The Illicit Happiness of Other People

5. Philipose, Philipose

OUSEP IS NOT DREAMING, he is sure about that, even though he is asleep and what he sees is a world in which Unni is not dead. Unni is not dead because he is not born yet. The world before Unni Chacko, according to Unni Chacko himself, ‘is the strongest evidence to support the ridiculous hypothesis that life will continue as usual after I am dead’.

Mariamma is young, beautiful and has been married for three months. She goes through these days with somewhat exaggerated glee, like an amateur lover. When he cracks a joke she runs away covering her mouth, she serves him food with a flourish of her hand, cleans his ear with too much care, as if she is repairing a watch. She lives with him in a large house that smells of red earth and bananas, and is surrounded by high palms and plantains and jackfruit trees. It is the office accommodation of the Weekly in Kottayam. He is among the brightest journalists in Kerala, and the youngest columnist anyone has ever known, whom politicians and bishops visit. Priests quote him in their Sunday sermons, even Protestant priests. Publishers, who have read his hugely popular short fiction in the Sunday magazines, beg him to write a novel.

Mariamma enjoys her new life, she sings love songs to herself, names the calves born in other houses, reads anything she can find. She translates One Hundred Years of Solitude into Malayalam. Small portions actually, and she does it out of love for the great Marquez. Her translation is good but there are words she skips; she says those words do not exist in Malayalam. He tries to think of synonyms to impress her but she is right, those words do not exist. And some objects in Marquez’s story remain blank gaping spaces in her prose.

She forces Ousep to go to church with her every Sunday; they walk together in their best clothes on narrow, wet, winding roads, talking and laughing, and fully aware that neighbours are watching from their windows — narrowing their eyes, craning their necks, fanning their stomachs, moving their jaws and whispering things to others. Ousep feels vulgar to be so happy in plain sight; he feels as if he is walking through a famine, eating a large fried fish. But then that is how they were, Ousep and Mariamma, young and happy in an unremarkable way. Who would believe it, once they were like anybody else?

She is shameless when they make love, which is often, and when they are this way the air is filled with the calamitous sounds of a woman who appears to be mourning the destruction of furniture. She stops now and then to give precise instructions on how he must proceed. But when they lie spent, she turns quiet and melancholic, even bad-tempered, and she is the first to leave the bed. That, innocent Ousep imagines, is how women are. He imagines that he fills her with so much tumult that she must retrieve herself in private. He begins to strut around his life thinking that there is something extraordinary about him as a lover, a suspicion he always possessed. How else can a girl collapse so completely in his embrace? When he sees new brides walk with their men, he is surprised at how they can be so happy, as happy as Mariamma Chacko. It seems odd to him that other men, the simple men, men who are not writers, they too can make their women laugh, make them glow.

Relatives and friends visit every day, there is much laughter and happy commotion in the house. Some evenings, white Ambassador cars with red lights on top are parked outside their home. The deputy collector asks Mariamma, not entirely in jest, ‘Considering everything, how tough the world is on women, would you still like to be a woman in your next life?’ She gives a gentle tilt to her head and asks, ‘And what is the other option?’ There is an explosion of laughter in the room.

Too much happiness, she tells Ousep. She says it with a hint of fear in her voice. She is sure that some visitors, his relatives especially, leave behind enchanted things to bring doom to their home and end their joys. She is right, she finds black coins and chicken bones hidden in the nooks of the iron gates of their home. There are things written on them, threads tied to them. She laughs because she is not superstitious. She collects them and puts them in a box. One day she finds a copperplate with inscriptions buried in the land that runs around their home. Another day she discovers a vial of dark oil in the grounds. She collects them all, keeps them safe, as if they are precious relics of human nature. Which they are, in a way.

Ousep goes to work around noon every day; Mariamma stands at the gate and watches him go down the red-earth path that runs in the shade of immortal trees. He looks back several times and they laugh, always, at their juvenile love. They are the couple who would stretch their arms and run towards each other in a sunflower farm, though they have never done that.

Ousep has stopped drinking. It is a tradition among Malayalee men to stop drinking after marriage. But slowly, like the rest, he resumes with small innocuous nips. Mariamma does not mind because she is yet to know him well. She has not seen him on buckling knees, seen him sway like a fool or on the arms of other men. But there is a lot about her that Ousep does not know. She too has abandoned something that really cannot be given up.

The first time he hears the voice is at dawn. He is stirred from his sleep by the unfamiliar sound of a woman’s deep whispers that break into soft howls and more whispers — ‘Just a girl, I was just a girl, Mother, a girl can tell her mother some things, can’t she?’ Ousep follows the voice, which leads him to the kitchen doorway. He sees his young wife standing with her lips curled inside her mouth, her head tilted. Her finger wags. Nobody has told him that she becomes this way sometimes. It is now clear why the rubber merchant had given away his daughter to the son of a pauper farmer. He was not mesmerized by Ousep’s prose as he had claimed. He had found a fool. But what Ousep feels at that moment as he stands outside the kitchen is a wounded affection for his woman.

Mariamma is studying the burnt bottom of a large aluminium vessel and she is saying, ‘You could have said something, Mother, just anything. So what if the boatman heard?’ She is shocked to see him in the kitchen doorway. She is so ashamed she begins to cry. He asks her why she is this way. He will ask her the same question in the months to come and, on occasion, in the years to follow. She will tell him that she was always this way, she will tell him that she cannot help it. ‘But I am not mad, I am actually a happy woman,’ she will say. She will try to control herself, be the girl she was in the first light of marriage but she will slip into the trance every few days, especially when she imagines she is alone.

In time, Ousep stops loving home, he becomes the other men, men who sink into the company of other men, the veteran husbands, men who drink late into the night with their friends, men with frail thighs who have never played football but talk about football, and at other times about the superiority of Marx over Keynes, and about the unattainable prose of the new Spanish writers.

Mariamma knows he has changed. She tries to make her home as beautiful as possible, she wakes up at dawn and grinds things in large stone boulders, stands sweating in the charcoal fumes of the kitchen and cooks for hours so that she can watch him eat like a boy. She tries to be happy enough so that she does not enact the moments from another time. She makes love to him in the mornings. But Ousep has gone too far the Malayalee way. In the mornings he does wish to be a good person, a decent man, but in the nights he returns as a corpse. She becomes bitter and angry. To punish him she takes the tailoring scissors and chops off the sleeves of his best shirt. They have a big fight. He holds his amputated shirt and calls her names, which makes her cry. He returns that night drunk. She chops off the legs of his best trousers. He continues to return drunk and she continues to cut his clothes. She stops cleaning the house, leaves things lying around, puts things in disorder, arranges the furniture in crooked ways.

