The Illicit Happiness of Other People

by Manu Joseph

  He scribbles in his notebook but she can see he is not working on the problem. He says, without looking up, ‘And I want to find out why he did what he did.’

  ‘What is it that your father has found?’

  ‘I don’t know much. I only know what I hear my father say when he is drunk. I think a few months ago my father found a comic by Unni. The day my brother died he had posted it to someone but somehow it returned after three years.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So my father thinks that if Unni had posted a comic on the day he died, it may have some clues.’

  ‘What is the comic about?’

  ‘It is a true story.’

  ‘What is the story?’

  ‘Do you know about Philipose?’

  ‘It is a very familiar name. I don’t know why it is so familiar.’

  ‘Have you heard the name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where did you hear the name?’

  ‘It is a name that has your mother’s voice in it. Yes, it comes to me now. I have heard your mother mention his name sometimes. You know, when she gets into one of her moods. I used to think it was one of her relatives.’

  ‘He is not a relative.’

  ‘Who is Philipose?’

  ‘Something happened many years ago, when my mother was much younger. One evening she was returning alone from school, and Philipose attacked her. My mother escaped because she started screaming and people came running. But she was very shocked, and from that day she started talking to herself. She did not tell anybody about this. But one day she told Unni about him and about what had happened. Unni was so angry he took a train and went to meet Philipose to beat him up. But Philipose was already dead. He died of old age, I think.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘That’s all. That’s how the story ends. I don’t like that story.’

  She turns the pages of the maths book, and tries once again to make up her mind. There is the bleak quiet of twilight all around. The children have quit their games, the birds have gone, it is as if nothing exists in the world but the two of them in a small room. ‘One hundred and twenty days,’ Thoma says. She looks at him and sees a flow of events that is now inevitable.

  ‘Mythili,’ Thoma says, ‘it will take two men one hundred and twenty days to build the wall. That’s a lot of time for a wall.’

  ‘Philipose should have killed himself, not Unni,’ she says.

  ‘Philipose led a normal, peaceful life, my mother tells me,’ Thoma says. ‘I don’t know if she is angry about that.’

  ‘Thoma, when Unni died, where were you?’

  ‘I was sleeping in my room. I sleep till late morning on holidays because I don’t sleep well most nights.’

  ‘Did Unni come into your room?’

  ‘I think so but I am not sure. I think he kissed my forehead, but I am not sure.’

  ‘You’re not sure?’

  ‘I am not sure. He always kissed me on my forehead when he saw me sleeping, so he might have done that. All I remember clearly is that I had a dream.’

  ‘What was your dream?’

  ‘I dreamt that a woman was running away from a giant sea wave.’

  ‘Who was the woman?’

  ‘She did not have a face. Does it make sense?’

  ‘Yes, that’s not unusual.’

  ‘But she was screaming as she ran.’

  ‘You heard her scream?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was it a voice you have heard before?’

  ‘I don’t know. A scream is a scream.’

  THE SILENCE IN SOMEN’S room is deep and ordained, and filled with indecipherable meaning. It feels like marriage. When Somen Pillai finally raises his gaze from the floor, he smiles and rotates the index finger of his right hand as if to stir the air.

  ‘You may have realized,’ the boy says, ‘as you were recounting the many bits of information you have so painstakingly gleaned, you may have realized the problem with your story. What you need is a chronology. When you understand the chronology you understand a lot.’

  ‘That’s true, Somen.’

  ‘So let me begin at the beginning. Wouldn’t that be nice?’

  ‘Without a doubt.’

  ‘In the beginning, Ousep, there was nothing. There were no stars, there was no space, there was no matter, there was no time.’

  Ousep rests his chin on his fingers and tries to achieve an impassive face. The boy bursts out laughing. ‘Don’t worry. I am just playing with you.’

  ‘I must admit, my heart did sink.’

