The Illicit Happiness of Other People

by Manu Joseph

  What he said appeared nonsensical and Balki did not think much about it. ‘Two years later Unni asked me if I remembered that moment, if I remembered what he had said. I said “yes”. And Unni said, “There is a reason why you did not forget it.”’

  ‘But what did he mean when he said one person will make it?’ Ousep asks.

  ‘I didn’t ask him.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘At that time I didn’t know he was going to die. So I didn’t attach too much importance to everything he said. But I can guess what he meant. He probably meant that the birth of every human is nature’s blind shot at achieving something grander. It constantly fails but by producing billions of people nature is improving its chances of attaining a mysterious goal.’

  ‘Does it make sense to you?’

  ‘If you eliminate that bit about nature having a goal, what Unni said is just a layperson’s description of the theory of evolution. Nature keeps producing millions and billions of nearly identical organisms for ages, then something happens to one creature by chance and a new species is born.’

  ‘But that’s not what Unni was talking about. He said, in your own words, one person will make it.’

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘What exactly did he mean?’

  ‘We will never know.’

  The door bursts open, startling Ousep and the boy. Mariamma walks in with a calm phoney smile, carrying two cups of coffee on a plastic tray. She sets the cups on the desk and lingers. Ousep glares at her but she decides not to meet his eye. So he walks her out of the room, shuts the door on her again and latches it.

  Balki sips his coffee, ruffles his hair, lets out a deep yawn, squeezes his penis for a moment as if to unknot it, looks in the direction of the church spire. Ousep waits without a word, flapping his thighs. Balki, too, begins to flap his thighs. They sit this way in silence, flapping their thighs.

  Balki pulls the Indian Express towards him and begins to read. He turns the pages, even folds the paper and gets down to reading a short item about a flyover that will soon be built. He takes far too long to finish the article, and it occurs to Ousep that the boy is probably here to say something and is not sure whether he should. He is making up his mind.

  When Balki finds his voice again, it is as if he had never paused. But it is not clear whether this is what he has come here to say or whether he is just buying time. ‘Nobody noticed it at first,’ he says, ‘but when Unni was seventeen he began to transform. We had just entered the twelfth standard. I don’t know how much you know, some bizarre things happened in the class.’

  Most of the boys in the class had been together from the time they were children, and the twelfth standard was a foreboding lodged in their minds all through the years of their childhood. Innumerable times, on good days and bad, they had sat together and wondered what would become of them when they sat the inescapable board exams at the end of the twelfth standard. They spoke in whispers about the fathers who had killed themselves in shame because their sons had failed. And when they finally entered the last year of school, they were filled with the deep melancholy seeded in them long before their memories began. The time had come. That was what everyone in Madras told them. The time had come. Their fates would be decided in a few months in the board exams and in the toughest engineering entrance exams in the world. Every teacher, even the language teachers, told them that they were ‘at the crossroads of life’.

  Every boy in the class became increasingly obsessed with his study material, except Unni, of course. He spent his free time drawing the portraits of boys engrossed in solving sample problems, their desks filled with fat books and their fingers tapping the Seiko calculator. This was what they did most of the time. They did that even in the sliver of time between classes, and during the lunch break, and in their homes as well, into the night and at dawn.

  It was inconceivable that anything could distract them. But Unni did something in the class one day that made almost everyone go crazy for over ten minutes. It is only now that the boys talk about the incident freely, according to Balki. And they talk about it only among themselves. But even now, no one fully understands what exactly happened or how Unni got everyone involved in the moment of madness.

  ‘There were thirty-two boys in the class when it happened,’ Balki says. ‘Everybody saw it, everybody was a part of it, but nobody can explain it. Has anyone told you about Simion Clark?’

  ‘No.’

  Balki begins to rock gently in his chair. ‘I was sure nobody would have told you this. Maybe they didn’t want to say anything bad about Unni to his father. People are so small. The way they think, they are so small. Or, maybe, they are still afraid. They still want to believe it never happened.’

