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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They went to the terrace and talked about ordinary things.

Teachers, cricket, people they knew. 'Nothing deep.' After it got dark, Somen walked on the narrow ledge with his arms stretched out. He slipped, almost fell. He turned to Unni and they laughed as if it was a great joke. Later, there would be many times when they would treat death as something funny. When they saw a funeral procession on the road, a body being taken for cremation, they would giggle.

Sai began to meet them every evening. On the terrace, Unni and Somen showed him the open window in the neighbourhood through which he could see a very old man try, for hours, to achieve sex with his old oiled wife, who hit him and kicked him to save herself from certain death.

The three boys went on long walks or on Somen's scooter, at which times Unni showed Sai the weird people he knew a short, brisk man who worked in Canara Bank, who locked his extraordinarily beautiful wife in the house every morning when he left for work. An architect who had suffered a head injury and after that started drawing flowers that do not exist on earth. A middle-aged woman who had the ability to open the dictionary at exactly the page she wanted. A scientist who was part of a team that was researching the desire in homeless madmen in Madras to direct traffic.

Unni and Somen then introduced him to the nun who had taken the vow of silence. Later, they took him to a slum in Choolaimedu to show him a very old man with flowing silver hair, who walked along the narrow unpaved lanes humming in the Carnatic classical style, pointing his finger at the lumps of human excrement deposited at short, equal intervals on both sides of the alleys, his pitch dramatically increasing or decreasing depending on the size of the shit. People stood outside their huts and watched without anger or amusement as their own shit determined the music of the wandering hummer.

'I thought Unni and Somen were trying to tell me something,' Sai said. 'I thought they would soon explain everything to me.' But that did not happen, and as the days went by Sai began to get impatient. He kept asking Unni, 'When are you going to show me how to go to the next level?' Unni never answered the question. He would laugh and maintain a knowing silence. But Sai was relentless. One day Unni asked him, 'What do you want me to say? What is it that you want to know?'

'What is everything, what is the secret, what is going on, why does the universe exist?' Sai said, which made Unni and Somen laugh hard. But later that evening, as Unni and Sai left their friend's house together and walked down the narrow lane, Unni whispered, 'It is dangerous, Sai. We must not talk about such things.'

'Why?'

'Because it is dangerous.'

'Why is it dangerous?'

Unni did not say anything for a while. They had left the narrow lane when he spoke again. He said, 'Somen is trying to get his hands on a bit of Mycobacterium leprae. Do you know what that is?'

'No.'

'It is the bacterium that causes leprosy. Somen wants to become a leper, he wants to sit on a roadside without fingers and toes and die the most painful death. He wants to beg to survive, he wants to destroy every bit of ego in him, he wants to crawl on the road, Sai. Why would a boy want to do that? Because ego is what stops us from seeing. What you want to see, what we all want to see, is not easy to achieve. That is the thing about this path, Sai. The path we are seeking does not pass through beautiful Himalayan mountains, the path does not take us to tantric sex. It passes through unimaginable pain and misery. Have you wondered why I meet Somen so often? Because I want to ensure he does not harm himself. That is why I come here. But you know what is the scariest thing of all? I don't know why I am stopping him. I know what he wants to do to himself is the right thing. That is what is scary.'

Sai was so terrified and confused by the moment that he ran away at a full sprint, he just ran and ran. But, after a week, he returned to Somen's house because he could not resist being with them. As the weeks passed he felt that Somen and Unni were beginning to transform.

'Many times they would just sit without uttering a word, sit like that for hours. One day, Somen told me, very softly and with great sadness in his voice, "Sai, some days I want to go to the terrace and scream, just scream, 'People, can't you see, can't you see.'" I asked him what exactly did he want the world to see, but he and Unni just looked at each other and they did not say anything. A few days later, I saw Somen with a large, very sharp knife. He kept patting his wrist with the edge of the knife. He did it gently in the beginning but slowly the knife started landing on his wrist harder and harder. I got so scared I ran to the door. That made them laugh.'

