It is possible that these are ordinary events whose significance is exaggerated because Unni chose to die. Children do strange things, which are usually forgotten because they turn out all right. Most of them, at least. But some don't make it, do they? Everything else about Unni, when he was a little boy, was unremarkable. Ousep does not like it when Balki uses the word 'ordinary'. But then he knows what Balki means. Balki means 'ordinary'.

When Unni was around fourteen, he began to draw outrageous caricatures of his teachers, which quickly became an underground sensation in the school. Soon, he found legitimate fame when he released what was probably his first comic story. It was drawn in watercolours over six pages.

Ousep lights up two more cigarettes and, as the first cloud of smoke leaves him, asks with a sporting smile, 'You actually remember the number of pages?'

'Six pages. Held together by a safety pin,' Balki says.

'Could the number of pages have been five, or seven?'

'Six,' Balki says.

'Do you remember the story of the comic?'

'Of course.'

The comic begins with a boy, who is probably fourteen, as old as Unni was then. The boy is going somewhere. A man is walking ahead, holding something in his hand. A bus goes out of control and hits the man from behind. The man's wallet, oddly the object that he was holding in his hand, flies into the air and lands near the boy. A great crowd gathers quickly around the man, and they block the boy's view. The comments of the crowd fill the air. 'Is that his face?' 'Is that his ear lying there?' 'There is something white coming out of his head.' The boy picks up the dead man's wallet and walks away. In the wallet is some cash. It also has the address and the photograph of the owner. The boy spends the cash and lives happily for several days, but then he begins to see the dead man in his dreams. Later, he begins to see the man in his waking hours, standing in unexpected corners and staring hard at him. Finally, unable to bear his hallucinations, the boy decides to return to the family of the dead man the money he had taken. He steals some cash from his grandmother's cupboard, puts it in the wallet, and goes to return it. He reaches the door of a flat and rings the doorbell; he waits. When the door opens, the boy is shocked because it is the corpse from his hallucinations who is at the door. The boy is so terrified that he is unable to move. The man sees the wallet in the boy's hand and he begins to thank him for his honesty. It turns out, the man's pocket had been picked earlier that week, and it was the thief who had died.

The comic, which was untitled according to Balki, passed from hand to hand for days. Jealous boys went about revealing the twist in the tale to those who were yet to read the story, but Unni's fame rested not only on the story but also on his exquisite images. The comic finally reached a teacher, who decided to stick the six pages to a wall outside the principal's office. Small crowds of boys, and on occasion parents, gathered every day to read the comic. The success of Unni's first comic must have created a small stir in the house, but Ousep was kept out of it all. He cannot blame anyone for that, but he does wish that he had been told about Unni's first-ever comic story and what a hit it was in the school. Ousep would have put his hand on his son's shoulder and told him, honestly, 'It's a great story, Unni, I am proud of you.' And Unni might have smiled in his shy way, shy but fully meeting the eye.

Around this time, Unni became immodest about his erections. Balki reveals this without any embarrassment or even an inflection in his steady voice. At the end of the class of an English teacher who was slim, whose sari was not tamed, and whose deep navel showed, Unni would sit in his place and invite all to feel his hardness, which in general opinion was so extraordinary that many refused to believe it was a part of his body. Unni was crafty, he was magic. Some said he was trying to pass off a raw plantain as his penis.

'What did you think?' Ousep asks.

Balki says in a severe way, 'How could it have been a plantain? People are so stupid.'

Nothing about Unni, when he was fourteen, even hinted at what he was to soon become, except for a brief comment one evening. After the final bell, the two boys were walking down the second-floor corridor from their class to the stairway. From that height they could see many streams of children emerging from their classes and joining a sea of uniforms, all going home.

'So many people in this world,' Unni said, 'so many many people. Nature has to keep making billions of people so that by pure chance, finally, one person will be born who will make it.'

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 blackboard. '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.

