The Illicit Happiness of Other People

6. Corpse

THE MOST TENSE MOMENTS in Thoma’s life are when his mother takes him to the Sacred Heart Family Store, where the enormous bare-chested shopkeeper sits on a sack of rice, eating his own jaggery. Mariamma owes him more than three thousand rupees but the parish priest has bought her time to settle the loan. The man does not like seeing her face and he usually pretends that he has not seen her. She stands patiently as he finishes with everybody else. When there is nowhere else he can look, he asks without respect, ‘What do you want?’ Thoma does not like anyone talking to his mother this way. Sometimes the man says, ‘You people do eat a lot.’ Mariamma quietly points to what she wants.

Thoma and his mother are walking back from the store, sweating in the afternoon heat, when they see the figure of Mythili Balasubramanium coming their way. Once again in his life, Thoma forgets how to walk. He is carrying two kilos of rice and his mother is holding a coconut in her hand as if it is a shot-put. He wishes he was walking alone, and wearing a tight white shirt and tight white trousers and white pointed shoes, with a Walkman strung to his ears. He hopes she does not see them, which is not an outlandish wish. Nobody ever sees them.

Mythili is walking the way she usually walks, mostly looking down at the road. She has not spotted them yet. He throws a nervous glance at his mother. If she chews her lips and wags a finger he will die on the spot in shame. But she is only looking at Mythili with a loving smile. ‘Be normal,’ he whispers to her. ‘Be absolutely normal.’

Mythili’s eyes are still on the road. The way she walks, it is a surprise she even gets anywhere. Thoma is distracted by a sudden movement behind Mythili. A man is walking fast and is gaining on her. He is in a brown shirt and a lungi. As he passes her, he slaps her back. That gives her a jolt and she looks up. She glares at the man, who now walks ahead of her as if nothing has happened. Then Mythili, too, continues to walk as if it did not happen. But Mariamma stops. She stares hard at the man, who is fast approaching them. He looks nervously at Mariamma for a moment and looks away. ‘Normal,’ Thoma whispers to his mother, but she is not listening. She looks steadily at the man. When he crosses them, she flings the coconut at him. It hits his head, falls on the road and rolls away. But the man walks away as if nothing has happened. It is as if he gets hit by a coconut all the time. What is this world, exactly? Thoma wonders. A man slaps a girl’s arse, she walks on as if nothing has happened. Then the man gets hit by a coconut thrown by a weird woman, and he walks away without even turning back.

Thoma sees his mother kneeling on the pavement. She says, ‘The coconut has rolled into the bushes.’ Thoma whispers to her, ‘Don’t overreact. Get up, get up, she is coming.’

‘The coconut, Thoma, it has gone into the bushes. He is not going to give us another coconut even if Jesus Christ asks him to.’

‘Get up,’ Thoma begs.

He decides to pretend that he has not seen Mythili, and when he wants to pretend that he has not seen someone he always yawns for some reason. But Mythili does not walk away. She goes up to his mother and peers into the bushes with her. ‘I can see it,’ she says. She puts her hand into the bushes and brings out the coconut. She looks into the eyes of his mother and gives her a smile. That has not happened in a while. As she walks away he can see she is crying.

‘Why is she crying?’ Thoma asks.

‘She still loves me, Thoma, that’s why.’

‘So why is she crying?’

‘That is how it is.’

In the evening, Thoma and his mother are standing on their rear balcony and watching the doctor’s widow below as she waters her roses. Every woman in Block A is keeping a close watch on that lady, who has decided not to wear a white sari as widows do, nor does she have a Usha Tailoring Machine on which widows sew with a sad face. That woman is under a lot of pressure to look sad, and even when she does something as ordinary as watering the plants, the women of Block A begin to murmur about her. Some say, ‘But why shouldn’t she be happy?’, which actually sounds like a reprimand. Mythili appears on her balcony, her hair in a white towel. Thoma has never seen her this way. She looks like a woman. She smiles at his mother, but this time her smile is cautious as if she is a stranger once again.

‘I will teach him,’ she tells his mother as she hangs the pleated green skirt of her school uniform to dry. ‘I will teach him on Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. We can start this Saturday.’ His mother and Mythili decide, without asking his opinion, that she must first teach him maths, then they discuss the exact time he must turn up.

Thoma waits nervously for Saturday. He will sit with Mythili, she will look at him and he will look at her, and they will talk. She will know, beyond any doubt, that he exists. The very thought scares him. He hopes, when he walks into her home, she will say, ‘Thoma, let me see how much you know.’

‘Ask me anything, Mythili.’

‘What does KGB stand for?’

‘Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti.’

‘My God, Thoma, I can’t believe you are so bright. Let me try another quiz question. It’s a very difficult question. What is Pele’s real name?’

‘Edson Arantes do Nascimento.’

‘Thoma, you are even smarter than Unni.’

In the days that follow, as he waits for Saturday to arrive, he begs his mother not to be too loud when she speaks to the walls, and he prays that his father, who has started drinking again after returning from the hospital, has another mild heart attack. But life is merciless, that is one thing Thoma knows about life. His daily humiliations continue. When his mother talks to herself in the mornings, he goes to the stairway to check whether her voice travels far enough for Mythili to hear. At night, when his father screams from the gate, he hopes she is in a deep sleep.

The good thing about school is that Mythili will never know what happens to him there. No matter how well he guards himself, no matter how innocuous his actions are, he often walks into the open arms of humiliation.

He is going down the corridor from his class towards the toilet. In front of him is Matilda Miss, a short, tight woman with no moving parts really. She is walking with quick, hurried steps, which is unusual. As he walks cautiously behind her, he spots something — she is leaving a trail of red dots on the floor. He stops to look at the dots and is stunned. It is blood. He follows her, and the trail of red dots. She rushes into the staff room, filled with teachers. She goes towards the ladies’ room, the trail of red dots in close pursuit. Before she can open the door, he decides to shout, ‘Miss.’ There is silence. A room full of teachers, most of them men, look at him. He is sure that he has probably saved her life with his timely warning. He points to the floor and says, ‘You are leaving a line of red dots, miss.’ Everybody looks at the floor and for some reason turns away. Matilda Miss moves one step forward like a little soldier and slaps him hard. What must Thoma Chacko do, what must a boy do to be happy? Will Thoma Chacko ever make it?

When Unni was his age, he was cast as Nehru in the Independence Day play, but Thoma is now rehearsing once again to be a nameless extra, just one of the many idiots who rolls on the floor, holding the national flag, as British soldiers beat them up saying, ‘Bloody Indians.’

Even a haircut is a form of humiliation. The St Anthony’s hairstylist, who has an image of the centrally bald St Anthony on his signboard, has been instructed by the parish priest to cut Thoma’s hair free of charge. So, the man there always makes Thoma wait for over an hour and cuts the hair of the people who have come after him. It is when there is no sign of a paying customer that the man asks Thoma to sit in his swivel chair. He never gives Thoma a white apron, never gives him a head massage as he does the others, and never holds a mirror behind him to show him his new haircut from all angles. In fact, when it is all done, he makes Thoma stand in front of him, and whips him hard several times with a short towel, making it look as if he is only dusting him.

An hour before Unni died, he had come here for a haircut. Ousep has interviewed the barber many times. ‘What’s your father looking for?’ the man says. ‘He keeps coming here to ask me if there was anything strange about Unni that day. I keep telling him Unni did not speak a word but your father keeps dropping in to ask the same questions again and again.’

‘Was there anything unusual about Unni that day?’ Thoma asks. The man whips him with the short towel harder than he usually does.

Thoma wants to investigate. He wants to ask questions, good questions, trick questions, he wants to probe, extract clues from the minds of people and find the reason why Unni did what he did. But when he thinks about it, he does not know where to begin. It is so difficult to solve mysteries. Will Thoma ever solve a mystery in his life?

IN HIS DREAM, WHICH Thoma knows is a morning dream, he is a tall, smart and deadly bodyguard walking with the chief minister down an endless corridor. Terrorists with machine guns appear from nowhere and take aim. Thoma, in slow motion, pulls the chief minister towards him and uses the man as a body shield. The chief minister is soon riddled with bullets, but Thoma is safe. He wakes up feeling sorry for the old man.

He has a long, nervous bath, washes his hair with soap and wears his best shirt, which was once Unni’s. Thoma does not own a pair of trousers. Shorts are all right, he does not mind them, but then he has to sit very carefully when he is with Mythili. If she sees through the gaps in his shorts, sees the old checked curtain of the Chacko household now reborn as his underwear, he will have no choice but to go to the terrace and jump head first.

That makes him wonder whether Unni had actually killed himself out of shame. There cannot be a better reason for a person to die than shame. But it is hard to imagine Unni being ashamed of anything. He was so strong, so superior to everything around him, even though he was as poor as Thoma.

At ten, the ominous maths textbook in his hand, he rings Mythili’s doorbell. His mother is watching from her doorway. He whispers to her, ‘Go inside.’ But she stands there because she is a curious person. When Mrs Balasubramanium finally opens the door, the two women look at each other across the short corridor and they imagine that they have smiled.

