The Illicit Happiness of Other People

by Manu Joseph

  ‘Only little girls wear frocks.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘And why was that boy putting his arm around you?’

  The next day, Mother starts a conversation purely to find a reason to say, ‘Unni is like your brother, he is like the brother you never had, Mythili. What a nice boy even though he has insane parents.’ Unni as brother is a repulsive thought for some reason, but Mythili keeps her mouth shut. Finally, one morning, in the middle of chopping tomatoes, Mother tells her what she really wants to say. ‘You can’t go to that boy’s house any more. And I don’t want him coming here. People have started talking.’

  ‘What are they saying?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter what they are saying, you can’t go to his house.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He has grown like a mountain.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You are not a little girl any more, Mythili. A thirteen-year-old girl is a child only to her dumb father. You and I know you are not a child.’

  But Mythili defies her. She has sat in the Chacko home almost every day of her life, even before her memories began. She has crawled across the short corridor to their door and wailed until Mariamma appeared. She still remembers the day Thoma was brought home, an infant with the odour of a raw egg. She was four. Unni was eight and ecstatic at the idea of owning a baby. She has eaten with Unni and Thoma, she has slept there some nights, brushed her teeth with the boys. She has listened to their mother tell them the stories of her village, and even the brief history of the Indian rupee. When Mariamma used to get into one of her moods, and Unni tried to make her laugh, Mythili was part of his plots. She has sat with Mariamma on quiet afternoons and tried to understand why she went nuts sometimes. ‘I am only a bit more energetic than other women,’ she said once. ‘If I was in a country where a woman is allowed to run a mile now and then, I think I would be all right.’

  Mariamma used to run, a long time ago, when she was an adolescent. She used to run across hills and river bridges and tiny villages that were silenced by the apparition of a barefooted young girl in full skirt running as if an invisible mob were chasing her. Some days, Mariamma used to hear people say, in a good-natured way, ‘Run away if you must, but haven’t you left your lover somewhere behind?’ or, ‘It’s all right, if your mama does not want you, we will adopt you’. But, eventually, she had to stop running. People talked. Girls had to walk, apparently, holding colourful umbrellas and handkerchiefs in their fists.

  Mythili fought every day with her mother to retain her right to go to that house. It was worth it. So what if Unni was almost a man. She even liked the idea of Unni as a man. She still likes the idea of Unni as a man. Or, maybe, what she really wants to say is that she likes the idea of a man as an artist, a man who is beautiful, who is somewhat unaware that he is beautiful, who smells like ginger on very hot days, and whose conceit is that he would never be afraid.

  That is a seventeen-year-old boy next door as remembered by a thirteen-year-old girl. At the heart of her memory of Unni is the stillness of time – he is always seventeen, she is always thirteen. Even though she has known him for most of her life, it is Unni at seventeen, Unni in the final year of his life, that is her central memory of him. The boy before that time was a very similar person, as endearing and important but another person. She does not know why she feels that way. She is not sure whether he changed in the last months of his life, changed physically, became a mountain of a boy as her mother accused. Or was it just that Mythili had newly arrived, as a thirteen-year-old, to the outer edges of womanhood? It could be both. Unni and Mythili had come to their own crossings at the same moment in time.

  An enduring memory from this time is of ambiguous innocence – a moment on Pasumarthy Street, where in the mornings there is the confluence of the boys of St Ignatius and the girls of Fatima Convent on their last lap to their schools, and with them a swarm of Romeos – malnourished young men, their groundnut arses in tight jeans, all of them in black sunglasses, all of them clones of film actors, saying things, singing songs, offering eternal love, marriage in faraway temples and exactly two healthy children each.

  She has walked with Unni down this road for years. She in white shirt and olive-green skirt, he in white shirt and khaki trousers. In time, as they walked, their bodies slowly grew apart by inches. They have walked holding hands, they have walked with Unni’s arm on her shoulder, he has carried her in his arms and run the entire stretch of the road, they have walked without holding hands, and finally they have walked with an arm’s length between them, as mandated by her mother.

