The Illicit Happiness of Other People (16 page)

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

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

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

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

‘Are you drawing me?’

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

‘I’ve better things to do, Unni.’

‘Just twenty seconds.’

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

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

‘Just ten seconds.’

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

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

‘I am not doing this, Unni.’

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

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

‘I have good fingers?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Just answer my question.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What is MPC?’

‘Maths-Physics-Chemistry.’

‘I see.’

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

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

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

‘What did you chat about?’

‘Nothing, nothing.’

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

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