  ‘But what happened?’

  Balki drags the paperweight in a circle over the desk. ‘Let’s say you want to commit a crime,’ the boy says, ‘but you know there are going to be witnesses, what do you do? How do you go ahead with the crime when you know that there are going to be witnesses?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You make the witnesses participate in the crime. What happens when the witness is also the accomplice? There is silence. That is how Unni guards some of his secrets long after he has gone. That is why you will never know everything he did. And that’s one of the reasons, I guess, why nobody has told you the story of Simion Clark.’

  SIMION CLARK WAS AN Anglo-Indian physics teacher whose sudden appearance in the cheap cement corridors of St Ignatius had all the enchantment of a Rolls-Royce passing through a narrow Madras lane. Simion was a legend even in his time. He sat erect among the dark slouched rustics in the staff room, he was much larger than all the men in the school and he was large in a way that made those who were smaller than him look like gnomes. He was lean and fit compared to the other teachers, who had been irreparably starved in their childhood; his perfect shirt was tucked inside fitted trousers while the polyester shirts of his colleagues, some days, showed white deltas of old sweat. And the way he pronounced ‘screw gauge’, ‘Ptolemy’ and ‘relativity’, it was as if these were words of his invention. He played the guitar and the piano, and laughed at the harmonium. And he always sang a sad Spanish song during school festivals. He bowed his head to the lady teachers even though they looked like his maids. But he had darkness within. He was merciless with the boys, even by the standards of St Ignatius. He slapped and caned them, hit the soles of their feet with a rod, and landed thuds on their bent backs that echoed, and when they cried, a smile quivered at the edges of his lips.

  Unni was thirteen when Simion arrived and was taken to every class as a showpiece by the headmaster, whose own English had become confused and tortured in the presence of the exotic new teacher.

  Simion began to walk down the school’s corridors, enjoying the deep fearful silence he cast all around him. Sometimes he stopped and surveyed the boys in a class through the window, waiting for a wrong move, a conversation that was not in English, a shoe that was not black enough.

  In Simion’s class, naturally, nobody spoke. If anybody coughed, he had to say, ‘Excuse me, sir’, which imposed considerable pressure on the boys to control their coughs, which sometimes transformed into loud alien yelps. It was inevitable that Unni and Simion would clash, but strangely Simion never hit the boy, or even spoke to him. The day of conflict came four years after Simion had arrived at St Ignatius. Simion was at the height of his powers. Unni was seventeen.

  The class began the way it always did. Simion’s entrance was preceded by a nervous calm. Into the familiar silence he walked and settled in his chair, the axis of his upper body slightly tilted as always. He arranged his things on his desk and flipped the pages of a book. There was an absolute stillness in the room, which was not unusual. A physics teacher facing the twelfth standard in any school in Madras would normally have some of the powers of God. In the case of Simion Clark, he was God.

  So all hearts stopped when Unni stood up and walked to the bl
ackboard. ‘I did not understand what was happening,’ Balki says. ‘What was Unni doing?’ Simion raised his eyes and looked at the class, and slowly turned to his right, where Unni was standing. Unni stood facing the boys for a while. Then he started singing a comical song, which sounded a lot like Simion’s Spanish song. The song was brief. Unni then went to Simion’s desk. ‘And it happened. Unni slapped him. Simion did not move. He sat there, looking at Unni without an expression on his face, as if he had expected it. Unni slapped him again and withdrew his hand into his trouser pocket.’ That was Simion’s style, that was how Simion slapped the boys – with a quick movement of his hand and a ponderous withdrawal of the weapon into his pocket. Unni kept slapping him in this manner. Simion now stared at a distant spot on the wall and endured the slaps. Unni went to the door and shut it. He faced the class and said, ‘Your turn.’

