The Illicit Happiness of Other People

by Manu Joseph

  ‘I am working, Ilango. I have to file a story about the fast. That’s why I asked you to come here.’

  Ilango looks at the fasting men but he has no curiosity about what is happening here.

  Ousep lights two cigarettes and leads the boy to a tea stall on the concrete pavement, where they sit facing each other on wooden stools that have unequal legs, a rugged aluminium-plated table between them. For a while they stare in silence at the fasting men on the other side of the road.

  ‘You know why I wanted to meet you,’ Ousep says.

  ‘Yes. Please ask me anything you want, Uncle. But I am very curious. What happened? Why are you asking questions about Unni? I hear you have spoken to almost everybody in the class. I hope everything is all right.’

  ‘Everything is fine. Let’s imagine it is not important why I am asking about Unni.’

  ‘I don’t know why he did that,’ Ilango says, ‘I really don’t know. After the twelfth-standard board exams I was not in touch with him. He did what he did a few weeks after the exams. I heard about it much later.’

  ‘I didn’t come for that. I want to know more about Unni. That’s all there is to this. Tell me what you remember. When he was in the twelfth standard, the final year of school, just months before he died, that’s the Unni I want to know. When he was seventeen, how was he in class?’

  Ilango’s eyes focus on a spot on the road. He is probably trying to extract something important from his memory, something significant. Everybody wants to tell a good story. That is the problem.

  When Ilango speaks, his voice has lost all its elaborate modesty. He speaks with a severe fondness for a friend who was shy, who liked to sit in a corner and sketch, but could be interrupted any time. Ousep has heard this many times. The reserve of Unni that yielded to the faintest tug of friendship.

  ‘Unni didn’t talk much,’ Ilango says. ‘I think he liked to be left alone. But if you went to Unni and if you talked to him, he would let you talk. And he would listen carefully, like a girl. He was interested in what you were saying. When you spoke to him you knew he was imagining what you were seeing in your head. And you would wonder, what’s so important about what I am saying?’

  ‘Can you recall a conversation?’

  ‘Once, I told him about a cat on my street that did not have a tail. He asked me a lot of questions about the cat. How it behaved, how it ran, stuff like that. I don’t know why. He asked me if I thought the cat knew it didn’t have a tail. How can I know something like that? That was the way he was.’

  ‘Why do you think he was that way?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think he liked to collect a lot of information. And he did know a lot of strange facts. Actually, I don’t know if they were really facts. One day he told me that the most powerful booze in the world is found in Kerala. He said it is called Jesus Christ.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Ousep says.

  ‘Why is it called Jesus Christ?’

  ‘If you drink it you will rise only on the third day.’

  Ilango scratches his chin with an open mouth, and looks around.

  ‘Sometimes he did say things that were totally strange, which simply cannot be true,’ he says.

  ‘Like?’

  Ilango rubs his nose. He is not trying to remember, he is probably coming to a decision. ‘One day he came up to me and said, “I know a corpse.” I asked him what he meant by that and he just laughed.’

  ‘What did he mean?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘He said, “I know a corpse”?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  Ousep is startled by the laments of women. There are about twenty of them, village women, who stand in a swarm on the other side of the road, behind the wooden barricade. They are facing the fasting ringleader, the man who has the table fan beside him. They are beating their breasts and wailing, but they also show the mild wonder of recent arrival. They cry in a distracted way, throwing glances all around, even looking up at the sky, though they know it very well. They are in tattered saris, blouseless, their hair tangled in brown dirt. Most of them are old, some are very young, but in a bestial way. Their wails are composed of the same three words, which probably have no meaning when not delivered in a dirge. They keep kissing the tips of their fingers. It is as if they are begging for food from a man who is fasting to death. But then a woman shows him a banana and it is now clear that they are asking him to eat, they are begging him not to starve to death. They are probably from his village. Someone must have told them that a son of their soil has decided to sacrifice his life for the Tamil cause. So the gang of malnourished women have descended to dissuade this man, whose full belly sits on his lap as if it is something dear to him. He looks at the women with valiant gloom, and their laments grow. He is probably trying to suppress a laugh now, so his face turns more serious. Then, in a master stroke, he turns the table fan towards the women. In the burst of air the women break into giggles. They try to cry again but their lungs are tired now, and they soon fall silent. They sit on the road and start chatting among themselves.

  All this will go one day, this animal poverty, it will vanish. And future generations will not know, will not even guess, the true nature of poverty, which is the longest heritage of man. Shouldn’t this be preserved somehow, like old colonial buildings, shouldn’t abject poverty be preserved as historical evidence? That is what socialists are trying to do in this country. Everybody misunderstands their intentions. They are noble conservationists, working hard to preserve a way of the world.

  Ousep and Mariamma were socialists once, like all the informed young men and women of the time, slim people in love who thought they knew how to make the world a better place, a place as happy as their beds. But Mariamma was not as naïve as him. One night she told him, her head on his bare chest, her hair all over his face, ‘But an idea that overrates human character is bound to fail. Look around, Ousep, in every way of the world, only ideas that do not overestimate human nature succeed.’ Ousep quoted her in his popular Sunday column. Not many young journalists could get away with quoting their own wives, but then every odd thing that Ousep Chacko did in those days was heralded as ‘Style’. Other writers started quoting their wives in their serious political columns, and that became a brief journalistic trend. Until, inevitably, it became a farce and died.

