The Illicit Happiness of Other People (4 page)

The moment Unni’s head hit the ground, what was she
doing? She has thought about this many times. She hopes it was not the moment when she was trying not to laugh as the prayer group raised its cries to the heavens, or when she approached one of the ladies for a loan, or when she tried to smile in shame as her request was being politely declined. She hopes he had not fallen when she was in the prayer group because she is not proud of what she does there. She is the spy of the parish priest, the mole who brings him news about the Catholic sheep that are increasingly flocking to Pentecostal evangelists. That is what Mariamma does in her spare time, and she does it because the priest waives the school fees, instructs the Sacred Heart Family Store to give her anything she wants on credit as long as she clears the dues every two months.

She hopes she was doing something dignified when the last sigh of breath left the lungs of her child; she hopes she was walking back home like a good mother, thinking about what meal to cook for two boys who ate so much.

When Unni was a little boy he was deeply interested in getting married. He was just five then and he was willing to wait till he reached the legal age but not a day more. He was so desperate to be married that she often used it to get her way. ‘Unni, if you don’t brush your teeth I won’t get you married.’ That was enough to send him running to the bathroom. How did that boy grow so strong?

He spoke a lot about death but not in a dark way as people now claim. One morning he stood in the doorway of the kitchen, bare-chested as he always was when he was at home. He had red spots all over his firm athletic chest because he was the type mosquitoes would bite. He told her that he had had a very funny thought. As he spoke he ran his thumbs over her forehead, a habit he had picked up when he was around seven, believing that the lines on her forehead were worries and that
he could make them vanish by straightening the creases. ‘People want to be happy, don’t they?’ he said. ‘They are desperate to be happy, aren’t they? But look at how many things have to go right in a person’s life for that. Your spouse has to be all right. Your children should not die before your time. And your grandchildren should not have polio or something. They, too, should not die young, of course. And their children, and their children, even if they come after you are long gone, they have to be all right. Everyone has to turn out fine. So many lives have to turn out right. What have you started, Mariamma Chacko, do you realize what you have started by having children? A whole line of humanity that would not have appeared without you. Surely, things would go wrong somewhere?’

And he said something strange. ‘But still, if I die, imagine I die,’ he said, ‘you would be sad, I know. Of course, you will be sad. But not as deeply as people would presume. In this world, it is very hard to escape happiness. That’s how it is.’

The boy thought too much, he was full of ideas. And he told her everything. He was not like the other boys, he did not treat his mother as an idiot who made food. He loved talking to her.

Sometimes he would say, ‘Come, let’s find the meaning of life.’ And he would hold his chin and look at the floor, pretending to be in deep thought. After a few seconds he would shake his head and say, ‘No, couldn’t find it.’ And they would laugh, always laugh.

Other days he was more serious about these matters. He told her that there were people who walked among them who knew something, something very important, but they could not explain. He really wanted to believe that. If he heard of a person who behaved in an extraordinary way, he would become very curious, he would try to find out more, even loiter near their homes. That’s why some people thought Unni was a bit odd himself.

He told her about a man who lived not very far away. He was a good man, an ordinary man. A good father and a good husband, which were terms used very often in her house, as a rebuke, a longing or satire, depending on who was talking. The man returned from work one day, had his dinner as he always did, played with his children and went to bed. He had two children, a girl and a boy, which emphasized his normalcy. Next morning he told his wife and children that he was going away for ever, that he could not explain why he was going away. He left in his nightclothes, taking nothing with him, not even his toothbrush. He never came back.

Unni narrated these stories as if he had a faint idea where such men were going and what they hoped to do with the rest of their lives. Some days, she saw Unni standing on the balcony, looking carefully at everything around him. He told her there were rogues among the birds, too, who went against the natural flow of life, who behaved in unexpected ways. It is a clue, he said, and he said that with a shy smile. ‘Something is going on, Mother.’ Maybe he was just a boy who liked to look at life around him and he invented the mysteries to grant a greater meaning to an idleness that was not tolerated any more in the new nervous city where a boy had so much maths to learn. She told him, ‘You must look, Unni, you must just stand and look at life for hours. If you were born in a village as I was, you would not need a reason, you would not need the high infidel thoughts that are not sanctioned by the pope.’

