The Illicit Happiness of Other People

by Manu Joseph

‘Olive Ridley is a turtle.’

  ‘A turtle?’

  ‘Endangered.’

  ‘Why must you go to a beach at midnight to see a turtle?’

  ‘The turtles swim in from the sea and walk on the beach at midnight to lay eggs.’

  ‘Why are you interested in turtle eggs?’

  ‘We have to ensure the eggs are safe. Or Olive Ridleys will become extinct.’

  ‘Do boys, too, want to save the Olive Ridleys?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mythili, just think about it. You. Midnight. Marina Beach. Boys. How could you even ask your father?’

  Mythili storms out of the house, which is a moment of comic rebellion because it contains within its drama the indestructible promise that she will return before the sun goes down.

  She has to take a walk to release her rage. The option of shutting herself in her room is not available any more. The latch on her door was removed after Mother complained to Father that she was spending long hours locked up in her room. After Father removed the latch with a screwdriver, Mythili started blocking the door with her table. So Father held four sizes of screwdrivers in his hand and said, ‘If you continue doing this I will remove the door.’

  Maybe Mythili should find a sweet boy and fall in love, and have plentiful foreplay in vengeance. She decides to go to the Circular Road, gather two friends and discuss the matter, walking in large circles around a park filled with cheap bougainvilleas.

  But right in front of her appears a familiar sight that puts her off boys for the week. A tall lanky thing, must be around fifteen, is flanked by his papa and mama, and they are going somewhere important, probably to a temple far away. He is much taller than his parents but they are, at this moment, giving him a good shaft up his arse. The boy is silent.

  Father says, ‘What is ninety-four per cent, what is ninety-four per cent these days? That, too, in maths. In Madras. What is ninety-four per cent? How can you come home and look into our eyes after doing something like this?’

  Mother says, ‘You are not working hard, look at all your friends, how hard they are working.’

  Father says, ‘And your JEE scores. What’s happened to you? Do you want to go to IIT or not? Do you want to go to America or not? That is the decision you have to make. Do you want to rot here?’

  ‘Do you want to be a failure?’

  ‘You don’t have the option of failure.’

  The boy will not be a failure, Mythili knows. She has seen the generations before. The boy will make it. As his father has said, he does not have the option of failure. He will crack at least one entrance exam, and he will one day have a nice house in a suburb of San Francisco, or in a suburb of a suburb of San Francisco. He will find a cute Tamil Brahmin wife and make her produce two sweet children. He will drive a Toyota Corolla to work. And there, in the conference room of his office, he will tell his small team, with his hands stretched wide in a managerial way, ‘We must think out of the box.’

  Her future husband must be something like this boy. He would have endured the same endoscopic bamboo up his arse, and emerged more resolute about cracking life. Her husband, her man, he is probably somewhere in Madras at this very moment. She wonders what he must be doing right now. Is he sitting at home, with a pile of IIT study material and a calculator on his desk? Does he, too, call his calculator ‘Calcy’? Is he taking breaks to jerk off, thinking of Silk Smitha. What are you doing right now, my lord?

  Would he measure up to Unni? It is a question she does not want to ask, she does not like it. She wonders whether Unni will always haunt her. Or will she forget him in time, will he become just another tame memory? As of this evening, what she believes is that she will always remember him through the myths of a thirteen-year-old girl. And the men who will come her way, men who will be dull software engineers by the laws of probability, may not have a chance when set against Unni Chacko.

  A surprising memory comes to her. She has not thought of this moment before. Since Unni died she has remembered him through the same set of images and events. It is as if the shock of the day had wiped clean many of her memories of him. But now and then some scenes come back to her and she wonders why she is being made to remember those ordinary moments, especially this. Even when she was thirteen, when it happened, she had not considered it important. But now that she remembers, now that she is older, she wonders whether there was more to it.

  What she remembers is an evening in his house. She has been there for a few hours but Unni is busy at his desk, his bedroom door shut. So she is in the hall, sitting on the floor with Thoma and teaching him how to mix watercolours to create other colours. At some point she realizes that Unni is standing in his doorway and watching. She smiles at him.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she says.

