to pass, and Ousep to fall into his bed. When Unni began to slip out of the house at midnight, or sometimes at dawn, he was probably fifteen, a time when he was still a child in many ways and was fragile enough to be saddened by the ways of his father. His mother tried to stop him but she had no control over him. According to her, and she says it in an accusing way, Unni walked in the peace of the night to relieve his pain, to be far away from home and to dream of his future, his whole life that lay ahead, which made him happy. But in time he began to enjoy walking down the abandoned lanes and seeing his world emptied of the tame people and replaced by another kind who did not belong to the day. He told his friends about what he saw, the long stretches of time when absolutely nothing happened, nothing stirred, then the appearance of beautiful eunuchs in bridal splendour, and the solitary women going somewhere with a smile. And how he was questioned once by cops and how they turned respectful and offered to drop him home when he spoke to them in English.

‘I had been hearing the night stories of Unni for months,’ Balki says, ‘and I was curious to go with him into the night. Like the boys of my type in Madras I was brought up as if I was a girl. I was not allowed to step out of the house after dark. So, when my parents decided to go to a wedding and leave me alone in the house for a week, I decided to wander with Unni one night and see for myself what he had been talking about. I took my father’s TVS-50 and we went all around Madras. We were breaking the law but the cops did not care. I realized the rules were very different late in the night. We were passing along a dark narrow lane under the Arcot Road flyover when we saw something strange. A woman in a red sari was lying on the pavement. I wanted to know why she was lying there but I didn’t stop. I went straight ahead but Unni asked me to go back. So we went back, parked the TVS and walked to where she was lying. Unni squatted very close to her. So I did the same. All we could do was stare. She was a young, slim woman. Not very pretty or anything but not bad at all. We could smell liquor. She had probably got drunk and passed out. She was a prostitute, I think. I have never seen a prostitute, but if a woman is so drunk that she has passed out on the road, she must be a prostitute. Unni said, “Do you want to squeeze her breasts?” That’s what he said. I had never touched a woman’s little finger before, as in touched it in an impure way. But now all I had to do was extend my hand and I could squeeze a real woman. “Have you done this before?” I asked Unni. He said, “No. They usually don’t lie around like this.”

‘I was not sure if I should do it but I wanted to. Very badly. I could see her legs. I wanted to do things to her, I was desperate. I was not in control. “Do it,” Unni said. I shook her shoulder and said, “Excuse me madam, wake up, please.” Unni burst out laughing. He knew that I didn’t want to wake her up, I just wanted to touch her. I tried to wake her up by touching her stomach, her arms, her legs, and finally I stopped pretending. I squeezed her breasts. She started mumbling something, I could not understand what she was saying but it was something very sad. We fled. That’s it. That’s what I wanted to tell you.’

‘You said that you were breaking the law when you took your father’s TVS-50 out. What did you mean by that?’

Balki looks baffled, probably because he was expecting a deeper question. ‘It was my father’s TVS-50.’

‘But it’s not illegal to ride your father’s TVS.’

‘I didn’t have a licence,’ he says.

‘You said, “We were breaking the law.”’

‘Neither of us had a licence.’

‘Did Unni squeeze her?’

‘No. That’s the whole point. That’s the way he was. He wanted others to do things, so that he could watch.’

Balki rubs his face with his fat palms. ‘What I did, was it wrong?’ he asks. ‘Did I molest a woman?’

‘Yes.’

Balki raises his voice. ‘But she was lying on the road and I was so desperate.’

Two weeks after the incident, unable to contain his guilt, Balki went to the Kodambakkam police station and confessed. The inspector called several of his men and asked Balki to repeat his confession. And they laughed at him. They said he should be sentenced to death by hanging, and they tried to chase him away. But Balki stood there, he insisted that he be punished. So they let him write down his confession, which he wrote in Tamil. They said they would get in touch with him. But he never heard from them.

‘In your confession, Balki, you obviously gave your name and your address?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the names of the other two?’

‘Yes.’

Balki stares at Ousep unpleasantly. He rises, but then decides to sit down.

‘I am sorry, Balki, I didn’t mean to trick you. So, that night there were three boys on the TVS-50, not two. Isn’t that true?’

Balki does not answer. He toys again with the paperweight.

‘No cop in Madras will fine you for riding a moped without a licence. You know that, Balki,’ Ousep says. ‘The only way you can break the law in the night is by having three people on that thing. Who is the third boy?’

‘I cannot tell you that. It would be unfair to that person.’

‘But you wrote his name in the confession you gave to the police.’

‘Yes. I had gone mad. I don’t know why I did it. But that was a long time ago. I am sure that piece of paper no longer exists.’

‘It exists in the police files. That is the nature of papers and police. I can retrieve it for you if you want.’

‘How will you do that?’

‘A reporter has his ways.’

‘I don’t want you to do anything. I want to forget the matter.’

‘I understand. But, Balki, I’ve run out of people who will talk to me. I want to know the name of this person. He may want to cooperate with me if he knows I have this information.’

‘Then this is going to disappoint you. It is not someone you have not met.’

‘Who is it?’

‘It is not fair to reveal his name.’

‘That’s all right. Be unfair, for Unni’s sake.’

‘You’ve met him before. So what use is this?’

‘He may want to talk at length now.’

‘You’re going to twist his arm now?’

‘I may try and persuade him.’

‘That would compromise my identity.’

‘Yes, but to a person who already knows what you have done.’

Balki looks at the church spire and tries to make a decision. He does not take long. He says, ‘It was Sai.’

‘Thank you, Balki. I have one more question. Did Unni ever talk to you about a corpse?’

‘Yes,’ Balki says, still preoccupied with his guilt. ‘But I think he was just fooling around.’

He has not recovered from his confession. He does not want to talk about anything else now. ‘Unni had this theory,’ he says. ‘According to him, every man, even a regular decent man, has harmed a woman at least once, or will in his lifetime. He really believed that for some reason. I used to argue with him that such statements are plain moronic. I think he made me do that thing on the road so that he could prove his point.’

‘You don’t have to take everything he ever said so seriously.’

‘But he turned out to be right, didn’t he?’

‘Don’t whip yourself,’ Ousep says. ‘Men do things. We can’t help it. That’s all there is to it. As you will discover in time, Balki, the primary choice every man has to make is whether he wants to be himself or if he wants peace.’

THE EIGHTEEN WOMEN AND the clean-shaven evangelist are on their knees, in a tight circle around a small golden cross. They raise their hands and sing ‘Praise the lord’. The woman whose house it is sings the loudest and the other women are careful not to eclipse her voice. Mariamma Chacko does not want to raise her hands because the underarms of her blouse are darned, so she raises her head in compensatory devotion.

This Sunday she will report what she has seen in the room to the parish priest to further milk him and also reconfirm his fear that the light of his authority has been diminished by the more energetic Protestant evangelists. But she must admit that there is something to his fear, there is something eerie about what is happening to the Catholic women of the Kodambakkam circle these days. The daily mass in the church does not satisfy them, they want more than the soft hymns, the sermons and the murmurs of prayers. They want what the young hallelujah evangelists make them do, they want all that dancing and clapping and screaming. And the evangelists are drawing more and more women into their fold.

The evangelist who is with them this afternoon is famous for converting hundreds of Hindu villagers, stunning them with a blessed white powder that makes the sick feel better. It is surprising what crushed paracetamol can do to parched, starving people. In his spell, the Catholic women of Kodambakkam, too, are now trying to convert their servants and the slum women, and anybody they can find.

How is it that an ordinary man can cast such a spell on women who are far cleverer than him? She wonders whether Unni was right, after all. He told her once, during one of his biblical moods, ‘Truly I say unto you, Mariamma. The fundamental quality of a delusion is that it is contagious. The very purpose of every delusion is to transmit itself to other brains. That is how a delusion survives. On the other hand, Mariamma Chacko, truth can never be transmitted, truth can never travel from one brain to another. Movement is a quality of delusion alone.’

‘What nonsense you talk, Unni. Are you saying that if two people believe in something it simply cannot be the truth?’

‘Absolutely, Mariamma Chacko, you’re a very clever woman.’