  Somen leans back, puts his arms behind his large head and studies his visitor with a relaxed superiority, which is not very different from the arrogance of doctors when they face their patients. It would be useful to puncture his confidence, see him collapse. Something always comes of that, but for the moment, though, the boy looks formidable as he speaks in his slow, scholarly way.

  ‘What I know about Unni is what he told me and what I observed in the classroom sitting in my corner and later in my home, which he visited very often. As you have so competently gathered from your sources, I came to know him well only when we were seventeen, just months before he died. There are many things he did not tell me. But what I know I will tell you.’

  It is disturbing for a father, even if the father is Ousep Chacko, to hear the story of his son’s childhood from a stranger. He can accept the fact that he did not know the life of Unni the adolescent. But Unni the child is a different matter.

  Ousep never hugged his son, never carried him on his shoulders, never took him to the circus or did any of the things that fathers do these days. Like the other fathers from a pastoral time and place, from the golden age of men, he had imagined that he had appointed his wife to do all those things. But now, as Somen speaks of Unni’s childhood, Ousep feels a fierce ownership towards his little boy. It offends him that an odd young man in exile in his own room is telling him things about Unni that he did not know. He feels a great desperation inside him to touch his child, hold his little fingers and walk with him, put him on the table and somehow charm out of him the strange world that he claimed he saw in his head.

  ‘Unni was normal most of the time,’ Somen says. ‘Normal means that the world he saw was identical to what others saw with their senses. Are you offended that I described the meaning of normal to you?’

  ‘I am not offended.’

  ‘Normal is a majority state.’

  ‘That’s a reasonable definition.’

  ‘Unni was normal most of the time. But he was born with a condition. His earliest memory of the phenomenon was when he was around five. It probably started much earlier but he realized that it was a condition and that it was odd only when he was five. What happened to him was that there were moments when one or more of his senses shut down. For a few minutes or even an hour some days, he would go deaf, or he would go blind, or both. Sometimes he would lose his ability to tell the difference between faces, everyone would look identical to him. On rare occasions he would not feel anything even if he pricked himself with a pin or hurt himself in another way, which he often tried to do to understand what was happening to him.’

  ‘He was not just imagining all this?’

  Somen lets out a gentle infuriating laugh, but he does not react to Ousep’s question. He continues to tell his story as if the question is not important.

  Unni is not terrified by what is happening to him. As he is just a child he considers it a game. He imagines there is a person inside him, a friend whom he calls Abu, who is playing with his senses – switching things on, switching things off. Unni would shed Abu around the age of seven.

  By the time he is ten, something else begins to happen. The sporadic shutdown of his senses continues, but there are also moments when his senses are enhanced. He claims that he can see the textures on the skin of an ant, see the details of people standing hundreds of metres away, claims that he can hear things others cannot hear. But there is nothing special about U
nni’s sense of smell or taste, which are actually a shade below normal. His nose does not easily differentiate between coffee and tea.

  The collapse and escalation of the senses visit him for short bursts of time. There are phases when they occur every day, times when they do not appear for days. He tells his mother about what is happening to him but she finds it hard to take him seriously because he tells her about his condition in a happy, excited way and not as a complaint. In time he decides not to tell his mother or anyone else about his condition. He is happy in his weird state, even eagerly waiting for things to happen to him.

  Unni goes through an enchanted boyhood, losing his senses sometimes, seeing more than he is meant to at other times. But when he is around fourteen the condition disappears.

  ‘He became normal. All his senses became consistent. He waited for weeks, for months, but his condition did not return. But his experience left him with an insight that would never leave him, that the world is a charade created by a combination of senses. His was not a philosophical view. It is important that you understand this, Ousep. As I get deeper into the story of Unni, it is natural that you should form your own explanations in your mind, and many times you will imagine that Unni was pursuing an abstract philosophical line of thought. But the fact is that he was merely converting experience into understanding. As a boy whose reality kept changing depending on what was turned on and turned off inside his brain, he could see more clearly than others that reality is merely the myth of the senses. When you do not experience but accept a phenomenon, it is philosophy, which is a form of religion. But when you experience it, it is different. An experience is a plain fact, experience is truth.’

