The Illicit Happiness of Other People (13 page)

‘You work at the State Bank?’ Ousep asks.

The man nods.

‘Can I ask your daughter some questions about Unni?’ he says.

The man nods again.

This is the first time a young girl will tell Ousep her memories of Unni. He had always hoped for this but he does not know what he must ask.

‘Mythili, it is strange that I ask you this after three years. You were just a little girl when Unni died, so I could not talk to you then. Do you know why Unni did what he did?’

She looks at the floor and says, ‘I don’t know.’ She is sitting at the edge of the chair, her knees pressed together, her back
meek and bent. Her nails are painted in a pale colour that certainly has a name. Her large blue earrings are the two hemispheres of the globe.

‘I am sure you have an opinion,’ Ousep says. ‘It seems everybody has an opinion about what happened. But your view is more important because you and Unni were good friends. You spent a lot of time in our home. He spent a lot of time here.’

‘I have no opinions,’ she says.

‘What kind of a person was he, how do you remember him?’

‘He was nice,’ she says, and waits for the question to go away. But Ousep waits too. She relents. ‘He was not serious about anything. He was full of pranks. He used to do a lot of crazy things.’ She lets out a chuckle. Finally, the chuckle of a girl at the memory of Unni. He deserves at least this much.

Does she think of him every day, does his memory make her heart ache? Or is she one of those tough pretty girls who would have no time for dead cartoonists? There is nothing about her, at least from what she has shown, that even hints that she attaches any importance to Unni’s memory. But if the boy were alive, would they have been covert lovers talking through signs from their balconies in the middle of the night?

‘What crazy things did he do?’

‘Just silly things.’

‘Like what?’

‘He would draw me the way I will look when I am an old woman. Things like that.’

‘Did you ever feel he was sad?’

‘No.’

‘So, why do you think he decided to die?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says, still looking at the floor.

‘Were you surprised?’

‘Everyone was shocked.’

‘Were you surprised?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘Did you see him the day he died?’

‘I don’t remember really. It was a long time ago.’

That is odd, for Mythili not to remember if she had seen Unni the day he died. But she was thirteen then. From there, three years is truly a vast expanse of time. Also, why should she lie?

‘Can you tell me something about him that was unusual, anything strange that you remember, anything extraordinary?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Both of you spent so much time together, there must be something you can tell me.’

‘I was a little girl then and I spent a lot of time with many people.’

‘Did he ever talk to you about a corpse?’

She looks up. She has the large amiable eyes of a good person. ‘A corpse?’ she asks.

‘Yes.’

‘No, he never said anything about any corpse.’

Her father stands up, and that ends the interview. Mythili rises and walks out of her house. She is going to the library.

MYTHILI BALASUBRAMANIUM KNOWS HER mother is watching – from the balcony or through a dark gap in the window curtain or from the other places that mothers find. Daughter has behaved in a suspicious manner all morning. A long shampoo bath followed by a bout of general happiness as evident from the humming of a love song, then the sudden decision to go to
the library, allegedly. The girl was about to slink out of the house into the light of day without wearing the shroud of the opaque slip over the cheap native bra. Daughter not embalmed as an Egyptian mummy. Why, Mythili?

‘It’s too hot.’

‘When was it not hot in Madras, Mythili?’

‘My top is not transparent. So take it easy.’

‘Men have X-ray vision, Mythili.’

Also, the visit of the town alcoholic asking questions about a gorgeous boy has shown the otherwise virginal daughter as a girl who might be acquainted with several gorgeous boys, even live ones. So mother will keep a watch on daughter as far as the eye can see. Is she walking with her head subdued, eyes unseeing, hair still in a ponytail, chest deflated?

It is after Mythili leaves the spinal lane of the colony that she feels her mother’s ethereal inspection lifting. It is then that she finds the comfort to release her memories of Unni. She wonders what it is that Mr Ousep Chacko has discovered now, why he has started probing Unni’s death all over again.

There are many things she could have told Mr Ousep Chacko about his son. She could have told him that she remembers Unni as if he were yesterday. Unni standing bare chested on the balcony like a tribal prince, his body lean and strong, long severe fingers holding a coffee mug. Unni smiling. Unni carrying his brother on his shoulders and drawing a star on her forehead with a black pen. She sees him clearly, she sees him every day. He is carefully rolling a matchstick over her eyelashes to remove a spore. He is sitting with his legs crossed, head bent, hand moving in swift strokes over a notebook, looking up at her occasionally with a serious face. He is looking into her eyes, about to divine a playing card in her mind. He is sitting on the compound wall, and watching the world go by.
He is running in the cyclonic rain, in smooth strides, like a wild beast inside a taut expensive skin.

She sees herself, too, as she was then. She is trying to smile at him without showing her teeth. She is showing off.
‘Bonjour, Unni, comment allez-vous?
’

She remembers the evening when she is walking in the playground. Unni comes from behind and puts his arm around her shoulder, as he sometimes does. Her hawk mother must have seen it or her hawk friends must have told her. Mother walks in concentric circles all evening in the kitchen until daughter returns home. She says, ‘Why are you still wearing frocks, Mythili, like an Anglo-Indian?’

‘Girls wear frocks. That’s why.’

‘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 pronounced by the French, where do they go?’