His father wanted to be left alone most of the time. Some fathers are like that. But Thoma knows that there were times when his father wanted to be included in the antics of Unni and his mother. Thoma is sorry today that his father was never allowed any easy entries into family life. Unni and his mother knew how to punish him and they always did.

Thoma remembers a Sunday afternoon from a distant time when he woke up from his nap and began chatting with Unni, who was working on a comic. Unni did not say anything, which was not unusual. When he was working he did not get distracted. But Thoma was so annoyed at being ignored he said, 'Can you hear me?' Unni did not turn. Thoma tried to distract him, even poked him a few times, but Unni could not see or hear or feel his brother. Thoma began to suspect that he had become invisible. When he rushed to his mother to confirm it she, too, could not see him or feel him. But he could see that she was trying not to laugh. Was it a prank? It was natural that Thoma would consider his father the ultimate test of his invisibility. He stood at the door of his father's room and mustered the courage to sing a song, but Ousep could not hear him. Thoma kept inching into the room and finally stood in front of his father, but Ousep looked right through him. Thoma put his hand on his open mouth and ran outside, screaming, 'I am gone, I am gone.' Unni was watching this from the hall. He hugged Thoma and told him that it was just a prank. Thoma was so relieved he laughed insanely, his eyes still wide and terrified, which made his mother hold her stomach and shake with laughter. Ousep stepped out of his room to laugh with them and be included; after all, he had figured out the game from the commotion in the house and had played along. But when he appeared, they went inside in a huddle to laugh privately. Thoma is sorry they did that.

The ride in the auto is long and slow. Thoma looks at the harsh light of day outside, an incandescent plane in the sky, vehicles going somewhere, men hanging from the window bars of buses, people laughing, waiting, running. He hopes his father is still a part of all this, he hopes Ousep Chacko will walk again, with his brisk morning strides.

Finally, his mother asks the driver to stop. Thoma is confused. They are not at the hospital, they are outside an apartment block.

'You said GG Hospital,' the auto driver says.

'I have to go and fetch someone,' she says.

'You have to come back fast,' he says. 'This is not your car.'

She takes Thoma's hand and marches into the concrete entrance of the building. The watchman decides not to stop them, possibly because Thoma looks like a flamboyant modern girl going somewhere important with her maid.

'Where are we going?' he asks.

'Thoma, it is like this. There was no money at home and I rushed out in a state. So we have no money for the auto.'

'What are we going to do?'

'We must do what we have to do,' she says.

They go to the rear portion of the building, climb the wall and jump into a quiet lane on the other side. 'What we are doing is wrong, Thoma, but we didn't have a choice,' she says. 'Jesus knows.'

As they walk swiftly down the back lanes, hand in hand, throwing nervous glances at the autos passing by, Thoma sees men looking at him in a way he has never seen them look. They are not trying to make up their minds, they are sure he is a girl. They look at his chest, at his crotch, at his arse. They are looking at him as if he is an ancient familiar foe from whom they would like to take something. Thoma feels humiliated. They look at him and spit unconsciously. He is reminded of what Unni had said. 'I have done research, Thoma, a lot of research over many weeks. Men in Madras spit all the time but the chances of them spitting when they see a young girl are seventy-eight per cent higher than when they are not looking at a young girl. When they see a girl, they don't even realize they are spitting.'

When they reach GG, the huge reception hall is crowded, and they stand there wondering what they must do. His mother asks a nurse something in Malayalam. The nurse then leads them to the lift. In the lift she looks carefully at Thoma.

'I am a boy,' he says, 'I was rehearsing for a school play.'

'You are a very beautiful boy,' she says, which makes Thoma happy despite the circumstances. She leads them to the longest corridor he has ever seen. He is stunned by the affluence of this place and he is proud that his father somehow managed to land here and not in some dreary government morgue.

The nurse consults with other white frocks and takes them through a network of clean beautiful corridors. 'He is in 401,' the nurse says, 'that's the one.' As they walk down the final corridor, his mother clutches his hand.

They are almost jogging now, which makes the nurse jog too, though she does not want to. She opens the door of 401 and takes them in. Thoma has not seen a more luxurious room. Everything is white and expensive and there is a deep elegant silence in the air. How can anybody have the heart to die in a place like this?

He sees his father lying in a green gown on a thick comfortable bed. There are some wires shoved up his nose, which must mean that he is alive. The nurse studies a bunch of papers hanging from his bed. 'He is all right,' she says. 'He is all right, Mariamma. He is very weak but he is going to be fine. He is going to be asleep the whole day though.'

His mother begins to cry but she has no desire to go and touch her man. Thoma wants to hold his father's hand but feels too shy to perform an act of love. 'Who brought him to this expensive place?' his mother says.