One evening, Unni told him that the Superman comics contained many secrets, which could be understood only if he practised the Superman pose the flying pose. 'He made me lie on the floor, on my stomach, with my arms stretched and head looking up. It was tougher than I thought, but I lay like that for God knows how long. When I could not bear it any more, I got up and went to find them, they were on the terrace. They burst out laughing when they saw me.'

In time, Somen started asking him to go and buy groceries, post letters, drag his scooter to the mechanic, even clean the ceiling fans with Somen's mother trying not to laugh. 'They treated me like a servant. Can you imagine that? The exams were just a few weeks away. The board exams, JEE, the regional college exams, all the exams were just a few weeks away and here I was cleaning ceiling fans.'

When his servant phase began, Sai was reminded of the kung-fu films in which Zen masters made their disciples perform all kinds of menial labour. He imagined that he was being drafted as a disciple. He thought Somen and Unni were trying to break down his ego so that he would begin to see the world through their eyes. So he endured all the humiliation and hard work without resisting. But, finally, some events helped him escape from their grasp.

On Marina Beach one Sunday evening, Unni and Somen started swimming, and kept going farther out. Sai sat on the sands and watched. Slowly, he began to get nervous. People on the beach started gathering to watch until they could not see the heads of the two boys. Sai sat there and cried. An hour later, a fisherman's catamaran arrived with the two boys, who looked peaceful. 'I heard the fishermen say they had never seen anyone swim so far out. By the time they found the boys they were too tired to even move their arms, but they were floating on their backs and laughing. Unni told me later that they knew this part of the sea well, they knew that they would be rescued by one of the many fishing boats that were going home.'

A few days later, they did something more dangerous. 'They told me that they wanted to show me something and took me to a railway bridge near Perambur.'

It was a single-track rail that ran over a canal, an isolated spot where nothing much happened for hours and then, suddenly, a train hurled past at full speed. Sai shuddered visibly when he recounted the incident. They convinced him to stand with them on the track and wait for the train to arrive. They stood in a tight line, in a huddle, holding each other's waists.

Unni was in the centre. He was holding Sai's waist tight. 'I didn't know how strong he was until that moment, he had an iron grip.' The game was simple they had to stand waiting for the train, let it approach them and they would jump off just a moment before it hit them. Sai stood looking at the horizon, waiting for the train. But nothing happened for a while. Then he heard the train's hoot. He shut his eyes, clenched his fists and waited. He could hear the hoot grow louder and louder, and then the sound of the train on the track. He opened his eyes, but he could not see the train. It struck him then that it was coming from behind. When he turned to look, the train was just a hundred metres away. 'I wanted to jump off but Unni was holding me so tight I could not free myself. He and Somen were laughing. I started hitting Unni but he did not let go. I thought I was going to die with them. I thought they had come there to die.' Sai shut his eyes, he could feel a great breeze on his back, and then he remembered flying. Somen and Unni were on the side of the track, rolling on the rocks and laughing. Sai was too stunned to even move.

That was the moment he ended the friendship. He stopped going to Somen's house. He ignored them in class. 'They didn't care. They didn't ask me why I was not talking to them. They just didn't care. I did not speak to Unni after that. When I heard that Unni had killed himself, I was not surprised. Have you wondered why you have not been able to meet Somen Pillai?'

'Why?'

'Can't you see?'

'No.'

'Because he is dead.'

'And his parents are hiding the fact? That doesn't make any sense.'

'There is a good chance his parents don't know. Maybe he just vanished one day and they don't want to admit that their son has gone mad and abandoned them. I think his bones are at the bottom of a canal under a railway bridge.'

'You say that, Sai, because you wish it. If I meet Somen Pillai and he talks to me I'll figure out how much you've not told me. Isn't that true, Sai?'

Sai let out a sad chuckle. 'I've told you everything. Except one bit. And I am going to tell you that now. If I had told you this before, you would not have let me talk about anything else.'