  ‘My arm or his arm?’

  ‘Shut up, Mythili.’

  The moment that endures is from the period when they were separated by the phantom arm. She saw a boy by the wayside, a half-naked labourer digging up the pavement to lay pipes. He was lean and powerful, and she could see the ripple of muscles on his abdomen. She thought what a beautiful sight he was, and she thought, a moment later, he has almost the same body as Unni. That made her feel shy and very aware of Unni, and she felt the stab of a nameless longing, but then the moment passed and she was a child again.

  By that time, Unni was some kind of a folk hero on Pasumarthy Street, who caused a small flutter among the olive-green pleated skirts walking to school. Even the Romeos studied him through long unhappy drags on their cigarettes. One day a Romeo stared hard at him and said, ‘Hero, come here, hero, I want to talk to you.’ That made Mythili laugh. ‘He just Eve-teased you, Unni,’ she said. And Unni laughed so hard, it made her proud. It was the first time she had made him laugh through her own joke.

  The seniors in her school began to draw her into quiet corners to ask questions about him, his postal address, his telephone number, the character of his mother. They called him ‘cartoonist hottie’. Mythili scrutinized the seniors carefully because if he must have a girlfriend it had to be a girl she approved of. She was unhelpful to the fat, excited ones with moustaches, and more generous with the pretty, modern girls whose skirts were two inches shorter than the school average.

  Mythili is in the Reading Circle Lending Library. She checks the spines of the books on the shelf but what she is thinking is that Unni used to have an account here. She wonders whether there is a register somewhere in the drawers that still bears his name, she wonders what the last book he borrowed was. Did he return it?

  She disliked what he read. She used to see the pile of books on his desk and feel repulsed. He never read fiction, never read anything that people generally read. He read a lot about the brain – not just the human brain, all kinds of brains. Even about the future of the brain. His books were a part of his life she did not know much about, the only part of his life that she thought was boring and dreary.

  ‘What is it that you’re reading, Unni?’

  ‘This.’

  ‘Folie-à-deux by Philippe Boulleau?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Vous lisez Folie-à-deux par Philippe Boulleau?’

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘It sounds like a French book, Unni.’

  ‘I can’t read French, Mythili. It’s in English.’

  ‘I know. But what does Folie-à-deux mean?’

  ‘The Folly of Two.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  ‘It is a neuropsychiatric phenomenon.’

  ‘You look funny when you use big words, Unni.’

  ‘Neuropsychiatric phenomenon.’

  ‘But what does it mean?’

  ‘A mad person transfers his delusion to another person, and both of them begin to see the same delusion. And they mutually corroborate what they see as true. That is the Folly of Two.’

  ‘Do you think that is really possible?’

  ‘All around you, Mythili, is the Folly of Two.’

  ‘“Folie-à-deux”. I don’t like this word.’

  ‘I was thinking, Mythili. All those syllables at the end of French words, all those syllables that are wasted because they are not p
ronounced by the French, where do they go?’

  ‘Where do they go, Unni?’

  ‘They join the underground Union of Insulted French Syllables.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What does the underground union do?’

  ‘The syllables try to influence mankind. Over centuries, over vast ages, they try to influence man. They give humans ideas, thoughts, doubts, eureka moments. All this to help man create something, a machine probably, that would have such a name, such a word that all the syllables in the Union of Insulted French Syllables would be included and pronounced. Humans think all of science is their creation, but no, Mythili. The insulted French syllables are the ones who are giving us those ideas.’

  ‘You are mad, Unni.’

  ‘The leader of the union is X.’

  ‘X?’

  ‘Yes, the most humiliated letter in French even today. There was a time when nobody in France used to pronounce it. Don’t laugh at X, Mythili. He waited for centuries and patiently fed ideas across many generations. And finally mankind discovered the X-ray. Now the French have to pronounce X. They have no choice.’

  ‘You’re mad, Unni.’

