The Illicit Happiness of Other People (19 page)

‘It’s never that simple. There are things a drunkard knows about his body. Most of Malayalam literature was about that until women started writing.’

Ousep tries to achieve a wounded smile, anticipating the discomfort of compassion in Balki, but the boy is all business. ‘You don’t have much time, then,’ he says. ‘Do you have a hunch about Unni at least? Are you following a particular line of investigation?’

‘Balki, why are you here?’

‘I am here to help you.’

‘Then help me.’

Balki looks with great concentration at the surface of the desk. He takes his time to form the words. ‘Unni had ideas, powerful ideas. He believed something is going on all around us. Have you heard about that? He told the whole class this, he said something is happening and if we looked carefully we
would be able to see it. He believed that something very ancient has survived and that it lives among us. Has anybody told you this?’

‘What was it that he thought was going on?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Could it be that he had got obsessed with an idea – the great awakening, everything-is-an-illusion, rubbish like that? It happens to some adolescents. They usually come back to their senses.’

‘I don’t think he was talking about those things,’ Balki says.

‘Why not?’

‘Somehow I feel that a person who thinks he has discovered the absolute truth will not be someone I know.’

‘Why couldn’t Unni just say what was bothering him?’

‘I don’t know. I think he could not explain it. I think he only suspected that something was going on, he was not sure. Then one day he saw something, and somehow that meant he had to die. It is possible that the reason why he died is linked to what he knew, what he discovered. Does that make sense to you?’

‘No.’

‘It doesn’t make much sense to me, either.’

‘Balki, we don’t have to sit here and try to figure out why Unni chose to die. That would be mere speculation. What we must do is talk about him, talk about him without a motive.’

Balki nods; he toys with the marble paperweight on the desk. He looks around the room, at the bed behind him, and at the bookshelf in a corner, probably searching for a spine he recognizes. He even looks at the ceiling fan, for some reason. When he finally speaks, he remembers Unni in a neat, chronological way.

Unni and Balki entered St Ignatius Boys’ High School the same year, when they were six. Balki’s first memories of Unni
are of a boy who was not exceptional in any way. Unni was a moderately gifted student who was not considered bright until many years later. Balki, on the other hand, was always a clever freak, and for that reason he did not have friends. Even the teachers hated him. But he had Unni, who put an arm around his shoulder, who took him by his hand to include him in the games that the boys played. When Unni was eight, he gave Balki a memorable reason why they were friends. He said that Balki reminded him of his mother. Two days later Unni would explain, without being asked, ‘My mother, too, is very smart, but a bit nutty.’

When he was around ten, something happened to Unni. Ousep has not heard this before. He is not sure whether the boy’s mother knows about this. At least twice in the classroom he held his head and doubled up in pain. On both occasions he got back on his feet in seconds. And on both occasions he told his teachers that he had felt his brain move, as if it was changing shape within his skull. Balki is not surprised that no one from their class has told Ousep this. ‘It happened a long time ago and people have very ordinary powers of retention. People usually remember what happened to them, and not the world around them.’

Around this time, there was another development. Unni began to spend a lot of time by himself in a corner of the playground. He would sit in a hypnotic trance as if he was watching something captivating before his eyes, and he would not hear people right next to him calling out his name. He would stir back to life only when shaken, and he would behave as if nothing had happened. He claimed to have no recollection of what he was thinking about or what he saw in his mind.

It is possible that these are ordinary events whose significance is exaggerated because Unni chose to die. Children do strange
things, which are usually forgotten because they turn out all right. Most of them, at least. But some don’t make it, do they? Everything else about Unni, when he was a little boy, was unremarkable. Ousep does not like it when Balki uses the word ‘ordinary’. But then he knows what Balki means. Balki means ‘ordinary’.

When Unni was around fourteen, he began to draw outrageous caricatures of his teachers, which quickly became an underground sensation in the school. Soon, he found legitimate fame when he released what was probably his first comic story. It was drawn in watercolours over six pages.

Ousep lights up two more cigarettes and, as the first cloud of smoke leaves him, asks with a sporting smile, ‘You actually remember the number of pages?’

‘Six pages. Held together by a safety pin,’ Balki says.

‘Could the number of pages have been five, or seven?’

‘Six,’ Balki says.

‘Do you remember the story of the comic?’

‘Of course.’

The comic begins with a boy, who is probably fourteen, as old as Unni was then. The boy is going somewhere. A man is walking ahead, holding something in his hand. A bus goes out of control and hits the man from behind. The man’s wallet, oddly the object that he was holding in his hand, flies into the air and lands near the boy. A great crowd gathers quickly around the man, and they block the boy’s view. The comments of the crowd fill the air. ‘Is that his face?’ ‘Is that his ear lying there?’ ‘There is something white coming out of his head.’ The boy picks up the dead man’s wallet and walks away. In the wallet is some cash. It also has the address and the photograph of the owner. The boy spends the cash and lives happily for several days, but then he begins to see the dead man in his
dreams. Later, he begins to see the man in his waking hours, standing in unexpected corners and staring hard at him. Finally, unable to bear his hallucinations, the boy decides to return to the family of the dead man the money he had taken. He steals some cash from his grandmother’s cupboard, puts it in the wallet, and goes to return it. He reaches the door of a flat and rings the doorbell; he waits. When the door opens, the boy is shocked because it is the corpse from his hallucinations who is at the door. The boy is so terrified that he is unable to move. The man sees the wallet in the boy’s hand and he begins to thank him for his honesty. It turns out, the man’s pocket had been picked earlier that week, and it was the thief who had died.

The comic, which was untitled according to Balki, passed from hand to hand for days. Jealous boys went about revealing the twist in the tale to those who were yet to read the story, but Unni’s fame rested not only on the story but also on his exquisite images. The comic finally reached a teacher, who decided to stick the six pages to a wall outside the principal’s office. Small crowds of boys, and on occasion parents, gathered every day to read the comic. The success of Unni’s first comic must have created a small stir in the house, but Ousep was kept out of it all. He cannot blame anyone for that, but he does wish that he had been told about Unni’s first-ever comic story and what a hit it was in the school. Ousep would have put his hand on his son’s shoulder and told him, honestly, ‘It’s a great story, Unni, I am proud of you.’ And Unni might have smiled in his shy way, shy but fully meeting the eye.

Around this time, Unni became immodest about his erections. Balki reveals this without any embarrassment or even an inflection in his steady voice. At the end of the class of an English teacher who was slim, whose sari was not tamed, and
whose deep navel showed, Unni would sit in his place and invite all to feel his hardness, which in general opinion was so extraordinary that many refused to believe it was a part of his body. Unni was crafty, he was magic. Some said he was trying to pass off a raw plantain as his penis.

‘What did you think?’ Ousep asks.

Balki says in a severe way, ‘How could it have been a plantain? People are so stupid.’

Nothing about Unni, when he was fourteen, even hinted at what he was to soon become, except for a brief comment one evening. After the final bell, the two boys were walking down the second-floor corridor from their class to the stairway. From that height they could see many streams of children emerging from their classes and joining a sea of uniforms, all going home.

‘So many people in this world,’ Unni said, ‘so many many people. Nature has to keep making billions of people so that by pure chance, finally, one person will be born who will make it.’

What he said appeared nonsensical and Balki did not think much about it. ‘Two years later Unni asked me if I remembered that moment, if I remembered what he had said. I said “yes”. And Unni said, “There is a reason why you did not forget it.”’

‘But what did he mean when he said one person will make it?’ Ousep asks.

‘I didn’t ask him.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘At that time I didn’t know he was going to die. So I didn’t attach too much importance to everything he said. But I can guess what he meant. He probably meant that the birth of every human is nature’s blind shot at achieving something grander. It constantly fails but by producing billions of people nature is improving its chances of attaining a mysterious goal.’

