The Illicit Happiness of Other People: A Novel

by Manu Joseph

  Ousep now recognizes the young man. He was in Unni’s class. Ousep met him once, three years ago, weeks before the boy became a celebrity. Balki had not just made it to IIT, he was ranked all-India second in the JEE, second among over a hundred thousand candidates. The meeting with him was very brief and largely useless, and Ousep decided that there was no point in meeting him again. But now it appears that Balki is coming home for some reason. Thoma, who has suddenly assumed the glow of importance, is leading the star. The swarm vanishes into the stairway tunnel. Is this the breakthrough Ousep has been waiting for?

  He keeps the front door open and waits. That draws Mariamma’s attention; she looks puzzled. She waits with him. When she sees the crowd of boys at her door, she begins to tremble. ‘What happened, what happened to my boy? Is Thoma all right?’ she sings. When she finds Thoma in the crowd, she puts her hand on her heart and pants. Thoma leads Balki into the house. The swarm does not come in but it does not want to leave. A boy asks, nervously, ‘Balki, do you believe in God?’

  ‘Yes,’ Balki says in his surprising baritone.

  ‘What a coincidence. Even I believe in God.’

  ‘OK, all of you,’ Balki says. ‘Thanks. Now I need to speak to Unni’s parents alone. Bye.’

  And they leave reluctantly, including Thoma. Balki shuts the door and faces Ousep and Mariamma.

  Ousep tries to understand what has come home. Balki is tall, his shoulders broad, and everything in the house has shrunk in his presence. He has a large head, and a long, full neck, which is far more uncommon than people imagine. His movements are brisk and devoid of cultured caution, and his unfocused eyes gape without respect as if the Chackos have borrowed money from him. And he is chewing gum.

  Mariamma holds the boy’s hand and tells him something about the passage of time. Then, for Ousep’s benefit, she mumbles a confused but flattering biography. He was always a genius, apparently. She says she has known Balki from the time he was a little boy.

  ‘We have met,’ Ousep says. ‘Briefly, a long time ago.’

  ‘Three years ago,’ the boy says.

  Mariamma touches the boy’s cheeks with the tips of her fingers. ‘Nobody visits us any more, Balki,’ she says. ‘All his friends have stopped coming. One by one, they stopped. Then one day, guess who turns up.’

  ‘Who?’ the boy asks.

  They look at each other, confused. ‘You, of course,’ she says.

  ‘I see. I don’t easily understand this style of speech.’

  She feels his face again. Balki is not embarrassed, he even bends a little to make it easier for her to cup his face in her hands. ‘I don’t mind being touched now,’ he says. ‘When I was little, I did not like being touched, I would scream if anybody touched me. Unni used to put his arm around me. I used to hate it but I grew to accept that it is a sign of friendship.’ He hands her the vegetable basket. ‘Look what I’ve got for you. The vegetables are for you. I brought them from my house. My mother said, “Take some vegetables for Unni’s mother.” I told her, “I must take fruits.” But she said, “Don’t be modern, Bala. Take vegetables. It will make her happy.”’

  ‘She’s right,’ Mariamma says.

  ‘My mother asked me to bring the basket back.’

  ‘Will you eat here, Balki? I can make a quick snack for you.’

  ‘I cannot eat in a house where meat is cooked,’ he says in his precise, inoffensive way.

  ‘Oh, we don’t cook any meat here,’ she says, throwing a bitter chuckle at Ousep. ‘Meat,’ she says, and shakes with genuine laughter.

  ‘We don’t harm meat, son, by bringing it here,’ Ousep says.

  Balki looks at them in incomprehension. ‘I don’t have much time,’ he says, ‘I have to leave as soon as I’ve spoken to Unni’s father.’

  ‘Is it something important?’ she says. ‘Tell me, Balki, do you know something about Unni?’

  Balki’s eyes have been darting to the framed black-and-white photograph of Unni on the wall. They stay on the portrait now.

  ‘He looks so young,’ he says. ‘When was this taken?’

  ‘Just a few months before he died,’ she says. ‘It was a passport-size photograph. We blew it up as much as we could. That’s why he looks a bit pale in it. My boy was not pale at all, you know that.’

  ‘He is so young, which obviously he was when he died. But in my mind he is a man, like me. In my mind, he is ageing with me. But in that photograph he is just a boy.’

  He goes up to the framed photograph for a closer look at Unni, who stares back with a knowing smile, as if he knew this moment would come. Balki, unexpectedly, joins his palms and shuts his eyes. A deep silence grows. Ousep uses the opportunity to point to his wife’s blouse, which is torn at the armpits. He tells her with a violent motion of his hand that she must disappear inside. But she stands there defiantly, even begins to imitate his actions. Ousep considers flinging his slippers at her. Balki opens his eyes after nearly a minute.

  ‘I think of Unni every day,’ he says.

  ‘What is it that you want to say to us, Balki?’ Mariamma asks.

  ‘I have to talk to Unni’s father. I have to speak to him in private.’

  Ousep leads him to his room, and shuts the door on Mariamma’s face. He shows the boy to a chair across from his desk, which is by the open windows that frame the tops of a sea of coconut trees and the terraces of blue and pink and white homes, and the distant yellow spire of Fatima Church. He lights up two cigarettes and tries to look relaxed, even flaps his thighs. The boy is probably amused to see a man smoke two cigarettes at once but he does not say anything.

  Ousep wonders what the boy wants. Nobody comes home with a story to tell unless he has a motive. Sometimes, the motive is the story. Ousep points to the church spire. ‘Unni is buried in the grounds of that church.’

  ‘I know,’ Balki says, ‘I’ve visited his grave twice.’

  ‘Were you at the funeral?’

  ‘I didn’t know for a week that he was gone. Most of his classmates didn’t know.’

  ‘We buried him a day after he died.’

  ‘I hear you are meeting them again, his classmates, you are talking to them.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They are stupid,’ Balki says, as if it is an unremarkable fact. ‘Most of them, they are very dumb. Did you find them dumb?’

  ‘They are like anybody else.’

  ‘Exactly. People are generally dumb. They are small petty animals, who want to do their small petty animal things. Unni was smart. I liked him.’

  ‘You were friends?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Balki says.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know, that’s what it means.’

  ‘After his death, I came to meet you in your house,’ Ousep says. ‘I remember you were very surprised when you saw me at the door. You were probably unhappy to see me.’

  ‘I was surprised, not unhappy. I was a bit confused, I could not understand why you were asking me questions about Unni. I didn’t know then that Unni’s death was not an accident. I heard it from you first, and you revealed it to me towards the end of our conversation when you felt I was not saying anything useful. I remember your words. I will always remember those words. “Unni jumped. He knew what he was doing.” I could not believe it. It didn’t make any sense. After our meeting I went to meet some boys from the class and they told me exactly what you had said. Two days ago I met someone at the bus stop. He told me that you are meeting Unni’s friends again, you are …’

  ‘I am embarrassed to interrupt you, Balki, but it is important that I say this. Unni’s mother is the curious type. As you can see, if you look under that door, she is standing right behind it. With her ear stuck to it. I am not saying this in a metaphorical way, Balki. She really is standing there with her ear stuck to the door. You have a loud booming voice, and both of us want to be discreet. I don’t have a radio or a two-in-one that works. So we may have to speak softly.’

&n
bsp; ‘I understand.’

  ‘Softer than that.’

  ‘Is this better?’

  ‘Why do you want to speak to me and not her?’

  ‘I want to speak to you and not to her. That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘What has Unni told you about his mother?’

  ‘Nothing much really. But I got the feeling that he was very fond of her.’

  ‘He was very fond of her, which is not unusual.’

  ‘I want to know,’ Balki says, licking his lips, ‘what you have found out about Unni.’

  ‘Nothing at all, to be honest.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Does it surprise you?’

  ‘I expected it. But why have you started investigating his death now? After three years, why now?’

  ‘My health is bad, I may not last very long. I thought I must solve the only riddle that matters to me before I begin to sink.’

  ‘People say you’ve discovered something.’

  ‘I’ve heard that too.’

  Balki stares at Ousep with a hint of mistrust. ‘Is your health bad in a specific way? Do you have a terminal disease?’

  ‘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.’