  ‘What if I am not?’

  When she leaves the library she tells herself that she will go home but she knows where she is going. She walks down the school lane, which is quiet today because of the weekend, turns right towards the church and heads to the graveyard that lies in the scented shade of eucalyptus trees. Nothing unusual about a decent Brahmin girl walking down a narrow path through a pretty ancient Christian graveyard. Nothing odd about the girl casting a glance at one grey tombstone, and nothing wrong at all if she clears a speck of dirt from her eyes.

  The afternoon he did what he did, she was having a shower. She heard the faint murmur of people, then the yells and screams. She turned off the shower and listened to the sounds more carefully. She heard snatches of what people were trying to say, and she began to shiver. She put on her clothes and ran to the front balcony, and she saw Unni lying in a small pool of blood, his eyes shut. Unni, what an idiot you turned out to be.

  3

  The Album of the Dead

  MARIAMMA CHACKO IN THE mornings is a faction of sounds – of furious water colliding with stainless steel, the rain of spoons, the many omens of steam, and the murmur of the huge boulder mortar in which she annihilates grains with inhuman strength. In between, there are satanic whispers about his mother and thick motiveless footsteps outside his door, and sweet lullabies from another time. But it is Sunday morning and the house is in the stunned peace of her absence. She is in the church, her head probably tilted, pious eyes looking up, knees on thin rubber slippers. Or, maybe, she has finally found a way to desert him. Ousep will soon know. At the moment, though, he does not care where she is and only hopes she does not return any time soon. Unni’s cartoons are scattered on his desk. In the thick mist of smoke, with two forgotten cigarettes in his fingers, he stares hard at one particular work, a rare single-panel cartoon.

  It is a scene in the confession box. A girl in a white dress is on her knees, her palms joined and her head bent. On the other side of the net partition is a sly priest, who is enjoying her confession, as evident from a remarkable bump in his crotch. As always in Unni’s works, the characters are carefully drawn, they are very real. So, the aspiration of the cartoon to be a farce fails, defeated by the potent body of the adolescent girl. A girl on her knees, her high heels removed and placed by her side, healthy legs bare, a girl humbled, revealing her secrets, seeking pardon from a man, asking to be punished. Did Unni, too, see her this way? Are sons and fathers stirred by the same thoughts?

  The cartoon is part of a series that Unni created in a few intense weeks, probably when he was sixteen. In this period he started going to church. He would sit in the last pew for hours, absolutely still. Some people saw him draw, but mostly he did nothing. His unnatural stillness comes up often in the interviews, though Ousep himself had never noticed that about the boy.

  Unni was probably not interested in sketching the giant stained-glass windows or the arches, or the high yellow spire, which is visible from Ousep’s desk. The spire does figure in a cartoon, but as a faint rudimentary backdrop. The focus of the scene is an electric wire where nine crows are sitting in line as crows do, their heads turned towards a luminous white dove sitting isolated at a distance on the same wire, an olive branch in its beak. One of the crows is whispering to another, ‘Kalia has converted.’

  Among the other cartoons inspired by the church, there is a full-length portrait of a young man standing in the aisle. He is in an extravagant shirt with large flowers on it, and his black trousers have the glow of leather. He is dashing, but looks stiff and uncomfortable. His left cheek is fully puffed. Unni had told a friend that boys from the slums came in their best clothes for the Sunday mass, and they stood in a self-conscious way in the suspicion of their own good looks, rubbing their noses, constantly touching the sleeves and collars of their shirts, and puffing a cheek involuntarily. Some of them used to have their sunglasses on during mass until the parish priest banned them, making an exception only for those who were blind beyond reasonable doubt.

