The Illicit Happiness of Other People (24 page)

The boy picked up a stool from the corner of the ward, sat a foot away from Ousep’s bed, and said, ‘I didn’t come here because you blackmailed me.’

‘I did no such thing, Sai. You’re imagining things.’

‘But what did you tell me at the bus stop? You said the cops would come to my home and ask me questions. You said I have to now mention in the US visa form that there is a police complaint against me.’

‘I was only trying to protect you. I was only trying to inform you of the possibilities so that you are on your guard.’

‘I didn’t come here because you blackmailed me, I want you to know that.’

‘I believe you, Sai.’

‘I know what I did to that woman on the road was wrong. I don’t know what happened to me. I am ashamed. I am ashamed because I am an upright person. I am a moral person, I believe that every man should touch only one woman in his entire life. I believe in morality.’

It occurred to Ousep that morality was probably the invention of unattractive men. Whom else does it benefit really?

‘What made you come here, Sai?’

‘I thought, what if you died, what if you died without knowing the real Unni? So I thought I would come here and talk to you. I owe Unni that much. So I don’t want you to think I am here because I am scared.’

Sai gaped without pride or hope but in his large dull eyes there was also unhappy compassion, which was not a good sign. Ousep was expecting fear.

‘I will tell you everything I know,’ Sai said, ‘but in the end what will be clear is that I may have hidden some things from you but I was not lying when I kept saying that there was no deep reason behind Unni’s death. He wanted to die and that is all there is to it. He killed himself for the same reason people always kill themselves. He did not wish to live.’

He fell silent for a while. Then, as if he had remembered something painful, his nostrils vibrated, his lips trembled, his eyes blinked several times. He blew his nose into his ironed handkerchief and licked his lips as he waited to gather his thoughts.

‘Why are you crying, Sai?’

Sai slouched his back and looked all around the ward. ‘What is everything?’ he said. ‘What is all this? What is life, what is space, what is finite, what is infinite?’

Through Sai’s mouth, philosophy was revealed in its true form – as a bunch of dim questions asked too early in the life of science. The boy fell silent again. And when he found his voice he spoke about himself, which was surprising. Sai, truly, had come here to talk.

Like Unni and Balki and many others in their class, Sai was enrolled at St Ignatius when he was six. He was a dull student, and his father believed that a thrashing with a leather belt every now and then would solve the problem. The man had the habit of holding his son’s report card in one hand and the belt in the other, reading out the scores aloud and whipping him. On occasion, he chased little Sai around the house with a heated serving spoon. Very often the spoon found Sai’s body, usually his arms and thighs. Like many other boys of his age, Sai eventually grew up into a fragile adolescent who was beaten up at home by a man who was shorter than him and was progressively getting shorter.

‘I was so miserable,’ Sai said, rubbing his nose and looking away. ‘I was so unhappy my hair began to change, it began to curl.’

‘Your hair?’

‘Yes. For a few months when I was sixteen, I was so stressed, my hair became very curly, like a black man’s hair. Unni used to call me Pubic Hair.’

The whole decade in school, until the very end, Unni did not mean much to Sai. Even after the Simion Clark incident, Unni was at best a curiosity, until the day he walked into the classroom and said that reality was not what it appeared, that something was going on, that everything people believed to be true was a lie.

Sai described Unni’s nervous declaration and his account was consistent with everything Ousep has heard before about the day. Unni must have spoken for less than a minute but something happened to Sai, something powerful went through him, it was as if a dangerous idea lurking in the darkness inside him had been shown a luminous light. ‘The first emotion I felt was fear and I don’t know why I looked behind me,’ he said.

Ousep wonders what it was about the moment that made such a lasting impression on so many boys. Its impact appears to have been out of proportion. He tries to imagine the scene, which has now been narrated to him by so many. All the accounts are the same except for Unni’s exact words, which will never be known. They all begin with how Unni walked into the classroom just before the first bell was about to ring. Did Unni plan it that way – to wait till everybody was seated and appear at the very end in a conspicuous way so that all eyes would be on him?