There was so much peace in her boy. That was why the mosquitoes drank from him. He slept without moving an inch, like a corpse.

The murmur of the men rises. Mariamma pats her sari, and goes to the kitchen balcony to see what has happened. The
commotion has naturally charmed all the women of Block A to their tiny balconies, where the sun is unbearable at this time of day. In normal circumstances they appear here at noon only to hang their secrets out to dry. This is the rear side of the building and there is an imagined discretion to all activities here, unlike at the front, which apparently faces the world.

As she is on the third floor she has a good view of the doctor’s house in the neighbouring plot, which shares a wall with Block A. It is a small independent house with a proud woman’s rose garden. Its door is wide open and all around the jute doormat that says ‘Welcome’ there are lots of footwear, chiefly male footwear. Several men are standing in the garden and talking among themselves with their arms folded. The signs are unmistakable but the women of Block A decide to ask what has happened anyway. They lean over the balcony railings, hold their chests to keep their saris from falling and whisper their queries. The men walk down the garden towards the common wall as if they are about to urinate, which is not beyond them. They look up and whisper to the women what has happened. And the chatter of women begins, which drives away the sparrows.

The women stand on their balconies and discuss the matter with the women on the other balconies. Some of them lean dangerously, with half their bodies in the air, to speak to women directly below, who in turn are twisted around their spines as they look up. They speak diagonally too. They also peep through the windows of their neighbours to announce the news to the old, who are probably lying on their hard beds and begging to know what has happened. And word soon spreads that the smart young doctor has been found dead in his chair, his Walkman attached to his ears, a feeble music still coming from it.

Those who live on the ground floor of Block A, whose view is hindered by the wall, have moved to the homes that are on the higher floors. They may have gone without any clever ruses. Just rang the bell, and walked to the view in brisk gloom.

Word now spreads that the doctor, whose age they had never known, was forty-two years old. It is somehow appropriate that the age of such a fine man must be an even number. Late in the morning, when his wife had left home for the market, there was nothing wrong with him. He seemed fine. When she returned after an hour and rang the doorbell, there was no response. She peeped through a window to look inside and found him sitting in his chair with his eyes open. He was not moving. She tossed a brinjal at him, which hit him, but he did not react. She ran to a neighbour for help, and soon several men appeared outside her house. They broke open the door.

This is how it happens, always. Every now and then, they hear these stories, which are all the same. The wife rings the bell and the door does not open. It is broken by the neighbours. Inside, they find, in poses that are generally granted only to the living, the corpse of a man who was in the middle of a routine. In fact, the children know these stories too, and their greatest fear is that they will return from school one day and find a lot of footwear outside their door.

A hush falls; it appears that something important is about to happen. The women wait, but nothing happens. So the murmur returns, and word spreads that someone has gone to fetch the doctor’s only child, a girl of fourteen, who is at school. She will not be immediately told about her father’s death. She will be led out of her classroom on some other pretext so that she does not faint or wail on the streets. She will soon appear at the mouth of the narrow lane that leads to her house and walk down the path, unaware that her life has changed, wondering
why so many people are standing on their balconies and staring at her. She will be here soon, in a sky-blue pinafore. And everybody will get to see a rare spectacle – of a girl who is about to learn that her father is dead.

Women from the other three blocks of Balaji Lane have begun to arrive, and the swarms of housewives on the balconies of the higher floors begin to swell. Chairs too must have come out because some people have now lost their height. One woman sombrely hands carrots to another woman on the next balcony. The chatter grows and the air is filled with the little things they know about heart attacks. There is probably no Tamil word for it yet. They say it in English – Heart Attack. Some who are prone to eloquence call it ‘cardiac arrest’. In the buzzing hive, Mariamma stands alone. Nobody speaks to her.