  This boy overrates experience but Ousep is not here to argue. He wants to extract all that he can before his situation changes and he is asked to leave. The boy is not as stable as he had appeared when Ousep entered the room. Somen falls silent often, as if distracted by ghostly strands of thought. At times he studies his own hand or his bare feet and looks very surprised that they exist. But when he speaks he is coherent.

  ‘That’s why Unni was drawn to cartoons,’ the boy says. ‘He loved their distortion, their caricature of reality. He could not take the world and its preoccupations seriously. If the world is the myth of the senses, there is something pointless about all arts. Whom will you read, what will you write, what music will you listen to, what can move you, what can you adore when nothing is true? But cartoons are different. In a farcical world, farce is the true art.’

  Unni at fourteen is slowly consumed by an idea. He begins to believe that what has happened to him is a glitch in a subterranean process of nature. In his magical moments as a child, when his senses were enhanced, he had seen beyond what a human is supposed to see. He believes that he has either seen far into the past of human evolution or deep into the future. He does not know which. In him are the remains of an extinct species or the portents of what is to come. He is convinced that nature creates a huge quantity of life so that, through trial and error, through the extinction and the evolution of billions of lumps of flesh over a vast period of time, it will finally attain its goal – a particular kind of neurological system.

  ‘He believed that the aspiration of nature is to achieve a type of brain. And that this ultimate brain is supposed to receive a set of information, which would fulfil the very purpose of nature.’

  But, two years later, when Unni is sixteen, he begins to believe that the very opposite is true. That the very purpose of nature, the evolutions it has managed through the vast ages, is to prevent a particular kind of neurological condition. It is as if the system of life is a devious force that does not want any organism to look too deep.

  ‘Ousep, now you are thinking that your son was probably delusional, that he was making up concepts so that the world appeared more and more extraordinary than it is in reality. But then, the fact is that when you begin to see the world more clearly, what you first contradict are the very ideas that were once dear to you. Isn’t that true, Ousep?’

  At some point when Unni is sixteen, a more powerful version of his childhood condition returns. Unni begins to blank out for short periods of time. ‘A few seconds maybe, a minute sometimes, as perceived through the standard measure of time in the material world.’

  In these periods, all his senses collapse but he sees flashes in his mind. It is an extraordinary vision, according to him, but he is unable to describe it. He claims that what he sees is the true nature of reality.

  ‘In your mind, Ousep, you are trying to imagine what Unni may have seen. You are seeing a colour. You are imagining a giant black night, or you are imagining a spectacular white sky, depending on your personality type. But these are the myths of storytellers. Unni does not see a black vacuum or a giant white sun. I have not seen what he has seen. I am only repeating what he has told me. He has not told me what he saw because what he saw is meant to be beyond the medium of language. He could not even begin to draw it.

  ‘How convenient, you think. A boy claims to have seen something paranormal, but he is unable to describe it. But is that so hard to accept? You and a dog see a car passing by, Ousep. Now imagine, the dog has to describe the scene to other dogs. It cannot. The dog saw an ordinary sight, even to a dog the moment is simple, but its neurological system has been devised in such a way that it is not meant to convey the thought, it is meant to be trapped in its own communication channels.’

  Unni feels trapped in the austerity of human communication, ‘he is trapped in language’. He wonders whether there is a way he can convey what he has seen to others. Convey the message that reality is very different from what people imagine. According to Unni, all of nature is a timeless contest between two forces – absolute reality, which is the true state of all matter, and the ‘syndicate of life’, which does not want its organisms to see the truth.