Mythili’s mother takes him to the door of her daughter’s bedroom, where Mythili stands waiting. ‘Very bad idea, Mythili,’ she tells her daughter. ‘You’ve so much work to do. Why are you taking on this burden?’ Mythili glares at her mother, drags Thoma in by his wrist and bangs the door shut. Mythili’s hand, he will always remember, is very cold.

She is in a half-skirt and T-shirt, the way she normally is at home. She does not wear such things when she is in full public view. She is a respectable girl, and Thoma likes respectable girls, though he is not sure why. She clasps a hairband in her mouth, and holds her thick black hair above her head as if she wants to lift herself in the air. She ties her hair in a ponytail because he has come — Mythili has performed a set of actions as a reaction to Thoma. He feels a moment of uncontrollable joy around his temples.

She sits on her bed with her bare legs crossed, and asks for his maths book. ‘Sit there, Thoma,’ she says, pointing to a solitary chair facing her. He senses an affection in her tone. She said ‘Thoma’. She need not have used his name but she did.

The last time Thoma was in her room was about three years ago, the day before Unni died. It has not changed since that day. Her windows are covered by a pink floral curtain that he does not remember, but her Godrej steel cupboard with a mirror on it, her tiny wooden desk and cot are in the same positions as before. Her bed is still the same, narrow even for a single bed, as if she should not share it with her own shadow.

She is going through the pages of the textbook carefully, with a smile, as if it is a family album. He has not seen anyone smile at a maths textbook before.

‘Mythili,’ he says.

‘Yes.’

He does not know why he opened his mouth. He had just wanted to utter her name in his mind, he did not expect any sound to come out of his stupid mouth. He has nothing to say, really. She is looking at him now.

‘What?’ she says.

‘Mythili, is it true that the home ministry is planning to change the value of pi from 3.14159 to just 3?’

‘Who told you this?’

‘Unni.’

She puts her hand on her mouth and laughs. Her fingers are clean and slender, and her nails are painted in a girlish colour whose name he does not know. ‘Unni,’ she says, and when she returns to the maths book he can see that she is somewhat distracted. She has a ghostly smile, which bursts into laughter again. ‘Unni was such an idiot,’ she says. She turns a few pages, her smile slowly receding. ‘You are wearing his shirt,’ she says without looking up. ‘I remember this shirt.’

Thoma is ashamed, he feels he is going to faint. He says, ‘My mother has bought me a lot of shirts but I like wearing Unni’s old shirts. You know, an old shirt feels softer than a new one. This was not altered. This was the shirt he used to wear when he was as old as me.’

‘I know, I know this shirt. You look like him in it,’ she says. Her large, serious eyes scan his face and he hopes she does not doubt her own analysis. Unni was handsome beyond ambiguity, and it is a good sign that Mythili sees his brother in him.

‘Do I look exactly like him? Or is it fifty per cent. Or is it ten per cent?’

‘In a very mathematical mood, are we?’

‘I am very mathematical actually. When I think, deep inside my mind, I am mathematical.’

‘When Unni was your age he used to look a lot like you. Now that you are wearing his shirt, I feel I am talking to him. It feels a bit strange. But then he had a bigger forehead and his eyes were more narrow, and they were not as innocent as yours. Even when he was a little boy he had the eyes of an old man who has seen it all.’

‘You remember so much, Mythili?’ he says, and uses his fingers to make a quick calculation. ‘When Unni was twelve, you were just eight.’

‘Girls remember,’ she says.

‘That’s what Unni used to say. Girls remember everything. I am beginning to forget his face, can you believe that? Some days when I try to think of him I cannot remember his face. I have to come home and see his photograph on the wall. You know where the frame of Jesus Christ used to be, we have a big picture of Unni there now.’

‘I remember his face very well,’ she says.

‘But when he died you were only as old as I am now.’

‘I was thirteen, you are twelve. Big difference.’

‘It’s just one year.’

‘Big difference.’

She says they must now stop chatting and focus on the maths. ‘Angles,’ she says.

‘That night,’ Thoma says, remembering something, ‘my father and I saw you walking to your door that night. Where were you coming from?’

‘Nowhere,’ she says. ‘I thought I heard a sound outside our door. I went to look. I went up the steps to see if the sound was coming from the terrace.’

‘You were wearing proper clothes.’

‘What does that mean, Thoma?’

‘You were wearing clothes you usually wear when you are outside your house.’

‘I was outside my house, wasn’t I?’

Thoma whispers, ‘What do you think the sound was?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You are very brave, Mythili.’

She shows him her palm and says that there are angles between her fingers.

Thoma wonders whether he is in love with her. Strangely, he has not thought of it before. And the question terrifies him because the fate of love in Madras is neatly divided into four kinds of suicide. Lovers who know that their parents will never let them marry go to a cheap hotel room, get into wedding clothes and eat rat poison. If they elope instead, their parents will consume the same rat poison. If it is only the girl’s parents who object to the marriage, she is most likely to immolate herself. Men who are spurned by girls almost always hang themselves from a ceiling fan. Men very rarely set fire to themselves for a girl.

‘If there are no angles between two lines, the value of the angle is either zero or 180 degrees. Thoma, idiot, are you listening?’

‘Mythili, you think Unni died because of some love problem?’

She makes a fist and knocks his head with her knuckles. How do all the bloody women in Madras know how to do this? He feels humiliated for a moment but then Mythili rubs his head.

He is glad he washed his hair with soap. ‘You must listen, Thoma,’ she says.

But they do chat about this and that. He has figured out that the best way to get her to talk is to talk about Unni.

‘Mythili, do you know the names of all the players in the national women’s basketball team?’

‘Of course not. Who would know something like that?’

‘That’s what Unni said. He said nobody would know the women’s basketball team. He said when you want to impress someone just make up ten names of girls and claim that this is the Indian women’s basketball team. Nobody will be able to check.’

She takes a thick strand of hair that is falling over her face and pushes it behind her ear. ‘Unni was always up to something,’ she says. ‘Remember how he used to read my mind? How do you think he did that, Thoma?’

Yes, he remembers. Unni would ask her to pick a card from a pack and put it back. He would then stare deep into her eyes, as she giggled or fluttered her eyelids in an exaggerated way. And he would guess the card she had picked. He was right every time, and Mythili would be stunned. She would ask him to leave the room when she was about to pick the card, and she would hide the card, chew it or even tear it into many pieces, but Unni would just walk in and guess it right. She even started going up to the terrace to pick the card in private, but Unni always guessed the card. Some days he would pretend that he was unable to read her mind because of too much activity inside her head. But the next morning, when she opened her school bag or a notebook, she would find the card she had picked. And she would shriek so loudly that Thoma and Unni could hear her in their house.

‘You think he could really read minds, Thoma?’

Thoma cannot bear it, but he doesn’t say anything.

‘You know what he told me?’ she says. ‘He told me that once upon a time in this world there lived a secret race of humans with supernatural powers. They invented cheap magic tricks and spread them far and wide so that people believed all supernatural acts to be just magic tricks. That’s what Unni told me. I still remember because I used to think that Unni was one of those supernatural people.’

‘I think Unni was good at some tricks. He did not have supernatural powers. I am very sure he had no supernatural powers, Mythili. I think only Pele is supernatural.’

‘Pele?’ she says, spitting out the word. ‘From where did you pick Pele?’

‘Pele is a great man,’ he says. ‘Do you know who he is?’

‘Yes, Thoma, I know who Pele is. Everybody knows Pele.’

‘He is a genius.’

‘Yes, he is a genius.’

Thoma is comforted that he has created reasonable competition for Unni.

‘Pele is mind-blowing,’ he says. ‘Only Pele is supernatural.’

‘But what a dumb name, though,’ she says. ‘Pele. How funny.’

Thoma cannot believe it. This is the moment he has always been waiting for but now he feels he is going to faint. This is a miracle. The first miracle in his life.

‘Not his real name,’ he says softly.

‘Pele is not his name?’

‘His real name is Edson Arantes do Nascimento.’

‘How do you know these things, Thoma? Not bad.’

‘He was a Russian spy,’ he says.

‘That’s rubbish.’

‘He used to work for the KGB. KGB is the Russian secret service.’

‘I know what KGB is,’ she says.

‘Usually girls do not know what KGB is,’ he says. ‘In fact, very few people in the world know what KGB stands for.’

‘What does it stand for?’

‘Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti.’

She rubs his head fondly. ‘I think you read a lot, Thoma.’

‘A lot. I read all the time.’

The whole day, Thoma wanders down the lanes of Kodambakkam with a Sense of Well-being and with sympathy for everybody he sees on the road because Mythili does not know them. He chooses only the short lanes because he fears that if he walks down a long street, Mythili will appear at the other end and he will forget how to walk, and she will know that he is just an ass. In the days that follow, he walks up and down his house, from the front balcony to the rear, for a glimpse of Mythili. Sometimes his path crosses that of his wandering mother, and they smile politely as if they are pedestrians greeting each other. He develops a nervous reverence for Mythili’s school uniform, which she hangs out to dry every evening. He looks at it only discreetly. The best part of his day is the time before he goes to sleep when he imagines that he is dying and that Mythili, in her school uniform, is crying softly for him, hiding in her bathroom. And the times when he is with her, he tries to distract her from maths by talking about Unni. And when she is not looking, he looks carefully at her, the way she used to stare at Unni when he was not looking — with a blank, serious face.

