'I think the other two used him as an errand boy. Sai might know something more than he lets on, but I don't think he is important. Somen Pillai is the person who can help you.'

'I can't find him.'

'I've heard.'

'How do I meet him?'

'I don't know.'

Balki rubs his eyebrows, glares intensely at the desk. Unexpectedly, he rises. He says, 'I have to go now.' But he stands there, lingering, which is odd. He pouts his lips and stares at Ousep, who decides to say nothing, but he gets the sense that it is important not to take his eyes off the boy as he struggles to make a decision. There is nothing Ousep can do but wait.

The boy, finally, makes the decision.

'I've something to say,' Balki says.

Ousep points to the chair; the boy lands hard on it. He looks nervous and his breathing is perceptible. He appears his age now. 'I've to get it out of my head. I think I trust you, I don't know why, but I trust you. I have to say it now or I'll never say it.'

'Tell me, Balki.'

'Unni used to wander in the night,' Balki says, 'late in the night, sometimes he would get back home at dawn. You may know this.'

Ousep knows, though he learnt about this long after the boy died. Unni did it only on some nights. He would wait for his father to come home, wait to stand with his mother, and for the storm to pass, and Ousep to fall into his bed. When Unni began to slip out of the house at midnight, or sometimes at dawn, he was probably fifteen, a time when he was still a child in many ways and was fragile enough to be saddened by the ways of his father. His mother tried to stop him but she had no control over him. According to her, and she says it in an accusing way, Unni walked in the peace of the night to relieve his pain, to be far away from home and to dream of his future, his whole life that lay ahead, which made him happy. But in time he began to enjoy walking down the abandoned lanes and seeing his world emptied of the tame people and replaced by another kind who did not belong to the day. He told his friends about what he saw, the long stretches of time when absolutely nothing happened, nothing stirred, then the appearance of beautiful eunuchs in bridal splendour, and the solitary women going somewhere with a smile. And how he was questioned once by cops and how they turned respectful and offered to drop him home when he spoke to them in English.

'I had been hearing the night stories of Unni for months,' Balki says, 'and I was curious to go with him into the night. Like the boys of my type in Madras I was brought up as if I was a girl. I was not allowed to step out of the house after dark. So, when my parents decided to go to a wedding and leave me alone in the house for a week, I decided to wander with Unni one night and see for myself what he had been talking about. I took my father's TVS-50 and we went all around Madras. We were breaking the law but the cops did not care. I realized the rules were very different late in the night. We were passing along a dark narrow lane under the Arcot Road flyover when we saw something strange. A woman in a red sari was lying on the pavement. I wanted to know why she was lying there but I didn't stop. I went straight ahead but Unni asked me to go back. So we went back, parked the TVS and walked to where she was lying. Unni squatted very close to her. So I did the same. All we could do was stare. She was a young, slim woman. Not very pretty or anything but not bad at all. We could smell liquor. She had probably got drunk and passed out. She was a prostitute, I think. I have never seen a prostitute, but if a woman is so drunk that she has passed out on the road, she must be a prostitute. Unni said, "Do you want to squeeze her breasts?" That's what he said. I had never touched a woman's little finger before, as in touched it in an impure way. But now all I had to do was extend my hand and I could squeeze a real woman. "Have you done this before?" I asked Unni. He said, "No. They usually don't lie around like this."

'I was not sure if I should do it but I wanted to. Very badly. I could see her legs. I wanted to do things to her, I was desperate. I was not in control. "Do it," Unni said. I shook her shoulder and said, "Excuse me madam, wake up, please." Unni burst out laughing. He knew that I didn't want to wake her up, I just wanted to touch her. I tried to wake her up by touching her stomach, her arms, her legs, and finally I stopped pretending. I squeezed her breasts. She started mumbling something, I could not understand what she was saying but it was something very sad. We fled. That's it. That's what I wanted to tell you.'

'You said that you were breaking the law when you took your father's TVS-50 out. What did you mean by that?'

Balki looks baffled, probably because he was expecting a deeper question. 'It was my father's TVS-50.'

'But it's not illegal to ride your father's TVS.'

'I didn't have a licence,' he says.

'You said, "We were breaking the law."'

'Neither of us had a licence.'

'Did Unni squeeze her?'

'No. That's the whole point. That's the way he was. He wanted others to do things, so that he could watch.'

Balki rubs his face with his fat palms. 'What I did, was it wrong?' he asks. 'Did I molest a woman?'

'Yes.'

Balki raises his voice. 'But she was lying on the road and I was so desperate.'

Two weeks after the incident, unable to contain his guilt, Balki went to the Kodambakkam police station and confessed. The inspector called several of his men and asked Balki to repeat his confession. And they laughed at him. They said he should be sentenced to death by hanging, and they tried to chase him away. But Balki stood there, he insisted that he be punished. So they let him write down his confession, which he wrote in Tamil. They said they would get in touch with him. But he never heard from them.

