The Illicit Happiness of Other People (31 page)

‘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?’