The Illicit Happiness of Other People: A Novel

by Manu Joseph

  The Pathan looks at her with fear masquerading as rage. He raises his hand slowly and points his index finger at her. He looks intently at the broom, which now begins to wag in the air. He lets the boy go, and Thoma runs away down the stairs – not that his life on the ground is going to be any better. The Pathan wags a finger at Ousep. ‘You meet me tomorrow,’ he says and goes away, looking back one last time to assess the woman standing at the door. She marches to the kitchen to update the lemon-yellow walls about what has just happened.

  IT MUST BE ALPHA’S father. He holds the door as if he wants to shut it. ‘We are watching a film,’ he says.

  ‘Alpha asked me to come,’ Ousep says.

  The man rebukes the doormat, ‘Who is Alpha?’

  ‘The cartoonist. This is the address given to me.’

  ‘Would you be interested in the name his dumb father gave him?’

  ‘I apologize,’ Ousep says. ‘I know him only as Alpha. What is the name you gave him?’

  The man leaves the door open and goes in. Ousep follows him. The small flat is dim and has the odour of a burp. The man knocks on a door and says, ‘Someone has come to see you.’ He goes back to his chair and gapes at the TV. His wife, sitting with her legs folded on the sofa, rocks on her haunches for a moment, as if she is lulling an invisible baby to sleep. The man points to a chair without looking at Ousep.

  Ousep sits with the strangers and watches the film as he waits for Alpha to emerge. It is an old Tamil film, which was revolutionary for its time. He forgets its name but he has seen it before.

  It is about a beautiful innocent girl. She does not see men as predators, and is very friendly with them, especially the men on her lane. She plays volleyball with them, even kabaddi, she wrestles with them, she goes to their homes, their rooms. Her sari is always falling off her chest, because she is innocent, and the men are often dramatically stunned by her gaping blouse. One day, she turns sad and mature, she becomes very ladylike. The reason for the sudden transformation is that she has become pregnant. She does not know how that has happened. As an innocent girl, she has only recently learned about the whole plumbing of pregnancy. Her parents, who believe her tale, set out to find out which of her half a dozen close male friends on the lane has impregnated their daughter – those men alone had the opportunity. The parents suspect the girl was made unconscious by one of the men and plucked. Every man they investigate turns out to be a good person, a decent, clean-shaven man with strong ideals, who quotes Tamil poetry, who confesses that there were several situations when he was tempted and did very nearly take advantage of the girl but that he did not commit the crime. In the end, the mystery remains unsolved.

  The suggestion of the plot is that one of the men is lying, or even that all of them probably slept with her. And the moral of the story is that women should never trust men, even men who appear to be good people in plain sight. Who can argue with that?

  ‘So you’re the father of Unni Chacko,’ the sullen voice says. Alpha is a tall, slender boy with long hair and a full black beard. He is in tired jeans and a T-shirt that has OM written on it. He looks a lot like Beta, he has the same restive eyes expressing general contempt, but Alpha is much thinner. ‘Look at these people,’ he says, pointing to his parents. ‘Hypnotized by a box that has moving images. Look at these idiots. These two idiots. Look at them. Like drugged animals.’

  The man and wife do not react. They stare at the TV. It is as if their son introduces them this way to a visitor every day. The man looks sideways at Ousep for a moment. The woman rocks briefly. Beyond this they show nothing. Ousep feels an uncontrollable urge to laugh. Look, Thoma, another unhappy home.

  ‘If you want to talk to me, come inside,’ Alpha says. He throws a final look at his parents. ‘Morons,’ he says.

  Alpha’s room has four visible objects – a cot, a cupboard, a table and a chair. There is nothing else. The walls are bare and his table clean. Ousep studies the boy with overt interest, and the boy appears to be doing the same with Ousep.

  ‘Do you believe in God?’ the boy asks.

  ‘No. What about you?’

  ‘Unni was a Hindu, do you know that?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard.’

