The Illicit Happiness of Other People (27 page)

‘He was a good man, a very good man. He was a loving husband and a good father of four strong sons and two beautiful daughters who adored him. They are all in the Gulf now, everyone is in the Gulf. Who has the time these days for their mother, who has the time for an old woman?

‘They make so much money, so that’s all right. They want to buy me a car. My husband, too, had made a lot of money. He bought so much
land, so much land. If I stand on my land I cannot see its end, Unni. Isn’t that a nice way to live? He was a rich man, my husband, but he was a good man. He started eight free schools for poor girls. He funded the college education of hundreds of girls from poor families. Do you know, Unni, the state government gave him an award?’

She takes me to a shelf which is full of awards for the social work done by you, Philipose. There is one award that has a white angel standing on a wooden stand. I cannot read Malayalam, so I ask your wife what the inscription on the stand says. She tells me the award was given by the state government for ‘Services To Humanity’. She shows me your framed black-and-white photographs that spread across time. I see you the way you must have looked when you attacked my mother, then I see you as you aged slowly. You look so happy and normal. You look like just another decent man. Then I see you on the wall. A giant photograph of a kind old man with a full mop of silver hair. You are smiling at me, Philipose. I know you are smiling at me.

It is time for me to go home. I hug her, I don’t know why. I walk along the stream, I look around as if I am searching for a twelve-year-old girl who might be in danger. I now say what my mother always used to say: ‘Philipose, you got away, Philipose.’

You lived a life filled with love, children, wealth and awards. And you died peacefully in your sleep. I was eight months late, Philipose.

When I get home, my mother slaps me hard. She has a powerful arm, so it hurts. Then she hugs me tight. ‘That’s a bad man, Unni, that’s a very bad man. I was so scared.’ Then we sit on the kitchen floor and I tell her what happened. We hold hands and we cry together.

‘But at least he died, Unni, so that’s all right, so that’s over,’ she says.

I tell her, ‘Also, I squeezed his wife’s boobs.’

And we laugh so hard, with tears running down our cheeks, we do not know if we are laughing or crying.

THE MOST TENSE MOMENTS in Thoma’s life are when his mother takes him to the Sacred Heart Family Store, where the enormous bare-chested shopkeeper sits on a sack of rice, eating his own jaggery. Mariamma owes him more than three thousand rupees but the parish priest has bought her time to settle the loan. The man does not like seeing her face and he usually pretends that he has not seen her. She stands patiently as he finishes with everybody else. When there is nowhere else he can look, he asks without respect, ‘What do you want?’ Thoma does not like anyone talking to his mother this way. Sometimes the man says, ‘You people do eat a lot.’ Mariamma quietly points to what she wants.

Thoma and his mother are walking back from the store, sweating in the afternoon heat, when they see the figure of Mythili Balasubramanium coming their way. Once again in his life, Thoma forgets how to walk. He is carrying two kilos of rice and his mother is holding a coconut in her hand as if it is a shot-put. He wishes he was walking alone, and wearing a tight white shirt and tight white trousers and white pointed shoes, with a Walkman strung to his ears. He hopes she does not see them, which is not an outlandish wish. Nobody ever sees them.

Mythili is walking the way she usually walks, mostly looking down at the road. She has not spotted them yet. He throws a nervous glance at his mother. If she chews her lips and wags a finger he will die on the spot in shame. But she is only looking at Mythili with a loving smile. ‘Be normal,’ he whispers to her. ‘Be absolutely normal.’

Mythili’s eyes are still on the road. The way she walks, it is a surprise she even gets anywhere. Thoma is distracted by a sudden movement behind Mythili. A man is walking fast and is gaining on her. He is in a brown shirt and a lungi. As he passes her, he slaps her back. That gives her a jolt and she looks up. She glares at the man, who now walks ahead of her as if nothing has happened. Then Mythili, too, continues to walk as if it did not happen. But Mariamma stops. She stares hard at the man, who is fast approaching them. He looks nervously at Mariamma for a moment and looks away. ‘Normal,’ Thoma whispers to his mother, but she is not listening. She looks steadily at the man. When he crosses them, she flings the coconut at him. It hits his head, falls on the road and rolls away. But the man walks away as if nothing has happened. It is as if he gets hit by a coconut all the time. What is this world, exactly? Thoma wonders. A man slaps a girl’s arse, she walks on as if nothing has happened. Then the man gets hit by a coconut thrown by a weird woman, and he walks away without even turning back.

Thoma sees his mother kneeling on the pavement. She says, ‘The coconut has rolled into the bushes.’ Thoma whispers to her, ‘Don’t overreact. Get up, get up, she is coming.’

‘The coconut, Thoma, it has gone into the bushes. He is not going to give us another coconut even if Jesus Christ asks him to.’

‘Get up,’ Thoma begs.