  ‘I was thinking, you may never see what I see.’

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘I see things that are very beautiful. And I was thinking, Mythili will go through her entire life without ever seeing what I see. Mythili will never know what she is meant to see.’

  ‘You are mad, Unni.’

  ‘What if I am not?’

  THOMA CHACKO WAKES UP earlier than usual and tries to understand what has happened to him. His head is fully tilted to his right, as if he is looking at the world with affection. He walks dreamily to the kitchen, feeling like the ghost of a boy who has been hanged, who is searching for his mother to tell her what they have done to him.

  His mother is washing the dishes, her sari hitched up well above her knees. She stops for a moment, stands absolutely still, the lid of the pressure cooker in one hand and a wet scrub in another. A smile crosses her face as her hand circles the bottom of the lid very slowly, and she sings a lullaby.

  It is dawn and the world is otherwise still. The lullaby is sweet and sad, like all lullabies. It was Unni who introduced him to the true nature of lullabies. ‘If you listen carefully, Thoma, you will realize that a lullaby is a sad song. That is the secret of the lullaby.’

  ‘Why is it sad, Unni?’

  ‘I cannot tell you, Thoma. You’re too young. But I have information that when mothers first began to sing lullabies they did it to mourn the birth of their babies. It was a tradition. Some people will tell you, Thoma, lullabies only sound sad because they are sung softly to lull babies into sleep. But the truth is lullabies are sad because they are meant to be sad. Do you know something, Thoma, even today, in some African tribes, lullabies and funeral songs are the same.’

  Now that Thoma is older, he knows that when people want to con you they bring in the African tribes. Unni, especially. But as he stands this dawn, listening to his mother, how can he deny that there is a stirring sorrow in the song that he hears, a song that is among his earliest memories. When she finally sees him, she says, ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘My neck is broken,’ he says.

  She approaches him with her strong open arms. ‘You’ve got a crick in your neck, Thoma. It’s nothing. Let us fix it the village way. One swift jerk of your head and you will be all right. You won’t feel a thing.’

  He screams, ‘It is not a sprain. I promise you it is something more important.’

  She looks at him carefully and gives him the benefit of doubt. She used to be very confident about her ways once, but after Unni’s death she has become unsure of all her opinions about the world.

  She grabs the coconut oil bottle from the shelf and before Thoma can react she pours some of it in his raised left ear. There is nothing he can do but just stand there as if his ear is a vat. He never lets her do it normally, but this morning she has grabbed her chance. ‘Too much wax in your ear, Thoma.’

  ‘Do we have any money to go to the clinic?’

  ‘We must go to the clinic, Thoma. And for that we must first go quietly into Iago’s chamber.’

  They tiptoe into Ousep’s bedroom. His lungi hangs from the fan as a noose. He is sleeping fully naked, his mouth open, legs spread wide, his balls lying on him
like an extraterrestrial pet. She covers him with a bedsheet, and they stand there and stare at him. There is no sign of life in him, his breath is imperceptible, his eyes are half open. But then a toe wiggles, which makes Mariamma and Thoma leave his bedside.

  She gently opens the table drawer and extracts Ousep’s thin leather wallet. She pouts her lips at Thoma, which means there is some cash in it. She usually does not steal money from him because he gets furious and creates a big scene when he finds out.

  They walk to the clinic on Arcot Road, which is not very far. The coconut oil is still in his ear because there is no way he can move his head to empty it. ‘Let it stay there for a while, Thoma,’ she says when they leave the house.

  On the way she gets into one of her moods. She holds Thoma’s hand in a fierce grip and starts marching furiously, thinking of her old foes, her lips curling into her mouth, her eyes looking insanely at the road. Occasionally, she wags a finger in the air. She does this in short bursts. She will mumble something, bite her own lips, wag a finger, and the next moment she is all elegant and sharp, her eyes alone preoccupied, lips smacking in preparation for the next bout. A man walking in their direction almost jumps in fright when she suddenly chews her lips and wags her finger. There are not many people on the road fortunately, because it is still very early in the morning, but the few who pass them by look at them curiously.

  Thoma endures the shame, his head tilted, his left ear filled with coconut oil. Now and then, he tells her softly to behave like a normal person but she ignores him. There is a moment when her head, too, is fully tilted, and she raises her right arm as if she is doing a warming-up workout. People look at them in incomprehension. A woman and a boy going somewhere, both their heads fully tilted. Nobody knows why.

  In Sai Polyclinic, there are only three doctors at this hour and they are busy with an emergency case. Thoma and his mother do not want to know what the case is, they wait for a while and decide to leave. They walk back home, the way they had come – Thoma’s head almost horizontal, Mariamma in occasional fury.

  That night, Thoma is woken up by his father to write his obituary. Mariamma says, ‘Leave him alone, his neck is broken.’ But she has decided not to fight. Thoma follows his swaying and stumbling father to the bedroom, where there is a lungi noose ready and hanging from the ceiling fan, and a chair below it. Ousep takes his position on the chair and puts the noose around his neck. Thoma stands with his head tilted. They stare at each other. ‘Bastard,’ Ousep says. ‘Are you making fun of me, you bastard?’

  ‘My neck is broken,’ Thoma says.

  Ousep tries to step down but is pulled back by the noose. He extricates himself, gets down, and takes Thoma by his hand. ‘I will take care of you, my son, I am your father.’

  So Thoma walks to Sai Polyclinic once again; this time he is led by a man who can barely walk. It is late in the night and the long straight road to the clinic is deserted, but occasionally, a taxi or an autorickshaw passes by and people stare at the strange sight of a drunken man leading a boy with a tilted head. Thoma wants to cry. In the morning, he goes somewhere with a mad woman, in the night with a drunkard. What a life. He feels a ball of warm sorrow in his throat.

  When they reach the clinic, the guard sees the state Ousep is in and will not let them in. Ousep throws his press card at him and says, ‘Do you know who I am?’ The guard screams to another guard inside, ‘A man here has forgotten who he is. Is the psychiatrist on duty?’ And the guards laugh. Ousep threatens to call the chief minister. The guard says, ‘Call the president.’ Ousep shakes his head at Thoma and says, ‘This moron does not know the president has no powers in this country.’

  Eventually, the guard wins. So they walk back. This time, Thoma has to lead his father, who stumbles many times and can barely stand. They go this way down the abandoned road – the boy with the tilted head leading the drunkard.

  Thoma sees two shadowy figures approach. An urchin girl of his age is leading her drunken father. As their paths cross, Thoma and the girl look at each other, and they smile as if to give the other the strength to survive the times. Many years later, Thoma will think of her and hope with all his heart that she, too, has somehow made it across.

  Thoma leads his father carefully to the stairway of Block A. Ousep is too drunk and sleepy to scream, which is a blessing. They walk up the steps quietly. Ousep stops. ‘Thoma,’ he says, ‘do you hate your father?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t hate me, son. There are people in this world who set out to make an omelette but end up with scrambled eggs. I am just one of them.’

  They resume their walk up the steps. They walk in silence. When they are about to reach the landing on the third floor, they see a strange sight. Mythili walks across the short corridor, like a midnight ghost, towards her door. She throws a look at Thoma but does not say anything. She slips into her home and shuts the door.

  ‘Did that happen, Thoma?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Ousep studies the front door of his house carefully and looks up at the short flight of steps that leads to the terrace door, which is locked. Just for a moment he looks strong and clever, the way he is in the mornings.

  4

  Gentleman’s Cholesterol

  THE TRUE NATURE OF sorrow is boredom. Ousep Chacko is more sure than ever as he stands on his balcony, in the stillness of the humid Saturday evening. The good husbands too are out on their balconies, half naked, their white sacred threads running between their loose undeniable breasts. Their wives keep serving them biscuits and coffee, lemon juice and water, or they disappear after obeying orders and appear with newspapers, bank passbooks or other objects that still belong to men here. Some couples are having long, conspiratorial conversations as couples do. On the ground below, children are playing a hectic game that is making them delirious. Can people really tell the difference between normal children and abnormal children? That somehow reminds him of the type of people who can tell the difference between good poetry and bad poetry.