  ‘Nobody moved, naturally. We were too shocked. So he dragged a boy called Kitcha to the head of the class. Kitcha was an idiot who was routinely thrashed by Simion. The guy begged, “No, Unni, I don’t want to do anything, Unni, no, Unni.” But when Unni put him in front of Simion, Kitcha suddenly began to look menacing. Simion swallowed. I clearly remember that. It was the moment, at least for me, when the myth of Simion Clark was broken. He looked afraid and fragile. I think Kitcha saw that too.’

  Kitcha kicked Simion’s legs, and looked at himself in disbelief. He was so scared he lost his mind. He went berserk. He slapped and kicked Simion a few more times. Now something even more bizarre happened. A few boys stood up, ran to the head of the class and joined Kitcha. They slapped and kicked Simion. Unni was standing near the door and watching carefully. It was strange that Simion did not move from his chair. Just once he spoke and that was to say, ‘Please don’t.’ Now everyone was going crazy. Almost everybody in the class was around his table. ‘I saw a boy jogging up and down in the aisle screaming, “I want to, I want to, I want to hit the bastard.”’

  Someone then went up to Simion and spat in his face. That showed an option for others who did not know how to hit a person. They went to his table and spat on him. Most of them had probably never spat at a target in their lives and they ended up spitting on themselves. ‘Spitting on a person is more difficult than it seems. I sat there watching all this. I don’t know what happened to me. I could not control myself. I went and punched him on his ear. Just once. It was the first time I had hit someone. I don’t know why I did it. It was a magical moment.’

  The whole class was now around Simion. Some punched him, many spat. His eyes were still fixed to that spot on the wall. Then, suddenly, his body began to shake, he bit his lips and started crying. The beatings stopped. Unni went back to his seat; that made everyone go back. Simion did not move. He was bleeding from his nose. He took out his handkerchief and wiped himself, all the spit and a trickle of blood. And he got up from his chair and left.

  ‘We went to the door and saw him walk down the corridor, then across the playground below, all the way to the gate. He did not pick up his things from the staff room. He just walked away, he left, just like that. No one ever saw him again.’

  The boys were delirious and, naturally, they wanted to discuss what had happened, but Unni refused to be drawn in. Every time someone asked him a question he would put a finger to his lips. It was as if he was saddened, even ashamed, by what had happened.

  By the end of the day, a rumour was spreading through the school that Simion had hanged himself from a fan in his house. Only Unni’s class knew what might have been the cause and they decided, without having to discuss the matter, to guard their secret. None of the teachers had any social contact with Simion. They did not believe they were good enough to be his friend. They did not know where he lived, where he came from. The administration tried to reach him but all his details in the school records turned out to be false. The phone number he had provided belonged to a parish in Tambaram twenty kilometres away, and his address simply did not exist. He was obviously not what he said he was. Simion Clark was probably not his real name even. With his affluent bearing and British English he had secured a job in the school with ease and worked there for four years. Nobody knew why he had lied about who he was or what it was that he had hoped to achieve. He remains a mystery even today.

  ‘Do you think he is dead?’ Ousep asks.

  ‘Nobody is sure,’ Balki says. ‘That is the scariest thing. The moment we heard that he had died, something happened inside all of us. We felt sick and afraid. We were regular guys. We had been trained by our parents to fear anything that was remotely dangerous or abnormal. And now suddenly we were responsible for a man’s death. That is why nobody talks about Simion. We suspect we killed him.’

  ‘Why did Simion endure all that? He just had to leave his chair to get Unni expelled from school.’

  ‘That’s exactly what we wanted to know but Unni refused to tell us anything. Anyway, after we heard of Simion’s death we didn’t want to discuss that man. Everybody decided to forget about him and get back to work. When you are preparing for the JEE, you focus. You don’t play cricket, you don’t watch TV, you don’t even masturbate. Abetting suicide is simply out of the question. So we wanted to just forget about what had happened.’

  ‘Is he dead?’ Ousep asks again.

  Balki, surprisingly, removes a cigarette from Ousep’s fingers and takes a drag. ‘Is this disrespectful?’ he asks.

  ‘Do you want a cigarette?’