He decides to pretend that he has not seen Mythili, and when he wants to pretend that he has not seen someone he always yawns for some reason. But Mythili does not walk away. She goes up to his mother and peers into the bushes with her. ‘I can see it,’ she says. She puts her hand into the bushes and brings out the coconut. She looks into the eyes of his mother and gives her a smile. That has not happened in a while. As she walks away he can see she is crying.

‘Why is she crying?’ Thoma asks.

‘She still loves me, Thoma, that’s why.’

‘So why is she crying?’

‘That is how it is.’

In the evening, Thoma and his mother are standing on their rear balcony and watching the doctor’s widow below as she waters her roses. Every woman in Block A is keeping a close watch on that lady, who has decided not to wear a white sari as widows do, nor does she have a Usha Tailoring Machine on which widows sew with a sad face. That woman is under a lot of pressure to look sad, and even when she does something as ordinary as watering the plants, the women of Block A begin to murmur about her. Some say, ‘But why shouldn’t she be happy?’, which actually sounds like a reprimand. Mythili appears on her balcony, her hair in a white towel. Thoma has never seen her this way. She looks like a woman. She smiles at his mother, but this time her smile is cautious as if she is a stranger once again.

‘I will teach him,’ she tells his mother as she hangs the pleated green skirt of her school uniform to dry. ‘I will teach him on Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. We can start this Saturday.’ His mother and Mythili decide, without asking his opinion, that she must first teach him maths, then they discuss the exact time he must turn up.

Thoma waits nervously for Saturday. He will sit with Mythili, she will look at him and he will look at her, and they will talk. She will know, beyond any doubt, that he exists. The very thought scares him. He hopes, when he walks into her home, she will say, ‘Thoma, let me see how much you know.’

‘Ask me anything, Mythili.’

‘What does KGB stand for?’

‘Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti.’

‘My God, Thoma, I can’t believe you are so bright. Let me try another quiz question. It’s a very difficult question. What is Pele’s real name?’

‘Edson Arantes do Nascimento.’

‘Thoma, you are even smarter than Unni.’

In the days that follow, as he waits for Saturday to arrive, he begs his mother not to be too loud when she speaks to the walls, and he prays that his father, who has started drinking again after returning from the hospital, has another mild heart attack. But life is merciless, that is one thing Thoma knows about life. His daily humiliations continue. When his mother talks to herself in the mornings, he goes to the stairway to check whether her voice travels far enough for Mythili to hear. At night, when his father screams from the gate, he hopes she is in a deep sleep.

The good thing about school is that Mythili will never know what happens to him there. No matter how well he guards himself, no matter how innocuous his actions are, he often walks into the open arms of humiliation.

He is going down the corridor from his class towards the toilet. In front of him is Matilda Miss, a short, tight woman with no moving parts really. She is walking with quick, hurried steps, which is unusual. As he walks cautiously behind her, he spots something – she is leaving a trail of red dots on the floor. He stops to look at the dots and is stunned. It is blood. He follows her, and the trail of red dots. She rushes into the staff room, filled with teachers. She goes towards the ladies’ room, the trail of red dots in close pursuit. Before she can open the door, he decides to shout, ‘Miss.’ There is silence. A room full of teachers, most of them men, look at him. He is sure that he
has probably saved her life with his timely warning. He points to the floor and says, ‘You are leaving a line of red dots, miss.’ Everybody looks at the floor and for some reason turns away. Matilda Miss moves one step forward like a little soldier and slaps him hard. What must Thoma Chacko do, what must a boy do to be happy? Will Thoma Chacko ever make it?

When Unni was his age, he was cast as Nehru in the Independence Day play, but Thoma is now rehearsing once again to be a nameless extra, just one of the many idiots who rolls on the floor, holding the national flag, as British soldiers beat them up saying, ‘Bloody Indians.’

Even a haircut is a form of humiliation. The St Anthony’s hairstylist, who has an image of the centrally bald St Anthony on his signboard, has been instructed by the parish priest to cut Thoma’s hair free of charge. So, the man there always makes Thoma wait for over an hour and cuts the hair of the people who have come after him. It is when there is no sign of a paying customer that the man asks Thoma to sit in his swivel chair. He never gives Thoma a white apron, never gives him a head massage as he does the others, and never holds a mirror behind him to show him his new haircut from all angles. In fact, when it is all done, he makes Thoma stand in front of him, and whips him hard several times with a short towel, making it look as if he is only dusting him.

An hour before Unni died, he had come here for a haircut. Ousep has interviewed the barber many times. ‘What’s your father looking for?’ the man says. ‘He keeps coming here to ask me if there was anything strange about Unni that day. I keep telling him Unni did not speak a word but your father keeps dropping in to ask the same questions again and again.’

‘Was there anything unusual about Unni that day?’ Thoma asks. The man whips him with the short towel harder than he usually does.

Thoma wants to investigate. He wants to ask questions, good questions, trick questions, he wants to probe, extract clues from the minds of people and find the reason why Unni did what he did. But when he thinks about it, he does not know where to begin. It is so difficult to solve mysteries. Will Thoma ever solve a mystery in his life?