  Ilango is not affected by the women, he sees nothing in what has just happened. But he says, pointing to the women, ‘According to Unni, those women are not as sad as we think they are. They are happy. According to him, everybody is happy. And people who are unhappy are only fooling themselves. For someone as clever as Unni it was a weird view.’

  Ilango’s eyes grow feeble as he quietly sips his tea. He does not speak for a while, then he begins to chuckle. Still he does not speak. Ousep does not push, he waits.

  ‘There was something Unni started doing in the final year of school which he had never done before,’ the boy says. ‘If a teacher was absent, or during the lunch break, any time the class was not guarded, he would quietly go to the teacher’s table, climb on it and stand in total silence, until all murmurs stopped and all eyes were on him. Then he would tell us stories, his own stories. And when Unni told a story … now how do I say it? I am not a smart boy. I don’t have the words to describe what I felt. When Unni told a story standing on top of that table, it was as if there was no other sound in the world. As he spoke you saw pictures in your head, you saw faces, and you could smell things that you did not know had smells.’

  This, Ousep has heard many times. The class of adolescent boys falling quiet as Unni approached the table, his smooth athletic leap on to the table, and then his dramatic silence, which infected all and killed the final chuckles. But what is odd is that several boys claim this never happened, or that they do not remember seeing Unni do this. That is strange. An act of this nature would have many witnesses, and it did happen in all probability. Then why woul
d many boys want to deny it? What is even more odd is that the boys who describe Unni’s storytelling do not remember any of his stories.

  ‘Do you remember one of his stories?’

  ‘No.’

  That was quick.

  ‘You remember the little details of how Unni told his stories, but you don’t remember any of the stories that he told?’

  Ilango’s large, expressive Adam’s apple rolls, as if it has become self-aware.

  ‘I don’t remember. I wonder why.’

  Ousep lights his cigarettes. ‘Do you smoke?’ he asks.

  The boy shakes his head, almost wounded for being asked.

  ‘Why do you smoke two cigarettes at once?’ he asks with exaggerated respect in his tone.

  ‘Because three is too much,’ Ousep says.

  The boy is not sure whether it is a joke; he nods. He looks away for a few seconds, then asks the inevitable question. ‘People say you have found something about Unni, is that true?’

  ‘I’ve always been searching, Ilango, I never stopped. Now I come back to you after three years because I thought age might make you see a few things differently.’

  The tea arrives in the filthy hands of a bare-chested waiter, who is humming a film song about the relationship between flowers and honeybees. Ilango drinks in thoughtful sips. And he begins to describe a residential colony, he gives directions on how to get there, which is the Tamilian way of telling a story – describe a place by almost giving its postal address. Several film directors live in this colony. ‘Some of them have mistresses,’ he says. Ilango pauses in a moment of embarrassment. He feels ashamed for using the word ‘mistress’ in the presence of a friend’s father.

  ‘It’s all right, you are not a child any more,’ Ousep says. ‘We are men. You and I. We are men. What about the mistresses?’

  ‘Unni said that the mistresses always lived on the ground floor. They were never on the higher floors. He used to wonder why. He really wanted to know why. That’s it,’ the boy says meekly, as if conceding that what he has just said does not deserve the tea Ousep has bought him. ‘I know it does not mean anything. Such an ordinary thing, actually. I don’t know how useful something like this is to you.’

  ‘It’s good. It’s very good. What I need are bits like these.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘The other boys I meet, they just don’t understand what I want. They try to give me their opinions. But you are a smart guy. You have an interesting memory.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Did Unni find out why the mistresses are usually kept only in the ground-floor flats?’

  ‘I don’t know. But he was sure there is a reason.’

  The boy sets his cup down, and wipes his mouth with his fingers. ‘What else do I remember about Unni?’ he says, and looks lost for a while. He is distracted by a memory, he is probably wondering whether he should give voice to it. He stares at the fasting men without looking at them. Then he makes his decision. ‘There is something else I remember,’ he says. And he speaks slowly, clearly.

  One evening, he is at a friend’s house with a few other boys, including Unni. It is a small house with an unpaved walkway that runs from the gate to a high boundary wall. The boys are on the terrace, which is not very high, just about twelve feet above the ground. The gate is locked, but a stray dog slips through the bars. It does not see the boys on the terrace. ‘Dogs usually don’t look up,’ Ilango says. ‘Unni used to say that often, I don’t know why. Animals usually don’t look up.’ It wanders in, and goes down the walkway. The narrow path is about sixty feet long, and it is hemmed in by a high boundary wall on one side and the wall of the house on the other. So the gate is its only escape if a situation arises.

  Unni jumps down and picks up a stone. He stands at the gate, blocking the dog’s path, and flings the stone. The stone is not intended to hit but the dog does not know that. It runs to the back wall and tries to climb but the wall is too high and this dog has probably never climbed a wall before. It stands there with its tongue out, wondering what it must do. Unni flings another stone, which hits the wall. The dog tries to climb the wall again, it slips and falls. It runs towards the side wall, runs in circles, runs towards Unni and then away from him, confused and terrified. It finally goes to the boundary wall and stands facing him, awaiting its fate. The other boys now jump down and pick up stones. Their stones miss, they hit the wall, but the dog is terrified. It makes sounds that are normally not associated with a dog. It leaps at the wall, leaps in the air, it begins to behave like an alien beast. Some stones now hit the dog. It cries, running up and down the walkway. At this point Unni says that they should let the dog go. All go back to the terrace. The dog charges to the gate and escapes. It runs down the road, it keeps running until it vanishes round the bend. That is it. That is what Ilango wants to say.

  ‘How did you feel about it?’ Ousep says.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The dog. The way it ran, the sounds it made, the fear in its eyes.’

  ‘It was terrible.’

  ‘Terrible, yes.’

  ‘There is no other way of looking at it.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know what had happened to us. We behaved like urchins who stone chameleons just for fun.’

  ‘Did Unni’s stones hit the dog?’

  ‘No. After all of us came down from the terrace he didn’t throw any more stones.’

  ‘Interesting that you remember that. A minor detail in a minor incident, after so long.’

  ‘I don’t know why I remember that.’

  ‘Did you hit the dog?’

  ‘Just once. I aimed at the wall but the dog got in the way.’

  The dog got in the way, he says. A stray dog, probably very ugly, which is a bad thing to be in such a situation, is trapped. It is powerless, comically terrified, almost singing. What would a bunch of boys with stones in their hands want to do? This boy says he aimed at the wall. He only wanted to see the dog react, he did not want to hurt it, he did not want to hear the sound of stone against its flesh and its brief responsive shriek.

  ‘Why do you think he did that, the whole game, why do you think he started it?’ Ousep asks.

  The boy studies his cup. For a moment there he looks intelligent, the way he looks with unhappy eyes at the cup, the way he lurks in his own silence. He says, ‘You used the word “game”, why did you use that word?’

  ‘I think sometimes Unni did things just to see how others reacted.’

  ‘Yes,’ the boy says, relieved for some reason. ‘That’s what I think. He had an abnormal interest in how people reacted. It was a game for him. Yes, that’s the word.’

  ‘The day the dog was stoned, were the other two present?’

  ‘Which two?’

  ‘Somen Pillai and Sai Shankaran.’

  ‘They were there, yes. Those three were always together. Always whispering and laughing among themselves. As if they were playing a secret game and the others were just fools who didn’t know what was happening. Unni had that attitude more than the other two. He could make you feel small and silly.’

  There is a surprising strength in the boy’s tone now, the impotence of nostalgia is gone, and in its place is the force of contempt, the contempt of a male for a smarter friend.

  ‘People used to say that those three were up to something,’ the boy says. The way he says ‘those three’, it is as if he has forgotten that one of them is Ousep’s dead son.

  ‘Those three,’ Ousep says in a soft voice. ‘What exactly was it about them? What do you think they were doing?’

  ‘It was as if they were a part of something, something others won’t understand. Like that day. After we went back to the terrace and watched the dog run down the road, they looked at each other, made eyes, smiled. There was always something going on between them.’

  ‘A lot of people have told me this but nobody is able to say what exactly they were up to.’

  ‘Even I
am not clear. They spent a lot of time together just talking, going somewhere, doing things. I don’t know what they did. Someone told me they were involved in betting.’

  ‘Do you remember who told you this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What kind of betting?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think they bet among themselves that some events were going to occur in a particular way.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m not clear myself. We were not very close, actually.’

  ‘Are you in touch with them?’

  Ousep feels stupid for a moment because when he said ‘them’ he had seen the faces of three boys. But one of them, of course, nobody is in touch with.

  ‘No,’ the boy says, ‘I’ve not seen them in a long time.’

  ‘Tell me what you know about Somen Pillai.’

  ‘There is nothing that I remember of Somen Pillai. It’s funny, actually. You know, some guys are like that, they are so silent, they are invisible. They don’t talk, they don’t do anything in the class, they just sit and watch.’

  Ousep has heard this before. Apart from the fact that he was Unni’s friend, Somen Pillai has no claim to the memory of his classmates. In the ten years that he studied in St Ignatius, there is nothing that he said or did that anybody can recall.

  ‘Have you met him?’ Ilango asks.

  ‘Yes, once. Very briefly. I’ve been trying to meet him again but he is refusing to meet me. Would you know why he would refuse me?’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t like talking,’ Ilango says. ‘Some boys are like that.’

  Ilango wants to leave. He takes one large decisive gulp of the tea, which is surely cold now. Ousep looks at him carefully, now willing to take a chance.

  ‘Did Unni ever send anyone his comics, did he ever post his comics to someone, maybe for a reaction or something?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did he have a girlfriend?’

  Ilango lets out a shy chuckle. ‘I don’t know, I was not that close to him. But I heard these Fatima School girls, they used to talk about him, I heard that from my cousin.’