By the time the event occurred, Unni had stature, which was important to what was about to happen. Unni was many things. He was a storyteller, he played football as if it were
important, he bowled with furious pace, and he had subdued a powerful sadistic teacher in an extraordinary fashion. It was such a person, not just anybody, who had walked into the class that day. And he told them, with fear and nervousness in the place of his indestructible cool, that there was something lurking out there in the world around them and that he might have seen it from very close. Ousep concedes that there is probably enough in the scene, and in the background of its protagonist, to make it an unforgettable moment.

By the time the incident occurred, Sai had long abandoned the idea of religion. ‘God did not make any sense to me,’ he said in the proud self-congratulatory way of young atheists. ‘I could see that life was merely an accident.’

Ousep waited for the inevitable sentence, the line that drags atheists back into the fold of religion without their knowing, the line that usually goes like this – ‘But I believe in a force.’

Sai looked intently at the floor and said with the sparkle of epiphany, ‘But there is a force, I believe in a force.’

The idea of an accidental life insulted God, and that comforted Sai, but it did not explain everything to him. He spent hours looking up at the sky. ‘Day sky, night sky,’ he said to show how comprehensive his study was. Thinking about the infinity of space made him go crazy for several hours every day. He imagined there was something deeply cerebral about his new obsession with the question ‘where does space end?’. He often thought about why there was something instead of nothing and what exactly was the meaning of human life on a speck of dust at the edge of just another galaxy.

‘So that was my life. Deep thoughts, belting by my father, very deep thoughts, more belting. I led a double life. The universe inside my head sometimes, other times red rashes on my arse.’

Ousep yawned to conceal a laugh.

It was in that period of gloom that Unni walked into the class one morning and said that something mysterious was going on. ‘An inner eye opened inside me,’ Sai said. ‘How can I explain what happened to me? I felt as if I could see for the first time in my life.’

He realized in an instant that all the philosophers he had read, all the religions, even Einstein, even J. Krishnamurti, were saying the same thing in different ways – there is a shocking truth hiding behind the world that we see, behind the ordinary days of our lives. God is not a lie but some kind of an abridged version of this reality, a beginner’s course that has been misunderstood.

Trapped in the trance, Sai thought he had become enlightened and that the full details of the universal truth would enter his head by lunchtime. When a teacher asked him a question in class, he remained silent, even smiled peacefully. He was thrashed by the man. ‘Yet another son of an illiterate farmer who had converted to Christianity in exchange for a bicycle or something. He kept slapping me but I could not speak. That made him go mad. He said, “Sai, say one word. One word and I will let you go. At least say A, B, C, D with the mouth that the Lord gave you or I am going to kill you today.”’

Despite the beating, Sai was unable to extricate himself from the moment. But by the time the day ended he had recovered. He realized he had not become enlightened. He asked Unni the meaning of what he had said in the morning. Unni told him that it was an insane moment and that he did not wish to speak about it. He said it was dangerous to talk about those things. That, naturally, made Sai even more obsessed.

For several days he begged Unni to explain. Unni said it was not a matter that could be explained, but that there were clues everywhere.

‘Unni told me, “Sai, have you ever wondered why animals don’t look at the sky? There must be a reason, there is a reason.”’ Unni showed him a series of portraits he had drawn of various mammals looking up at the sky. Unni said, ‘I drew these to show how weird it is for us to see animals looking up. They never do it. Why?’ Sai begged him to explain but Unni said that language was not the medium through which to understand these things. ‘He said, “Language was created by nature to guard its secrets, not to reveal them. We are trapped in language. Even thought has become language. That is what nature wants, Sai. It has given us language because it has hidden the truth somewhere else.”’

‘Nature is the enemy?’ Sai asked, in a whisper.

Unni looked with caution around him. ‘You won’t believe it, Sai. When you see, you won’t believe it.’

