The Illicit Happiness of Other People: A Novel
Page 31
When she feels the hand running through her hair and down her spine and legs, and all over her body, she is not sure whether it is a dream. She cannot deny she has had such dreams before, but then she knows it is not a dream. She gets up with a start and sees Unni staring at her. He holds her in his powerful arms and kisses her. She is so frightened she screams and tries to extricate herself from his grip, and in her struggle, her top tears at the shoulder. That is when Unni leaves her, something in him snaps. She looks at him just for a moment before she runs away. That would be the last time she would see him alive. What she sees in that minuscule moment is Unni standing without meeting her eye, looking at the space behind her with a gentle smile. She has thought of his expression many times and tried to find its meaning. But she does not understand the face.
She runs to her home, into the bathroom. She sits on the floor and cries, she is shivering. She decides to have a bath. She wonders what she should tell her mother about the torn top. She invents many excuses in the bath. That is when she hears the sounds of men, she hears the word ‘Unni’ several times, and she is too terrified even to guess what may have happened. What an idiot, Unni, what an idiot.
In a few hours, Mythili will tell Unni’s mother everything about that day. But what she really wants to tell her, if she is not too shy to do that, is that she is sorry she abandoned her. The day Unni died, Mariamma lost a son and a daughter. Mythili is sorry she chose the comfort of hiding, she is sorry it turned out that way, but now the daughter has returned, and she will always watch over her till the end of her time. That is what she will say. She has the strength to say it now.
OUSEP HAS LONG FINISHED the story of Unni Chacko, and his wife has listened in silence but without any questions. Something about her tells him that she has finally made peace with Unni, she may even believe that his death has been resolved. But Ousep plans his day ahead.
He will wake up early and make a list of people he will meet – all kinds of people, new people. What did Unni see? What did Unni know, what could make a boy so contemptuous of happiness, of his own extraordinary happiness, and of human life, which he considered so trivial that he needed merely one honourable reason to shed it? Ousep will go in search of the answers, he will not stop. A search without an end. What is so terrifying about a search without an end?
Ousep, finally, in the search for meaning. Resolute, even though he does see Unni Chacko in another place, arching his body and laughing.
Acknowledgements
THE NOVEL LED ME to several people in Madras, or Chennai as it is now called. It is where I spent the first twenty years of my life. I am grateful it was not a paradise.
Among the people I met were neurosurgeons and neuropsychiatrists. Some of them were amused to learn that even novelists had to gather facts, but they gave me their days. Dr Krishnamoorthy Srinivas, an unforgettable patriarch with eight pens and a tiny torchlight in his shirt pocket, Dr Ennapadam Krishnamoorthy and Dr A.V. Srinivasan have contributed to the novel more than they will ever guess.
I am fortunate to have the unrelenting confidence of the finest editors in the world. Karthika V.K. of HarperCollins India, who was the first person in the publishing world to decide my fiction was fit to print. Roland Philipps of John Murrays. Amy Cherry of Norton. Iris Tupholme of HarperCollins Canada. Joost Nijsen of Podium. The novel is a beneficiary of their remarkable eye, and the care of their team, especially Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri of HarperCollins India and Joanne Gledhill of John Murrays.
But my primary editor is a person I am besotted with – Anuradha, who was the first person to read the novel, and who began her analysis, as usual, with the words, ‘Now don’t growl …’
Isobel Dixon of the Blake Friedmann literary agency has saved me in more ways than I have let her know.
For some reason, my mother, Kunjamma, and sister, Aswathy, the extraordinary women who raised me, found it hilarious every time I asked them to recount, once again, our family stories. But they always found the time for me. As did my father, Joseph Madapally, a storyteller himself.
But most of all, I thank my daughter Kavya for delaying the novel.
About the Author
Manu Joseph’s acclaimed first novel, Serious Men, won the PEN Open Book Award and The Hindu Best Fiction Award. It was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Joseph lives in Delhi, where he is a columnist for the International Herald Tribune and editor of Open magazine. Visit him online at www.manujoseph.com or on Facebook.
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Copyright
The Illicit Happiness of Other People
Copyright © 2012 by Manu Joseph
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-443-41639-9
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by John Murray (Publishers), an Hachette UK company. First published in India in 2012 by HarperCollins Publishers India Ltd.
FIRST CANADIAN EDITION
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