Sai was right because what he had to reveal, very simply, was that Unni's final comic, How To Name It, was meant for him. The only thing Unni hated about cartooning was filling up the dialogue bubbles with text. He found it tedious, probably the reason why he usually devised stories that did not need prose. But, apparently, several of his comics did need text and for that he used Sai as a mule. What Unni used to do was finish his comics, leaving the bubbles blank, and write out the story on a piece of paper.

'I was supposed to read the story and make a rough draft of the storyboard and show it to him for approval. He would make a lot of corrections and I would write another draft and another until it was good enough for him, then I would sit and carefully fill up the bubbles in capital letters. But many times, after I finished, he would just tear up the comics and throw them away. He was not happy with most of his work.'

Sai then asked how Ousep had got hold of the comic. As Ousep was explaining, the boy did something unexpected he collected his cheap shoulder bag from the floor, stood up and looked set to leave.

'Sit down, Sai.'

'I have to leave.'

'Really?'

'Yes.'

'How were you supposed to fill in the dialogue bubbles when you didn't know what the story was?'

'I knew the story. He had written the story and given it to me but got down to finishing the comic only weeks later. I never saw the comic, until you showed it to me.'

'Sit down, Sai, we have just begun.'

'I know what you're going to ask me.'

'What am I going to ask you?'

'You are going to ask me, "What is the story of the comic, where is the story of the comic?"'

'Where is the story?'

'I gave it to Unni's mother this morning.'

A soft moan may have escaped Ousep's lungs. 'Why would you do something like that, you idiot? You go and give something that I have been searching for to that woman!'

'Because the story is about her. It is a private matter from her life. I have a duty to the memory of Unni to protect his mother's past.'

'Wait, wait, wait, Sai. Wait right there.'

'Unni's comic was about something that concerned his mother. I will not tell you what it is about. You must ask her yourself.'

'Sai, you're making a mistake. What's the story?'

'I can't tell you.'

'But he told you. So his father can surely know. What was it?'

'Unni said that his father must never know because that is what his mother wishes.'

'Sai, sit down. Sit down and tell me more.'

'Do you know that Unni went missing for three days?'

'No. I didn't know that.'

'You didn't know anything that happened in that house.'

'Why did he go missing? Where did he go?'

'Why is the comic so important to you?' Sai asked, walking back a few steps.

'Because, a few hours after he posted the comic to you, he was dead.'

'And you think there is a connection?'

'Obviously.'

The way Sai looked, it killed something inside Ousep. The honest compassion of a fool, how humiliating that is. 'Is that why you started probing his death again?' Sai said. 'Is that why you did everything you did in the last few months? Because you found this comic? I feel sorry for you. The comic has nothing to do with why he died. If Unni's mother ever tells you what the story is, you will understand what I am saying.'

'Tell me the story, Sai.'

'I have to go now. I've told you everything I know and everything I can say. I don't want to see you again. You and Unni and Somen. I am done with all this. I am an ordinary person, I want ordinary things. I don't want to know the truth. I don't want to see beauty. I am just another boy in Madras who wants to escape to America.'

FOR THE REST OF her life, Mariamma Chacko would tell herself that it was a mistake to let Unni know what had happened to her when she was twelve. For all his swagger he was just a child, and as his mother she should have protected him from himself. But then Unni had been persistent. He had pieced together many of her monologues and figured that at the heart of her indignation was an incident in her childhood. He asked her almost every day what had happened. He was relentless, and in a moment of weakness she yielded. They sat on the kitchen floor and she told him about that day. A happy twelve-year-old village girl without a grouse, that was how she had begun, that was how she had described herself.