Sai began to spend hours by himself trying to guess what Unni seemed to know. He shadowed Unni, called him up several times with questions, came to his house, sat beside him in class. In time, Unni loosened up a bit. ‘One day he told me, “Try walking on the streets without looking at girls, just do not look at them, do not look at their bodies. Don’t ask me why, just do it.”’

Sai stopped looking at young women, including some of his teachers. When he saw women on the road, he would lower his gaze and walk on. ‘Like a woman.’ In packed buses he would shut his eyes. When young mothers spoke to him he stared at his toenails and answered them. He began to look at the world differently and the world, too, seemed like another place. A world without women is a very different world.

One afternoon on the stairway of the school, Unni came from behind and whispered into his ear, ‘Now it is time for you to stop masturbating. Just quit it right now. Don’t go home and
send out one last spurt. Start from this moment. You will begin to feel a powerful force inside you. That will take you to the next level.’

It was a surprisingly candid revelation by Sai to the father of a friend. Ousep saw a motive in this. The boy probably wanted to convince him that he was withholding nothing, and he was building this myth through the facility of sexual confession. Was Sai a cunning bastard, or was he just a boy who had dropped his guard?

Sai’s imaginary fornications were the only happy moments in his life. ‘But I stopped. Just like that I stopped because Unni said I must stop.’ Within weeks, he went crazy. He began to have enormous erections that lasted for hours, even powerful sexual desires for his mother, whom he had not considered a woman before. He stopped looking at her, too, which confused everyone at home. Finally, his father held the leather belt in one hand and pointed the other at his wife. ‘Look at her, Sai, look at your mother.’

In the middle of these upheavals, he cycled every evening to Brilliant Tutorials for the JEE classes. The exam was just months away but Sai’s practice scores, not surprisingly, were getting worse. His father began to belt him almost every day now. That made Sai think more deeply about the meaning of life and Unni’s secret.

Unni, by now, was often seen in the company of Somen Pillai, even on Sundays. It was a new association, by all the accounts Ousep has heard, and Sai confirmed that. Somen Pillai, the lonely insignificant boy whose voice was rarely heard in class, who had no talents, who never used to even run, became an enigmatic figure all of a sudden. Now that everybody was looking at him more closely they agreed that there was something wrong with him. His walk was unnaturally slow,
and there was an unfathomable smile on his face. ‘There was something about him.’

That is the most exasperating quality of everybody’s memory of Somen. They are sure that he was not normal but nobody is able to fully explain what exactly was wrong with him. ‘He had a way of not being there even when he was there. He did not move much, never drew much attention to himself. He rarely spoke, and when he did speak, his sentence construction was a bit weird. I cannot explain beyond this.’

Sai let himself drift into the company of Unni and Somen Pillai. They did not resist. He walked with them, ate with them, sat on the steps of the Fatima Church and listened to them talk. ‘They spoke mostly about Hindu gods, which was a surprise to me.’

In the world according to Unni, Hinduism was a giant comic created over centuries by great artists who encoded within their cryptic stories meanings within meanings. But the demons and the gods with several hands and animal-headed beings were not outlandish metaphors. According to Unni, they really existed and they exist even now, they live among ordinary people. What was Unni trying to say? Surely, he did not believe this? Was he just trying to muddle the minds of fools? Is it now time for Ousep to accept a fact that has long been staring him in the face – that his son was an anarchist, who plotted against the people around him with the modest means available to a seventeen-year-old?

One evening after school, on his way to the JEE coaching class, Sai turned his cycle into the narrow mud lane that led to Somen’s house. He had never been to the house before. As he approached the gate, he could see Somen and Unni framed by the foyer’s giant window. They were playing chess. Somen, who did not look surprised, let him in and went
back to the game. Sai sat with them and watched the game in silence. He could see that their level of play was high, far beyond his. ‘It was very peaceful to just sit there and watch two guys who were not interested in any entrance exam in the world play a great game.’ Somen’s mother appeared briefly to give them something to eat and left them alone for the rest of the evening. At some point, Somen and Unni decided to stop the game. They noted down the positions of the pieces in a notebook, which held several scribbled chess notations from past games.