‘Does it make sense to you?’

‘If you eliminate that bit about nature having a goal, what Unni said is just a layperson’s description of the theory of evolution. Nature keeps producing millions and billions of nearly identical organisms for ages, then something happens to one creature by chance and a new species is born.’

‘But that’s not what Unni was talking about. He said, in your own words, one person will make it.’

‘That’s what he said.’

‘What exactly did he mean?’

‘We will never know.’

The door bursts open, startling Ousep and the boy. Mariamma walks in with a calm phoney smile, carrying two cups of coffee on a plastic tray. She sets the cups on the desk and lingers. Ousep glares at her but she decides not to meet his eye. So he walks her out of the room, shuts the door on her again and latches it.

Balki sips his coffee, ruffles his hair, lets out a deep yawn, squeezes his penis for a moment as if to unknot it, looks in the direction of the church spire. Ousep waits without a word, flapping his thighs. Balki, too, begins to flap his thighs. They sit this way in silence, flapping their thighs.

Balki pulls the
Indian Express
towards him and begins to read. He turns the pages, even folds the paper and gets down to reading a short item about a flyover that will soon be built. He takes far too long to finish the article, and it occurs to Ousep that the boy is probably here to say something and is not sure whether he should. He is making up his mind.

When Balki finds his voice again, it is as if he had never paused. But it is not clear whether this is what he has come here to say or whether he is just buying time. ‘Nobody noticed it at first,’ he says, ‘but when Unni was seventeen he began to transform. We had just entered the twelfth standard. I don’t
know how much you know, some bizarre things happened in the class.’

Most of the boys in the class had been together from the time they were children, and the twelfth standard was a foreboding lodged in their minds all through the years of their childhood. Innumerable times, on good days and bad, they had sat together and wondered what would become of them when they sat the inescapable board exams at the end of the twelfth standard. They spoke in whispers about the fathers who had killed themselves in shame because their sons had failed. And when they finally entered the last year of school, they were filled with the deep melancholy seeded in them long before their memories began. The time had come. That was what everyone in Madras told them. The time had come. Their fates would be decided in a few months in the board exams and in the toughest engineering entrance exams in the world. Every teacher, even the language teachers, told them that they were ‘at the crossroads of life’.

Every boy in the class became increasingly obsessed with his study material, except Unni, of course. He spent his free time drawing the portraits of boys engrossed in solving sample problems, their desks filled with fat books and their fingers tapping the Seiko calculator. This was what they did most of the time. They did that even in the sliver of time between classes, and during the lunch break, and in their homes as well, into the night and at dawn.

It was inconceivable that anything could distract them. But Unni did something in the class one day that made almost everyone go crazy for over ten minutes. It is only now that the boys talk about the incident freely, according to Balki. And they talk about it only among themselves. But even now, no one fully understands what exactly happened or how Unni got everyone involved in the moment of madness.

‘There were thirty-two boys in the class when it happened,’ Balki says. ‘Everybody saw it, everybody was a part of it, but nobody can explain it. Has anyone told you about Simion Clark?’

‘No.’

Balki begins to rock gently in his chair. ‘I was sure nobody would have told you this. Maybe they didn’t want to say anything bad about Unni to his father. People are so small. The way they think, they are so small. Or, maybe, they are still afraid. They still want to believe it never happened.’

‘But what happened?’

Balki drags the paperweight in a circle over the desk. ‘Let’s say you want to commit a crime,’ the boy says, ‘but you know there are going to be witnesses, what do you do? How do you go ahead with the crime when you know that there are going to be witnesses?’

‘How?’

‘You make the witnesses participate in the crime. What happens when the witness is also the accomplice? There is silence. That is how Unni guards some of his secrets long after he has gone. That is why you will never know everything he did. And that’s one of the reasons, I guess, why nobody has told you the story of Simion Clark.’