'Why is he asking questions about Unni, why now?'

'I don't know.'

'People tell me that he has found something about Unni. Do you know?'

'I don't know, sir.'

'Are you sure?'

'I have no information,' Thoma says.

Mariamma opens the door for Thoma with an absent-minded smile that holds him in its affection for a moment before she drifts to the other people who are not present. They exist in another time, when she was young and people were so important to her that she still remembers everything they told her. She answers them back now, after all these years, and they probably respond to her, wandering alone in their vast rubber forests in a faraway place, smiling at her memories sometimes, returning her scowls sometimes.

Unni told Thoma that their mother had a Condition, and that it had a name, as if the fact that it had a name was very good news. Thoma has forgotten the name Unni had mentioned. It had sounded important, though very male. 'It is not a serious condition, Thoma, a lot of perfectly happy people have it.'

She is in the kitchen. Her sari is hitched up on one side, the hem bunched into her waist, and Thoma can see a long sliver of her bare, formidable thigh. So much of a woman's legs he sees only at home. Mariamma, her lips curled into her mouth, wags a finger at the overhead cupboard. 'Annamol Chacko,' she says, summoning once again Ousep's mother. 'So you didn't like my tea. You and your nine dumb daughters, you sit and whisper among yourselves and giggle at my tea. You say to thin air, "This is a cup of tea made by Mariamma, this is the tea made by an economics postgraduate." And all of you laugh.'

She sees Thoma staring at her and first smiles in embarrassment, then bursts out laughing. Her sudden happiness fills Thoma with a Sense of Wellbeing. Other days, her voice is loud and it trembles in the air like a wail; she takes the full Christian names of Ousep's mother and all his nine sisters, and on rare occasions she talks in a formal way to her own mother and someone called Philipose. When she is that way, her lip is curled in, head tilted upwards, and her index finger wags. And she is unmindful of everything around her. Unni could change her mood just like that, make her laugh and extricate her from the Torments of Memories. Unni would crack a joke, and she would reclaim her pretty face from the angry scowl, and begin to shake with laughter. But Thoma does not have the gift.

His mother surprises him with a packet of cashew nuts, and says, 'The doctor, Thoma, the man with the rose garden, he is dead. It was heart attack.' They sit facing each other across the dining table and eat. She does not place the cashews in her mouth as economics postgraduates normally do, she flings them in. Unni used to call her 'Village woman'.

As a girl, she tells him as if she has never told him this before, she used to walk down the banks of a narrow silver stream with her friends, collecting fallen cashews and pebbles, and when the laps of their skirts could take no more they used to throw away some of the cashews. She cannot accept now that she has to actually buy cashew nuts.

She repeats things. That is her nature. 'Hunger is the best side dish, Thoma.' And when he is desperately studying on the morning of an exam, she will say, 'This is what you do, Thoma, you study just hours before a test. When you are about to shit, you search for your arse.' She used to tell Unni almost every day how big boys should behave with girls. Boys must not harass girls, must not Pass Indecent Remarks, must not stand too close to girls, must not stand too close to even little girls, must not touch them. All that has stopped, of course, because Thoma is too young for the lessons. There is something else that she does not mention any more. When she heard that the child of a working mother had got hurt by falling or was hit by a bicycle or knocked down by a cow, she would gather Unni and Thoma and say, 'See, this is what happens to the children of working women. You are safe because your mother is always around, don't ever forget that.' With Unni gone, she has lost the right to say this any more.

'How come we are eating cashews?' Thoma says. 'Sacred Heart Family Store won't give you cashews without taking money. It is not an Essential Commodity. Did you pawn another bangle?'

'I don't have any more bangles to pawn.'

'Did you sell your blood?'

'No, Thoma. A lot of women came to our home to watch the doctor's house. And they decided that they wanted to phone their husbands, they wanted to know that their husbands were all right. They gave me a rupee each. When a man dies in the neighbourhood, women think of their own husbands. I too had a long loving thought about your father.'

'So I am eating cashew nuts because the doctor died today.'

'Yes.'

'Strange Are The Ways Of The World.'

'Strange are the ways of the world, my boy.'

'The Lord Moves In Mysterious Ways.'

'The lord moves in mysterious ways.'

Thoma goes to stand on the rear balcony and watch the doctor's house. There is a crowd outside the main door, talking softly about the death as if they don't want the dead man to know that he is gone.

He eyes the balcony to his immediate left, which is just three feet away. There is nobody there, but she may appear any time, tossing her hair and holding a clip in her mouth as she normally does. He can feel his heart hammer against his chest.

When girls toss their hair and hold clips in their mouths, when they run their hands down the back of their skirts before they sit, when they shift a lock of hair from their face and stuff it over their ears, or cover their mouths when they have to laugh, when they do these things that have no name, and when he hears a female chorus sing 'I have a dream', Thoma's chest fills with ache and he wishes them well in life. Is there a movement in his body that can fill a girl with such love? Do women long at all for men the way men long for women? The cold fear inside him at the sight of Mythili, are women capable of such agony inside them, do their throats go cold and do they feel a deep wandering sorrow?

Mythili Balasubramanium arrives the way he had imagined, tossing her abundant hair, bunching it high above her head as if she is about to pull herself up by her hair. And she is holding a clip in the scowl of her mouth. She has large clever eyes. Sometimes she draws her eyes standing on her balcony, making each eye bulge and underlining it with a fat pencil as if to say, 'This is my eye, here is my eye.' She does such things, including rustling her hair, only on the rear balcony. Her mother does not let her stand on the front balcony if her hair is not tied. She is still in her school uniform green pleated skirt and white shirt with frills at the chest. She is much older than Thoma, she is sixteen. Like most people she does not have any respect for him, he knows that. He is after all from a weird, sullen home, the home of Unni, whose name she does not utter any more, though she used to be very fond of him. At the time of Unni's death, three years ago, she was just a harmless little girl.

Thoma gathers the courage to say, 'I am having cashew nuts.' She does not react, it is as if she has not heard him. He is about to repeat what he had said when she turns and leaves. He stands there, shamed. A familiar gloom fills him. As Unni used to say, 'Thoma, you are feeling low right now, as low as a dachshund's balls.'

Thoma goes down to play and he is soon a part of a cricket match that often forgets he exists. A boy from another colony is setting the field and he, very rudely, tells Thoma where he must stand. Tony is a Sri Lankan refugee. How can a refugee tell Thoma where he must stand in his own country? But Thoma keeps his mouth shut, the refugee is much older and stronger. Thoma is more infuriated when Tony lifts his head and looks up. That is what all grown-up boys here do once every thirty seconds, all the boys on the playground, on the boundary wall, on the lane outside they keep looking up to see if Mythili is watching. Her balcony has long become a shrine that pulls boys and men from faraway places. They come to strut up and down the lane for her. Even the Roadside Romeos come, with their hair wet, in their best clothes, all of them wearing dark glasses. They come on foot, cycles and motorbikes. The times she appears on the balcony, it is as if a circus bell has rung and the clowns below must now begin to perform. They start doing stunts on their bikes, the slum boys do Michael Jackson's Moonwalk, all this as if it is not a performance but their Fundamental Nature. The boys of the colony, too, become brisk and happy in her presence, they run fast, bowl as furiously as they can, insult each other, harm small boys, talk aloud about intelligent matters words like 'perestroika' and 'GATT' fill the air. They do this with swift glances upwards to check whether she is still there. But Mythili usually stands in an unseeing way, or she just vanishes. Mostly she never appears.

Thoma is unable to concentrate on the game, his mind wanders. Eight girls of his age are sitting on the wall and chatting. Padmini, in a rare careless moment, spreads her legs and he can see her red underwear. She sits that way talking, and he is hypnotized by the sight. He is unable to look away even though he knows he is committing a crime. Now that he has seen her this way, will she ever get married?

When the sun sets, the children vanish, except Thoma, who wanders around the playground. The twilight fear comes to him and he hopes that the night will pass without incident, which it never does.

He decides to delay going home by walking up and down the three stairwells and listening to the other homes. He likes to know what happens in the other homes. Once, he heard a man scream at his son for scoring ninety-five per cent in maths. 'Where is the five per cent, where is it, where has the five per cent gone?' Then, something happened that made the boy cry in total fright. The man's voice said, 'Here, these are your clothes. Take this money. Leave the house at once and go search for the five per cent. Come back only when you find it.' The boy begged his father to let him stay. Thoma sat on their doormat and laughed, holding his stomach. Some days he heard the cries of friends whose fathers chased them with a heated spoon because the boys had not scored well enough in the tests. This was rare, though. Usually the boys only got belted. In the middle of one such lashing, a man said, 'The only system that matters to an Indian?'

'The decimal system,' the boy answered.

One hard lash, and a boyish grunt.

'The only system that matters to an Indian?'

'The decimal system.'

But, most of the time, there were happy voices, families sitting together and talking and singing and laughing in the fragrance of their unattainable meals.

Thoma cannot ignore it any more, the fear grows in his stomach. Another night that he must endure. He goes home thinking of what Unni used to say, mimicking their sports coach: 'Fight, Thoma, put fight.' He used to say that when Thoma was trying to study maths at dawn, or when he walked to the stumps to bat at number eleven, or when he was learning how to ride a cycle. It is now Thoma's anthem. Fight, Thoma, put fight. He likes it because it says what he must do but does not mention the outcome at all.

He has to first make a confession to his mother, and he chooses the time when she is doing the dishes in the kitchen. He stands near the stove and numbs her mind by mumbling many things, including the National Pledge and the first two stanzas of 'Lochinvar', and finally he arrives at a prayer, which is a form of silence to her: 'Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name, I saw Padmini's undies. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.'

Mother does not turn from the plates, but as far as Thoma is concerned he has confessed.

In an hour Thoma is pretending to be asleep in the bedroom that he and Unni used to share. His father will come any time now. Thoma remembers a Tamil proverb that had once startled him with its simple truth 'You can wake up a man who is asleep, but not the one who is pretending to be asleep'. And that is what Thoma tries to do every night when his father comes to wake him up. But he never manages to pretend long enough. He always rises, but today he decides to lie there with his eyes shut, come what may. If he is pulled, dragged or kicked, it won't matter. Thoma will lie like a dead dog.

Unexpectedly, he has fallen asleep. He is woken by the distant wail of his father's gifted voice: 'Good evening, dear bank clerk bastards.' Ousep is probably at the gates of the block. Everybody must have heard it, but fortunately, Ousep had screamed in Malayalam and they do not know Malayalam. But then Ousep repeats the greeting in Tamil. Thoma feels the familiar shame. He hopes Mythili has not heard it, he hopes she is fast asleep. There is a long, terrifying silence, for about five minutes. He hears the main door open. His father is home. His mother, as always, comes to Thoma and says, 'Be strong, Thoma, don't be afraid. I am here. What am I, Thoma? Tell me, what am I?'

'You're the Rock.'

'Yes, I am the Rock.'

He hears his father scream, 'Where is my beloved wife, the beloved daughter of a rubber pirate?' Thoma knows she is sitting in a corner of the kitchen floor, near the stone grinder. That's where she sits in these circumstances. Ousep is standing in the hall, pointing to various objects and asking, 'What is this? What is this?' Then he falls quiet. He is now probably in his room, sitting at his desk and writing his own obituary as he usually does.

There is the sound of a loud crash. He has flung the Best Writer award again, the silver angel on the wooden stand. Father received the award from the Kerala chief minister many years ago, when he was very young. He was famous then, his mother says. She says that when the award first came home the silver angel was looking straight ahead, but as Father kept flinging her, the lady's neck kept bending. Now she looks up at the roof, somewhat heroic.

Thoma can hear him grunting, he is walking down the hall, he is approaching the bedroom door, but then he walks past, into the kitchen, and it appears that he has gone to the rear balcony. Thoma hears him scream, 'Doctor, I hear you are gone! Doctor, is that true? You asked me a question a month ago. Sorry I could not answer you then. Here it is, though. It is watery. You bastard, my stools are watery. Is that the question you ask the great Ousep Chacko when you meet him for the very first time? How are your stools, Mr Chacko? Moron, how are your stools today?'