IT IS NOT THAT Ousep Chacko has abandoned the investigation again, it is just that he does not know how to proceed. After he was discharged from the hospital he resumed the probe, though he did not know what he was looking for any more. He has met everyone who appears to matter, except for Somen Pillai. There is no one else left to meet or to confront. He has met Simion Clark, too. That was a week ago.

Simion Clark turned out to be a tall, fit man in his forties who was at once Caucasian and Indian, with cautious eyes behind square glasses, thin severe lips, hair the colour of dirt, and a pronounced arse. He stood in the doorway, unnaturally erect, and stared with mild hostility. There was a bit of unpleasantness at first as Simion insisted he was Albert Fernandes. But he slowly relented because he knew his cover was blown and he knew it was silly to defend his position. Also, he was curious.

His flat was small and it was further diminished by three massive leather sofas that faced each other. Simion pretended to be relaxed. It is easier for men with long legs to appear that way.

‘How did you find me?’ he asked.

‘You don’t have a scar, Simion, which is surprising.’

‘I said, “How did you find me?”’

‘Usually, men like you in Madras have scars.’

Scars from the times when they were attacked by cruel mobs of men who did not understand their way. The description of Simion as given by Balki had suggested to Ousep a pattern he was familiar with. The descriptions of the others later only confirmed that. Simion was one of those classy men in Madras who liked to be teachers in a boys’ school, who were very strict, who inflicted pain, who spanked boys, who liked to teach subjects that needed a lab, where they could meet young boys behind shut doors. And in Madras, men like Simion are accustomed to fleeing. When Ousep began asking around in the gay underground, it turned out that Simion was not hard to find. A gay Anglo-Indian was just too conspicuous in the city. Simion also wrote for the editorial pages of the Indian Express under the name of Roy Gidney, tirelessly demanding legitimacy for homosexuality. The man even had a big following.

‘I want to know why Unni did that to you in the class,’ Ousep said.

‘Is that why you are here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I want to know my son better.’

‘Why don’t you just ask him?’

‘Because he is dead.’

Ousep had not expected Simion to be stunned by the news. His farcical composure was gone and there was no strength in him. ‘How did that happen?’ he asked. When Ousep told him, Simion looked lost and confused. He went to the bathroom and shut himself in for over ten minutes. When he emerged, his nose was red, as if he had had a good cry. He asked Ousep to leave but did not insist. He sat with his hands folded and took several minutes to weigh his options. Ousep had not conveyed any direct threats to make his life hell, but Simion was smart enough to see the sense in cooperating.

Simion rose again, and this time he disappeared into a room, probably his bedroom. He did not shut the door. He returned with a sheet of paper and handed it to Ousep. It was a full-length caricature of Simion, a flawed portrait but somehow efficient. There was a touch of Unni in the art, but strangely, it was a diminished Unni.

‘He must have been thirteen when he drew this,’ Simion said. ‘He gave it to me in the school corridor. I think he admired me as a teacher, I think he did. I am a good teacher, a bit strict, but I am good. I am not strict for the filthy reasons you presume, but yes, I am strict, I care. And Unni at thirteen was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. His face, I will always remember his face.’

Simion was so infatuated with young Unni that he would become tongue-tied in his presence. He was too nervous even to speak to him. He thought if he spoke to him or if he even looked at him beyond a passing glance he would stray. As Unni grew up, Simion could see that the boy was not gay. ‘What a shame, what a waste. With that face, that body, what a waste. There was something about him, about the way he moved, that was divine.’

Ousep had longed to hear this, longed to know his son as a subject of unashamed love, but he was offended by the idea of Unni as the sexual fantasy of a man. ‘I am not a bad person, Mr Chacko. I try to be a good man,’ Simion said. ‘In every school I’ve worked at, I’ve tried to control myself. And when I was in that school I tried harder than ever. But it is tough for a man like me in a city like this. It is very hard.’

Simion used to take the train to school. He had an old sky-blue Fiat but he took the train because he wanted to travel on a particular morning train, in a particular second-class compartment, in the predetermined tight squeeze of a predetermined corner. That corner was legend in the folklore of homosexuals. In that corner, men stood feeling the bodies of other men like them. Eyes met, affections were conveyed, plans were made, all in great caution because a single bad judgement would have meant a violent attack by outraged men. On good days, virgin adolescent boys in search of male flesh made their way to the corner to see for themselves whether the legend was true, ‘if paradise really existed in Madras’. They came to be felt and loved and promised a more elaborate time.

‘Such a beautiful creature came one day to the compartment. He looked me in the eye, stood close to me. I felt the tightness of his young body, I imagined him being mine. In the crowd of men I placed my hand on him and I could feel him come to life. But he was nervous, naturally, very scared. When the train stopped at the next station he rushed out and disappeared. He went away, just like that. I knew I would never see him again.’

Simion reached school that morning, stirred and insatiate. All morning, he was distracted by the apparition of the exotic boy on the train. He was unable to focus on his classes. That afternoon he was in the lab, alone, and wishing the thoughts would go away. He saw a little boy of around ten pass by in the corridor. ‘I don’t know why I called him in and started talking to him. I don’t know why I started massaging his thighs. That’s all that happened.’

Unni walked in at that instant, and saw what was going on. He asked the little boy to leave, and held Simion in a steady gaze. ‘I could not figure out what he was thinking but it was the most shameful moment of my life. When I was caught like that, it should not have been Unni. I went on my knees and joined my palms and begged him to forgive me. I told him I was quitting the school at that very moment, I accepted that I did not deserve to be a teacher.’

But Unni surprised him. He convinced him that he should stay. Unni said, ‘Things happen. We cannot control ourselves all the time.’

Simion decided to stay. But the next day, when he entered Unni’s class, the boy knew what he was going to do. ‘I don’t know why he did that. My beautiful Unni, I don’t know why he did that. I don’t know, I really don’t know. I think of him often and I ask myself why he was so cruel to me. I ask that even though I deserved it.’

Unni had found his Philipose. That was what it was about.

THE COMIC THAT IS titled Epidemic begins with the Revolutionary Leader standing alone on Marina Beach. The man is in a white fur cap and dark glasses, a white shirt and white veshti. His feet are bare. There is a blank thought-bubble over his head. He looks silly and clueless, which he was when he ruled the state as a semi-literate film star who had become the hero of the poor even though he did not know how to solve the poverty of other people. He gave free lunches to schoolchildren, and made it legal for two people to ride on a bicycle, and did other such things. But Unni’s intention is not to make the great Leader look silly. Epidemic is much deeper than that. The comic acquires an eerie quality as it progresses. In the second panel, the Leader’s plump cylindrical mistress, Amma, in a dark green sari, appears beside him. She too is thinking, and she is sharing the same amoebic thought-bubble. The blank bubble, though, has now grown in size.

After the Leader died, which was a few months after Unni’s death, hundreds immolated themselves, apparently in grief. Amma got on to the open hearse of her departed lover, which inched through a sea of people. But that was no place for her — the mistress of a man is always in a very bad position, especially on his hearse. She was kicked by several men in full view and thrown off the vehicle. Later, she was molested on the floor of the legislative assembly and hit on the head with a mike. But there is something of the Leader inside her and the masses see it very clearly. She is ascending, she is going to be the next chief minister, and in revenge for everything that men have done to her, she often makes them stand in a long line and come to her one after the other and fall at her feet. And the men are happy to do that because, even though many people have tried to inherit the power of the Leader, it is Amma alone who has acquired it, and for some reason she alone is able to transmit it to the people. Epidemic is about mass movements as infestations.

As the comic progresses, more and more people are added behind the Leader and Amma — regular, nameless people, the masses. All of them just stand and share the same empty thought-bubble, which grows larger in every frame. Epidemic ends with thousands of people massed on the beach, and all of them share one blank thought, which is now a giant white cloud over their heads.

Ousep goes through the comic again, this time very slowly. He hears the doorbell ring. Mariamma is not at home, so he decides not to open the door. It rings again, then several more times. Through the doorway of his room he sees Thoma walk across the hall, hears him open the door, and the sound of him running. The boy appears at the doorway and says, ‘He has come.’

The mountainous Afghan in the Pathani suit smiles. His face is almost the colour of blood from the heat and the walk up the stairway. He rolls his sleeves over his enormous arms, his thick powerful legs stand apart in combat stance. In the republic of small male thighs, this is a rare stud.

‘So fast, the door opened so fast,’ he says, looking down at the boy from his foreign heights. ‘Usually, it does not open until I almost break it down. Your wife sees through the peephole, I see through the peephole, all those games happen before the door opens. But today is different. Today is a good day. Maybe you have my money, then.’ Thoma tries to squeeze himself between the Pathan and the door frame and escape to the stairway outside, but the man grabs him. ‘Where are you going, hero?’ He begins to tickle Thoma, who giggles. He pokes the boy in the chest with his fat fingers. Then he holds the boy’s right arm in a fierce grip, and raises his gaze to Ousep. He begins to slowly twist the arm. Thoma’s body turns as if in a modern dance, and he now faces his father, his arm pinned to his back. Thoma thinks he is laughing, but his face is growing serious.