'In your confession, Balki, you obviously gave your name and your address?'

'Yes.'

'And the names of the other two?'

'Yes.'

Balki stares at Ousep unpleasantly. He rises, but then decides to sit down.

'I am sorry, Balki, I didn't mean to trick you. So, that night there were three boys on the TVS-50, not two. Isn't that true?'

Balki does not answer. He toys again with the paperweight.

'No cop in Madras will fine you for riding a moped without a licence. You know that, Balki,' Ousep says. 'The only way you can break the law in the night is by having three people on that thing. Who is the third boy?'

'I cannot tell you that. It would be unfair to that person.'

'But you wrote his name in the confession you gave to the police.'

'Yes. I had gone mad. I don't know why I did it. But that was a long time ago. I am sure that piece of paper no longer exists.'

'It exists in the police files. That is the nature of papers and police. I can retrieve it for you if you want.'

'How will you do that?'

'A reporter has his ways.'

'I don't want you to do anything. I want to forget the matter.'

'I understand. But, Balki, I've run out of people who will talk to me. I want to know the name of this person. He may want to cooperate with me if he knows I have this information.'

'Then this is going to disappoint you. It is not someone you have not met.'

'Who is it?'

'It is not fair to reveal his name.'

'That's all right. Be unfair, for Unni's sake.'

'You've met him before. So what use is this?'

'He may want to talk at length now.'

'You're going to twist his arm now?'

'I may try and persuade him.'

'That would compromise my identity.'

'Yes, but to a person who already knows what you have done.'

Balki looks at the church spire and tries to make a decision. He does not take long. He says, 'It was Sai.'

'Thank you, Balki. I have one more question. Did Unni ever talk to you about a corpse?'

'Yes,' Balki says, still preoccupied with his guilt. 'But I think he was just fooling around.'

He has not recovered from his confession. He does not want to talk about anything else now. 'Unni had this theory,' he says. 'According to him, every man, even a regular decent man, has harmed a woman at least once, or will in his lifetime. He really believed that for some reason. I used to argue with him that such statements are plain moronic. I think he made me do that thing on the road so that he could prove his point.'

'You don't have to take everything he ever said so seriously.'

'But he turned out to be right, didn't he?'

'Don't whip yourself,' Ousep says. 'Men do things. We can't help it. That's all there is to it. As you will discover in time, Balki, the primary choice every man has to make is whether he wants to be himself or if he wants peace.'

THE EIGHTEEN WOMEN AND the clean-shaven evangelist are on their knees, in a tight circle around a small golden cross. They raise their hands and sing 'Praise the lord'. The woman whose house it is sings the loudest and the other women are careful not to eclipse her voice. Mariamma Chacko does not want to raise her hands because the underarms of her blouse are darned, so she raises her head in compensatory devotion.

This Sunday she will report what she has seen in the room to the parish priest to further milk him and also reconfirm his fear that the light of his authority has been diminished by the more energetic Protestant evangelists. But she must admit that there is something to his fear, there is something eerie about what is happening to the Catholic women of the Kodambakkam circle these days. The daily mass in the church does not satisfy them, they want more than the soft hymns, the sermons and the murmurs of prayers. They want what the young hallelujah evangelists make them do, they want all that dancing and clapping and screaming. And the evangelists are drawing more and more women into their fold.

The evangelist who is with them this afternoon is famous for converting hundreds of Hindu villagers, stunning them with a blessed white powder that makes the sick feel better. It is surprising what crushed paracetamol can do to parched, starving people. In his spell, the Catholic women of Kodambakkam, too, are now trying to convert their servants and the slum women, and anybody they can find.

How is it that an ordinary man can cast such a spell on women who are far cleverer than him? She wonders whether Unni was right, after all. He told her once, during one of his biblical moods, 'Truly I say unto you, Mariamma. The fundamental quality of a delusion is that it is contagious. The very purpose of every delusion is to transmit itself to other brains. That is how a delusion survives. On the other hand, Mariamma Chacko, truth can never be transmitted, truth can never travel from one brain to another. Movement is a quality of delusion alone.'

'What nonsense you talk, Unni. Are you saying that if two people believe in something it simply cannot be the truth?'

'Absolutely, Mariamma Chacko, you're a very clever woman.'

'So there is only one person in the world who knows the truth. And that is you?'

'Truly I say unto you. Truth is not consistent. It changes from brain to brain. The truth of every neurological system is unique and it cannot be transmitted. It cannot be told, it cannot be conveyed, it cannot be searched for and found.'

'Unni, do you want some coffee?'