  Alpha pats his chest with a tight fist. ‘Hindu,’ he says. ‘A Hindu understands things that others don’t.’

  ‘What does he understand?’

  ‘He understands that everything is a hint.’

  ‘A hint at what?’

  ‘At more hints, Mr Chacko, and more hints.’

  ‘What does it lead to?’

  ‘You’ve started with questions, which is a good thing. It is good,’ the boy says, ‘I was about to tell you that we cannot have a conversation. You must ask me questions. I will answer those questions.’

  ‘All right. You, too, can ask me questions.’

  ‘I may not have any questions for you. You are the seeker. What are you, Mr Chacko? You are the seeker. Do not chat. Ask me questions.’

  ‘What do you do?’ Ousep asks.

  ‘I do nothing,’ Alpha says.

  ‘You must do something with your time?’

  Alpha points to a shut drawer. ‘A graphic novel,’ he says, ‘I am working on a graphic novel.’

  ‘That is very ambitious.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘As you say, Alpha. What is the story of your graphic novel?’

  ‘Why do you want to know the story?’

  ‘I am curious.’

  ‘Is it important to you that I tell you the story?’

  ‘No. But I would really like to know the story. What is it called?’

  ‘Anti-story.’

  ‘That is the name of the graphic novel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what is the story?’

  Alpha looks at the floor and does not speak for a while. He is probably deciding whether he must tell the story. The boy, obviously, has psychiatric problems. Why was Unni interested in Alpha? Maybe Alpha is an extraordinary comic artist? Unni and Alpha have nothing in common. But when Alpha begins to tell the story of his graphic novel, it sounds like something Unni might have written.

  ‘In the beginning,’ Alpha says, ‘as in the beginning of the universe, the beginning of time, there is Story and there is Anti-story. Story wanders through the entire universe searching for a Storyteller who would, as you may have guessed, tell the Story.’

  It finds a small blue planet that orbits around an average-sized yellow sun in the outer edges of an ordinary whirlpool galaxy. Story tries out many ways to create the Storyteller and arrives at the idea of the carbon body, and after millions of years of creating and discarding species, it finally invents the human ape. Story enters the human body as a hallucination. The purpose of the human race is to pass the hallucination down the ages, across all of eternity.

  Meanwhile, Anti-story gets wind of where Story is and what Story has done. So Anti-story infiltrates the human body and becomes thought, which is so powerful that the human race becomes trapped in thought and is unable to see the hallucination of Story any more. The world is now filled with Anti-storytellers who are entranced by thought and logic and the associated hallucinations that thought and logic together create. Thought takes over the world. But there is something about the brain, some kind of an evolutionary glitch. One in a million brains, by pure chance, escapes from thought and sees the original primordial hallucination and becomes the Storyteller. These people are so stunned by the vision that they isolate themselves for exactly thirty-two days, and when they emerge into the world again, something about them has changed. There was a time in the history of man when Storytellers were worshipped by the Anti-storytellers. But the power of logic is so strong now that the world now thinks of Storytellers as mentally ill, so they put them in cages in an asylum.

  ‘So, the fellowship of Storytellers has to come together and find a way to reveal the original hallucination,’ Alpha says. ‘They have to find a way to tell the Story.’

  ‘So th
ere are many hallucinations that the human brain sees. And one of the hallucinations of the mind is the original Story?’

  ‘You are right.’

  ‘Why can’t the Storytellers just stand on the street and tell the Story?’

  ‘The Story cannot be transmitted through language. But Anti-story has trapped mankind in language. That’s why it is difficult for the Storytellers to tell the Story. They don’t know how to tell the Story. They can only see the Story.’

  ‘Why can’t a hallucination be told through language?’

  ‘There are many ordinary hallucinations that cannot be explained through language.’

  ‘That can’t be true.’

  ‘Can you describe the colour red through language, describe red without using its wavelength or comparing it with other colours of the spectrum? If you cannot describe the illusion of red through language, obviously the highest order of hallucination would be impossible to describe through mere words.’