Ousep’s tiny avian mother has been waiting to torment Mariamma by right, but he has never let her stay in the house for too long. She smells trouble in his home, so she is persistent, says she wants to live with her son, her great writer son for whom she has toiled all her life, milked buffaloes on so many dawns. Eventually, he gives up and the woman comes and straightens the furniture, cleans the house, cooks for her son. His nine parasitic sisters too move in, one after the other, to harass the weird girl who talks to herself. They insult her, treat her poorly in her own home. He does not know how he allowed it but he does not deny he did — he does nothing as they torture his wife every day. Those petty women, he let them do all that. She suffers in silence but she does not forget. Their full Christian names enter her insane monologues, she repeats what they tell her, hangs their memories on the wall and asks them pointed questions. Even now, after all these years, she says almost every day, ‘You got away, Annamol, you got away.’ That is at the heart of Mariamma’s lament, the grouse against all who committed crimes against her and got away.

Mariamma abandons her proud rationality. She throws away the enchanted items, she calls a controversial Catholic priest to purify her home, who utters things in Sanskrit. But nothing changes.

Ousep and Mariamma are not ethereally fused any more, they drift apart, but when they attain a distance between themselves, from where they cannot always hear the other but can still see, they drift no more. They begin to orbit each other, like two equal planets that cannot let go. The distance separates them in their bed too, but there are times when they collide, searching for flesh.

The night Unni is born, Ousep comes fully drunk to the hospital, he goes to the wrong ward and abuses the baby in the crib, calls it an ugly monkey. The new mother screams for help. Men and women hold him by his arms and carry him to Mariamma’s bed. He mumbles something to her but leaves without seeing the baby.

Around this time he gets a lead from an altar boy that the powerful archbishop is a paedophile. Ousep chases the story for months, convinces several boys and parish workers to speak to him, promising them anonymity. When he finally files the story, the editor, a venerated old man, calls Ousep to his office and asks him the identity of his unnamed sources. Ousep is reluctant. ‘I am not asking you to give it in writing, Ousep,’ the editor says. ‘Just tell me who these people are. Their names would dissolve in air. I’ve a right to know, you have a duty to tell, it is journalistic tradition.’ Ousep reveals the names. The story is then killed. The archbishop had long known of the story, and had been waiting patiently to learn the names of those who had ratted on him. Ousep gets drunk one night and tries to break into the archbishop’s residence to beat him up. He loses his job in disgrace. To his surprise, he finds himself unemployable. He has suddenly acquired the reputation of being an arrogant, uncontrollable young man, who fabricates stories. There are tales about him in the newsrooms, most of them exaggerations of things he has said and done under the influence of alcohol. The men who were waiting for Ousep to fall, including some friends, ensure that he will never rise again in Kerala. He finds a modest job with the United News of India, moves to Madras, and begins to live in the midst of austere vegetarians.

NOT FOR THE FIRST time since he was brought here, he wakes up and accepts that he is in an impressive hospital ward and that he has not slept on a better bed than this. He is probably heavily drugged; everything around him is in a tidy white haze. He enjoys his own physical frailty, which reminds him of a sleepy rainy day, enjoys the fact that he is being cared for by strangers to whom he owes nothing, especially money. His body is too feeble even to think, he is filled with what has to be deep serenity, and he is worried that he has been transformed into someone better. Is this clarity? Is clarity a single transparent thought or is it the absence of thought? Was Unni right after all — could it be that thoughts are truly the corrupt dominant species of the world that have colonized man, relentlessly mutating into increasingly complex ideas and making him do things so that they can finally intrude into the material world as marvellous objects?

Ousep loves the drug the hospital has given him, but then his palm circles his hairy chest, which means what he needs now is a small nip.

The white door opens and an almost beautiful nurse enters the ward holding a pen over a notebook as if she knows what she is going to write but will not do so until she sees it with her own eyes. Unlike the older nurses she does not seem lampooned in the starched white frock and white stockings. She looks forbidden and unattainable, even important. As the door shuts behind her, there is something deeply carnal about the decisive click of the knob. It is the first time in years that he has been alone in a sealed room with a young woman, and he feels he must do something inappropriate. The eyes of the nurse fall on different objects in the room, including him. She makes some quick notes in her book and leaves.

He does not know whether it is night or day, or how long he has been here, lying like a transvestite in this ridiculous green gown, but he decides to stay awake and wait for Mariamma. He has a feeling that she is somewhere around, she would not leave him alone in a hospital ward. There is a lot that they have to talk about — that is, if she is willing to answer his questions.

He sits up on the bed and leans his back against the massive pillow. He tries to remember when exactly he had seen the apparition. A few hours ago, days ago? He is not clear what had woken him up at that moment but when he was awake the first thing he saw was Sai Shankaran standing in the doorway of the ward, meek and harmless, his hair wet and immovable as always in the mornings. Even as a sudden apparition, Sai was incapable of giving a fright. When he finally walked in, the room was filled with the smell of Lifebuoy soap.

‘Have you come to kill me, Sai?’

‘No,’ Sai said in a way that turned Ousep’s jest into a reasonable question.

‘Sai.’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you help me urinate?’

Sai looked terrified. So Ousep lied. ‘I was just kidding.’

The boy picked up a stool from the corner of the ward, sat a foot away from Ousep’s bed, and said, ‘I didn’t come here because you blackmailed me.’

‘I did no such thing, Sai. You’re imagining things.’

‘But what did you tell me at the bus stop? You said the cops would come to my home and ask me questions. You said I have to now mention in the US visa form that there is a police complaint against me.’

‘I was only trying to protect you. I was only trying to inform you of the possibilities so that you are on your guard.’

‘I didn’t come here because you blackmailed me, I want you to know that.’

‘I believe you, Sai.’

‘I know what I did to that woman on the road was wrong. I don’t know what happened to me. I am ashamed. I am ashamed because I am an upright person. I am a moral person, I believe that every man should touch only one woman in his entire life. I believe in morality.’