When she returns home and is about to open her door, she hears the phone ring. That is unusual because the phone does not ring at this time of the day. By the time she reaches it the phone has died. She wonders why she is afraid. Thoma is in school. What can happen in school? Did he fall down the stairs? Someone poked his eye with a divider? The phone rings again and she grabs the receiver. 'Hello,' she says.

A man's voice at the other end says, 'Is this Mariamma Chacko?'

Is it that call, then, the call she has wished for many times?

Now that it has come she does not want it, she wants it to go away. She may have sent some prayers up in her weak moments, but surely, God has the sense to know which of a woman's prayers he must take seriously.

'Is this Mariamma Chacko?'

'Yes.'

'I am calling from GG Hospital. Ousep Chacko has had a heart attack.'

It is several moments before she speaks. 'Is he all right?' she asks.

'Can you come down to GG right now?'

'Is he all right?'

'The doctors are still with him.'

'Is he all right?'

'I don't know. Please come immediately.'

Long after the line goes dead she stands holding the receiver. The first time she saw him she had felt her cheek with her fingers. She had a stain on her face from brushing against a raw hill mango. The black stain from the milk of the mango would take a month to go, and what bad luck it was that the fine young man who had come to the hill to seek her hand should arrive at this time in her life. Not that she adored him at first sight. The truth is she was disappointed. He was in a cheap shirt, with many things in its sagging pocket, and in rubber slippers. But then his name was known to all in her village, and probably everyone in Kerala who read short stories. A poor writer, but still a writer. Which girl back then would not have wished to marry a young writer?

Thoma Chacko always knew that this is how it would be, this is how the news of his father's death would be broken to him that the day would begin like any other day, that he would be in school and his mother would suddenly appear looking like a maid, pretending to be calm, and take him away to a hospital without revealing much. But he would never have guessed that when the day he feared the most arrived, he would be in a purple velvet frock.

It is the dress rehearsal of the school play and he is in the main hall. He is, as usual, an extra, but this time a female extra, one of the many girls in frocks waiting with their right hands on their left elbows for the king to arrive. Rufus Sir has told all the lady extras that they must stand with their legs together. 'That's how girls stand,' he says. Everybody knows that Rufus Sir enjoys beating up boys when they are dressed as girls. So Thoma does not let his mind wander, he does not want to give him any excuse.

When Thoma hears her the first time, he knows that he is not imagining it but he pretends that he has not heard her. He can see his mother standing at a great distance, in the doorway, with the headmaster. She has dressed in a hurry and he is surprised how cheap she looks. 'Thoma,' she says again.

As he walks down the large empty hall and the strong, grim figure of his mother approaches, Thoma is sure that his life is about to get worse. 'Thoma, where is your uniform?' she says.

'It is in the class.'

'We don't have time, you have to go this way.'

'What happened?'

'Your father has had a heart attack. He is in the hospital.'

She tells the headmaster, 'I rushed out of my house without taking any money. Would you have a hundred rupees for the auto? I have to go to GG Hospital.'

'I have nothing, madam,' the man says. 'And the office deposited all its cash in the bank in the morning.' He screams to the assembled cast, 'Does anybody have a hundred rupees? It is an emergency.'

There is silence.

Mariamma takes her son's hand and walks. Thoma hears a boy whine, 'Sir, that is my sister's frock he is wearing. I have to take it back today.' They walk at a steady pace towards the school gate. There is an auto waiting for them outside. The driver looks annoyed. 'You can't make me wait that long,' he says, 'this is not your car.'

They ride in silence. Thoma allows the gloom to fill him, he sees his father in the mornings, when he is a clever, elegant man. Thoma is proud that his father is not an ordinary person on an old scooter. He is not a bank clerk carrying a lunch box to work, he is not just anybody. His father is a journalist. When important things happened in this country, Ousep Chacko used to be there, taking notes. He appeared on TV once, very briefly, to say something about a politician whose name Thoma has forgotten. Everybody saw him and everybody said, 'Thoma, we saw your father on TV.'

'Is he dead?' he asks his mother.

'They won't tell me,' she says.

'He is dead, isn't he?'

'I don't know, Thoma.'

His father had a complicated relationship with their Mustang TV. He tried many times to take it away and pawn it. Some days, when he was about to set out for work, he would stop and stare at the TV for a long time, making an elaborate plan in his head. Then he would lift it from its stand and take it to the door with great care as if it were a fallen child he was taking to the hospital. But he would always return it to the stand, smile at Thoma and pat his face. One day his father brought a muscular man along who carried the TV away in a tight hug. Ousep was about to follow the thug but he stopped in the doorway and looked at Thoma. 'We are just taking it for repair, Thoma,' he said. The TV never came back. But at least his father had the heart to lie. It is the sweetest memory he has of his father. It was a moment of love, who can deny that?