  ‘Do they succeed, the Storytellers, do they win in the end?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you on the side of Story or Anti-story?’

  Alpha laughs. It is a surprising, booming laughter.

  ‘What about you, Mr Chacko?’

  ‘I want the Storytellers to win because that appears to be the happy ending.’

  Alpha laughs again, and nods his head.

  ‘Did you and Unni talk about this story?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you meet Unni?’

  ‘Beta brought him home.’

  ‘Have you ever met Somen Pillai?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Alpha, do you know why Unni killed himself?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you tell me what you and Unni talked about?’

  ‘We met only eight times,’ Alpha says. ‘We spoke about this and that, I don’t remember. Yes, we had conversations. But it has been a while.’

  ‘Still, I am sure you remember something.’

  ‘We spoke about many things, things that do not interest people. We spoke about the eye, how the eye sees.’

  ‘How does the eye see?’

  ‘What the eye really sees, the image, is registered at the back of the retina, at the back of the eye; yet what we see, the visible world, is in front of us. How is that possible? Why is sight in front of us and not at the back of the eye, like a thought?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because what we see is a projection of the brain. The world we see is a projection.’

  ‘What else did you talk about?’

  ‘What do you mean, “what else”?’

  ‘I mean what else did you talk about?’

  ‘Just this and that.’

  ‘Can you think of something specific? Like the eye.’

  ‘We spoke about the corpse.’

  ‘Who is the corpse?’

  ‘The corpse is a corpse.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You would understand everything if you met Psycho.’

  ‘Who is Psycho?’

  Alpha laughs. He repeats the question – ‘Who is Psycho?’

  ‘Is Psycho a cartoonist?’

  Alpha looks away and laughs hard. ‘Psycho is Psycho,’ he says. ‘He spent a lot of time with Unni. Psycho is different from me. Psycho has conversations. Psycho has very long conversations.’

  He writes something on a piece of paper and hands it to Ousep. It says, ‘4 Anna Salai’.

  ‘Is this an address?’ Ousep asks.

  ‘You’re a very clever man.’

  ‘What will I find there?’

  ‘You will find a white building with six floors. Go to the third floor. On the third floor, there is a long corridor. At the far end of the corridor is a white door. Behind the door sits Psycho.’

  ‘What does he do, Alpha?’

  Alpha laughs and shakes his head. ‘You’ll understand everything when you get there,’ he says.

  ‘Is this his real name? “Psycho”, is that his real name?’

  ‘What’s real about a name?’

  ‘What’s his name, Alpha? You know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I do. His real name, his real real real name, his very real, absolutely truthful name, is Psycho. You have to be very careful with Psycho. He is on the side of the Anti-storytellers.’

  ‘Does Psycho know why Unni did what he did?’

  ‘Mr Chacko, you’re not listening to me. You have to be very careful when you meet Psycho. You cannot tell him why you are there. You have to invent reasons. You have to be smart. He is a very dangerous man.’

  ‘Does Psycho know why Unni did what he did?’

  ‘I don’t think that bastard knows anything. But Psycho will lead you to the corpse. Only Psycho knows who the corpse is.’

  ‘Who is the corpse?’

  ‘I just told you. Only Psycho knows. I have never met the corpse. All I know is that Unni was very close to the corpse.’

  ‘And what will the corpse tell me?’

  ‘The corpse will tell you everything you want to know.’

  OUSEP FINDS IT HARD to accept what he sees in front of him even though there is no doubt in his mind that he is at the address Alpha had given him. It is a white building with six floors. A giant board over the dark hollow of the porch says ‘Institute of Neurosciences’.

  In the waiting area inside there are not more than twenty people and they appear to be in good health. At the reception desk three women in starched cotton saris are in the middle of a conversation about a man they do not like. Behind them is a wooden board that announces the speciality of every floor above. The third floor, the board says, is the Schizophrenia Day Ward and Research Centre.