It occurred to Ousep that morality was probably the invention of unattractive men. Whom else does it benefit really?

‘What made you come here, Sai?’

‘I thought, what if you died, what if you died without knowing the real Unni? So I thought I would come here and talk to you. I owe Unni that much. So I don’t want you to think I am here because I am scared.’

Sai gaped without pride or hope but in his large dull eyes there was also unhappy compassion, which was not a good sign. Ousep was expecting fear.

‘I will tell you everything I know,’ Sai said, ‘but in the end what will be clear is that I may have hidden some things from you but I was not lying when I kept saying that there was no deep reason behind Unni’s death. He wanted to die and that is all there is to it. He killed himself for the same reason people always kill themselves. He did not wish to live.’

He fell silent for a while. Then, as if he had remembered something painful, his nostrils vibrated, his lips trembled, his eyes blinked several times. He blew his nose into his ironed handkerchief and licked his lips as he waited to gather his thoughts.

‘Why are you crying, Sai?’

Sai slouched his back and looked all around the ward. ‘What is everything?’ he said. ‘What is all this? What is life, what is space, what is finite, what is infinite?’

Through Sai’s mouth, philosophy was revealed in its true form — as a bunch of dim questions asked too early in the life of science. The boy fell silent again. And when he found his voice he spoke about himself, which was surprising. Sai, truly, had come here to talk.

Like Unni and Balki and many others in their class, Sai was enrolled at St Ignatius when he was six. He was a dull student, and his father believed that a thrashing with a leather belt every now and then would solve the problem. The man had the habit of holding his son’s report card in one hand and the belt in the other, reading out the scores aloud and whipping him. On occasion, he chased little Sai around the house with a heated serving spoon. Very often the spoon found Sai’s body, usually his arms and thighs. Like many other boys of his age, Sai eventually grew up into a fragile adolescent who was beaten up at home by a man who was shorter than him and was progressively getting shorter.

‘I was so miserable,’ Sai said, rubbing his nose and looking away. ‘I was so unhappy my hair began to change, it began to curl.’

‘Your hair?’

‘Yes. For a few months when I was sixteen, I was so stressed, my hair became very curly, like a black man’s hair. Unni used to call me Pubic Hair.’

The whole decade in school, until the very end, Unni did not mean much to Sai. Even after the Simion Clark incident, Unni was at best a curiosity, until the day he walked into the classroom and said that reality was not what it appeared, that something was going on, that everything people believed to be true was a lie.

Sai described Unni’s nervous declaration and his account was consistent with everything Ousep has heard before about the day. Unni must have spoken for less than a minute but something happened to Sai, something powerful went through him, it was as if a dangerous idea lurking in the darkness inside him had been shown a luminous light. ‘The first emotion I felt was fear and I don’t know why I looked behind me,’ he said.

Ousep wonders what it was about the moment that made such a lasting impression on so many boys. Its impact appears to have been out of proportion. He tries to imagine the scene, which has now been narrated to him by so many. All the accounts are the same except for Unni’s exact words, which will never be known. They all begin with how Unni walked into the classroom just before the first bell was about to ring. Did Unni plan it that way — to wait till everybody was seated and appear at the very end in a conspicuous way so that all eyes would be on him?

By the time the event occurred, Unni had stature, which was important to what was about to happen. Unni was many things. He was a storyteller, he played football as if it were important, he bowled with furious pace, and he had subdued a powerful sadistic teacher in an extraordinary fashion. It was such a person, not just anybody, who had walked into the class that day. And he told them, with fear and nervousness in the place of his indestructible cool, that there was something lurking out there in the world around them and that he might have seen it from very close. Ousep concedes that there is probably enough in the scene, and in the background of its protagonist, to make it an unforgettable moment.

By the time the incident occurred, Sai had long abandoned the idea of religion. ‘God did not make any sense to me,’ he said in the proud self-congratulatory way of young atheists. ‘I could see that life was merely an accident.’

Ousep waited for the inevitable sentence, the line that drags atheists back into the fold of religion without their knowing, the line that usually goes like this — ‘But I believe in a force.’

Sai looked intently at the floor and said with the sparkle of epiphany, ‘But there is a force, I believe in a force.’

The idea of an accidental life insulted God, and that comforted Sai, but it did not explain everything to him. He spent hours looking up at the sky. ‘Day sky, night sky,’ he said to show how comprehensive his study was. Thinking about the infinity of space made him go crazy for several hours every day. He imagined there was something deeply cerebral about his new obsession with the question ‘where does space end?’. He often thought about why there was something instead of nothing and what exactly was the meaning of human life on a speck of dust at the edge of just another galaxy.

‘So that was my life. Deep thoughts, belting by my father, very deep thoughts, more belting. I led a double life. The universe inside my head sometimes, other times red rashes on my arse.’

Ousep yawned to conceal a laugh.

It was in that period of gloom that Unni walked into the class one morning and said that something mysterious was going on. ‘An inner eye opened inside me,’ Sai said. ‘How can I explain what happened to me? I felt as if I could see for the first time in my life.’

He realized in an instant that all the philosophers he had read, all the religions, even Einstein, even J. Krishnamurti, were saying the same thing in different ways — there is a shocking truth hiding behind the world that we see, behind the ordinary days of our lives. God is not a lie but some kind of an abridged version of this reality, a beginner’s course that has been misunderstood.

Trapped in the trance, Sai thought he had become enlightened and that the full details of the universal truth would enter his head by lunchtime. When a teacher asked him a question in class, he remained silent, even smiled peacefully. He was thrashed by the man. ‘Yet another son of an illiterate farmer who had converted to Christianity in exchange for a bicycle or something. He kept slapping me but I could not speak. That made him go mad. He said, “Sai, say one word. One word and I will let you go. At least say A, B, C, D with the mouth that the Lord gave you or I am going to kill you today.”’

Despite the beating, Sai was unable to extricate himself from the moment. But by the time the day ended he had recovered. He realized he had not become enlightened. He asked Unni the meaning of what he had said in the morning. Unni told him that it was an insane moment and that he did not wish to speak about it. He said it was dangerous to talk about those things. That, naturally, made Sai even more obsessed.

For several days he begged Unni to explain. Unni said it was not a matter that could be explained, but that there were clues everywhere.

‘Unni told me, “Sai, have you ever wondered why animals don’t look at the sky? There must be a reason, there is a reason.”’ Unni showed him a series of portraits he had drawn of various mammals looking up at the sky. Unni said, ‘I drew these to show how weird it is for us to see animals looking up. They never do it. Why?’ Sai begged him to explain but Unni said that language was not the medium through which to understand these things. ‘He said, “Language was created by nature to guard its secrets, not to reveal them. We are trapped in language. Even thought has become language. That is what nature wants, Sai. It has given us language because it has hidden the truth somewhere else.”’

‘Nature is the enemy?’ Sai asked, in a whisper.

Unni looked with caution around him. ‘You won’t believe it, Sai. When you see, you won’t believe it.’

Sai began to spend hours by himself trying to guess what Unni seemed to know. He shadowed Unni, called him up several times with questions, came to his house, sat beside him in class. In time, Unni loosened up a bit. ‘One day he told me, “Try walking on the streets without looking at girls, just do not look at them, do not look at their bodies. Don’t ask me why, just do it.”’

Sai stopped looking at young women, including some of his teachers. When he saw women on the road, he would lower his gaze and walk on. ‘Like a woman.’ In packed buses he would shut his eyes. When young mothers spoke to him he stared at his toenails and answered them. He began to look at the world differently and the world, too, seemed like another place. A world without women is a very different world.

One afternoon on the stairway of the school, Unni came from behind and whispered into his ear, ‘Now it is time for you to stop masturbating. Just quit it right now. Don’t go home and send out one last spurt. Start from this moment. You will begin to feel a powerful force inside you. That will take you to the next level.’

It was a surprisingly candid revelation by Sai to the father of a friend. Ousep saw a motive in this. The boy probably wanted to convince him that he was withholding nothing, and he was building this myth through the facility of sexual confession. Was Sai a cunning bastard, or was he just a boy who had dropped his guard?

Sai’s imaginary fornications were the only happy moments in his life. ‘But I stopped. Just like that I stopped because Unni said I must stop.’ Within weeks, he went crazy. He began to have enormous erections that lasted for hours, even powerful sexual desires for his mother, whom he had not considered a woman before. He stopped looking at her, too, which confused everyone at home. Finally, his father held the leather belt in one hand and pointed the other at his wife. ‘Look at her, Sai, look at your mother.’

In the middle of these upheavals, he cycled every evening to Brilliant Tutorials for the JEE classes. The exam was just months away but Sai’s practice scores, not surprisingly, were getting worse. His father began to belt him almost every day now. That made Sai think more deeply about the meaning of life and Unni’s secret.

Unni, by now, was often seen in the company of Somen Pillai, even on Sundays. It was a new association, by all the accounts Ousep has heard, and Sai confirmed that. Somen Pillai, the lonely insignificant boy whose voice was rarely heard in class, who had no talents, who never used to even run, became an enigmatic figure all of a sudden. Now that everybody was looking at him more closely they agreed that there was something wrong with him. His walk was unnaturally slow, and there was an unfathomable smile on his face. ‘There was something about him.’

That is the most exasperating quality of everybody’s memory of Somen. They are sure that he was not normal but nobody is able to fully explain what exactly was wrong with him. ‘He had a way of not being there even when he was there. He did not move much, never drew much attention to himself. He rarely spoke, and when he did speak, his sentence construction was a bit weird. I cannot explain beyond this.’

Sai let himself drift into the company of Unni and Somen Pillai. They did not resist. He walked with them, ate with them, sat on the steps of the Fatima Church and listened to them talk. ‘They spoke mostly about Hindu gods, which was a surprise to me.’

In the world according to Unni, Hinduism was a giant comic created over centuries by great artists who encoded within their cryptic stories meanings within meanings. But the demons and the gods with several hands and animal-headed beings were not outlandish metaphors. According to Unni, they really existed and they exist even now, they live among ordinary people. What was Unni trying to say? Surely, he did not believe this? Was he just trying to muddle the minds of fools? Is it now time for Ousep to accept a fact that has long been staring him in the face — that his son was an anarchist, who plotted against the people around him with the modest means available to a seventeen-year-old?

One evening after school, on his way to the JEE coaching class, Sai turned his cycle into the narrow mud lane that led to Somen’s house. He had never been to the house before. As he approached the gate, he could see Somen and Unni framed by the foyer’s giant window. They were playing chess. Somen, who did not look surprised, let him in and went back to the game. Sai sat with them and watched the game in silence. He could see that their level of play was high, far beyond his. ‘It was very peaceful to just sit there and watch two guys who were not interested in any entrance exam in the world play a great game.’ Somen’s mother appeared briefly to give them something to eat and left them alone for the rest of the evening. At some point, Somen and Unni decided to stop the game. They noted down the positions of the pieces in a notebook, which held several scribbled chess notations from past games.

They went to the terrace and talked about ordinary things.

Teachers, cricket, people they knew. ‘Nothing deep.’ After it got dark, Somen walked on the narrow ledge with his arms stretched out. He slipped, almost fell. He turned to Unni and they laughed as if it was a great joke. Later, there would be many times when they would treat death as something funny. When they saw a funeral procession on the road, a body being taken for cremation, they would giggle.

Sai began to meet them every evening. On the terrace, Unni and Somen showed him the open window in the neighbourhood through which he could see a very old man try, for hours, to achieve sex with his old oiled wife, who hit him and kicked him to save herself from certain death.

The three boys went on long walks or on Somen’s scooter, at which times Unni showed Sai the weird people he knew — a short, brisk man who worked in Canara Bank, who locked his extraordinarily beautiful wife in the house every morning when he left for work. An architect who had suffered a head injury and after that started drawing flowers that do not exist on earth. A middle-aged woman who had the ability to open the dictionary at exactly the page she wanted. A scientist who was part of a team that was researching the desire in homeless madmen in Madras to direct traffic.

Unni and Somen then introduced him to the nun who had taken the vow of silence. Later, they took him to a slum in Choolaimedu to show him a very old man with flowing silver hair, who walked along the narrow unpaved lanes humming in the Carnatic classical style, pointing his finger at the lumps of human excrement deposited at short, equal intervals on both sides of the alleys, his pitch dramatically increasing or decreasing depending on the size of the shit. People stood outside their huts and watched without anger or amusement as their own shit determined the music of the wandering hummer.

‘I thought Unni and Somen were trying to tell me something,’ Sai said. ‘I thought they would soon explain everything to me.’ But that did not happen, and as the days went by Sai began to get impatient. He kept asking Unni, ‘When are you going to show me how to go to the next level?’ Unni never answered the question. He would laugh and maintain a knowing silence. But Sai was relentless. One day Unni asked him, ‘What do you want me to say? What is it that you want to know?’

‘What is everything, what is the secret, what is going on, why does the universe exist?’ Sai said, which made Unni and Somen laugh hard. But later that evening, as Unni and Sai left their friend’s house together and walked down the narrow lane, Unni whispered, ‘It is dangerous, Sai. We must not talk about such things.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it is dangerous.’

‘Why is it dangerous?’

Unni did not say anything for a while. They had left the narrow lane when he spoke again. He said, ‘Somen is trying to get his hands on a bit of Mycobacterium leprae. Do you know what that is?’

‘No.’

‘It is the bacterium that causes leprosy. Somen wants to become a leper, he wants to sit on a roadside without fingers and toes and die the most painful death. He wants to beg to survive, he wants to destroy every bit of ego in him, he wants to crawl on the road, Sai. Why would a boy want to do that? Because ego is what stops us from seeing. What you want to see, what we all want to see, is not easy to achieve. That is the thing about this path, Sai. The path we are seeking does not pass through beautiful Himalayan mountains, the path does not take us to tantric sex. It passes through unimaginable pain and misery. Have you wondered why I meet Somen so often? Because I want to ensure he does not harm himself. That is why I come here. But you know what is the scariest thing of all? I don’t know why I am stopping him. I know what he wants to do to himself is the right thing. That is what is scary.’

Sai was so terrified and confused by the moment that he ran away at a full sprint, he just ran and ran. But, after a week, he returned to Somen’s house because he could not resist being with them. As the weeks passed he felt that Somen and Unni were beginning to transform.

‘Many times they would just sit without uttering a word, sit like that for hours. One day, Somen told me, very softly and with great sadness in his voice, “Sai, some days I want to go to the terrace and scream, just scream, ‘People, can’t you see, can’t you see.’” I asked him what exactly did he want the world to see, but he and Unni just looked at each other and they did not say anything. A few days later, I saw Somen with a large, very sharp knife. He kept patting his wrist with the edge of the knife. He did it gently in the beginning but slowly the knife started landing on his wrist harder and harder. I got so scared I ran to the door. That made them laugh.’

One evening, Unni told him that the Superman comics contained many secrets, which could be understood only if he practised the Superman pose — the flying pose. ‘He made me lie on the floor, on my stomach, with my arms stretched and head looking up. It was tougher than I thought, but I lay like that for God knows how long. When I could not bear it any more, I got up and went to find them, they were on the terrace. They burst out laughing when they saw me.’

In time, Somen started asking him to go and buy groceries, post letters, drag his scooter to the mechanic, even clean the ceiling fans with Somen’s mother trying not to laugh. ‘They treated me like a servant. Can you imagine that? The exams were just a few weeks away. The board exams, JEE, the regional college exams, all the exams were just a few weeks away and here I was cleaning ceiling fans.’

When his servant phase began, Sai was reminded of the kung-fu films in which Zen masters made their disciples perform all kinds of menial labour. He imagined that he was being drafted as a disciple. He thought Somen and Unni were trying to break down his ego so that he would begin to see the world through their eyes. So he endured all the humiliation and hard work without resisting. But, finally, some events helped him escape from their grasp.

On Marina Beach one Sunday evening, Unni and Somen started swimming, and kept going farther out. Sai sat on the sands and watched. Slowly, he began to get nervous. People on the beach started gathering to watch until they could not see the heads of the two boys. Sai sat there and cried. An hour later, a fisherman’s catamaran arrived with the two boys, who looked peaceful. ‘I heard the fishermen say they had never seen anyone swim so far out. By the time they found the boys they were too tired to even move their arms, but they were floating on their backs and laughing. Unni told me later that they knew this part of the sea well, they knew that they would be rescued by one of the many fishing boats that were going home.’

A few days later, they did something more dangerous. ‘They told me that they wanted to show me something and took me to a railway bridge near Perambur.’

It was a single-track rail that ran over a canal, an isolated spot where nothing much happened for hours and then, suddenly, a train hurled past at full speed. Sai shuddered visibly when he recounted the incident. They convinced him to stand with them on the track and wait for the train to arrive. They stood in a tight line, in a huddle, holding each other’s waists.

Unni was in the centre. He was holding Sai’s waist tight. ‘I didn’t know how strong he was until that moment, he had an iron grip.’ The game was simple — they had to stand waiting for the train, let it approach them and they would jump off just a moment before it hit them. Sai stood looking at the horizon, waiting for the train. But nothing happened for a while. Then he heard the train’s hoot. He shut his eyes, clenched his fists and waited. He could hear the hoot grow louder and louder, and then the sound of the train on the track. He opened his eyes, but he could not see the train. It struck him then that it was coming from behind. When he turned to look, the train was just a hundred metres away. ‘I wanted to jump off but Unni was holding me so tight I could not free myself. He and Somen were laughing. I started hitting Unni but he did not let go. I thought I was going to die with them. I thought they had come there to die.’ Sai shut his eyes, he could feel a great breeze on his back, and then he remembered flying. Somen and Unni were on the side of the track, rolling on the rocks and laughing. Sai was too stunned to even move.

That was the moment he ended the friendship. He stopped going to Somen’s house. He ignored them in class. ‘They didn’t care. They didn’t ask me why I was not talking to them. They just didn’t care. I did not speak to Unni after that. When I heard that Unni had killed himself, I was not surprised. Have you wondered why you have not been able to meet Somen Pillai?’

‘Why?’

‘Can’t you see?’

‘No.’

‘Because he is dead.’

‘And his parents are hiding the fact? That doesn’t make any sense.’

‘There is a good chance his parents don’t know. Maybe he just vanished one day and they don’t want to admit that their son has gone mad and abandoned them. I think his bones are at the bottom of a canal under a railway bridge.’

‘You say that, Sai, because you wish it. If I meet Somen Pillai and he talks to me I’ll figure out how much you’ve not told me. Isn’t that true, Sai?’

Sai let out a sad chuckle. ‘I’ve told you everything. Except one bit. And I am going to tell you that now. If I had told you this before, you would not have let me talk about anything else.’

Sai was right because what he had to reveal, very simply, was that Unni’s final comic, How To Name It, was meant for him. The only thing Unni hated about cartooning was filling up the dialogue bubbles with text. He found it tedious, probably the reason why he usually devised stories that did not need prose. But, apparently, several of his comics did need text and for that he used Sai as a mule. What Unni used to do was finish his comics, leaving the bubbles blank, and write out the story on a piece of paper.

‘I was supposed to read the story and make a rough draft of the storyboard and show it to him for approval. He would make a lot of corrections and I would write another draft and another until it was good enough for him, then I would sit and carefully fill up the bubbles in capital letters. But many times, after I finished, he would just tear up the comics and throw them away. He was not happy with most of his work.’

Sai then asked how Ousep had got hold of the comic. As Ousep was explaining, the boy did something unexpected — he collected his cheap shoulder bag from the floor, stood up and looked set to leave.

‘Sit down, Sai.’

‘I have to leave.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘How were you supposed to fill in the dialogue bubbles when you didn’t know what the story was?’

‘I knew the story. He had written the story and given it to me but got down to finishing the comic only weeks later. I never saw the comic, until you showed it to me.’

‘Sit down, Sai, we have just begun.’

‘I know what you’re going to ask me.’

‘What am I going to ask you?’

‘You are going to ask me, “What is the story of the comic, where is the story of the comic?”’

‘Where is the story?’

‘I gave it to Unni’s mother this morning.’

A soft moan may have escaped Ousep’s lungs. ‘Why would you do something like that, you idiot? You go and give something that I have been searching for to that woman!’

‘Because the story is about her. It is a private matter from her life. I have a duty to the memory of Unni to protect his mother’s past.’

‘Wait, wait, wait, Sai. Wait right there.’

‘Unni’s comic was about something that concerned his mother. I will not tell you what it is about. You must ask her yourself.’

‘Sai, you’re making a mistake. What’s the story?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘But he told you. So his father can surely know. What was it?’

‘Unni said that his father must never know because that is what his mother wishes.’

‘Sai, sit down. Sit down and tell me more.’

‘Do you know that Unni went missing for three days?’

‘No. I didn’t know that.’

‘You didn’t know anything that happened in that house.’

‘Why did he go missing? Where did he go?’

‘Why is the comic so important to you?’ Sai asked, walking back a few steps.

‘Because, a few hours after he posted the comic to you, he was dead.’

‘And you think there is a connection?’

‘Obviously.’

The way Sai looked, it killed something inside Ousep. The honest compassion of a fool, how humiliating that is. ‘Is that why you started probing his death again?’ Sai said. ‘Is that why you did everything you did in the last few months? Because you found this comic? I feel sorry for you. The comic has nothing to do with why he died. If Unni’s mother ever tells you what the story is, you will understand what I am saying.’

‘Tell me the story, Sai.’

‘I have to go now. I’ve told you everything I know and everything I can say. I don’t want to see you again. You and Unni and Somen. I am done with all this. I am an ordinary person, I want ordinary things. I don’t want to know the truth. I don’t want to see beauty. I am just another boy in Madras who wants to escape to America.’

FOR THE REST OF her life, Mariamma Chacko would tell herself that it was a mistake to let Unni know what had happened to her when she was twelve. For all his swagger he was just a child, and as his mother she should have protected him from himself. But then Unni had been persistent. He had pieced together many of her monologues and figured that at the heart of her indignation was an incident in her childhood. He asked her almost every day what had happened. He was relentless, and in a moment of weakness she yielded. They sat on the kitchen floor and she told him about that day. A happy twelve-year-old village girl without a grouse, that was how she had begun, that was how she had described herself.

She is in her village, walking down the south stream at the foot of the hill towards a giant rock from where the half-naked boys dive into the water. She has walked alone on the banks many times and it is an unremarkable part of her life. She cannot see the rock yet but it will appear after the bend in the stream. There is a familiar stillness all around her and she tells herself that she likes the peace of the hill more than the fuss of the big cities. She sees someone approach, a young man with smooth fox-like strides. When he gets closer, she realizes it is Philipose, a man who is described in at least eight villages as the ‘talented young man’. He reads from the Bible on Sundays, sings in the choir, organizes boat races, heads protest marches to the collector’s office and demands black-tar roads for the rubber hills. She smiles at him. Unexpectedly, he stops and starts talking to her. She smells liquor on him, so she begins to walk away. ‘Wait here and talk for a while,’ he says. She says she has to go. But he holds her hand and says, ‘Why are you in a hurry today?’ She tries to extricate herself from his grip but he holds her tight. She begins to scream. He covers her mouth with his palm and pushes her down on the ground. His hands begin to grope her, tearing her clothes. She struggles but he is too strong. She manages to poke his eye with a stone. As he howls, she screams too. People run towards her. Philipose flees. Nobody chases him. ‘It is Philipose,’ they say. ‘It is Philipose.’

Mariamma is taken to her mother by seven women who have shrouded her in a bedsheet. They walk up the hill. Her mother stands at the top with her hands on her hips, and waits. She has heard the news. Mariamma is happy to see her mother. But the moment she is handed over, her mother slaps her in front of everyone. ‘Why do you strut alone on the banks?’ she says. She takes her in and asks her, ‘What did he do?’ Mariamma does not know how to answer that. She does not say anything. Mother inspects her, and looks relieved. ‘Such things happen when girls are not careful,’ her mother says. ‘Don’t think too much about it.’

The same evening, they sit in the coracle and go to her foster home. Her mother has nothing to say to her, not a word. Mariamma is dropped on the bank. She wades through the shallow water and reaches the steps. When she turns back, the boat and her mother have already gone some distance. Mariamma stands there and watches long after the boat has disappeared. She does not know how long she has been standing there. She is finally surprised by a pall of middle-aged women in white who are returning from a funeral. They look at her as if she is a strange animal.

‘What is wrong with you, Mariammo?’ one of them says.

‘Why do you ask me that?’

‘You were talking to the river.’

This happens several times in the coming weeks. People startling her and telling her that she has been talking to herself. They begin to say, Mariamma is behaving in a funny way. That is what they say. But about Philipose, they still say, ‘the talented young man’.

Unni was furious. ‘Did they punish Philipose? Tell me they did something to him,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Nobody wanted to even talk about it. My mother, especially. Philipose went on living as if nothing had happened.’

Unni took a glass and broke it on the floor. ‘I’ll kill him,’ he said. It was terrifying, to see the rage of such a gentle boy.

When Mariamma opens the hospital ward door and walks into the milk-white room, she finds Ousep sitting on his bed and staring at her as if he has been waiting for the door to open. She drags a chair over and sits by his side, and sets her bag on the floor. ‘I know what you want to know,’ she says. And she tells him what she had, until this moment, told only Unni. Ousep listens without a word. When she finishes, he puts a feeble hand on her lap.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he says.

‘I didn’t want to tell you. You were my happiness, when I married you. I wanted to forget all that was old.’

‘You should have told me,’ he repeats like a fool.

‘I told Unni, I don’t know why. I should not have. He was disturbed for many days. He started talking like me. “He got away, didn’t he? Philipose got away.” One evening, Unni did not return home. I waited but he didn’t return. I called all his friends but nobody knew where he had gone. You came home drunk, did your usual things and went to sleep. But Unni was not home yet. Next morning I got a call from him. He said he was in Kerala. He said he was going to confront Philipose. I started screaming at him, but he put the phone down. He returned two days later. He told me what had happened. The comic that you have been guarding, Ousep, that is what it is about. It is about Unni’s journey to meet Philipose.’

‘And what happened when he went to meet Philipose?’

‘How did you get that comic?’ she asks.

He tells her.

‘Is that why you started meeting his friends all over again?’ she asks.

‘Yes.’

‘The comic does not explain why he died, Ousep.’

‘I know that now.’

‘What you must search for is what I have told you before. Why Unni did not leave a note behind for me. That is what you must chase.’

‘But what does that mean? If Unni did not explain his death to you, what does that mean, Mariammo?’

‘It’s obvious. I thought you would know. I thought you understood.’

‘No, I don’t understand,’ Ousep says.

‘Unni thought I would come to know why he chose to die.’

‘But you don’t?’

‘I don’t. You go and find out what it is that my child thought I am supposed to know.’

She digs into her coir bag and takes out sheets of paper that have been stapled together. Ousep can see Unni’s extravagant handwriting on the pages. She hands them to him. ‘This is the story Unni wrote about his journey,’ she says. ‘This is the story of the comic. This is exactly what he told me when he returned from Kerala.’

The story that Ousep holds in his hands is not the clue he thought it was. But his hands are not steady as he begins to read the account of Unni Chacko, who is on his way to confront a man he has never met before. The story of a seventeen-year-old boy who is about to meet a man who had molested his mother many years ago, when he was young and she was just a girl. A man called Philipose.

How To Name It

BY UNNI CHACKO

Philipose, Philipose.

I have heard your name many times. I have heard your name from the time I was a child. I have heard it from my mother. This is what my mother says, ‘Philipose, you got away, Philipose.’ You know my mother. I hope you are human enough to remember her.

For most of my life I did not know who you were. I thought you must be just another relative. But now I know who you are. I am coming to get you, Philipose. Finally, I am coming to get you.

I know the name of your village, I know your family name, I know your house name. I will find you. I know you are still in your village because my mother says men like you never leave. You have your land, a hill full of rubber trees that you got in dowry, and you are semi-literate. There is no respect for you outside your land, Philipose. In the big world outside your village, men like you have no respect, so you live there in your old homes all your lives, eating jackfruits and mangoes and river fish and red boiled rice.

You will see me soon. You will see me from your window, a strong athletic boy walking down the mud path to your house. You will narrow your eyes, you will get up from your armchair, and you will step out of your door and wait for me. You will ask me, ‘Who are you, my boy?’

I will not tell you anything, Philipose. I will first punch you on the nose. And you will begin to see Mariamma Chacko in me. And you will run. But you won’t go too far. I will hold your neck and drag you through your land and take you to the state highway outside your farm. I will beat you up until all the villagers gather around us and then I will tell them. I will tell them what you did to my mother when she was just a twelve-year-old girl. I will tell them, ‘I am the son of Mariamma Chacko and I have come for justice.’ I will tell them what you did.

I say this to all the men who commit such crimes. You may think you can get away, but a time will come when the girls will become mothers and they may tell their sons about what you did to them. And their sons, if they are sons like me, will come to get you, will come and beat you up and shame you in front of your own people.

I am seventeen years old, Philipose. You must be over sixty now. You are probably a strong man. I know you work in the fields with the labourers. I know you have big bones and you probably have big muscles. You may have strong sons and strong friends. But I am strong, too. You won’t believe it when you see me but there is something inside me, Philipose. But it is possible that you and your sons and your village people will defeat me. There is a chance that you will hold me in your hundred arms, put me on the ground and stand with your foot on my head. But before that happens, I will have told everybody what you did three decades ago to a little girl on the banks of the white stream. I will tell all the women of your village. If you have daughters I will tell them what you did.

I am on my way. I have borrowed money from my friend for the journey. I left home without telling my mother. She would have tried to stop me because she thinks I am a child. But I am not a child. I was never a child.

I am inside Egmore station. I am waiting on the platform, in front of me is the Quilon Express. I am getting into the unreserved compartment, it is packed with men and women and children. I will sit on the floor and travel this way through the night and all of next morning. I smell piss and shit in this compartment, I smell filth. But I can sit absolutely still for many hours and when I sit that way I am not affected by anything. I am indestructible.

Many people who were sitting on the floor got off in the middle of the night and there is a place for me in the doorway. The thick iron door is fully open and I am sitting on the edge with my legs hanging in the air. The breeze is so strong that I have to turn away to breathe. I see dark forests and villages and mountains pass. The night becomes day and I see Kerala. Entire villages are rushing past me. I see green hills and wide rivers and narrow black roads. I see red roofs and there is this smell of steam. The women here, their hair is always wet. And all the men have moustaches. Do you have a moustache, Philipose? Do you feel like a man, Philipose? Like a man-man? Do you have a thick bushy moustache, which you rub fondly when you see little girls?

I have reached Kollam. I am here. From the station I call home because I know Mother will be worried. She is hysterical when she hears my voice. I tell her calmly where I am and why I am here. She screams at me. ‘Those are bad men, Unni,’ she says. I tell her, ‘I am no saint, myself,’ and I put the phone down.

I am sitting in a packed bus. We are close now, very close to each other. I am in Patazhi, Philipose. Can you believe that? The boy who was born years after your crime has arrived in your village for justice.

I am walking down the narrow roads of the village and everybody is looking at me. They can see I am a city boy. They have so much time to stare. I ask a man who is passing by, ‘Where is Valolikal, the house of Philipose K. John?’

He tells me, ‘Go down this road, son, and when you see the stream to your right, walk down the bank until you reach a big yellow house. That is where you want to go. But who are you?’

‘I am the son of an old friend of Philipose,’ I say.

I walk down the long road. People who are standing outside their homes stare at me. People who pass me by look at me as if I am a creature they want to know. They probably know my mother. Her village is not far away. Her stupid old mother still lives but I do not wish to meet her.

I must have walked over two kilometres when I see a gushing white stream. I walk down the bank and I wonder where it happened, where exactly did the crime happen. When my mother was just a little girl and she was walking along the stream. I have walked for over forty minutes by the stream but I don’t see any houses here. Where are you, Philipose?

I see it now. A big yellow house on top of a small hillock at the end of the bank. What a place to live, Philipose. A forest of rubber in front and a white stream as your backyard. I walk up the steep path towards the front of the house. Do you see me, Philipose, do you see me coming? Come out, Philipose, step out right now. The door is open but there is no sign of people. I say in Malayalam, ‘Is there anybody home?’

Nothing happens for nearly a minute. I wonder if I must go in. Then a middle-aged woman appears. She looks at me and goes and fetches her glasses. And she looks at me as if she needs more glasses. I say, ‘Is this the house of Philipose K. John?’

She giggles. ‘That’s his name but nobody says it like that.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Who are you, son?’ she says. ‘Are you from the city?’

‘I am the son of an old friend of your man. Can I meet him?’

‘What is the name of this friend?’

‘Mathew.’

‘Which Mathew? The world is full of Mathews. There are more Mathews than Anthonys. I wonder why.’

‘Mathew from Kottarakara.’

‘I did not know he had such a friend,’ she says. ‘What is your name?’ ‘I am Unni.’

‘So, Unni, son of Mathew, why is your Malayalam so terrible?’

‘I was in Madras for too long.’

‘And what does Unni want?’

‘Are you the wife of Philipose K. John?’

I use your full name, Philipose, because I cannot bear to use any word that would grant you a hint of respect.

‘Yes, I am his wife.’

‘Can I meet him?’

‘What business do you have with him?’

‘My father used to be with the Rubber Board and he used to talk about Philipose K. John. They had some good times together. My father is dead and he told me on his deathbed that I must inform his friends of his death personally.’

‘In that case, son, Philipose K. John already knows. He is in heaven with Mathew of Kottarakara. My husband died eight months ago.’

I am stunned, Philipose. What do I do now? I don’t know what to say, what to do. I just stand there. I came all the way to get you but you’ve escaped.

Your wife asks me to come in and have a cup of tea. Your wife, she has big sagging boobs. She must wear a suspension bridge as a bra.

She takes me into the house, then into a room, then another room. I don’t know where she is taking me. Finally, we enter a dark storeroom. I can see a lot of plantains hanging from the ceiling as if they have been sentenced to death. The floor is filled with jackfruits.

She says, ‘I’ve been waiting for days for a tall young man to come by and change the bulb.’ She takes out a bulb from a box and hands it to me. ‘Unni, my angel, will you stand on that stool there and change the bulb for an old widow?’

I drag the stool over and stand on it and change the bulb.

‘How did he die?’ I ask.

‘He came home one night in the rains. He had a fever. He had some tea and went to sleep. In the morning I found him dead in his bed. It was a peaceful death. That is how we must go. Peacefully, in our sleep. His face looked so serene.’

So, that’s how you went, Philipose. Peacefully, in your sleep.

After what you did to my mother, that is how you went. And I am now changing the bulb in your house.

She takes me into the kitchen, she is looking carefully around the house as if she is searching for something for me to fix before I leave. Cunning old woman. She gives me tea, which has a lot of dead red ants in it. We sit at a table in the kitchen and drink tea. She talks about you with great affection.

‘He was a good man, a very good man. He was a loving husband and a good father of four strong sons and two beautiful daughters who adored him. They are all in the Gulf now, everyone is in the Gulf. Who has the time these days for their mother, who has the time for an old woman?

‘They make so much money, so that’s all right. They want to buy me a car. My husband, too, had made a lot of money. He bought so much land, so much land. If I stand on my land I cannot see its end, Unni. Isn’t that a nice way to live? He was a rich man, my husband, but he was a good man. He started eight free schools for poor girls. He funded the college education of hundreds of girls from poor families. Do you know, Unni, the state government gave him an award?’

She takes me to a shelf which is full of awards for the social work done by you, Philipose. There is one award that has a white angel standing on a wooden stand. I cannot read Malayalam, so I ask your wife what the inscription on the stand says. She tells me the award was given by the state government for ‘Services To Humanity’. She shows me your framed black-and-white photographs that spread across time. I see you the way you must have looked when you attacked my mother, then I see you as you aged slowly. You look so happy and normal. You look like just another decent man. Then I see you on the wall. A giant photograph of a kind old man with a full mop of silver hair. You are smiling at me, Philipose. I know you are smiling at me.

It is time for me to go home. I hug her, I don’t know why. I walk along the stream, I look around as if I am searching for a twelve-year-old girl who might be in danger. I now say what my mother always used to say: ‘Philipose, you got away, Philipose.’

You lived a life filled with love, children, wealth and awards. And you died peacefully in your sleep. I was eight months late, Philipose.

When I get home, my mother slaps me hard. She has a powerful arm, so it hurts. Then she hugs me tight. ‘That’s a bad man, Unni, that’s a very bad man. I was so scared.’ Then we sit on the kitchen floor and I tell her what happened. We hold hands and we cry together.

‘But at least he died, Unni, so that’s all right, so that’s over,’ she says.

I tell her, ‘Also, I squeezed his wife’s boobs.’

And we laugh so hard, with tears running down our cheeks, we do not know if we are laughing or crying.