'His office people,' the nurse says. 'He was in his office when it happened.'

'Who is going to pay for all this?'

'His office, from what I can see. Mariamma, don't you worry. You can go home this evening and come back tomorrow morning. He is not going to wake up before morning.'

More nurses come in, all of them fully grown women in white frocks. Like Thoma and his father, they too look as if they are extras in a bad play. A fat doctor walks in smoking a pipe. He studies Mariamma and figures that she is not important. He mumbles that her husband almost died, and he goes away. The nurses follow him, leaving Thoma and his mother alone. They stand together in discomfort, looking at the ceiling and the walls, as if they are in a rich stranger's home.

Ousep's trousers are hanging on the wall. Mariamma extracts his wallet and a bunch of papers, which are neatly folded. She arranges the papers and searches for a place to sit. But something about what she is holding makes her freeze and she forgets to sit. It looks like one of Unni's comics, but Thoma has never seen this one before. His mother looks disturbed as she turns the pages. When she comes to the image of a man giving a thumbs-up sign, she drops the comic in shock, or maybe the pages just fall for no reason at all. She is a person who drops things. She picks up the comic and looks carefully at the man. When she reaches the final page, Thoma is surprised to see a giant image of his mother in full flow.

'What's this?' he asks.

'I don't know,' she says.

She takes all the money in the wallet but leaves the comic behind. They take a bus back home. It is when they walk through the gates of Block A and all the boys who are playing begin to laugh that Thoma is reminded of his dress. He looks up at the balconies, at the men and women who are standing there. They do not laugh. They probably know about the heart attack and they wonder what has happened. Thoma is reminded of the time when he and his parents had returned from the church. It was a day like this. They had gone somewhere as a family and returned one person short.

He looks up again to check whether Mythili has seen him in this condition but there is only her mother standing there. As they walk up the stairway, doors open and the women step out. They ask Mariamma what happened and they hold her hand and ask her to be brave. Later, they come to his home, one after the other, with hot food and fruit and coffee. Even Mrs Balasubramanium comes with many things on a plate. His mother puts it all on the table, and at some point in the evening, when they hear another doorbell, she says, 'This man should have a heart attack every day.' And they have a good laugh.

5.

Philipose, Philipose.

OUSEP IS NOT DREAMING, he is sure about that, even though he is asleep and what he sees is a world in which Unni is not dead. Unni is not dead because he is not born yet. The world before Unni Chacko, according to Unni Chacko himself, 'is the strongest evidence to support the ridiculous hypothesis that life will continue as usual after I am dead'.

Mariamma is young, beautiful and has been married for three months. She goes through these days with somewhat exaggerated glee, like an amateur lover. When he cracks a joke she runs away covering her mouth, she serves him food with a flourish of her hand, cleans his ear with too much care, as if she is repairing a watch. She lives with him in a large house that smells of red earth and bananas, and is surrounded by high palms and plantains and jackfruit trees. It is the office accommodation of the Weekly in Kottayam. He is among the brightest journalists in Kerala, and the youngest columnist anyone has ever known, whom politicians and bishops visit. Priests quote him in their Sunday sermons, even Protestant priests. Publishers, who have read his hugely popular short fiction in the Sunday magazines, beg him to write a novel.

Mariamma enjoys her new life, she sings love songs to herself, names the calves born in other houses, reads anything she can find. She translates One Hundred Years of Solitude into Malayalam. Small portions actually, and she does it out of love for the great Marquez. Her translation is good but there are words she skips; she says those words do not exist in Malayalam. He tries to think of synonyms to impress her but she is right, those words do not exist. And some objects in Marquez's story remain blank gaping spaces in her prose.

She forces Ousep to go to church with her every Sunday; they walk together in their best clothes on narrow, wet, winding roads, talking and laughing, and fully aware that neighbours are watching from their windows narrowing their eyes, craning their necks, fanning their stomachs, moving their jaws and whispering things to others. Ousep feels vulgar to be so happy in plain sight; he feels as if he is walking through a famine, eating a large fried fish. But then that is how they were, Ousep and Mariamma, young and happy in an unremarkable way. Who would believe it, once they were like anybody else?

She is shameless when they make love, which is often, and when they are this way the air is filled with the calamitous sounds of a woman who appears to be mourning the destruction of furniture. She stops now and then to give precise instructions on how he must proceed. But when they lie spent, she turns quiet and melancholic, even bad-tempered, and she is the first to leave the bed. That, innocent Ousep imagines, is how women are. He imagines that he fills her with so much tumult that she must retrieve herself in private. He begins to strut around his life thinking that there is something extraordinary about him as a lover, a suspicion he always possessed. How else can a girl collapse so completely in his embrace? When he sees new brides walk with their men, he is surprised at how they can be so happy, as happy as Mariamma Chacko. It seems odd to him that other men, the simple men, men who are not writers, they too can make their women laugh, make them glow.