  ‘Because, if you see the truth, you will be in a perpetual state of ecstatic trance, you won’t fuck, you won’t sustain life, you won’t be desperate to live inside a carbon body. If you see reality you will not want to be a part of the syndicate of life. The purpose of the syndicate is to sustain itself, to exist for ever in the minds of its organisms. Therefore, from the beginning of conscience, it has eliminated any neurological network that has the potential to see nature in its true form. It has done this through a process of natural selection, through trial and error, by rewarding species that are delusional and by terminating those that are awakened. What is left of this process is what you see around you – beings that are programmed to survive and multiply but cannot think too deeply, which includes almost all of humanity.’

  ‘Whose view is all this?’ Ousep asks. ‘Did Unni say this or is it your view?’

  ‘Both of us had this view, the same view.’

  ‘A shared view of the world?’

  ‘Yes,’ Somen says, ‘a shared view.’

  ‘But who said it first? Who came up with the expression “syndicate of life”? You or Unni?’

  ‘What is more important is that you understand the rogue brain.’

  ‘The rogue brain?’

  ‘Over the ages, the syndicate of life has exterminated all types of brain that have the capacity to see too much. But now and then, by pure chance, nature accidentally creates human brains that can see more than they are meant to. So, the syndicate has inserted some safeguards – one of them is that the brain can perceive a lot more than it can describe to other brains through language and visual arts. That way, even if a rogue brain is accidentally able to grasp the truth, it will not be able to describe it. It would start behaving in a manner that would be considered abnormal or unstable.’

  ‘This was Unni’s view?’

  Somen ignores the question. It is as if he has not heard him, but he looks Ousep in the eye when he speaks.

  ‘The syndicate also responds to the rogue brain by inflicting a condition that is widely known as depression – the idea is to switch off all the delusions of pleasure and
make life itself seem so dull and meaningless that the organism will be influenced to self-terminate. The syndicate tries many other methods of quelling the rebellion of potential rogue brains. In most brains, including conformist brains, the system has seeded the delusions of many philosophies and the delusion of enlightenment. The idea here is to satisfy the curiosity of the brain by providing a false sense of intellectual quest. Through philosophy, God and rationality, the syndicate efficiently ensures that the curiosity of almost every neurological system is satisfied.’

  Who is left, then? No one, except Unni and Somen?

  ‘But there are rare rogue brains, which are not fooled yet,’ Somen says. ‘And the syndicate responds through more powerful delusions. In such rogues, the syndicate enhances all the senses and shows a life that is extraordinarily pleasurable. That is what happened to Unni. Soon after he began to blank out and see the flashes of something he could not explain, he also began to feel moments of unnatural power within him. In these moments he would be filled with great happiness and he would see the world in all its colours and beauty. Even a touch of the breeze or the movement of ants would seem to him as if it were a deep experience. Life made him feel every moment it had to offer. He also became supernaturally sexual. He did not tell me much about his sexual cravings, all he told me was that he was filled with the filthiest thoughts, dangerous thoughts, but very pleasurable thoughts.’

  But Unni knows what is happening to him. He has seen the other side and he knows that the syndicate of life is trying to delude him. He believes that there are more like him in the world and begins to search for them. He searches among the seemingly normal, and among the mad. He searches for the unnaturally happy and the inexplicably sad. But he finds no one who is like him.

  THOMA CHACKO STANDS IN the doorway of the kitchen and wonders whether it is a good time to make the confession. His mother looks peaceful by her standards, but she is clearly lost in her own thoughts, which is what he wants. She has just returned from the Sacred Heart Family Store and is transferring things into jars and bottles. She takes the one-kilo sachet of sunflower oil in her hand and bites the tip off. This is the best time to confess, Thoma knows, because when she is pouring sunflower oil into a bottle she does it with ascetic concentration. ‘Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name,’ he says. She does not turn, she is not listening to him. Thoma must do it now. ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. I told Mythili about Philipose, I don’t know why I did that. Hope I did not do anything wrong. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts …’