Chairman Emeritus.

The Schizophrenia Day Ward and Research Centre

Ousep considers the door for a moment. Behind the door, somewhere inside the room, sits a doctor, a grand old man in all probability, a neurosurgeon, a neuropsychiatrist, whom Alpha calls Psycho. From what Ousep has seen, Alpha is not a normal person. The nature of the association between Alpha and a neuropsychiatrist is not hard to guess. It is natural that the boy would imagine Psycho as an adversary. But then Ousep does not want to dismiss Alpha's warning. He has to decide. Should he reveal to the man the reason why he is here, or should he play.

He opens the door and finds a surprisingly large room, with no windows. In the middle of the room is an ancient wooden desk, and behind the desk sits a small old man with rich silver hair that has been neatly combed back. His head is bent, he is reading something engrossing on his lap, and if he has heard the door open he is not curious to know the nature of the intrusion. Ousep walks in and stands still. The old man is in a checked cotton shirt buttoned at the collar and the cuffs. There are eight fountain pens clipped to his shirt pocket and one small black object, probably some kind of a torch. There are three silver medals pinned on the third button. The room is filled with shields and framed citations, most of which contain the unsmiling face of a younger man who has undoubtedly become the person in front of him.

Iyengar lifts his head and is not surprised by what he sees. He does not stare in incomprehension, does not ask any questions. He points to a chair. This is the old man in The Album of the Dead, one of the four unidentified characters in the series. Ousep tries to assume an apologetic inferior face that still retains considerable dignity. Iyengar puts the book he was reading on the clean desk. It is the Bhagavatgita, in Sanskrit. An old philosophical man with a lot of time, which is a good sign.

'Dr Iyengar, my name is Ousep, I am the chief reporter with UNI. I apologize for coming here without an appointment.'

'What is UNI?' the doctor asks, leaning back and looking amused. His voice is deep, but feeble.

'United News of India, it is a news agency, like PTI.'

'I get it now.'

'I am working on a story. A feature story on schizophrenia in Madras. The condition of schizophrenics.'

'The condition?'

'How people with this condition go through life, what is being done to help them.'

'So, Ousep, you are going to write a story about schizophrenics, and what you write will be carried by all the newspapers that subscribe to UNI. Is that correct?'

'That's correct.'

'But this is not news, it is not a current affairs story. As you say, you are working on a feature story, which means it can appear at any time. It can appear in a week, in a month. Is that correct?'

'That's correct.'

'Would it appear in The Hindu?'

'That's possible.'

'But you don't know?'

'I don't know.'

'I've never seen a feature story that has the name of a news agency under it. I see PTI stories all the time, which are all news stories.'

'Yes, it is a bit odd but I am very interested in the subject.'

'Why?'

'I just am interested.'

'Ousep, I have a friend. He is a sexologist. Do you know what a sexologist does?'

'Yes.'

'Good. Because I don't know what a sexologist does. He meets a lot of journalists every week. Senior journalists like you, elegant men, smart men, but more importantly they are not young men. They go to his office, just turn up, as you have come here to see me. They tell him that they want to know something about the sexual problems of men and women in Madras. The sexual condition of men and women. They tell him they are working on a story. That's what they tell him. But he knows what they want. They want to get their penises up and they want a free and discreet consultation.'

'I am here for the story.'

'I am not disputing that. I am merely telling you something I know about journalists. Do you have any mental condition?'

'No.'

'Do you suspect that any of your family members has a mental condition?'

'I am not here for a free consultation.'

'You're here to do a story.'

'Yes.'

'And you came without an appointment because I am an old man, unimportant, useless.'

'That's far from the truth.'

'I am sure you interviewed all the bright young neurologists in Madras before coming to me.'

'That's not true. You are, in fact, the first person I am interviewing for the story. You can verify this. You belong to a small, tight community. You can call up a few people and find out.'

'Why am I the first person you chose to meet?'

'I wanted to meet the patriarch first and then move downwards.'

'You wanted to meet the patriarch first and move downwards. All right, Ousep, if that is what you want.'