She is in her village, walking down the south stream at the foot of the hill towards a giant rock from where the half-naked boys dive into the water. She has walked alone on the banks many times and it is an unremarkable part of her life. She cannot see the rock yet but it will appear after the bend in the stream. There is a familiar stillness all around her and she tells herself that she likes the peace of the hill more than the fuss of the big cities. She sees someone approach, a young man with smooth fox-like strides. When he gets closer, she realizes it is Philipose, a man who is described in at least eight villages as the 'talented young man'. He reads from the Bible on Sundays, sings in the choir, organizes boat races, heads protest marches to the collector's office and demands black-tar roads for the rubber hills. She smiles at him. Unexpectedly, he stops and starts talking to her. She smells liquor on him, so she begins to walk away. 'Wait here and talk for a while,' he says. She says she has to go. But he holds her hand and says, 'Why are you in a hurry today?' She tries to extricate herself from his grip but he holds her tight. She begins to scream. He covers her mouth with his palm and pushes her down on the ground. His hands begin to grope her, tearing her clothes. She struggles but he is too strong. She manages to poke his eye with a stone. As he howls, she screams too. People run towards her. Philipose flees. Nobody chases him. 'It is Philipose,' they say. 'It is Philipose.'

Mariamma is taken to her mother by seven women who have shrouded her in a bedsheet. They walk up the hill. Her mother stands at the top with her hands on her hips, and waits. She has heard the news. Mariamma is happy to see her mother. But the moment she is handed over, her mother slaps her in front of everyone. 'Why do you strut alone on the banks?' she says. She takes her in and asks her, 'What did he do?' Mariamma does not know how to answer that. She does not say anything. Mother inspects her, and looks relieved. 'Such things happen when girls are not careful,' her mother says. 'Don't think too much about it.'

The same evening, they sit in the coracle and go to her foster home. Her mother has nothing to say to her, not a word. Mariamma is dropped on the bank. She wades through the shallow water and reaches the steps. When she turns back, the boat and her mother have already gone some distance. Mariamma stands there and watches long after the boat has disappeared. She does not know how long she has been standing there. She is finally surprised by a pall of middle-aged women in white who are returning from a funeral. They look at her as if she is a strange animal.

'What is wrong with you, Mariammo?' one of them says.

'Why do you ask me that?'

'You were talking to the river.'

This happens several times in the coming weeks. People startling her and telling her that she has been talking to herself. They begin to say, Mariamma is behaving in a funny way. That is what they say. But about Philipose, they still say, 'the talented young man'.

Unni was furious. 'Did they punish Philipose? Tell me they did something to him,' he said.

'No,' she said. 'Nobody wanted to even talk about it. My mother, especially. Philipose went on living as if nothing had happened.'

Unni took a glass and broke it on the floor. 'I'll kill him,' he said. It was terrifying, to see the rage of such a gentle boy.

When Mariamma opens the hospital ward door and walks into the milk-white room, she finds Ousep sitting on his bed and staring at her as if he has been waiting for the door to open. She drags a chair over and sits by his side, and sets her bag on the floor. 'I know what you want to know,' she says. And she tells him what she had, until this moment, told only Unni. Ousep listens without a word. When she finishes, he puts a feeble hand on her lap.

'Why didn't you tell me?' he says.

'I didn't want to tell you. You were my happiness, when I married you. I wanted to forget all that was old.'

'You should have told me,' he repeats like a fool.

'I told Unni, I don't know why. I should not have. He was disturbed for many days. He started talking like me. "He got away, didn't he? Philipose got away." One evening, Unni did not return home. I waited but he didn't return. I called all his friends but nobody knew where he had gone. You came home drunk, did your usual things and went to sleep. But Unni was not home yet. Next morning I got a call from him. He said he was in Kerala. He said he was going to confront Philipose. I started screaming at him, but he put the phone down. He returned two days later. He told me what had happened. The comic that you have been guarding, Ousep, that is what it is about. It is about Unni's journey to meet Philipose.'

'And what happened when he went to meet Philipose?'

'How did you get that comic?' she asks.

He tells her.

'Is that why you started meeting his friends all over again?' she asks.

'Yes.'