‘So there is only one person in the world who knows the truth. And that is you?’

‘Truly I say unto you. Truth is not consistent. It changes from brain to brain. The truth of every neurological system is unique and it cannot be transmitted. It cannot be told, it cannot be conveyed, it cannot be searched for and found.’

‘Unni, do you want some coffee?’

When she returns home and is about to open her door, she hears the phone ring. That is unusual because the phone does not ring at this time of the day. By the time she reaches it the phone has died. She wonders why she is afraid. Thoma is in school. What can happen in school? Did he fall down the stairs? Someone poked his eye with a divider? The phone rings again and she grabs the receiver. ‘Hello,’ she says.

A man’s voice at the other end says, ‘Is this Mariamma Chacko?’

Is it that call, then, the call she has wished for many times?

Now that it has come she does not want it, she wants it to go away. She may have sent some prayers up in her weak moments, but surely, God has the sense to know which of a woman’s prayers he must take seriously.

‘Is this Mariamma Chacko?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am calling from GG Hospital. Ousep Chacko has had a heart attack.’

It is several moments before she speaks. ‘Is he all right?’ she asks.

‘Can you come down to GG right now?’

‘Is he all right?’

‘The doctors are still with him.’

‘Is he all right?’

‘I don’t know. Please come immediately.’

Long after the line goes dead she stands holding the receiver. The first time she saw him she had felt her cheek with her fingers. She had a stain on her face from brushing against a raw hill mango. The black stain from the milk of the mango would take a month to go, and what bad luck it was that the fine young man who had come to the hill to seek her hand should arrive at this time in her life. Not that she adored him at first sight. The truth is she was disappointed. He was in a cheap shirt, with many things in its sagging pocket, and in rubber slippers. But then his name was known to all in her village, and probably everyone in Kerala who read short stories. A poor writer, but still a writer. Which girl back then would not have wished to marry a young writer?

Thoma Chacko always knew that this is how it would be, this is how the news of his father’s death would be broken to him — that the day would begin like any other day, that he would be in school and his mother would suddenly appear looking like a maid, pretending to be calm, and take him away to a hospital without revealing much. But he would never have guessed that when the day he feared the most arrived, he would be in a purple velvet frock.

It is the dress rehearsal of the school play and he is in the main hall. He is, as usual, an extra, but this time a female extra, one of the many girls in frocks waiting with their right hands on their left elbows for the king to arrive. Rufus Sir has told all the lady extras that they must stand with their legs together. ‘That’s how girls stand,’ he says. Everybody knows that Rufus Sir enjoys beating up boys when they are dressed as girls. So Thoma does not let his mind wander, he does not want to give him any excuse.

When Thoma hears her the first time, he knows that he is not imagining it but he pretends that he has not heard her. He can see his mother standing at a great distance, in the doorway, with the headmaster. She has dressed in a hurry and he is surprised how cheap she looks. ‘Thoma,’ she says again.

As he walks down the large empty hall and the strong, grim figure of his mother approaches, Thoma is sure that his life is about to get worse. ‘Thoma, where is your uniform?’ she says.

‘It is in the class.’

‘We don’t have time, you have to go this way.’

‘What happened?’

‘Your father has had a heart attack. He is in the hospital.’

She tells the headmaster, ‘I rushed out of my house without taking any money. Would you have a hundred rupees for the auto? I have to go to GG Hospital.’

‘I have nothing, madam,’ the man says. ‘And the office deposited all its cash in the bank in the morning.’ He screams to the assembled cast, ‘Does anybody have a hundred rupees? It is an emergency.’

There is silence.

Mariamma takes her son’s hand and walks. Thoma hears a boy whine, ‘Sir, that is my sister’s frock he is wearing. I have to take it back today.’ They walk at a steady pace towards the school gate. There is an auto waiting for them outside. The driver looks annoyed. ‘You can’t make me wait that long,’ he says, ‘this is not your car.’

