The Illicit Happiness of Other People

by Manu Joseph

  She has not returned yet, though it is time. What if she never returns, what if she has somehow found a way to desert him? But that is unlikely. Where will she go? Everybody wants to flee, but for Mariamma to flee her home, a lot must happen.

  First, some socialists have to die. And the nation that they destroyed has to go to the very brink with all its reserve dollars slowly vanishing, a slide that has already begun. With no money left for imports, the government would do what Mariamma has done all her life. Pawn gold to buy oil. The surrender of gold would be a humiliation the whole nation would understand and the new young men would then craftily use the moment of collective shame to convince the old obsolete men that they have no choice but to open up the Indian market to foreign companies. In the liberation that would ensue, Thoma would have to play his cards right. Then he could take his mother somewhere far away and put her in a beautiful new house. For a woman to flee, a lot must happen.

  So, in all probability, she is still in the church, together with the maids, the dandy slum boys and the other new converts who attend the Tamil mass. She prefers the English mass, but she feels too small when she stands among the rich. They in their sparkling ironed clothes and happy fragrances, and she in a tired old sari and rubber slippers. After mass, she will go to the confession box to perplex the priest once again by refusing to tell him her sins, demanding instead that she be handed the penance anyway. She will correct him if the punishment is too harsh or too mild, and help him arrive at the correct number of prayers she must utter. It was Unni who had discovered this about his mother. The undercover misanthrope could somehow charm the most insignificant information from the hearts of people. He would have probably solved his own death in no time.

  Ousep shuts the Album more violently than he intended and puts it on top of the pile of cartoons on his desk. He stares without hope at the haphazard array of lampoons that grudgingly tells the story of a boy. He considers getting the other works from the wooden trunk and going through all of them one more time. He may spot something, a simple clue that was always in plain sight. Are not mysteries solved this way, through a moment of accidental discovery? No one ever solves a riddle by thinking too hard about it.

  He opens the back panel of the radio and extracts the pages of How To Name It. He goes through the pages, not sure what he is searching for. The familiar scenes pass – the tough rustic man on a rubber farm who begins to run for his life, the journey of the mysterious narrator, the amiable middle-aged woman, the giant bra as suspension bridge over a river, the walk through the woman’s house, the rustic man now raising his thumb in triumph, and finally Mariamma Chacko in tumult, standing on the wooden stand, like a trophy, looking up and wagging a finger, her leg raised in a valiant leap.

  Ousep goes through the comic again, then again, as he has done a thousand times. He stops on every page and tries to piece together the story. Most of the panels in the comic have blank spaces at the top, probably for the narration. The dialogue bubbles, when they appear, are all of the same size. Did Unni imagine that every piece of dialogue was going to be of the same length? And why are they blank? The same questions, every moment of Ousep’s life.

  According to Mariamma, the fact that her son did not leave a note behind for her is a significant decision, even a vital clue. Ousep takes her far more seriously than she imagines. So, he wonders once again, can it be true? Does the absence of an explanation contain within its baffling emptiness a simple message that Unni presumed his parents would be smart enough to see?

  THOMA CHACKO STANDS NAKED in the bathroom and asks himself whether he will remember this moment forever. Many years later, will he remember this Sunday evening when he was filling a bucket with water? Will he look back across a whole lifetime one day and say to the boy he once was, ‘Yes, I remember the moment. You were shorter than the fridge those days. It was a blue bucket, wasn’t it? And, Thoma, by the way, if you want to know. You made it, Thoma, you made it. You’re very famous and reasonably rich.’

  The bucket is overflowing but he does not want to turn the tap off. He likes the roar of water, its ominous terror. In the bucket is the sea, about four kilometres deep. He stirs the water with his hand and makes a furious whirlpool, which leaves a calm eye at its heart. Thoma imagines he is in the eye of a giant ocean whirlpool. Ships and whales, mere specks on the enormous swirling wall of water, orbit him. He feels a deep fear in his stomach and screams.

  But what is more terrifying than a whirlpool is a giant wave. Unni said that a powerful earthquake beneath the sea could create a sudden ocean wave one kilometre high. It could appear any time on the horizon. That is why Thoma sometimes looks carefully over the coconut trees and the building tops or as far as the eye can see. Such a wave would exterminate the entire human population. Millions of years later, new humans might rise and they might build a new world that would look very different from everything Thoma knows. But the pass mark in science and maths would still be thirty-five per cent. That is what Unni said. It astonishes Thoma that the human race will always arrive at a cut-off score that he can just about achieve. Unni said that there were many such things in the Universe that nobody could fully explain. For example, even though the sun is many times larger than the moon, they look the same size in the sky. How miraculous it is for a planet to be in a position in space where its sun and its moon appear to have the same size. ‘Is there a reason, Thoma?’ Unni would whisper, as if he knew the reason.

  Thoma looks nervously at the bathroom window; through the iron bars he sees apartment blocks and the tops of independent homes and a distant forest of coconut trees. He looks carefully at the arc of land’s end. He has seen something; it seems the horizon has risen, a giant blue mist is approaching. The Bay of Bengal is coming. He screams, jumps into his underwear, remembering through an inescapable moment that it was once his father’s shirt. And he runs out of the bathroom. In the hallway he is stabbed by an old fear. Is he like his mother? Will he, too, go through life seeing great spectacles that others cannot see, will he live in the sorrows of the past, will he go through life talking to himself, crying and laughing, calling out the full Christian names of his relatives and asking them the same questions forever? He can hear his mother in the kitchen, her voice rising, and her words beginning to tremble.

  He stands in the kitchen doorway and looks as Unni used to. ‘Annamol Chacko,’ she tells the exhaust fan. ‘You and your nine daughters come to visit your son, Ousep, when we are living in Kottayam. I am eight months pregnant with Unni. Still I make tea for all of you. And you say I am too learned to make good tea. And all of you laugh.’

  Thoma has never understood why this moment means so much to his mother. Criticism of tea is hardly a matter that should affect a clever woman like her. But Unni did tell him one day that in the words of some women there was great injustice that only other women could decipher. ‘It is not about the tea, Thoma, it is never about the tea.’

  Thoma has a hazy memory of his grandmother, who used to visit every summer. He remembers her as a tiny woman with the face of a pony and cruel eyes that had an opinion about all that they saw. And she was usually in a white blouse, shrouded in an expensive white cloth that had a cross pinned on it. Below the waist she was bound tightly by another white cloth that was bunched behind her like a bird’s tail. ‘Like a hand fan to cool her arse,’ Unni said. She used to come by the night train from the village with her silent husband, who carried on his shoulders at least two jackfruits and all the fearless flies of Kerala. For some reason, she always walked ahead of him.

  Unni said that their mother’s enemy was their enemy, so Thoma decided to hate his grandmother, even though she appeared to love him very much. There was a reason why it was easy for Thoma to dislike her. In the first few minutes of her arrival, Mariamma would cane Thoma’s legs for no good reason, then take him inside to kiss him and say she was sorry. She never hit Unni, probably because he was one of those people nobody wants to hit, or maybe she treated him differently
because he was older than Thoma. Though, sometimes, she did chase Unni with a broom in her hand, both of them laughing. It disappointed Thoma that his mother, who was usually very kind, would behave in this puzzling manner with him every time Grandmother visited. But Unni told him one day that it was a Village Tradition. One way of insulting the mother-in-law was to beat up your kids in front of her. He was probably right because Annamol was deeply affected by the caning and it could not have been out of love for him. She would look sadly at the floor and weep with an occasional shiver of her nostrils.

  Thoma is amazed at the telepathy of women. How miraculous it is for one woman to do something weird and another woman to extract its intended meaning. One morning, his mother told him, ‘Thoma, when I am old I’ll go to an old-age home so that I am not a burden on you.’ Thoma could not understand why she was saying this when there was a lot of time to decide the matter. But then Unni told him, ‘That message was not for you, Thoma. It was meant for Annamol Chacko. Mother is hinting to the old woman that she is a bloody nuisance.’

  Thoma is glad he is not a woman. He is not good at deciphering clues and if he were a woman he would go through his entire life missing all the insults hurled at him by other women. Which is not such a bad way to be, when you think of it.

  Despite everything, Annamol continued to visit every summer of Thoma’s life, until he was seven. He would always remember the dawn when he woke up to her terrifying screams. She was in the bathroom by the time Thoma arrived but the door was not locked. He opened the door nervously and the sight of an old woman wailing at the mirror was so terrifying that at first he did not see what was wrong with her. Then he realized that most of her hair was gone. Someone had cut her long silver hair when she was sleeping. The whole day she sat in a corner, her head covered, looking wicked, holding her broken hair in her fist. Father was not in town that day. He was in Sriharikota to report the launch of an Indian rocket. Mother was silent that day, but not unhappy. Finally, Annamol told her husband, ‘I want to leave.’

  The old man was sitting cross-legged in just his underwear, a lit cigarette in his hand, elbows resting on his thighs, his whole body glistening with sweat.

  ‘I want to leave,’ she said again.

  ‘India is about to launch a rocket,’ he said.

  ‘That’s all very nice, but Annamol is happy to take a train,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t understand, woman, the government says that people should remain indoors because the rocket can fall anywhere.’

  So Annamol left in the night, after the newsreader announced that the rocket had fallen safely into the sea. When she was at the door she raised a hand and flung a fistful of air at Mariamma. ‘I curse you,’ she said. ‘As I cry, so shall you.’ Mariamma looked up at the ceiling and mumbled a Hail Mary. Grandmother stared hard and said, in a whisper that had the hiss of a snake, ‘Mary can’t save you. Just because men like virgins, it does not make them gods.’

  Mariamma looked at the ceiling again and she whispered, ‘My Lord, my God, there are Protestants among us, it seems, forgive them their sins.’

  Thoma has not seen his grandmother since. She was not present at Unni’s funeral. None of the relatives had come. The funeral was a day after he died; there was not enough time for people to come from Kerala.

  Thoma wonders whether on a vast field far away Annamol wags a finger at a jackfruit tree and accuses his mother of cutting her hair. Grandmother probably still does not know the truth.

  It was Unni who had cut her hair. He was just fifteen then but he was brave, he was always brave. The night Annamol left, he said with terrifying hatred in his eyes, ‘Justice for our mother, Thoma. The worst thing that can happen to a person is a tragedy that is also funny. And that has happened to Grandmother.’

  Every time Mariamma spoke to the walls, Unni used to listen very carefully, usually standing out of sight, staring at the floor, hands on his hips. When Thoma came to him to chat, Unni would raise a finger asking him to shut up. It was very important to Unni that he heard every word that she uttered. It was as if he were trying to piece together a riddle from the strands of her many conversations with herself. Some days, when Mother seemed particularly disturbed, he would go to her and crack a joke about the way she was or stand beside her and imitate her perfectly. Or he would make her tell him the family stories that lurked behind every grouse, and she would become very happy as she told him her stories. Sometimes she would laugh in the middle of her tales and say, ‘You are like a daughter, Unni.’

  He once pointed out a fact that Thoma might not have figured out on his own. It might appear that their mother’s grouses were endless and the persons who once harmed her numerous, but the truth was that there were not more than a dozen names she uttered, and against every name she repeated the same set of two or three incidents. It comforts Thoma that there are not too many bad things that happened to his mother when she was young. And that if you had the time to do the maths you could actually arrive at the exact number of grouses she has. He hopes there is a way he can calm her forever and make her a woman, like any other woman, who does not talk to the walls.

  Mariamma is a bit louder than usual right now and he knows that everybody on the floor and even below can hear her. At some point, as always, she catches him looking at her. She wipes her tears and lets out an embarrassed chuckle. Swings her arms in the air like a wrestler before a bout and says, ‘I was just exercising, Thoma. Don’t worry. I’m just letting off some steam.’ She begins to march like a soldier now, swinging her arms. ‘Left, right, left, right,’ she says, trying to make him laugh. She gives up, leans against the kitchen counter, and smiles in an ingratiating way. She probably wants him to leave so that she can let off more steam. Thoma decides to make her laugh. He feels a cold fear in his throat because what he is about to do is risky. He has never tried this before, though he has thought of it many times.

  ‘Jesus is sitting with his disciples for the Last Supper,’ he says.

  ‘What did you say, Thoma?’

  ‘There is a really foul smell in the air. Jesus looks a bit worried. He says, “Tonight one of you will betray me.”’

  Mariamma searches for something on the floor. Thoma is surprised that his mother has lost interest in his joke so fast.

  ‘Judas gets up holding his nose and says, “It was Jesus, it was Jesus.”’

  Mariamma finds the broom in a crevice above the gas cylinder.

  ‘You didn’t get it?’ he says. ‘It was Jesus who had farted and Judas betrayed him.’

  ‘I got that much, you little rat,’ Mariamma says, and charges at him with the broom.

  He flees, wondering why the joke sounded so funny when Unni used to tell it. Mariamma runs behind him, screaming, ‘That’s all this house needs, another God-abusing fool.’

  Thoma runs to the bathroom and shuts the door. He screams from inside, ‘I was only trying to make you laugh.’

  ‘I don’t need help to laugh, I don’t need help to cry. Don’t you know that?’

  ‘I won’t try again.’

  ‘Open the door.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I have put the broom down.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What you should be doing, Thoma, is having your books in front of you. We have to do something about your marks.’

  ‘I pass in all the subjects all the time, don’t I?’

  ‘That’s not enough, Thoma. That’s not enough. You have to score in the late nineties. Otherwise there is no hope for a boy in this country. I ask you again, do you want to become a writer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what do we do about your marks, Thoma? I can’t afford tuition. I can teach you but I am not good at teaching kids.’

  ‘I don’t understand anything when you teach me.’

  ‘So what do we do about you, Thoma? Come out, first.’

  ‘I will work hard. Don’t worry.’

  ‘I was thinking, Thoma. Maybe we should ask Mythili again.’


  ‘Don’t do that. She has not come here since Unni did what he did. She has become like the other people. She does not like us any more.’

  ‘Don’t say that. Nobody dislikes us.’

  From the way her last sentence ends, Thoma realizes that she is probably crying. He begins to cry, too. Both of them stand on either side of the shut bathroom door and cry as silently as they can.

  ‘Why did Unni do it?’ he asks. ‘Of all the people in the world, Unni.’

  ‘That’s what even I ask myself every single moment of my life. Of all the people in the world, Unni.’

  Thoma opens the door and steps out. He wants to stand next to his mother and hug her with one hand, without feeling her breasts, the way Unni used to hug her. But then Unni was tall and strong. He would hug her with one hand and lift her off the ground.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he says.

  ‘You don’t cry,’ she says.

  ‘I’ve stopped.’

  ‘Then I’ve stopped, too.’

  ‘What is it that Father has found? People say he has found something about Unni. He is meeting Unni’s old friends again.’

  ‘I’ve heard,’ Mariamma says. ‘But your father is not telling me anything yet.’

  ‘Why isn’t he telling us?’

  ‘He is not telling anyone what he has found, that’s my guess.’ ‘Why, do you think …’

  ‘I don’t know. But sooner or later he has to tell me. Your father wants to tell me. He is just waiting for the right time.’

  ‘You really don’t know why Unni did what he did?’

  ‘I don’t know, Thoma. I don’t know what got into Unni that day.’

  ‘People say he had a lot of sorrow in his heart.’

  ‘We know that’s not true.’

  ‘Will I become like him? Will I decide to jump off one day?’

  ‘Don’t talk like that, Thoma. Have you ever felt like doing something like that?’

  ‘No.’