Relatives and friends visit every day, there is much laughter and happy commotion in the house. Some evenings, white Ambassador cars with red lights on top are parked outside their home. The deputy collector asks Mariamma, not entirely in jest, 'Considering everything, how tough the world is on women, would you still like to be a woman in your next life?' She gives a gentle tilt to her head and asks, 'And what is the other option?' There is an explosion of laughter in the room.

Too much happiness, she tells Ousep. She says it with a hint of fear in her voice. She is sure that some visitors, his relatives especially, leave behind enchanted things to bring doom to their home and end their joys. She is right, she finds black coins and chicken bones hidden in the nooks of the iron gates of their home. There are things written on them, threads tied to them. She laughs because she is not superstitious. She collects them and puts them in a box. One day she finds a copperplate with inscriptions buried in the land that runs around their home. Another day she discovers a vial of dark oil in the grounds. She collects them all, keeps them safe, as if they are precious relics of human nature. Which they are, in a way.

Ousep goes to work around noon every day; Mariamma stands at the gate and watches him go down the red-earth path that runs in the shade of immortal trees. He looks back several times and they laugh, always, at their juvenile love. They are the couple who would stretch their arms and run towards each other in a sunflower farm, though they have never done that.

Ousep has stopped drinking. It is a tradition among Malayalee men to stop drinking after marriage. But slowly, like the rest, he resumes with small innocuous nips. Mariamma does not mind because she is yet to know him well. She has not seen him on buckling knees, seen him sway like a fool or on the arms of other men. But there is a lot about her that Ousep does not know. She too has abandoned something that really cannot be given up.

The first time he hears the voice is at dawn. He is stirred from his sleep by the unfamiliar sound of a woman's deep whispers that break into soft howls and more whispers 'Just a girl, I was just a girl, Mother, a girl can tell her mother some things, can't she?' Ousep follows the voice, which leads him to the kitchen doorway. He sees his young wife standing with her lips curled inside her mouth, her head tilted. Her finger wags. Nobody has told him that she becomes this way sometimes. It is now clear why the rubber merchant had given away his daughter to the son of a pauper farmer. He was not mesmerized by Ousep's prose as he had claimed. He had found a fool. But what Ousep feels at that moment as he stands outside the kitchen is a wounded affection for his woman.

Mariamma is studying the burnt bottom of a large aluminium vessel and she is saying, 'You could have said something, Mother, just anything. So what if the boatman heard?' She is shocked to see him in the kitchen doorway. She is so ashamed she begins to cry. He asks her why she is this way. He will ask her the same question in the months to come and, on occasion, in the years to follow. She will tell him that she was always this way, she will tell him that she cannot help it. 'But I am not mad, I am actually a happy woman,' she will say. She will try to control herself, be the girl she was in the first light of marriage but she will slip into the trance every few days, especially when she imagines she is alone.

In time, Ousep stops loving home, he becomes the other men, men who sink into the company of other men, the veteran husbands, men who drink late into the night with their friends, men with frail thighs who have never played football but talk about football, and at other times about the superiority of Marx over Keynes, and about the unattainable prose of the new Spanish writers.

Mariamma knows he has changed. She tries to make her home as beautiful as possible, she wakes up at dawn and grinds things in large stone boulders, stands sweating in the charcoal fumes of the kitchen and cooks for hours so that she can watch him eat like a boy. She tries to be happy enough so that she does not enact the moments from another time. She makes love to him in the mornings. But Ousep has gone too far the Malayalee way. In the mornings he does wish to be a good person, a decent man, but in the nights he returns as a corpse. She becomes bitter and angry. To punish him she takes the tailoring scissors and chops off the sleeves of his best shirt. They have a big fight. He holds his amputated shirt and calls her names, which makes her cry. He returns that night drunk. She chops off the legs of his best trousers. He continues to return drunk and she continues to cut his clothes. She stops cleaning the house, leaves things lying around, puts things in disorder, arranges the furniture in crooked ways.

Ousep's tiny avian mother has been waiting to torment Mariamma by right, but he has never let her stay in the house for too long. She smells trouble in his home, so she is persistent, says she wants to live with her son, her great writer son for whom she has toiled all her life, milked buffaloes on so many dawns. Eventually, he gives up and the woman comes and straightens the furniture, cleans the house, cooks for her son. His nine parasitic sisters too move in, one after the other, to harass the weird girl who talks to herself. They insult her, treat her poorly in her own home. He does not know how he allowed it but he does not deny he did he does nothing as they torture his wife every day. Those petty women, he let them do all that. She suffers in silence but she does not forget. Their full Christian names enter her insane monologues, she repeats what they tell her, hangs their memories on the wall and asks them pointed questions. Even now, after all these years, she says almost every day, 'You got away, Annamol, you got away.' That is at the heart of Mariamma's lament, the grouse against all who committed crimes against her and got away.