‘Do you have my money, Ousep?’ the Pathan says.

‘Next month,’ Ousep says.

The Pathan gives another twist to the boy’s arm.

‘I want my money,’ he says.

‘Come next month.’

‘Now.’

Thoma’s heels have left the ground and he is on his toes. There is a feeble smile on his face. His eyes keep darting to Mythili’s door. He is afraid the girl will open her door and see him like this.

The phone rings, which gives Ousep an elegant reason to wave his hand at the Pathan and say, ‘Come later.’ But the man wants to create trouble today. He gives one more twist to Thoma’s arm. The boy does not pretend to smile any more. The phone rings in a persistent way and Ousep cannot ignore it any longer. He goes to his room and picks up the receiver. He pulls the wire to its full extent, stares at the Pathan through the doorway, wags a finger at him and says, ‘Hello.’ The Afghan is perplexed but he twists Thoma’s arm some more.

‘Hello,’ Ousep says again.

‘I said you’ve been asking about me,’ the voice of a man says.

‘Who is this?’

‘Beta.’

‘Yes, I’ve been searching for you. The people at the Society of Amateur Cartoonists don’t seem to know where you live or even your phone number.’

Ousep wags a finger at the Pathan again. Thoma is beginning to struggle now, he lets out a sporting laugh and starts hitting the man’s powerful arm. The Pathan laughs.

‘I don’t like it,’ Beta says.

‘You don’t like what?’

‘I don’t like people searching for me. I will speak to you when I want to.’

‘Can we meet?’

‘I don’t want to meet you because I know I cannot help you.’

‘Do you know who can help?’

‘I have been speaking to someone who may be interested in talking to you. He does not like meeting people,’ Beta says.

‘Who is he?’

‘Alpha.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. Alpha.’

‘Is he a cartoonist?’

‘Yes.’

‘When can I meet him?’

‘I’ll speak to him. I’ll ask him if he will meet you.’

‘Where does he live?’

‘I can’t tell you that right now. You have to wait.’

‘You say Alpha will help me?’

‘I don’t know how useful he will be. But he can lead you to the corpse.’

‘The corpse?’

‘Yes.’

‘The corpse is a cartoonist?’

‘I don’t know,’ Beta says, laughing.

‘Is the corpse male or female?’

‘Strange question. I never thought of it before. But I’ve never met the corpse. So I don’t know.’

‘What would the corpse tell me?’

‘The corpse would know what you want to know.’

Ousep hangs up and goes to the hall, distracted but ready for the confrontation. ‘Let the boy go,’ Ousep says.

‘We are just playing,’ the Pathan says. ‘Aren’t we just playing, boy?’

‘We’re playing,’ the boy says, giggling like a fool, ‘but I want to go now.’

‘Not that easy,’ the Pathan says.

The appearance of Mariamma startles everyone. Ousep feels a stab of shame. She looks carefully at the giant Pathan as if his face is really at the back of his head. She whispers to him, ‘Blade.’ Ousep, despite the circumstances, appreciates the literary beauty of her metaphor. That is what the moneylender is, he bleeds his prey through compound interest. ‘Blade,’ she says, and this time she is menacing and loud.

‘What are you doing to my boy?’ she says. There is a quiver in her tone and the Pathan knows it is not a good sign. Even Thoma senses it. He looks nervously at Mythili’s door, and his eyes plead for his mother to take it easy. He puts a finger on his lips. ‘Shh,’ he says.

‘Leave the boy alone,’ she says.

‘We are just playing,’ the Pathan says.

‘Do you hear me? I said leave the boy alone.’

‘There is no respect in your voice, madam. That’s not how women should be talking to men. I have three wives and a mother. None of them talks to me this way.’

‘Leave the boy.’

‘Ask your man to give me my money and I’ll be gone.’

‘You ask him. Twist that man’s hand. Not my son’s.’

‘Any hand that eats my fruit, I will twist.’

‘Is that true?’ she says. She is panting now. And the next time she says, ‘Is that true?’ the quiver in her voice is operatic. Thoma puts his finger on his lips and says, ‘Shh.’

‘Take it easy, madam,’ the Pathan says, ‘we are just playing.’

‘Let me play, too, then,’ she says.

‘Shh,’ Thoma says.

‘Let me play this game, Thoma,’ she says, and she sprints inside the house, straight into the kitchen. She emerges with a broom in her hand and runs back to the doorway. She stands with the broom raised, ready to strike. Her chest heaves and her whole body bobs as if she is in a boat. She will hit him, Ousep knows.

The Pathan looks at her with fear masquerading as rage. He raises his hand slowly and points his index finger at her. He looks intently at the broom, which now begins to wag in the air. He lets the boy go, and Thoma runs away down the stairs — not that his life on the ground is going to be any better. The Pathan wags a finger at Ousep. ‘You meet me tomorrow,’ he says and goes away, looking back one last time to assess the woman standing at the door. She marches to the kitchen to update the lemon-yellow walls about what has just happened.

IT MUST BE ALPHA’S father. He holds the door as if he wants to shut it. ‘We are watching a film,’ he says.

‘Alpha asked me to come,’ Ousep says.

The man rebukes the doormat, ‘Who is Alpha?’

‘The cartoonist. This is the address given to me.’

‘Would you be interested in the name his dumb father gave him?’

‘I apologize,’ Ousep says. ‘I know him only as Alpha. What is the name you gave him?’

The man leaves the door open and goes in. Ousep follows him. The small flat is dim and has the odour of a burp. The man knocks on a door and says, ‘Someone has come to see you.’ He goes back to his chair and gapes at the TV. His wife, sitting with her legs folded on the sofa, rocks on her haunches for a moment, as if she is lulling an invisible baby to sleep. The man points to a chair without looking at Ousep.

Ousep sits with the strangers and watches the film as he waits for Alpha to emerge. It is an old Tamil film, which was revolutionary for its time. He forgets its name but he has seen it before.

It is about a beautiful innocent girl. She does not see men as predators, and is very friendly with them, especially the men on her lane. She plays volleyball with them, even kabaddi, she wrestles with them, she goes to their homes, their rooms. Her sari is always falling off her chest, because she is innocent, and the men are often dramatically stunned by her gaping blouse. One day, she turns sad and mature, she becomes very ladylike. The reason for the sudden transformation is that she has become pregnant. She does not know how that has happened. As an innocent girl, she has only recently learned about the whole plumbing of pregnancy. Her parents, who believe her tale, set out to find out which of her half a dozen close male friends on the lane has impregnated their daughter — those men alone had the opportunity. The parents suspect the girl was made unconscious by one of the men and plucked. Every man they investigate turns out to be a good person, a decent, clean-shaven man with strong ideals, who quotes Tamil poetry, who confesses that there were several situations when he was tempted and did very nearly take advantage of the girl but that he did not commit the crime. In the end, the mystery remains unsolved.

The suggestion of the plot is that one of the men is lying, or even that all of them probably slept with her. And the moral of the story is that women should never trust men, even men who appear to be good people in plain sight. Who can argue with that?

‘So you’re the father of Unni Chacko,’ the sullen voice says. Alpha is a tall, slender boy with long hair and a full black beard. He is in tired jeans and a T-shirt that has OM written on it. He looks a lot like Beta, he has the same restive eyes expressing general contempt, but Alpha is much thinner. ‘Look at these people,’ he says, pointing to his parents. ‘Hypnotized by a box that has moving images. Look at these idiots. These two idiots. Look at them. Like drugged animals.’

The man and wife do not react. They stare at the TV. It is as if their son introduces them this way to a visitor every day. The man looks sideways at Ousep for a moment. The woman rocks briefly. Beyond this they show nothing. Ousep feels an uncontrollable urge to laugh. Look, Thoma, another unhappy home.

‘If you want to talk to me, come inside,’ Alpha says. He throws a final look at his parents. ‘Morons,’ he says.

Alpha’s room has four visible objects — a cot, a cupboard, a table and a chair. There is nothing else. The walls are bare and his table clean. Ousep studies the boy with overt interest, and the boy appears to be doing the same with Ousep.

‘Do you believe in God?’ the boy asks.

‘No. What about you?’

‘Unni was a Hindu, do you know that?’

‘Yes, I’ve heard.’

Alpha pats his chest with a tight fist. ‘Hindu,’ he says. ‘A Hindu understands things that others don’t.’

‘What does he understand?’

‘He understands that everything is a hint.’

‘A hint at what?’

‘At more hints, Mr Chacko, and more hints.’

‘What does it lead to?’

‘You’ve started with questions, which is a good thing. It is good,’ the boy says, ‘I was about to tell you that we cannot have a conversation. You must ask me questions. I will answer those questions.’

‘All right. You, too, can ask me questions.’

‘I may not have any questions for you. You are the seeker. What are you, Mr Chacko? You are the seeker. Do not chat. Ask me questions.’

‘What do you do?’ Ousep asks.

‘I do nothing,’ Alpha says.

‘You must do something with your time?’

Alpha points to a shut drawer. ‘A graphic novel,’ he says, ‘I am working on a graphic novel.’

‘That is very ambitious.’

‘No.’

‘As you say, Alpha. What is the story of your graphic novel?’

‘Why do you want to know the story?’

‘I am curious.’

‘Is it important to you that I tell you the story?’

‘No. But I would really like to know the story. What is it called?’

‘Anti-story.’

‘That is the name of the graphic novel?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what is the story?’

Alpha looks at the floor and does not speak for a while. He is probably deciding whether he must tell the story. The boy, obviously, has psychiatric problems. Why was Unni interested in Alpha? Maybe Alpha is an extraordinary comic artist? Unni and Alpha have nothing in common. But when Alpha begins to tell the story of his graphic novel, it sounds like something Unni might have written.

‘In the beginning,’ Alpha says, ‘as in the beginning of the universe, the beginning of time, there is Story and there is Anti-story. Story wanders through the entire universe searching for a Storyteller who would, as you may have guessed, tell the Story.’

It finds a small blue planet that orbits around an average-sized yellow sun in the outer edges of an ordinary whirlpool galaxy. Story tries out many ways to create the Storyteller and arrives at the idea of the carbon body, and after millions of years of creating and discarding species, it finally invents the human ape. Story enters the human body as a hallucination. The purpose of the human race is to pass the hallucination down the ages, across all of eternity.

Meanwhile, Anti-story gets wind of where Story is and what Story has done. So Anti-story infiltrates the human body and becomes thought, which is so powerful that the human race becomes trapped in thought and is unable to see the hallucination of Story any more. The world is now filled with Anti-storytellers who are entranced by thought and logic and the associated hallucinations that thought and logic together create. Thought takes over the world. But there is something about the brain, some kind of an evolutionary glitch. One in a million brains, by pure chance, escapes from thought and sees the original primordial hallucination and becomes the Storyteller. These people are so stunned by the vision that they isolate themselves for exactly thirty-two days, and when they emerge into the world again, something about them has changed. There was a time in the history of man when Storytellers were worshipped by the Anti-storytellers. But the power of logic is so strong now that the world now thinks of Storytellers as mentally ill, so they put them in cages in an asylum.

‘So, the fellowship of Storytellers has to come together and find a way to reveal the original hallucination,’ Alpha says. ‘They have to find a way to tell the Story.’

‘So there are many hallucinations that the human brain sees. And one of the hallucinations of the mind is the original Story?’

‘You are right.’

‘Why can’t the Storytellers just stand on the street and tell the Story?’

‘The Story cannot be transmitted through language. But Anti-story has trapped mankind in language. That’s why it is difficult for the Storytellers to tell the Story. They don’t know how to tell the Story. They can only see the Story.’

‘Why can’t a hallucination be told through language?’

‘There are many ordinary hallucinations that cannot be explained through language.’

‘That can’t be true.’

‘Can you describe the colour red through language, describe red without using its wavelength or comparing it with other colours of the spectrum? If you cannot describe the illusion of red through language, obviously the highest order of hallucination would be impossible to describe through mere words.’

‘Do they succeed, the Storytellers, do they win in the end?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you on the side of Story or Anti-story?’

Alpha laughs. It is a surprising, booming laughter.

‘What about you, Mr Chacko?’

‘I want the Storytellers to win because that appears to be the happy ending.’

Alpha laughs again, and nods his head.

‘Did you and Unni talk about this story?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did you meet Unni?’

‘Beta brought him home.’

‘Have you ever met Somen Pillai?’

‘No.’

‘Alpha, do you know why Unni killed himself?’

‘No.’

‘Can you tell me what you and Unni talked about?’

‘We met only eight times,’ Alpha says. ‘We spoke about this and that, I don’t remember. Yes, we had conversations. But it has been a while.’

‘Still, I am sure you remember something.’

‘We spoke about many things, things that do not interest people. We spoke about the eye, how the eye sees.’

‘How does the eye see?’

‘What the eye really sees, the image, is registered at the back of the retina, at the back of the eye; yet what we see, the visible world, is in front of us. How is that possible? Why is sight in front of us and not at the back of the eye, like a thought?’

‘Why?’

‘Because what we see is a projection of the brain. The world we see is a projection.’

‘What else did you talk about?’

‘What do you mean, “what else”?’

‘I mean what else did you talk about?’

‘Just this and that.’

‘Can you think of something specific? Like the eye.’

‘We spoke about the corpse.’

‘Who is the corpse?’

‘The corpse is a corpse.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You would understand everything if you met Psycho.’

‘Who is Psycho?’

Alpha laughs. He repeats the question — ‘Who is Psycho?’

‘Is Psycho a cartoonist?’

Alpha looks away and laughs hard. ‘Psycho is Psycho,’ he says. ‘He spent a lot of time with Unni. Psycho is different from me. Psycho has conversations. Psycho has very long conversations.’

He writes something on a piece of paper and hands it to Ousep. It says, ‘4 Anna Salai’.

‘Is this an address?’ Ousep asks.

‘You’re a very clever man.’

‘What will I find there?’

‘You will find a white building with six floors. Go to the third floor. On the third floor, there is a long corridor. At the far end of the corridor is a white door. Behind the door sits Psycho.’

‘What does he do, Alpha?’

Alpha laughs and shakes his head. ‘You’ll understand everything when you get there,’ he says.

‘Is this his real name? “Psycho”, is that his real name?’

‘What’s real about a name?’

‘What’s his name, Alpha? You know what I mean.’

‘Yes, I do. His real name, his real real real name, his very real, absolutely truthful name, is Psycho. You have to be very careful with Psycho. He is on the side of the Anti-storytellers.’

‘Does Psycho know why Unni did what he did?’

‘Mr Chacko, you’re not listening to me. You have to be very careful when you meet Psycho. You cannot tell him why you are there. You have to invent reasons. You have to be smart. He is a very dangerous man.’

‘Does Psycho know why Unni did what he did?’

‘I don’t think that bastard knows anything. But Psycho will lead you to the corpse. Only Psycho knows who the corpse is.’

‘Who is the corpse?’

‘I just told you. Only Psycho knows. I have never met the corpse. All I know is that Unni was very close to the corpse.’

‘And what will the corpse tell me?’

‘The corpse will tell you everything you want to know.’

OUSEP FINDS IT HARD to accept what he sees in front of him even though there is no doubt in his mind that he is at the address Alpha had given him. It is a white building with six floors. A giant board over the dark hollow of the porch says ‘Institute of Neurosciences’.

In the waiting area inside there are not more than twenty people and they appear to be in good health. At the reception desk three women in starched cotton saris are in the middle of a conversation about a man they do not like. Behind them is a wooden board that announces the speciality of every floor above. The third floor, the board says, is the Schizophrenia Day Ward and Research Centre.

Ousep takes the stairs. Good for the heart, he says. Did you hear that, Unni? Even Ousep Chacko wants to live. On the third floor there is a long, dim corridor flanked by shut doors, river-green doors. At one end of the corridor, which is now behind Ousep, is the gloom of a yellow wall. The far end is dark, but Ousep can make out a broad white door. There is nobody in the corridor but he can hear voices coming through the walls, sudden solitary laughter, a hard object falling on the floor, soft conversations that do not intend to be whispers. As he walks to the far end, a side door opens and three middle-aged nurses in white frocks walk towards him, laughing and talking in Malayalam about bananas, about yellow bananas and green bananas. As they pass him they look at him with suspicion as if he is a patient who has gone astray. That makes him walk more briskly and call on all his daylight dignity.

As the white door approaches, the corridor gets cleaner, and a short red carpet appears and leads all the way to the door. He can see that there is a nameplate on the door and it is so large that it probably says much more than ‘Psycho’. When he finally arrives at the door he feels that one part of the Alpha puzzle is beginning to fall into place, but he is still not very sure. The nameplate says:

Dr C.Y. Krishnamurthy Iyengar

DM, FRCP (Glas), FRCP (Edin), FRCP (Lond),

FAMS, FACP, FICP FIMSA, FAAN

Neurosurgeon, Neuropsychiatrist

Chairman Emeritus

The Schizophrenia Day Ward and Research Centre

Ousep considers the door for a moment. Behind the door, somewhere inside the room, sits a doctor, a grand old man in all probability, a neurosurgeon, a neuropsychiatrist, whom Alpha calls Psycho. From what Ousep has seen, Alpha is not a normal person. The nature of the association between Alpha and a neuropsychiatrist is not hard to guess. It is natural that the boy would imagine Psycho as an adversary. But then Ousep does not want to dismiss Alpha’s warning. He has to decide. Should he reveal to the man the reason why he is here, or should he play.

He opens the door and finds a surprisingly large room, with no windows. In the middle of the room is an ancient wooden desk, and behind the desk sits a small old man with rich silver hair that has been neatly combed back. His head is bent, he is reading something engrossing on his lap, and if he has heard the door open he is not curious to know the nature of the intrusion. Ousep walks in and stands still. The old man is in a checked cotton shirt buttoned at the collar and the cuffs. There are eight fountain pens clipped to his shirt pocket and one small black object, probably some kind of a torch. There are three silver medals pinned on the third button. The room is filled with shields and framed citations, most of which contain the unsmiling face of a younger man who has undoubtedly become the person in front of him.

Iyengar lifts his head and is not surprised by what he sees. He does not stare in incomprehension, does not ask any questions. He points to a chair. This is the old man in The Album of the Dead, one of the four unidentified characters in the series. Ousep tries to assume an apologetic inferior face that still retains considerable dignity. Iyengar puts the book he was reading on the clean desk. It is the Bhagavatgita, in Sanskrit. An old philosophical man with a lot of time, which is a good sign.

‘Dr Iyengar, my name is Ousep, I am the chief reporter with UNI. I apologize for coming here without an appointment.’

‘What is UNI?’ the doctor asks, leaning back and looking amused. His voice is deep, but feeble.

‘United News of India, it is a news agency, like PTI.’

‘I get it now.’

‘I am working on a story. A feature story on schizophrenia in Madras. The condition of schizophrenics.’

‘The condition?’

‘How people with this condition go through life, what is being done to help them.’

‘So, Ousep, you are going to write a story about schizophrenics, and what you write will be carried by all the newspapers that subscribe to UNI. Is that correct?’

‘That’s correct.’

‘But this is not news, it is not a current affairs story. As you say, you are working on a feature story, which means it can appear at any time. It can appear in a week, in a month. Is that correct?’

‘That’s correct.’

‘Would it appear in The Hindu?’

‘That’s possible.’

‘But you don’t know?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’ve never seen a feature story that has the name of a news agency under it. I see PTI stories all the time, which are all news stories.’

‘Yes, it is a bit odd but I am very interested in the subject.’

‘Why?’

‘I just am interested.’

‘Ousep, I have a friend. He is a sexologist. Do you know what a sexologist does?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Because I don’t know what a sexologist does. He meets a lot of journalists every week. Senior journalists like you, elegant men, smart men, but more importantly they are not young men. They go to his office, just turn up, as you have come here to see me. They tell him that they want to know something about the sexual problems of men and women in Madras. The sexual condition of men and women. They tell him they are working on a story. That’s what they tell him. But he knows what they want. They want to get their penises up and they want a free and discreet consultation.’

‘I am here for the story.’

‘I am not disputing that. I am merely telling you something I know about journalists. Do you have any mental condition?’

‘No.’

‘Do you suspect that any of your family members has a mental condition?’

‘I am not here for a free consultation.’

‘You’re here to do a story.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you came without an appointment because I am an old man, unimportant, useless.’

‘That’s far from the truth.’

‘I am sure you interviewed all the bright young neurologists in Madras before coming to me.’

‘That’s not true. You are, in fact, the first person I am interviewing for the story. You can verify this. You belong to a small, tight community. You can call up a few people and find out.’

‘Why am I the first person you chose to meet?’

‘I wanted to meet the patriarch first and then move downwards.’

‘You wanted to meet the patriarch first and move downwards. All right, Ousep, if that is what you want.’

‘Before we start, Doctor, I am very curious,’ Ousep says, taking out his scribbling pad and pen from his trouser pocket. ‘Why do you carry eight pens in your pocket?’

‘Because they are mine.’

‘And is there a special reason why those medals are pinned to your shirt?’

‘These are medals of honour, Ousep. One is from the American Neurological Association, another is from the American Academy of Neurology, and the third one is from the Indian International Neuropsychiatry Association. I like wearing them. I know how this looks. I know what you are thinking. You think a patient is sitting in the doctor’s chair. My patients, they like it when they see me, they like the fact that I don’t look normal, that I don’t look like one of those people from the other side. They think I am on their side.’

‘I see you were reading the Gita.’

‘Yes, you see a lot, it seems to me. If you are an Indian, a real Indian, Ousep, you never start reading the Gita. You only reread it. You reread it at different points of your life and you see things you never saw before. It is the greatest subplot ever written. I feel peaceful when I read. I feel good. I am a bit lost these days, Ousep. That’s why I am with the Gita.’

‘Why are you lost?’

‘My wife died three months ago. Have you heard this joke, Ousep? “My love, I feel terrible without you. It is like being with you.”’

Ousep lets out a good-natured man-to-man chuckle.

‘Do you find it funny?’ the old man asks.

‘Yes, it’s funny.’

‘Humour is a form of fact, isn’t it? That’s why it works. Do you know why we laugh?’

‘Why do we laugh?’

‘Our laugh evolved from a ferocious face that early man used to make. He made that face when he was not sure if a danger had passed. That face in time became human laughter. We laugh because humour assaults us with a slice of truth and we sense danger. That is the reason why people laugh in an aeroplane — when there is turbulence and people are scared, they laugh, don’t they? Have you ever been inside a plane?’

‘Yes, a few times.’

‘You must be an important journalist, then. My wife, she had never been inside a plane. Isn’t it sad? That a person has died without ever flying.’

‘It’s sad, yes.’

‘Do you know anyone who has died without ever flying?’

‘Strange question, Doctor.’

‘Do you know anyone who has died without ever flying?’

‘So many, there are so many.’

Ousep wonders what Unni would have thought of flying. He imagines him as a smart young man in a serious blue shirt, very preoccupied with something important, strapped in a seat, looking at the world below through the plane’s window.

Iyengar rolls a pen between his palms in some kind of an exercise, and says, ‘Who were you thinking about?’

‘No one.’

‘Someone who has never flown?’

‘I was not thinking about anything specific actually, Doctor.’

‘I was thinking about my wife,’ Iyengar says. ‘I think about her all the time.’

‘You must love her very much.’

‘All Tamil Brahmin women of an age hate men. Did you know that?’

‘Is that true?’

‘That’s what my wife said. And she said — you know what she said? — she said she hated me, that she always hated me. Those were her last words. I was a monster, apparently. People look at an old man and they think he is an innocuous fool, that he can be toyed with, that he is an idiot whose time and dignity have no meaning. He can be tricked. But old women, they have a different story to tell, don’t they?’

Iyengar, obviously, is no fool. That much he has conveyed. He probably senses that Ousep is hiding something. Ousep wonders whether he should just reveal the truth and get on with it.

‘I am such a silly old man,’ Iyengar says. ‘I’ve been talking rubbish. Like silly old men. You’re here for a purpose. Tell me, Ousep, what do you want to know?’

Iyengar takes his card from a stack on the table and hands it to him. Ousep has no choice but to hand him his own card. The doctor studies it but there is no sign of recollection on his face, no hint of remembering a name from the past.

‘Ousep Chacko,’ Iyengar says. ‘Yes, Ousep Chacko, chief reporter of UNI, what would you like to know?’

‘Maybe we can start with an interesting case you’re working on right now.’

‘Interesting?’

‘A case that has fascinated you recently?’

‘I know what you mean. Interesting case. There is a case of two sisters. Would you like to know?’

‘Yes.’

Iyengar looks at the empty pen-holder on his desk and says, ‘One sister is thirty and the other is twenty-eight. A few weeks ago the two sisters were found almost dead in their house. The milkman found them. Which is strange. Usually, in such cases, the maid finds them, isn’t that true, Ousep? The maid knocks on the door, nobody opens the door, she breaks a window and peeps in and there she sees someone lying motionless. Isn’t that how these stories usually start, Ousep?’

‘That’s true.’

‘But these sisters, they didn’t have a servant. So, it was the milkman who found them. Every day he would drop the milk packets outside their door. Not a very observant man, this guy. He took a week to figure out that the milk packets he had been dropping outside the door had not been touched. He decided to knock. When they did not open, he looked through the window and saw a leg on the floor, behind a cupboard. He broke open the front door and went in. He found the girls lying on the floor in the kitchen, mumbling something. He got some neighbours together and they took the girls to a clinic. The doctors there soon realized that the girls had almost starved to death. They fed them through tubes, and soon they referred the sisters to the Schizophrenia Centre because the girls were saying that they heard voices. When you hear voices, you come to me.’

The sisters lived alone. Their father had died when they were little girls. And their mother had died a few months earlier by consuming poison because she could not marry off her daughters.

‘I asked the girls why they had starved when obviously they had enough money to eat. They said that they had been hearing the voice of their mother and she had been warning them that someone was poisoning their food, a mysterious hand was poisoning their food, poisoning everything. Both the girls heard the voice and the voice said the same things to both of them.

‘I had a fair idea what was going on and what emerged did not surprise me very much. The elder sister was schizophrenic. The younger one was normal, absolutely normal. The elder sister has a history. Right from when she was a child she saw visions, heard voices. She had a special bond with Lord Krishna, who sat on her bed every night and guarded her from Indra, who was trying to rape her. But she went to work like any other person. She worked in a small library. Since she was a bit off, it was hard for her widowed mother to get her married. Until the elder one got married, the younger one could not be married. So one day their mother felt that she had had enough of this world and decided to die. She ate a lot of rat poison and to be sure drank half a bottle of phenyl.

‘The girls sat at home mourning their mother. It is not unusual for two women, in these circumstances, to completely cut themselves off from the rest of the world for a few days.

‘They were depressed, naturally. Also, society, the world, was responsible for their mother’s death. That was how they saw it. So they lost interest in going out of their house. They sat in the house and did nothing. After some time, the elder sister began to hear voices. She started telling her sister that their mother was saying that she had not killed herself, someone had poisoned her, and that the girls should not eat anything until the danger had passed. The elder sister stopped eating and she kept telling the other girl about the voices. One day the younger sister, too, started hearing the voices. The elder sister had transferred her delusion to the younger sister. And now they found confirmation of their delusion in each other. It is a classic case of shared delusion. Folie-à-deux. The Folly of Two.’

‘The elder sister has a history of hearing voices, seeing visions?’ Ousep says.

‘Yes. She is schizophrenic. We are treating her.’

‘And the younger one. She is a normal girl but she began to hear the voices.’

‘She is absolutely normal to the best of my knowledge.’

‘This is strange. Can a schizophrenic person transfer her delusion to a normal person?’

Iyengar looks at Ousep with meaning. It appears to Ousep that he has said something that has given him away, but he is not very sure.

‘Happens all the time, Ousep,’ Iyengar says, turning his swivel chair to the wall and leaning back comfortably. ‘You will have seen it in your own life without recognizing it as the Folly of Two. Cases that are not as dramatic as the story of the two sisters, but still cases of shared delusion. Happens a lot in families, especially between husbands and wives. Man keeps losing his job, never survives in an office for more than a few months. He thinks the world is against him, he thinks he is too good for the world. Wife begins to believe that too. He has transferred his delusion to her. They go through life thinking the world is out to harm them, that someone has cursed them, that there is a force working against them. But in reality the guy loses his job because he is not good enough.’

‘But this can happen among normal couples, too,’ Ousep says. ‘A man need not be delusional or have a neurological condition to fool his wife. Maybe he is just an idiot. An idiot who loses his job every few months because he is incompetent, and he lies to his wife about why he loses his job.’

‘Yes. But would she believe him?’

‘What do you mean, Doctor? Why wouldn’t she believe him? If he is a good liar, she would believe him.’

‘Can you fool your wife?’

‘I don’t see your point, Doctor. Husbands fool their wives all the time. Do you dispute that?’

‘Ousep, we arrive at an intriguing aspect of the Folly of Two. You have to listen to me carefully. Imagine the two sisters. Imagine the elder sister is you. You as in you — Ousep Chacko, who is not schizophrenic. We assume that though I don’t know your medical history. So, in the place of the schizophrenic elder sister who hears voices, it is you. You do not hear voices because you are not a nut. Now, imagine I ask you to fool the younger sister, I ask you to lie to her about the voices. And you lie to her. You tell her that you have heard your mother’s voice and that the voice has instructed both of you to stop eating. You keep saying this to her. You do this for days. Would the younger sister start hearing the voices?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you feel, what does your instinct say?’

‘I would be very surprised if she starts hearing voices just because I tell her that I am hearing voices.’

‘I have studied this, Ousep. I have studied the phenomenon in this very building. Even if you are the best actor in the world, there is only a very small chance that the younger sister will begin to hear voices just because you say there are voices. You are as persistent as the elder sister, you say everything she would have said, you do everything she would have done, but you cannot make the normal younger sister hear voices by lying about the voices.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because to fool a person, it appears, you have to first fool yourself. That is at the heart of all human influences. That is why the elder sister can make the younger sister hear the voices, and you cannot do that. A delusion is many times more powerful than a lie. The distinction between a delusion and a lie is the very difference between a successful saint and a fraud. Why does one man succeed in convincing half the country that he is God while other third-rate magicians like him fail, or even get arrested or beaten up? Why do some evangelists do better than other evangelists? Rationalists think all god-men are frauds. That is the problem with rationalists. They are not rational enough. The world cannot be conned so easily by frauds. Great god-men are great because they really believe they are holy. And all our gods, Ousep, are not lies. They existed. All our gods, from the beginning of time, have been men with psychiatric conditions. And their delusions were so deep, they passed them on. God and believer were then locked in the Folly of Two, they still are. Sometimes in this equation the god could be a political theorist in the grip of a powerful idea, or an economist, a dictator, even a particle physicist. They can influence the world not because they are right, or because they are conmen. They can influence the world because they are deeply deluded. The human delusion has that extraordinary property. It transmits itself. Especially when it does not have to fight a powerful existing myth, a delusion moves from one neurological system to another, it spreads. This is a world that is locked in the Folly of Two.’

As an afterthought, he includes social workers in the list of the deluded. ‘Some of them, our living saints, do not realize that they are actually sadists who enjoy watching human misery from very close.’

His eyes grow ponderous and he smiles as if he has experienced a happy memory. ‘A boy once told me something, and he said it in this very room. He was sitting where you are sitting right now. He told me that the very objective of a delusion is to spread, to colonize other neurological systems. That is its purpose. There is no evidence to support this but it does appear sometimes that the boy was right.’

‘Who was the boy?’

Iyengar waves his hand in a dismissive way. Ousep decides not to push. He says, ‘From what you say, Doctor, it seems a person can pass his delusion to more than one individual. So it is not just the Folly of Two. Is that correct?’

Iyengar is about to say something but stops himself. Ousep knows that his questions are somehow exposing him but he cannot understand how that can be. Or is Iyengar just a dramatic man, a cinematic man, who has learnt to intrigue people with cinematic moments? Ousep would never underestimate the power of Tamil cinema. Madras is full of actor clones, full of acts and moments that people have plagiarized from films.

‘Ousep, how did you come here?’

‘I don’t understand your question.’

‘Let me imagine the chain of events. You decide to write a story about schizophrenics in Madras. You decide to meet the patriarch first, as you say. But then you don’t know what I am. You have done no research, it seems. Very odd for a senior journalist like you. Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to embarrass you. I am trying to understand the situation that we are in. You wanted to meet Dr Krishnamurthy Iyengar but you have no idea who he is, what he means to his profession. When neurologists think of me, do you know what they think of?’

‘I should admit that I’ve been incompetent in my research.’

‘Or you just walked into this building not knowing what to expect, and you knocked on a door. But why?’

‘It may appear that way, I admit, but I came here looking for you.’

‘I believe that, Ousep.’

‘If you’re not too offended, and I am truly very embarrassed to say this, can you tell me what you are, Doctor?’

Iyengar laughs like a child. ‘Of course, I would love to. Isn’t that what I was getting at? My wife always complained that she and I only talked about me. One day she told me, “Let’s go to a good restaurant and talk about you, you and you.”’

Iyengar laughs again, drinks a glass of water waiting for him on the desk. ‘All my life I have used the Folly of Two to study mass delusion,’ he says. He speaks softly, he is reflective, even proud perhaps. ‘That is my rebellion. That is what I am. Why is this important? The society of neuroscientists does not recognize mass delusion as a psychiatric condition. What does this mean? This means, the society of neuroscientists would admit that all evidence points to the fact that God is a figment of man’s delusion, yet believers in God, who form most of humanity, cannot be considered delusional. This is a ridiculous position. From the point of view of neuroscience, sanity is a majority condition, and a mass delusion is not a delusion but merely human nature. I don’t agree. I have never agreed. What they are saying is that if there is a pandemic and all of mankind is infected, that must be considered normal and a healthy human a freak. That is rubbish. That is why I fought for the inclusion of mass delusion as a part of neuropsychiatry, but I failed. I was ridiculed. Why did I fight, Ousep? Because I believe that there is absolute sanity, there is a human condition that is perfectly sane. But it is a minority condition, which means, from the point of view of neuroscience, it would be in the spectrum of insanity. Somewhere in this world there are people who are in an extraordinary mental state, an extraordinary state of sanity. And they would be considered odd.’

‘What is this state, Doctor?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘So you have not met anybody who is in an extraordinary state of sanity?’

Iyengar answers with a blank face. ‘A neuropsychiatrist would be the last person to meet such a being, isn’t that true, Ousep?’

‘That’s true.’

‘But neuroscience does recognize the delusion of a group of people as a form of mental instability. There is the Folly of Three, and the Folly of Four and even the Folly of Many, which is sometimes used to describe the mass hysteria in the adolescent girls of a school, or the sort of people and their master who wait for alien contact, or wait for the arrival of The One. But they all come under the basic principles of the Folly of Two. There is usually a primary agent, whose powerful delusion is passed on to the secondary agents, and they start corroborating each other’s delusions. They start seeing visions, hearing things.’

‘So it is never equal. Two people in the Folly of Two are never equally deluded.’

‘Rarely.’

‘So there is always a primary and a secondary?’

‘Yes. A primary agent and a secondary agent.’

‘Alpha-Beta.’

Iyengar nods, drums the table with his fingers, fixes Ousep with an indecipherable stare.

‘I am reminded of an old case. Not very old, actually. It is another classic case of the Folly of Two. Can I tell you?’

‘Yes, you must, I am grateful.’

‘I know you are, Ousep. I know. There were two brothers, twins, not identical twins but fraternal twins. When I met them they were in their late teens, which is when these things happen to boys. Adolescence is a very dangerous period in the lives of philosophically oriented males. The brothers, they were cartoonists, very good cartoonists. They showed me their comics. The comics were about powerful supervillains fighting underdog superheroes. Not surprising at all, you will understand why. I don’t remember the names of the boys now but I remember what they called themselves — Alpha and Beta. That is how they signed their comics. Strange, because that was what they turned out to be. Alpha and Beta.

‘Alpha was schizophrenic. He believed that the early human race was in the trance of a great vision, which has now been lost. He believed, and he probably still believes, that some people, by pure chance, see the original vision, a vision without thought, a vision of the entire universe that is immeasurably beautiful. Meanwhile, the others, almost all of humanity, are trapped in what is generally considered human nature. Some days, Alpha heard voices, voices of ancient people who have seen the great hallucination, guiding him, asking him to lock himself in a room for days and meditate so that he could prepare himself to see what they saw. Alpha passed his delusion on to Beta. Beta was not entirely normal but as a doctor I would not diagnose him as schizophrenic. But, under the influence of Alpha, he started believing in the vision. Some days, he, too, started seeing visions and hearing voices. The boys stopped going to college. They started acting weird. Their father forced them to meet me.

‘The boys did not like me much. They thought I was with the dark forces, they thought my purpose was to brand people like them mad and lock them up. They refused to meet me but their father kept forcing them. One day, Alpha walked into this room and picked up a paperweight and threw it at me. He missed, fortunately. But then he held me by my shirt and started shaking me as if the truth would then spill out of my ears. I yelled like a fool. The peons came and saved me.’

‘When was this, Doctor?’

‘About three years ago.’

‘Was that the last time you saw Alpha? The day he attacked you?’

‘Yes, that was the last time. But a few weeks later something interesting happened. Alpha sent a message through a friend.’

Iyengar opens the drawer of his table and takes out a folder, which contains handwritten letters, short printed notes, medical certificates and yellowing pages from Sanskrit books. He takes out a sheet of paper from the folder and hands it to Ousep. ‘Alpha sent this,’ he says.

On the sheet is a brilliant caricature of Iyengar. At the bottom of the portrait is a short message: ‘I am sorry.’ And it is signed ‘Alpha’. But the style of the cartoon very clearly points to Unni. Unni’s caricatures are austere portraits, he did not exaggerate any part of the face, he was true to all dimensions and there was no attempt at humour. It was as if he found the human face funny enough, so he did not try hard. The quality of the paper, its density and colour, is the same as the pages of Unni’s notebooks. Also, from what Ousep has seen of Alpha, he does not appear to be the sort of person who would care to apologize. In all probability, the messenger was Unni and the message was his.

Iyengar asks a surprising question. ‘Do you think the portrait was done by Alpha?’ Ousep decides to be silent. He realizes that the conversation is not in his control any more, it probably never was.

‘The friend whom Alpha had sent was a cartoonist,’ Iyengar says, extending his hand to retrieve the portrait and carefully inserting it back in the folder. ‘I forget the boy’s name but I remember his face very well. A handsome boy, there was something about his face, his stare. He was younger than Alpha. He told me he was seventeen.’

The boy starts a conversation with the doctor about the Folly of Two. ‘That boy knew a lot about the subject. He obviously had been reading about it. He even knew about my position on mass delusions.’

At some point, the boy tells the doctor about his hypothesis — that the objective of every human delusion is to spread to other brains. Iyengar, naturally, does not take an adolescent’s theory seriously enough to offer a scientific opinion, but he enjoys the conversation that follows.

‘It was a rich conversation. I enjoyed talking to him.’

The boy asks him whether there is a possibility that enlightenment is just a schizophrenic condition. All the sages who turned into anthills beneath tropical trees in the search for truth, and all the saints and the gods, what if they were just schizophrenics? Iyengar accepts, with complex qualifiers, that he has seen patients who exhibit the enlightenment syndrome, who believe that they are one with the universe, who feel that their bodies are mere vehicles of an eternal condition. Iyengar has seen people who believe they are gods with many hands, demons with many heads, giants of astronomical sizes, even illuminated white doves that speak. He has met men whose dreams contain coded messages from heaven. The boy finds it funny that men and women whose mental conditions have specific names in neuropsychiatry today were, in another time, gods. He finds it funny, and strangely satisfying, that the pursuit of truth is in all likelihood a path left behind by ancient schizophrenics.

‘As we were chatting, at some point the boy probably realized that I could not continue talking to him. I had work to do. But he wanted to hold my attention. So he had to make himself valuable. He had researched me, Ousep, he knew a lot about me, he knew what I would fall for. He told me, “Doctor, I know someone with the Cotard Delusion.” I was hooked. The boy had me. The Cotard Delusion is a very rare form of schizophrenia. It is also called the Corpse Syndrome. A person with this condition would feel as if he were a living corpse, that he was rotting inside, that he was actually dead and hence eternal. It is a strange philosophical state, but also an extreme case of depression, and the only reason the corpse does not kill himself is that he thinks he is dead anyway. I had never directly interviewed a person with the Cotard Delusion. Not many doctors in the world have. And here was a boy in my room who claimed that he knew someone with the condition. Someone very close to him, he said, but did not reveal any details.’

The boy and Iyengar meet several times over four weeks. The boy wants to understand the world of delusions, and Iyengar wants to meet the corpse. They spend hours together, Iyengar even lets the adolescent meet some of his patients. They form a relationship, a bizarre fellowship. Every time they meet, Iyengar asks the boy about the corpse and the boy says that the corpse does not want to meet the doctor yet. ‘Then one day, the boy simply vanishes. He stops coming. I don’t see him again. This was three years ago.’

Iyengar leans back in his chair, crosses his fingers. ‘Now, Ousep, I’ve told you everything you may want to know. Is there something you would like to tell me?’

‘The boy’s name is Unni.’

‘Unni, yes, that was his name. Unni Chacko.’

The doctor leans forward, and asks in a gentle tone, but without compassion or curiosity or fear, ‘Where is Unni?’

‘He is dead.’

Iyengar nods. ‘How did he die?’

‘He killed himself.’

Iyengar nods again. ‘When was this, Ousep?’

‘Three years ago. Sixteenth May 1987.’

‘And you have been trying to find out why he died?’

‘Yes. One of the people I met was Alpha. He asked me to meet you. He said you would know who the corpse is. And the corpse would know why Unni did what he did.’

‘How did Alpha know about the corpse?’

‘Unni used to talk about the corpse. He had told several people about the corpse.’

‘So the corpse does exist. He was not lying.’

‘Yes. He knew a corpse. I was hoping you would know who that is.’

‘I am sorry, Ousep. I don’t know.’

‘You don’t seem very surprised by his death, Doctor.’

‘In my line of work I have no room to be surprised. But if it is grief that you are actually asking about, I will deal with it when I am alone, which is most of the time.’

Ousep’s scribbling pad and pen lie on the desk like the props of a farce. He puts them back in his trouser pockets, which makes Iyengar smile. ‘There is something else I want to ask you, Doctor,’ Ousep says. ‘Unni used to play a prank with people. He would ask a person to think of a two-digit odd number. The chances of his guessing the number right were roughly one in forty-five. He would always guess the number as thirty-three. That way, by pure chance, he would get it right sometimes. There are people who still think Unni could read minds. They don’t remember that he had asked them to think of a two-digit odd number, that he had reduced the odds; they only remember that Unni had somehow read what was in their mind. Why do you think Unni did it?’

Iyengar shakes his head. ‘I’ve no idea, Ousep. But listen, not everything he did need have any relevance to his death. He was an adolescent. He discovered a great prank. There is probably nothing more to it.’

They sit in silence, without any discomfort between them. The old man, too, is remembering Unni perhaps. He puts his elbows on the desk and asks, ‘Is there anybody you know who was very close to Unni who appears to fit the description I gave you of the Cotard Delusion? Anybody? Family, friends, the guard in your building, it could be anybody.’

‘No.’

‘The boy told me that he was very close to the corpse. It is highly probable that the corpse would know something important about him.’

‘Can you take a guess, Doctor? Why would Unni kill himself?’

‘I cannot, Ousep. I am as clueless as you are. I gather you have interviewed everyone who matters.’

‘Yes.’

‘Except the corpse?’

‘Yes. Except the corpse.’

‘And there is nobody you know who could be the corpse?’

‘Did Unni ever tell you about a boy called Somen Pillai?’

‘No. Who is Somen Pillai?’

‘He was Unni’s closest friend. But I have not been able to meet him. He does not want to meet me. Every time I go to his house, his parents send me back saying he is not at home.’

‘Can you describe this person to me?’

‘I’ve met him only once and that was three years ago. He was shy, he did not talk much. He did not always look me in the eye. That is all I can say about him.’

‘You know nothing more about him?’

‘All his classmates say he spoke very rarely. When he was in a room it was as if he did not exist, he was one of those invisible types.’

‘Was his hair neatly combed?’

‘Yes, it was combed.’

‘Did he have a hairstyle?’

‘Nothing flamboyant.’

‘And his clothes? They were clean and smart?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he use the word “I” to refer to himself? Was he aware of his self?’

‘I don’t remember,’ Ousep says.

‘Did he have plans? Did he have a concept of the future, his own future?’

‘I can’t be sure.’

‘Still,’ Iyengar says, leaning back and resting his head comfortably on the chair, ‘he could be the corpse. There is a corpse in this boy, I feel.’