  Ousep takes the stairs. Good for the heart, he says. Did you hear that, Unni? Even Ousep Chacko wants to live. On the third floor there is a long, dim corridor flanked by shut doors, river-green doors. At one end of the corridor, which is now behind Ousep, is the gloom of a yellow wall. The far end is dark, but Ousep can make out a broad white door. There is nobody in the corridor but he can hear voices coming through the walls, sudden solitary laughter, a hard object falling on the floor, soft conversations that do not intend to be whispers. As he walks to the far end, a side door opens and three middle-aged nurses in white frocks walk towards him, laughing and talking in Malayalam about bananas, about yellow bananas and green bananas. As they pass him they look at him with suspicion as if he is a patient who has gone astray. That makes him walk more briskly and call on all his daylight dignity.

  As the white door approaches, the corridor gets cleaner, and a short red carpet appears and leads all the way to the door. He can see that there is a nameplate on the door and it is so large that it probably says much more than ‘Psycho’. When he finally arrives at the door he feels that one part of the Alpha puzzle is beginning to fall into place, but he is still not very sure. The nameplate says:

  Dr C.Y. Krishnamurthy Iyengar

  DM, FRCP (Glas), FRCP (Edin), FRCP (Lond),

  FAMS, FACP, FICP FIMSA, FAAN

  Neurosurgeon, Neuropsychiatrist

  Chairman Emeritus

  The Schizophrenia Day Ward and Research Centre

  Ousep considers the door for a moment. Behind the door, somewhere inside the room, sits a doctor, a grand old man in all probability, a neurosurgeon, a neuropsychiatrist, whom Alpha calls Psycho. From what Ousep has seen, Alpha is not a normal person. The nature of the association between Alpha and a neuropsychiatrist is not hard to guess. It is natural that the boy would imagine Psycho as an adversary. But then Ousep does not want to dismiss Alpha’s warning. He has to decide. Should he reveal to the man the reason why he is here, or should he play.

  He opens the door and finds a surprisingly large room, with no windows. In the middle of the room is an ancient wooden desk, and behind the desk sits a small old man with rich silver hair that has been neatly combed back. His head is bent, he is reading something engrossing on his lap, and if he has heard the do
or open he is not curious to know the nature of the intrusion. Ousep walks in and stands still. The old man is in a checked cotton shirt buttoned at the collar and the cuffs. There are eight fountain pens clipped to his shirt pocket and one small black object, probably some kind of a torch. There are three silver medals pinned on the third button. The room is filled with shields and framed citations, most of which contain the unsmiling face of a younger man who has undoubtedly become the person in front of him.

  Iyengar lifts his head and is not surprised by what he sees. He does not stare in incomprehension, does not ask any questions. He points to a chair. This is the old man in The Album of the Dead, one of the four unidentified characters in the series. Ousep tries to assume an apologetic inferior face that still retains considerable dignity. Iyengar puts the book he was reading on the clean desk. It is the Bhagavatgita, in Sanskrit. An old philosophical man with a lot of time, which is a good sign.

  ‘Dr Iyengar, my name is Ousep, I am the chief reporter with UNI. I apologize for coming here without an appointment.’

  ‘What is UNI?’ the doctor asks, leaning back and looking amused. His voice is deep, but feeble.

  ‘United News of India, it is a news agency, like PTI.’

  ‘I get it now.’

  ‘I am working on a story. A feature story on schizophrenia in Madras. The condition of schizophrenics.’

  ‘The condition?’

  ‘How people with this condition go through life, what is being done to help them.’

  ‘So, Ousep, you are going to write a story about schizophrenics, and what you write will be carried by all the newspapers that subscribe to UNI. Is that correct?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘But this is not news, it is not a current affairs story. As you say, you are working on a feature story, which means it can appear at any time. It can appear in a week, in a month. Is that correct?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Would it appear in The Hindu?’

  ‘That’s possible.’

  ‘But you don’t know?’