Mariamma abandons her proud rationality. She throws away the enchanted items, she calls a controversial Catholic priest to purify her home, who utters things in Sanskrit. But nothing changes.

Ousep and Mariamma are not ethereally fused any more, they drift apart, but when they attain a distance between themselves, from where they cannot always hear the other but can still see, they drift no more. They begin to orbit each other, like two equal planets that cannot let go. The distance separates them in their bed too, but there are times when they collide, searching for flesh.

The night Unni is born, Ousep comes fully drunk to the hospital, he goes to the wrong ward and abuses the baby in the crib, calls it an ugly monkey. The new mother screams for help. Men and women hold him by his arms and carry him to Mariamma's bed. He mumbles something to her but leaves without seeing the baby.

Around this time he gets a lead from an altar boy that the powerful archbishop is a paedophile. Ousep chases the story for months, convinces several boys and parish workers to speak to him, promising them anonymity. When he finally files the story, the editor, a venerated old man, calls Ousep to his office and asks him the identity of his unnamed sources. Ousep is reluctant. 'I am not asking you to give it in writing, Ousep,' the editor says. 'Just tell me who these people are. Their names would dissolve in air. I've a right to know, you have a duty to tell, it is journalistic tradition.' Ousep reveals the names. The story is then killed. The archbishop had long known of the story, and had been waiting patiently to learn the names of those who had ratted on him. Ousep gets drunk one night and tries to break into the archbishop's residence to beat him up. He loses his job in disgrace. To his surprise, he finds himself unemployable. He has suddenly acquired the reputation of being an arrogant, uncontrollable young man, who fabricates stories. There are tales about him in the newsrooms, most of them exaggerations of things he has said and done under the influence of alcohol. The men who were waiting for Ousep to fall, including some friends, ensure that he will never rise again in Kerala. He finds a modest job with the United News of India, moves to Madras, and begins to live in the midst of austere vegetarians.

NOT FOR THE FIRST time since he was brought here, he wakes up and accepts that he is in an impressive hospital ward and that he has not slept on a better bed than this. He is probably heavily drugged; everything around him is in a tidy white haze. He enjoys his own physical frailty, which reminds him of a sleepy rainy day, enjoys the fact that he is being cared for by strangers to whom he owes nothing, especially money. His body is too feeble even to think, he is filled with what has to be deep serenity, and he is worried that he has been transformed into someone better. Is this clarity? Is clarity a single transparent thought or is it the absence of thought? Was Unni right after all could it be that thoughts are truly the corrupt dominant species of the world that have colonized man, relentlessly mutating into increasingly complex ideas and making him do things so that they can finally intrude into the material world as marvellous objects?

Ousep loves the drug the hospital has given him, but then his palm circles his hairy chest, which means what he needs now is a small nip.

The white door opens and an almost beautiful nurse enters the ward holding a pen over a notebook as if she knows what she is going to write but will not do so until she sees it with her own eyes. Unlike the older nurses she does not seem lampooned in the starched white frock and white stockings. She looks forbidden and unattainable, even important. As the door shuts behind her, there is something deeply carnal about the decisive click of the knob. It is the first time in years that he has been alone in a sealed room with a young woman, and he feels he must do something inappropriate. The eyes of the nurse fall on different objects in the room, including him. She makes some quick notes in her book and leaves.

He does not know whether it is night or day, or how long he has been here, lying like a transvestite in this ridiculous green gown, but he decides to stay awake and wait for Mariamma. He has a feeling that she is somewhere around, she would not leave him alone in a hospital ward. There is a lot that they have to talk about that is, if she is willing to answer his questions.

He sits up on the bed and leans his back against the massive pillow. He tries to remember when exactly he had seen the apparition. A few hours ago, days ago? He is not clear what had woken him up at that moment but when he was awake the first thing he saw was Sai Shankaran standing in the doorway of the ward, meek and harmless, his hair wet and immovable as always in the mornings. Even as a sudden apparition, Sai was incapable of giving a fright. When he finally walked in, the room was filled with the smell of Lifebuoy soap.

'Have you come to kill me, Sai?'

'No,' Sai said in a way that turned Ousep's jest into a reasonable question.

'Sai.'

'Yes.'

'Will you help me urinate?'

Sai looked terrified. So Ousep lied. 'I was just kidding.'

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."'