They ride in silence. Thoma allows the gloom to fill him, he sees his father in the mornings, when he is a clever, elegant man. Thoma is proud that his father is not an ordinary person on an old scooter. He is not a bank clerk carrying a lunch box to work, he is not just anybody. His father is a journalist. When important things happened in this country, Ousep Chacko used to be there, taking notes. He appeared on TV once, very briefly, to say something about a politician whose name Thoma has forgotten. Everybody saw him and everybody said, ‘Thoma, we saw your father on TV.’

‘Is he dead?’ he asks his mother.

‘They won’t tell me,’ she says.

‘He is dead, isn’t he?’

‘I don’t know, Thoma.’

His father had a complicated relationship with their Mustang TV. He tried many times to take it away and pawn it. Some days, when he was about to set out for work, he would stop and stare at the TV for a long time, making an elaborate plan in his head. Then he would lift it from its stand and take it to the door with great care as if it were a fallen child he was taking to the hospital. But he would always return it to the stand, smile at Thoma and pat his face. One day his father brought a muscular man along who carried the TV away in a tight hug. Ousep was about to follow the thug but he stopped in the doorway and looked at Thoma. ‘We are just taking it for repair, Thoma,’ he said. The TV never came back. But at least his father had the heart to lie. It is the sweetest memory he has of his father. It was a moment of love, who can deny that?

His father wanted to be left alone most of the time. Some fathers are like that. But Thoma knows that there were times when his father wanted to be included in the antics of Unni and his mother. Thoma is sorry today that his father was never allowed any easy entries into family life. Unni and his mother knew how to punish him and they always did.

Thoma remembers a Sunday afternoon from a distant time when he woke up from his nap and began chatting with Unni, who was working on a comic. Unni did not say anything, which was not unusual. When he was working he did not get distracted. But Thoma was so annoyed at being ignored he said, ‘Can you hear me?’ Unni did not turn. Thoma tried to distract him, even poked him a few times, but Unni could not see or hear or feel his brother. Thoma began to suspect that he had become invisible. When he rushed to his mother to confirm it she, too, could not see him or feel him. But he could see that she was trying not to laugh. Was it a prank? It was natural that Thoma would consider his father the ultimate test of his invisibility. He stood at the door of his father’s room and mustered the courage to sing a song, but Ousep could not hear him. Thoma kept inching into the room and finally stood in front of his father, but Ousep looked right through him. Thoma put his hand on his open mouth and ran outside, screaming, ‘I am gone, I am gone.’ Unni was watching this from the hall. He hugged Thoma and told him that it was just a prank. Thoma was so relieved he laughed insanely, his eyes still wide and terrified, which made his mother hold her stomach and shake with laughter. Ousep stepped out of his room to laugh with them and be included; after all, he had figured out the game from the commotion in the house and had played along. But when he appeared, they went inside in a huddle to laugh privately. Thoma is sorry they did that.

The ride in the auto is long and slow. Thoma looks at the harsh light of day outside, an incandescent plane in the sky, vehicles going somewhere, men hanging from the window bars of buses, people laughing, waiting, running. He hopes his father is still a part of all this, he hopes Ousep Chacko will walk again, with his brisk morning strides.

Finally, his mother asks the driver to stop. Thoma is confused. They are not at the hospital, they are outside an apartment block.

‘You said GG Hospital,’ the auto driver says.

‘I have to go and fetch someone,’ she says.

‘You have to come back fast,’ he says. ‘This is not your car.’

She takes Thoma’s hand and marches into the concrete entrance of the building. The watchman decides not to stop them, possibly because Thoma looks like a flamboyant modern girl going somewhere important with her maid.

‘Where are we going?’ he asks.

‘Thoma, it is like this. There was no money at home and I rushed out in a state. So we have no money for the auto.’

‘What are we going to do?’

‘We must do what we have to do,’ she says.

They go to the rear portion of the building, climb the wall and jump into a quiet lane on the other side. ‘What we are doing is wrong, Thoma, but we didn’t have a choice,’ she says. ‘Jesus knows.’