Thoma feels an irresistible urge to laugh, but then he hears him screaming at his mother 'Buffalo woman,' he says. Thoma wants to be by her side but he is afraid. Ousep has never hit his mother, but what if he finally decides to? Unni was brave. Thoma does not remember a single moment when Unni was nervous or shaken. He never pretended to be asleep when Ousep came home drunk. In fact, when their father stood too close to their mother, seething like a fool, Unni would stand between them. Ousep would push him away but Unni would always regain his position, fists clenched. Unni usually went about life at a leisurely pace, his movements slow and gentle, but when he was angry he became alert and menacing. Sometimes Thoma got the feeling that there were two people inside Unni.

One night, Unni slapped his drunken father. Ousep just fell to the floor as if he had no strength in him and he did not rise. His head began to bleed but he lay there quoting from King Lear. Unni calmly put a thread through a needle and stitched the cut on Father's forehead. A whole week after that Unni looked a bit sad, and he did not meet anyone's eye in that period.

Thoma hears heavy footsteps approach, the door opens, he gets the sweet sugar-cane smell of liquor. Ousep is very close, probably standing right next to him. Thoma is on the floor, lying on his stomach, his head buried in the pillow.

'Get up,' Ousep says. 'Get up, my idiot son.'

Mariamma walks in. She does not say anything yet. The Rock waits.

'Get up,' Ousep says.

He lifts Thoma's head by the ear and holds it that way for a few seconds and then drops it. But Thoma pretends to be dead. Ousep pokes his back with his finger. 'Get up,' he says. Mother decides to scream, she has had enough. She wrestles with Ousep, saying, 'Leave him alone, leave him alone.' So Thoma wakes up, he is afraid his mother will get hurt. Ousep leads him out of the room.

Thoma sees his father walk in front of him, swaying unsteadily, his hair like Einstein's halo, shirt dirty and wet, trousers sagging. This is not the man he sees in the morning, the strong, tidy and fragrant writer, his long hair neatly combed, so elegant and handsome, who reads four newspapers in three languages with such indestructible clever eyes that Thoma feels scared for the reporters whom his father is reading. In the mornings the man looks exactly like the Great Ousep Chacko of his mother's fables.

In Ousep's room, the noose is ready. It is his lungi, which is dangling from the fan, his chair placed ceremoniously under it. Ousep kneels on the chair and pulls himself up. He puts the noose around his neck. Thoma sits on the floor, by the wall, with a paper and pen. He has already written the words, 'The Obituary of a Failed Writer'. Mariamma watches, leaning on the bookshelf.

Ousep says, in a calm, serious way, 'The Obituary of a Failed Writer.'

Thoma pretends to write.

'By A Staff Reporter,' Ousep says. 'A man was found hanging from the ceiling fan in his house.'

For some reason that brings a terrifying burst of laughter to Thoma's chest. He holds it, but then his mother, too, begins to chuckle.

'... Enquiries reveal that the man's name is Ousep Chacko, the greatest writer the Malabar Coast has ever produced, greater than all the no-talent effeminate bastards who masquerade as writers today.'

Ousep loses his balance somewhat and wobbles for a moment on the chair. Thoma is shaking with laughter now. He begs his mind to bring sadness to his throat. He tries to think of Unni, but it is his brother's comic that appears in his mind. It is set in a beautiful park with four children sitting on the swings. Among them is Ousep, hanged by the neck with his own lungi, swinging happily with the children.

'You bastard, Thoma, you find this funny,' Ousep says, gently touching the noose. That makes Thoma burst out laughing, but in the hysteria of a deep terror he is also crying. Mariamma comes to him and leads him out of the room by his hand. They go to the other bedroom, laughing, wiping their tears. 'Now sleep,' she says. 'You have school tomorrow. I promise he won't come here again. He is done for the night.' And she shuts the door.

Mariamma leans on the bookshelf in the bedroom she has not shared with the man in years. He is still standing on the chair with the noose around his neck. She inspects the chair. It has grown weak over time but a chair never collapses like a table. That is the true nature of a good chair. At best, it becomes lame, it tilts. That won't be enough to kill Ousep. She can go and snatch the chair right now from under his feet. It would be a perfect murder. She has considered it before but she is not very sure about the strength of the lungi or even the fan. Ousep is heavier than he looks.

'Ousep Chacko is survived by a wife, who is a buffalo woman, and an idiot son. His elder son Unni Chacko died three years ago in mysterious circumstances.'