  Thoma is among the happy kids who are now running like a fleeing mob. Even in Thoma’s world, some days are good days. Girls in their late adolescence walk in packs from one wall to another, throwing sideways glances at the big boys sitting in line on the compound wall. In another time, on an evening like this, Unni would have been among the boys on the wall, sitting quietly and returning the looks of the girls.

  Boys of Unni’s age in the colony are of two kinds, without exception since the exception is dead. The dejected, who failed to clear the JEE but have managed to enter the best of the second-rung engineering colleges, and the irreparably damaged, who attend third-rate institutes, some of them in faraway, gloomy industrial towns. The irreparably damaged flock together. They walk without the spring of life, their spines have lost their pride, and there is no light in their eyes. They become alert when they hear words like ‘idiot’ or ‘fool’ or ‘stupid’. Even when these descriptions are not about them, the words land painful blows in their hearts. The eight boys on the wall today are of the flock.

  They are distracted by a girl walking down the road. Unni used to call her ‘Typewriter’ and that is what they call her here even now. Books pressed to her chest, oiled hair tied in a single fierce braid, she walks down this road every evening. She walks in great discomfort, as always, to the sounds of her silver anklets, with a distraught smile of excruciating shyness, her head bent, her baffled eyes gaping at the road, fully aware of the boys on the wall, boys on their balconies, boys behind windows, all the boys in the world. She loses authority over her tense legs often and veers to the side until she reaches the very edge of the road, sometimes a compound wall, when she gets mildly alarmed and veers to the other side, like the roller of a typewriter.

  The boys on the wall, the men and women on the balconies, even the old who can see far, laugh as they see the girl go round the bend. She is a passing moment of joy. Like the Chackos, she makes people feel they are better.

  After she van
ishes, a numbing dullness returns to the world. The boys have nothing to laugh at, nothing to do. On occasion, their heads lift for a swift hopeful gaze at Mythili’s balcony, where there is no one standing right now.

  She used to stand on her balcony and call out for Unni. Some days, when she was in the mood, she would yell out his name several times in the different accents of the elders in the block. Unni would then walk across his father’s bedroom with his tired arrogance, without fear or respect, and open the narrow door that leads to the balcony. He and the girl would then chat standing on their balconies, sometimes for over an hour. Unni usually said very little, she did most of the talking, chiefly complaining about her friends or teachers. Sometimes she whispered things about her mother to him and giggled. That was then, when she was allowed to talk to men.

  Ousep decides he has had enough of the humid evening, he must now head somewhere affluent and have a quiet drink, maybe more. It is an inevitability that masquerades as a decision. That is the way of a drunkard. He grants himself the dignity of choice, as if there is another option. But then is there really any choice in the world? Could it be that every human action is merely an inevitability masquerading as a human decision, life granting dignity to its addicts through the delusion of choice?

  He is about to leave the balcony when he spots something at the far end of Balaji Lane. He is unable to understand what is happening but everybody else appears to know what is going on. There is a stranger walking down the lane, a young man whose features are not clear. As he passes the other blocks, boys stop playing and stare, boys stand on the walls and stare. Girls appear on the balconies rolling their hair and look. Men and women point to the young man and talk among themselves, nodding their heads. A small swarm of boys, short and tall, is now following the young man. The news has just gone around Block A. The children run out to the lane, many climb the compound wall and stand on it to get a better look. The big boys, too, are standing on the wall. The entire length of the wall is now lined with boys of many heights standing and looking to their right. The balconies fill with people. The young man approaches in his swarm. He is unaffected by all the attention. And it is now clear what is in his hand – a red basket filled with vegetables. Miraculously, the apparition enters Block A. Even more incredibly, it speaks to Thoma, who is visibly dazed as he clumsily climbs down from the wall.