  Around this time, a span of about two months according to some accounts, Unni developed an interest in the dead. He had a network of informers who contacted him the moment they got wind of a funeral mass. He would rush to the church, stand near the coffin, and stare at the corpse as the mourners in the pews behind him probably asked each other who the boy was. It was an uncharacteristically conspicuous thing for him to do, and it is not surprising that several people remember seeing his lone figure peering into a coffin. At least once he took his notebook out and attempted to draw the face of the corpse – in that case, an old lady in thick spectacles. A mourner went up to him and asked him to stop. Unni continued to sketch; soon other mourners joined the quarrel, and the priest had to interrupt the service to ask him to get out.

  Seeing corpses in their coffins probably inspired his longest work, The Album of the Dead. As it progressed he showed it to several friends, who were disturbed by his idea of humour. In the Album, he imagined family, friends and other familiar people dead in their coffins.

  Every person has a whole vertical page, and there are thirty-two caricatures in all, including a self-portrait. The Album of the Dead is his only comic that has been granted its own exclusive book. The portraits occupy only one half of the book; the other half is blank. He planned it as a continuing series that would keep growing as newer people came his way. He even wished to draw some of the people again as they slowly aged. He wanted to frame the passage of time inside unchanging coffins. If he had lived long, as he once certainly hoped, The Album of the Dead would have been an enormous work contained in several books.

  It begins with his mother, drawn with a son’s bias. It is a top-angle scene, like the other caricatures. She is lying peacefully in a black coffin, a bit thinner than she is in reality. Her arms are folded over her stomach. There is a solemn dignity about her, which is how everybody is portrayed, except Ousep. He does not emerge very well from his caricature. He is lying in his coffin with his hands and legs hanging out of the box. He is bare-chested, and below the waist he is covered by a lungi instead of a white shroud. His left hand is connected to an intravenous fluid system that stands near the coffin. The fluid is in the unmistakable golden bottle of Honeydew Rum.

  The humour of the Album lies in its entirety, in seeing page after page of people lying in their black diamond coffins. But not everyone found it funny.

  Mariamma had seen her portrait soon after Unni had finished it, and she was hurt. She said no son in the world would draw his own mother in a coffin, especially when she was alive. Ousep remembers hearing fragments of the fuss one morning. Long ago, it seems. How would she react if she knew what Unni had told a friend about her? He had told the friend, in the middle of pumping air into a cycle tyre, that if his mother died the same evening h
e would not be affected. ‘I will have no problem using her skull as a pen-holder,’ he said. He surely did not mean it. He was probably trying to make a larger point by using the skull of the person he loved the most as an example, but the friend remembered the incident through moral outrage.

  ‘He was a good person, Unni was a good person, but some of the things he said were horrible. His own mother, the skull of his own mother. A pen-holder?’

  ‘Did he imagine her skull as anything else? Or was it only as a pen-holder?’

  ‘No. Only a pen-holder.’

  ‘Are you sure about that? Did he say “pencil-holder” or “pen-holder”?’

  ‘Pen-holder.’

  Thoma must have been eight when he was included in the Album. He occupies less than half of the coffin. His hair is combed, and his face has an angelic radiance, which he does not possess in reality. Ousep accepts the general hilarity of The Album of the Dead, but not of Thoma this way. He feels the fear of losing this one too. When boys want to jump head first, who can stop them?

  The others in the Album are Mythili from a different time, Somen Pillai, Sai Shankaran, and many of Unni’s friends, teachers and neighbours, including Mythili’s parents. There are four unidentified people, including a dignified old man who really does look dead. None of Unni’s friends have been able to identify these four.

  It is a melodramatic coincidence that the final cartoon in the series is the self-portrait – Unni in his casket. And it is natural for his mother to wonder whether this was her deserved suicide note. Did the boy draw himself in the coffin the day he went to the terrace to jump? Is there a message here, a clue that has to be cracked? It is a reasonable thought, but Unni’s friends remember seeing the self-portrait months before he died, they are very sure.

  Ousep, his chin resting on a palm, looks with affection at the portrait, which has acquired an aching sweetness about it. Unni, with his enormous head and high mop of hair, a clear handsome face, and the austere body of a rustic. This was how he had looked when he was taken to the church in a plywood coffin.