The boy says, 'What is more important than Unni's stories is what happened in the days that preceded them.' After what Unni did to Simion, he exerted considerable power over the class. When he spoke people listened, when he asked a question they answered. And, for some reason, he slowly influenced many of them to confess to their sexual acts and fantasies. 'Those days we had more fantasies than acts. He asked me too. I told him I have nothing to say. Then he asked me, "Have you ever committed a sexual crime?" I said, "No." He looked at me in disbelief. That was the only time I thought he looked dumb. Did he really expect all schoolboys to be rapists?'

After Unni had collected all the confessions he could, he converted them into true stories that he would deliver from the teacher's desk. 'That's what he did, those were his stories.' He protected the identity of the boys but gave broad hints. He described the setting and the characters involved in great detail. 'Now, these were true stories, sex stories,' Balki says, 'stories of the boys in our class. Some really dark stuff was coming out. I was very surprised by the kinds of things boys did. Everybody was hooked, they got addicted to the stories, and everybody tried to guess who was who.' Some begged Unni not to reveal their confessions, which were told to him in good faith, of course. They feared they would be identified. But Unni assured them they were overreacting.

'His first story was about a boy whose identity we could guess through the descriptions. He had molested the servant maid when she was sleeping in his house. She did not complain because she feared she would be sacked. So he did it again. Some stories were sad and infuriating, some were funny. There was one about a boy who used to take his sister's school uniform, put it over a pillow and do things to it. Another guy took a pomegranate from the kitchen, made a hole in it and made love to it, and actually returned it to the kitchen.'

'Were there any stories in which the protagonist was probably Unni?'

'No.'

At some point in the final year of school, Balki had distanced himself from Unni. He says that in an uncharacteristically obtuse way, with a hint of lame pride about his decision, about his discipline, the way some people would say, expecting a compliment in return, 'I don't eat meat.'

'There was something about him,' Balki says. 'Obviously, there was something going on inside his head. And everything he said, everything he did, somehow affected me. He distracted me. And the exams were just a few months away. So I thought it was best to keep away from him. Actually, he didn't care. He probably didn't even notice. He was the star, I was just the brilliant guy.'

Unni was increasingly drawn to the shadowy Somen Pillai, and the unremarkable Sai Shankaran. The three spoke in whispers in class, they were rumoured to meet in Somen's house every evening, they went places together, they had a mysterious purpose. They were on to something, everybody said. Ousep has heard this many times in different forms.

This answers a question Ousep has been waiting to ask. Why did everyone describe Somen and Sai as the closest friends of Unni and not mention Balki at all? The Unni that everybody remembers is the indecipherable boy of seventeen, and it turns out that in this period Balki was not around Unni.

Balki dismisses Sai as an idiot who was perpetually unhappy because he was afraid that he was an idiot. 'You know the kind of guy who would not play chess with you because he is afraid that he would be exposed? That's Sai. Actually, that's most guys in the world, but you know what I mean.'

Somen Pillai, on the other hand, is more complicated than Ousep had imagined. He had first walked into St Ignatius when he was six, the same year as Unni and Balki. Through a huge expanse of time, his entire boyhood, Somen sat quietly in his place, spoke only reluctantly, did nothing memorable he never ran, never played, never sang, never danced or acted in a play, and he barely managed to pass every test. He hopped from year to year in a shroud of silence and insignificance. There is a Somen in every class, in every room of the world where men congregate the quiet one whose opinions are never known. Wherever he exists, he creates a dim corner out of his space. It is not surprising that when Simion Clark was being assaulted by the entire class, Somen was the only student who did nothing. He sat in his place, in his safe corner. In the ten years that they were together in the class, Balki does not remember a single conversation that even mentioned Somen in passing.

'But he is the key,' Balki says. 'Somen Pillai is the person who knows what happened to Unni in the months before he died. The question "why did Unni do what he did" has an answer. I think Somen Pillai knows the answer.'

'What about Sai?'