'Before we start, Doctor, I am very curious,' Ousep says, taking out his scribbling pad and pen from his trouser pocket. 'Why do you carry eight pens in your pocket?'

'Because they are mine.'

'And is there a special reason why those medals are pinned to your shirt?'

'These are medals of honour, Ousep. One is from the American Neurological Association, another is from the American Academy of Neurology, and the third one is from the Indian International Neuropsychiatry Association. I like wearing them. I know how this looks. I know what you are thinking. You think a patient is sitting in the doctor's chair. My patients, they like it when they see me, they like the fact that I don't look normal, that I don't look like one of those people from the other side. They think I am on their side.'

'I see you were reading the Gita.'

'Yes, you see a lot, it seems to me. If you are an Indian, a real Indian, Ousep, you never start reading the Gita. You only reread it. You reread it at different points of your life and you see things you never saw before. It is the greatest subplot ever written. I feel peaceful when I read. I feel good. I am a bit lost these days, Ousep. That's why I am with the Gita.'

'Why are you lost?'

'My wife died three months ago. Have you heard this joke, Ousep? "My love, I feel terrible without you. It is like being with you."'

Ousep lets out a good-natured man-to-man chuckle.

'Do you find it funny?' the old man asks.

'Yes, it's funny.'

'Humour is a form of fact, isn't it? That's why it works. Do you know why we laugh?'

'Why do we laugh?'

'Our laugh evolved from a ferocious face that early man used to make. He made that face when he was not sure if a danger had passed. That face in time became human laughter. We laugh because humour assaults us with a slice of truth and we sense danger. That is the reason why people laugh in an aeroplane when there is turbulence and people are scared, they laugh, don't they? Have you ever been inside a plane?'

'Yes, a few times.'

'You must be an important journalist, then. My wife, she had never been inside a plane. Isn't it sad? That a person has died without ever flying.'

'It's sad, yes.'

'Do you know anyone who has died without ever flying?'

'Strange question, Doctor.'

'Do you know anyone who has died without ever flying?'

'So many, there are so many.'

Ousep wonders what Unni would have thought of flying. He imagines him as a smart young man in a serious blue shirt, very preoccupied with something important, strapped in a seat, looking at the world below through the plane's window.

Iyengar rolls a pen between his palms in some kind of an exercise, and says, 'Who were you thinking about?'

'No one.'

'Someone who has never flown?'

'I was not thinking about anything specific actually, Doctor.'

'I was thinking about my wife,' Iyengar says. 'I think about her all the time.'

'You must love her very much.'

'All Tamil Brahmin women of an age hate men. Did you know that?'

'Is that true?'

'That's what my wife said. And she said you know what she said? she said she hated me, that she always hated me. Those were her last words. I was a monster, apparently. People look at an old man and they think he is an innocuous fool, that he can be toyed with, that he is an idiot whose time and dignity have no meaning. He can be tricked. But old women, they have a different story to tell, don't they?'

Iyengar, obviously, is no fool. That much he has conveyed. He probably senses that Ousep is hiding something. Ousep wonders whether he should just reveal the truth and get on with it.

'I am such a silly old man,' Iyengar says. 'I've been talking rubbish. Like silly old men. You're here for a purpose. Tell me, Ousep, what do you want to know?'

Iyengar takes his card from a stack on the table and hands it to him. Ousep has no choice but to hand him his own card. The doctor studies it but there is no sign of recollection on his face, no hint of remembering a name from the past.

'Ousep Chacko,' Iyengar says. 'Yes, Ousep Chacko, chief reporter of UNI, what would you like to know?'

'Maybe we can start with an interesting case you're working on right now.'

'Interesting?'

'A case that has fascinated you recently?'

'I know what you mean. Interesting case. There is a case of two sisters. Would you like to know?'

'Yes.'

Iyengar looks at the empty pen-holder on his desk and says, 'One sister is thirty and the other is twenty-eight. A few weeks ago the two sisters were found almost dead in their house. The milkman found them. Which is strange. Usually, in such cases, the maid finds them, isn't that true, Ousep? The maid knocks on the door, nobody opens the door, she breaks a window and peeps in and there she sees someone lying motionless. Isn't that how these stories usually start, Ousep?'

'That's true.'

'But these sisters, they didn't have a servant. So, it was the milkman who found them. Every day he would drop the milk packets outside their door. Not a very observant man, this guy. He took a week to figure out that the milk packets he had been dropping outside the door had not been touched. He decided to knock. When they did not open, he looked through the window and saw a leg on the floor, behind a cupboard. He broke open the front door and went in. He found the girls lying on the floor in the kitchen, mumbling something. He got some neighbours together and they took the girls to a clinic. The doctors there soon realized that the girls had almost starved to death. They fed them through tubes, and soon they referred the sisters to the Schizophrenia Centre because the girls were saying that they heard voices. When you hear voices, you come to me.'

The sisters lived alone. Their father had died when they were little girls. And their mother had died a few months earlier by consuming poison because she could not marry off her daughters.

'I asked the girls why they had starved when obviously they had enough money to eat. They said that they had been hearing the voice of their mother and she had been warning them that someone was poisoning their food, a mysterious hand was poisoning their food, poisoning everything. Both the girls heard the voice and the voice said the same things to both of them.

'I had a fair idea what was going on and what emerged did not surprise me very much. The elder sister was schizophrenic. The younger one was normal, absolutely normal. The elder sister has a history. Right from when she was a child she saw visions, heard voices. She had a special bond with Lord Krishna, who sat on her bed every night and guarded her from Indra, who was trying to rape her. But she went to work like any other person. She worked in a small library. Since she was a bit off, it was hard for her widowed mother to get her married. Until the elder one got married, the younger one could not be married. So one day their mother felt that she had had enough of this world and decided to die. She ate a lot of rat poison and to be sure drank half a bottle of phenyl.

'The girls sat at home mourning their mother. It is not unusual for two women, in these circumstances, to completely cut themselves off from the rest of the world for a few days.

'They were depressed, naturally. Also, society, the world, was responsible for their mother's death. That was how they saw it. So they lost interest in going out of their house. They sat in the house and did nothing. After some time, the elder sister began to hear voices. She started telling her sister that their mother was saying that she had not killed herself, someone had poisoned her, and that the girls should not eat anything until the danger had passed. The elder sister stopped eating and she kept telling the other girl about the voices. One day the younger sister, too, started hearing the voices. The elder sister had transferred her delusion to the younger sister. And now they found confirmation of their delusion in each other. It is a classic case of shared delusion. Folie-a-deux. The Folly of Two.'

'The elder sister has a history of hearing voices, seeing visions?' Ousep says.

'Yes. She is schizophrenic. We are treating her.'

'And the younger one. She is a normal girl but she began to hear the voices.'

'She is absolutely normal to the best of my knowledge.'

'This is strange. Can a schizophrenic person transfer her delusion to a normal person?'

Iyengar looks at Ousep with meaning. It appears to Ousep that he has said something that has given him away, but he is not very sure.

'Happens all the time, Ousep,' Iyengar says, turning his swivel chair to the wall and leaning back comfortably. 'You will have seen it in your own life without recognizing it as the Folly of Two. Cases that are not as dramatic as the story of the two sisters, but still cases of shared delusion. Happens a lot in families, especially between husbands and wives. Man keeps losing his job, never survives in an office for more than a few months. He thinks the world is against him, he thinks he is too good for the world. Wife begins to believe that too. He has transferred his delusion to her. They go through life thinking the world is out to harm them, that someone has cursed them, that there is a force working against them. But in reality the guy loses his job because he is not good enough.'

'But this can happen among normal couples, too,' Ousep says. 'A man need not be delusional or have a neurological condition to fool his wife. Maybe he is just an idiot. An idiot who loses his job every few months because he is incompetent, and he lies to his wife about why he loses his job.'

'Yes. But would she believe him?'