IN HIS DREAM, WHICH Thoma knows is a morning dream, he is a tall, smart and deadly bodyguard walking with the chief minister down an endless corridor. Terrorists with machine guns appear from nowhere and take aim. Thoma, in slow motion, pulls the chief minister towards him and uses the man as a body shield. The chief minister is soon riddled with bullets, but Thoma is safe. He wakes up feeling sorry for the old man.

He has a long, nervous bath, washes his hair with soap and wears his best shirt, which was once Unni’s. Thoma does not own a pair of trousers. Shorts are all right, he does not mind them, but then he has to sit very carefully when he is with Mythili. If she sees through the gaps in his shorts, sees the old checked curtain of the Chacko household now reborn as his underwear, he will have no choice but to go to the terrace and jump head first.

That makes him wonder whether Unni had actually killed himself out of shame. There cannot be a better reason for a person to die than shame. But it is hard to imagine Unni being ashamed of anything. He was so strong, so superior to everything around him, even though he was as poor as Thoma.

At ten, the ominous maths textbook in his hand, he rings Mythili’s doorbell. His mother is watching from her doorway. He whispers to her, ‘Go inside.’ But she stands there because
she is a curious person. When Mrs Balasubramanium finally opens the door, the two women look at each other across the short corridor and they imagine that they have smiled.

Mythili’s mother takes him to the door of her daughter’s bedroom, where Mythili stands waiting. ‘Very bad idea, Mythili,’ she tells her daughter. ‘You’ve so much work to do. Why are you taking on this burden?’ Mythili glares at her mother, drags Thoma in by his wrist and bangs the door shut. Mythili’s hand, he will always remember, is very cold.

She is in a half-skirt and T-shirt, the way she normally is at home. She does not wear such things when she is in full public view. She is a respectable girl, and Thoma likes respectable girls, though he is not sure why. She clasps a hairband in her mouth, and holds her thick black hair above her head as if she wants to lift herself in the air. She ties her hair in a ponytail because he has come – Mythili has performed a set of actions as a reaction to Thoma. He feels a moment of uncontrollable joy around his temples.

She sits on her bed with her bare legs crossed, and asks for his maths book. ‘Sit there, Thoma,’ she says, pointing to a solitary chair facing her. He senses an affection in her tone. She said ‘Thoma’. She need not have used his name but she did.

The last time Thoma was in her room was about three years ago, the day before Unni died. It has not changed since that day. Her windows are covered by a pink floral curtain that he does not remember, but her Godrej steel cupboard with a mirror on it, her tiny wooden desk and cot are in the same positions as before. Her bed is still the same, narrow even for a single bed, as if she should not share it with her own shadow.

She is going through the pages of the textbook carefully, with a smile, as if it is a family album. He has not seen anyone smile at a maths textbook before.

‘Mythili,’ he says.

‘Yes.’

He does not know why he opened his mouth. He had just wanted to utter her name in his mind, he did not expect any sound to come out of his stupid mouth. He has nothing to say, really. She is looking at him now.

‘What?’ she says.

‘Mythili, is it true that the home ministry is planning to change the value of pi from 3.14159 to just 3?’

‘Who told you this?’

‘Unni.’

She puts her hand on her mouth and laughs. Her fingers are clean and slender, and her nails are painted in a girlish colour whose name he does not know. ‘Unni,’ she says, and when she returns to the maths book he can see that she is somewhat distracted. She has a ghostly smile, which bursts into laughter again. ‘Unni was such an idiot,’ she says. She turns a few pages, her smile slowly receding. ‘You are wearing his shirt,’ she says without looking up. ‘I remember this shirt.’

Thoma is ashamed, he feels he is going to faint. He says, ‘My mother has bought me a lot of shirts but I like wearing Unni’s old shirts. You know, an old shirt feels softer than a new one. This was not altered. This was the shirt he used to wear when he was as old as me.’

‘I know, I know this shirt. You look like him in it,’ she says. Her large, serious eyes scan his face and he hopes she does not doubt her own analysis. Unni was handsome beyond ambiguity, and it is a good sign that Mythili sees his brother in him.

‘Do I look exactly like him? Or is it fifty per cent. Or is it ten per cent?’

‘In a very mathematical mood, are we?’

‘I am very mathematical actually. When I think, deep inside my mind, I am mathematical.’

‘When Unni was your age he used to look a lot like you. Now that you are wearing his shirt, I feel I am talking to him. It feels a bit strange. But then he had a bigger forehead and his eyes were more narrow, and they were not as innocent as yours. Even when he was a little boy he had the eyes of an old man who has seen it all.’

‘You remember so much, Mythili?’ he says, and uses his fingers to make a quick calculation. ‘When Unni was twelve, you were just eight.’

‘Girls remember,’ she says.