She wonders why a woman would go to the vegetable market in this unearthly heat, why would a woman go to the market at noon? She looks carefully at the porch of the dead doctor’s house. There is no bag there, no vegetables. A woman returns from the market and rings the doorbell. Her husband does not respond. She peeps through a window and finds him sitting in a chair motionless, his eyes wide open. What would she do? She would drop the bag. If her purse is in it, she may take it out. That is acceptable. But she would leave the bag there. And she would scream for help. But nobody heard a woman scream. It was the time of day when one could hear even the sudden wind from the aged in other houses. Even if she had run quietly to the neighbours, being a slim, refined woman and all that, where was the bag? Neighbours broke open the door, and as she ran in she took the vegetables inside? Or, later, as she was wailing beside the corpse of her husband, the neighbours took the bag in? All this is against human nature. But then Mariamma asks, ‘Mariammo, what are you suggesting?’

Mariamma is not suggesting anything. She is just thinking. As a girl who grew up far away from the city, in a forest of rubber trees on a giant hill, she remembers the time when men were strong and they moved like alluring beasts. When a man died young those days, in mysterious circumstances, people looked carefully at his wife. Now, things are different, nobody is surprised when a man goes young, people have given a name to such a death.

What she is actually getting at is a question she has asked many times. Will Ousep Chacko die this way one day? Of natural causes? She would return from church on a quiet Sunday, and she would ring the doorbell and he would not answer. And the door would be broken down, without much damage hopefully, if it were broken along the lock. She imagines Ousep dead, lying on the floor, his eyes wide open. She remembers the advertisement for a sunflower cooking oil – ‘A Gentleman’s Cholesterol Is In The Hands Of His Wife’. But then Ousep Chacko is not a man who can be killed by oil. He does not eat much. He smokes a lot, though, which may have thickened his blood, or thinned his arteries, she always forgets which of the two happens. A man’s heart can also be arranged to stop if he is given a good sudden fright. But she knows it would take a lot to damage the pastoral heart of that man. He is made of red earth and Malabar air.

She walks to the bedroom and has a good look at Ousep’s chair. She sits on it and feels the strain of her body on its legs. This is her only hope, but she has to be very patient, which she is.

She snaps out of her thoughts, asking herself the disturbing question, ‘Mariammo, what are you thinking?’ She is obviously not a murderer, she is just a housewife with exaggerated notions about herself. She does write occasional book reviews
under the name ‘Gabriel’ for a women’s weekly, but still she is not a bad person. Also, it is important that Ousep lives, at least for now. If anyone can solve Unni’s death, it is Ousep. He has found something significant, she can tell. But for some reason he is keeping it from her.

The doorbell gives her a jolt. She is surprised to find six women from the other blocks, standing in line like penguins outside her door. They say that the other balconies are full, can they come in? They must be desperate to ring Mariamma’s doorbell. Nobody comes to her house any more. Out of habit, she wonders whether the women are hiding enchanted coins and nails and needles in their saris to plant them in her house and bring doom to her family, as Ousep’s relatives used to once upon a time. But then that is a laughable thought. Nobody is jealous of the Chacko household any more.

The murmur outside grows louder, and it excites the women at the door. They look to their right, at the stairway, which goes up to the gloomy terrace door, but that door is now kept locked at all times after what Unni did. Mariamma asks the women to come in. They rush to the balcony to see what has happened. She does not stand alone any more, she stands in the huddle of women on her balcony like the other women on theirs. Mariamma, finally a host.

They can see the doctor’s daughter now. ‘Bindu or something like that,’ one of the women says. The girl walks down the narrow lane towards her home. She is in a blue pinafore, her hair tied in a red ribbon. She walks with a man who is holding her schoolbag. She smiles at an acquaintance, but she is clearly confused. She looks around at the silent people on the street, who are standing without meeting her eyes. She looks up at the rear balconies of Block A, at the swarms of unmoving women
who stare back at her. The girl’s face turns serious. She opens the short gate of her home and sees the whispering strangers in the garden. She begins to walk faster. She stops for a moment when she sees the mass of footwear outside the front door, and she runs in crying.