  Balki shakes his head, inserts the cigarette back between Ousep’s fingers and says, ‘If nobody knew where Simion came from or where he lived or what he was, I wonder who first received the news that he had died.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Do you think Unni started the rumour?’ Ousep asks.

  ‘It achieved exactly what he wanted. Simion became a secret,’ Balki says. ‘It was in everybody’s interests to keep him a secret.’

  ‘Why was Unni doing all this?’

  ‘We come back to the original problem. Why did Unni do everything that he did?’

  Balki arranges the newspapers on the desk in a neat stack. He gazes at the church spire, nods his head almost imperceptibly at a private thought, gapes again at the objects in the room. ‘Or,’ he says, ‘Simion is dead and I am trying to fool myself into believing that Unni started the rumour. Everyone else who was present in the classroom that day thinks that Simion is dead. The rumour was very strong when it began.’

  ‘Did Simion have a scar on his face?’ Ousep asks.

  Balki, as expected, considers the question strange. ‘No,’ he says.

  ‘Any cuts, any old wounds on the forehead, on his lips?’ Ousep asks.

  ‘No,’ Balki says. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Just curious. Was he always a physics teacher or was it something he became later in his career?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Balki says. ‘Your questions are strange.’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘Do you know someone who might be Simion?’

  ‘No,’ Ousep says, which is the truth. But there are many Simions in the world. They have scars from old injuries, and they like labs. Ousep knows where to look.

  He thinks of the time when Unni had influenced a gang of boys to almost kill a stray dog by pelting it with stones. Simion Clark reminds him of that mongrel, who probably still lives.

  After the disappearance of Simion, a myth grew around Unni. Some boys said that he had paranormal powers, that he could control the actions of others, that he could read minds, that when they stood close to him they felt a magnetic pull. It was around this time that he walked into the class one morning, sat in his place and waited for a moment of silence to say, very softly, as if to himself, ‘Something is happening around us.’ Ousep has heard of this moment from several boys and all their descriptions are the same.

  Unni looked disturbed. Nobody had ever seen Unni that way before. He was abstract and incoherent when he tried to explain. Balki says, ‘It was as
if he had seen something. He said things were not what they appeared to be. Everything that we knew about the world was wrong, everything was a lie. Nature guarded a dark secret, a secret that would stun us if we knew it, and it guarded it in incredibly clever ways. He didn’t make sense but as he was talking I felt such a cold fear in my heart I turned to look behind me. It was a strange thing to do. I looked back to see if there was any danger coming towards me. Why would I do that? What is even stranger is that I saw three other boys look back, exactly the way I did. We didn’t know why we did that.’

  A few weeks later, Unni started telling stories standing on the teacher’s desk. ‘Has anybody told you about his stories?’ Balki asks.

  ‘Yes. But some deny this ever used to happen.’

  Balki laughs; he leans forward and asks in a teasing whisper, ‘Those who did not deny it, did they tell you what his stories were about?’

  ‘They said they don’t remember.’

  ‘That’s what I thought they would say.’

  Balki releases a hiss of air from his lungs. ‘You have met so many boys from our class, you went to them as the father of a dead boy, not just any dead boy but Unni Chacko. Yet they hold back information because they are afraid, they are afraid of everything they were, everything they are. People are such cowards, people are so pathetic.’

  Ousep realizes why he has been feeling hopeful in the presence of this boy who has a reasonable contempt for the world. It is the misanthrope alone who has clarity. By standing outside the huddles of man, he sees a lot, and what he often sees is the evidence that people are not as smart as dogs think they are. And he wants to see it time and again. In the fog of ambiguities and mysteries, he desperately searches for truths because truth usually shows humanity in a poor light. Balki and Unni are similar in that way. Unni, too, was exceptional, he was strong, so he did not need to belong. Unni, too, stood beyond the bonds of people because that was a good place to stand and watch. And Balki does not want to concede that such an endearing foe of the ordinary was ultimately defeated by the world. For that is what Unni’s death is until proven otherwise – a defeat. Balki will do all he can to take Ousep closer to the truth.