As they walk swiftly down the back lanes, hand in hand, throwing nervous glances at the autos passing by, Thoma sees men looking at him in a way he has never seen them look. They are not trying to make up their minds, they are sure he is a girl. They look at his chest, at his crotch, at his arse. They are looking at him as if he is an ancient familiar foe from whom they would like to take something. Thoma feels humiliated. They look at him and spit unconsciously. He is reminded of what Unni had said. ‘I have done research, Thoma, a lot of research over many weeks. Men in Madras spit all the time but the chances of them spitting when they see a young girl are seventy-eight per cent higher than when they are not looking at a young girl. When they see a girl, they don’t even realize they are spitting.’

When they reach GG, the huge reception hall is crowded, and they stand there wondering what they must do. His mother asks a nurse something in Malayalam. The nurse then leads them to the lift. In the lift she looks carefully at Thoma.

‘I am a boy,’ he says, ‘I was rehearsing for a school play.’

‘You are a very beautiful boy,’ she says, which makes Thoma happy despite the circumstances. She leads them to the longest corridor he has ever seen. He is stunned by the affluence of this place and he is proud that his father somehow managed to land here and not in some dreary government morgue.

The nurse consults with other white frocks and takes them through a network of clean beautiful corridors. ‘He is in 401,’ the nurse says, ‘that’s the one.’ As they walk down the final corridor, his mother clutches his hand.

They are almost jogging now, which makes the nurse jog too, though she does not want to. She opens the door of 401 and takes them in. Thoma has not seen a more luxurious room. Everything is white and expensive and there is a deep elegant silence in the air. How can anybody have the heart to die in a place like this?

He sees his father lying in a green gown on a thick comfortable bed. There are some wires shoved up his nose, which must mean that he is alive. The nurse studies a bunch of papers hanging from his bed. ‘He is all right,’ she says. ‘He is all right, Mariamma. He is very weak but he is going to be fine. He is going to be asleep the whole day though.’

His mother begins to cry but she has no desire to go and touch her man. Thoma wants to hold his father’s hand but feels too shy to perform an act of love. ‘Who brought him to this expensive place?’ his mother says.

‘His office people,’ the nurse says. ‘He was in his office when it happened.’

‘Who is going to pay for all this?’

‘His office, from what I can see. Mariamma, don’t you worry. You can go home this evening and come back tomorrow morning. He is not going to wake up before morning.’

More nurses come in, all of them fully grown women in white frocks. Like Thoma and his father, they too look as if they are extras in a bad play. A fat doctor walks in smoking a pipe. He studies Mariamma and figures that she is not important. He mumbles that her husband almost died, and he goes away. The nurses follow him, leaving Thoma and his mother alone. They stand together in discomfort, looking at the ceiling and the walls, as if they are in a rich stranger’s home.

Ousep’s trousers are hanging on the wall. Mariamma extracts his wallet and a bunch of papers, which are neatly folded. She arranges the papers and searches for a place to sit. But something about what she is holding makes her freeze and she forgets to sit. It looks like one of Unni’s comics, but Thoma has never seen this one before. His mother looks disturbed as she turns the pages. When she comes to the image of a man giving a thumbs-up sign, she drops the comic in shock, or maybe the pages just fall for no reason at all. She is a person who drops things. She picks up the comic and looks carefully at the man. When she reaches the final page, Thoma is surprised to see a giant image of his mother in full flow.

‘What’s this?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know,’ she says.

She takes all the money in the wallet but leaves the comic behind. They take a bus back home. It is when they walk through the gates of Block A and all the boys who are playing begin to laugh that Thoma is reminded of his dress. He looks up at the balconies, at the men and women who are standing there. They do not laugh. They probably know about the heart attack and they wonder what has happened. Thoma is reminded of the time when he and his parents had returned from the church. It was a day like this. They had gone somewhere as a family and returned one person short.

He looks up again to check whether Mythili has seen him in this condition but there is only her mother standing there. As they walk up the stairway, doors open and the women step out. They ask Mariamma what happened and they hold her hand and ask her to be brave. Later, they come to his home, one after the other, with hot food and fruit and coffee. Even Mrs Balasubramanium comes with many things on a plate. His mother puts it all on the table, and at some point in the evening, when they hear another doorbell, she says, ‘This man should have a heart attack every day.’ And they have a good laugh.