'Get down,' she says. 'And go to sleep.'

Ousep removes the noose, somewhat gloriously, as if it is the garland of his fans, those garlands he used to receive when he was much younger. She helps him off the chair. He drags his chair back to the table.

'Why are you looking so sad, Mariammo,' he says. 'Don't look so sad.'

'I am not sad.'

'The secret to happiness is not to have any expectations from people.'

'I know that.'

'Especially from the people who matter most to you.'

'I know that, too.'

'Go away, go.'

She leaves quietly. He changes, turns off the lights, bangs the door shut, and goes to sleep.

Mariamma stands facing the large portrait of Unni in the hall. She runs her hand over its surface, though he seems more lifeless when she does that. He surveys his mother with a knowing smile. He has her beautiful nose, her skin of high pedigree, her colour. He has his father's high forehead. Some people think Unni was arrogant, which is not such a bad thing, not as bad as people make it out to be. But people have their way of thinking. So they have a faint triumph in their voices when they speak of Unni's death, his fall from the height. It is such a defeat, it seems, to die.

There is nothing that she understands about his death. People say something must have happened in those twenty minutes when he was home, or something must have happened on the stairway. Or maybe he got a phone call. Maybe he saw something. But what could have happened, really? Nothing makes sense. Some people say he was not normal, he was drifting towards dark thoughts, he was too clever for his age.

In the days that followed Unni's death, his father tried his best to find out what had happened. He spoke to almost all the classmates and friends of Unni, but in the end nothing could explain what the boy had done. And Ousep gave up. 'Some boys don't make it, that's all there is to it,' he said, and closed the chapter.

So what has happened now? What has landed on Ousep's lap? 'An unexpected message,' he tells the walls in his drunken moments, 'provided by the unnatural level of incompetence of the Indian postal department.' He does not say anything more, she has asked him several times, she has even asked him through crafty whispers during his deep sleep, but he does not say what he has found. Whatever it is, it has made him knock on doors again, he is asking questions again.

There is only one clue that Mariamma holds, and she knows it is not as insignificant as Ousep imagines. Unni left without leaving a note for his mother, he left without explaining his action to her.

She turns off the lights and wanders in the hall, wanders in the darkness, feeling the peace of the quiet, imagining that she sees the same emptiness that Unni sees. What is so great about the light that falls on the world, what is so great about what we see that a woman must mourn her son? But then she cries.

She wakes up early in the morning, to the fragrance of paradisiacal breakfasts and the long whistles of steam from the kitchens of happy people, and the monologues of children memorizing their lessons. And Subbulakshmi's morning chant from a thousand bad radios, which sounds like a medieval woman's list of complaints in Sanskrit about the men of her time.

THOMA AND HIS MOTHER tiptoe into Ousep's bedroom. His lungi is still hanging from the fan as a noose. Ousep is sleeping fully naked, his mouth slightly open, legs spread wide. They can see his large luminous testicles, which look rough and industrial. 'Like something the Soviets have made,' Mariamma says. She covers her man with a bedsheet, muttering, 'He has no shame even when he is asleep.' Thoma wonders whether one day his own organ will be so large, and assume this weird asymmetric shape that has no name even in Euclid's geometry. He is too shy to ask his mother whether this is the fate of all men.

He has seen his father this way many times. He goes into the bedroom often to see whether he has had a heart attack. Lots of fathers have gone in their sleep, and Thoma is afraid that his father, too, will go that way. When Ousep is asleep he looks dead. He does not move and you have to concentrate on his stomach to see if he is breathing. Thoma's mother, too, goes often to his bed to check if the man is alive. She usually stands with her hands on her hips, and stares, waiting to see a hint of breath in him, or a toe move.

That was exactly how the three of them had stared at Unni's body when it lay in the hall under a white shroud. They stood around him for an immeasurable amount of time, in a deep hopeful silence, and waited for him to wake up any moment and burst out laughing. He really did look as if he was just sleeping. They waited, until the hearse driver came and rang the doorbell.

Ousep rubs his nose. He is alive, today. Mariamma climbs on a chair and removes the noose. An hour later, Thoma stands with his school bag strung on his tense shoulders. He wonders how many people heard the commotion in his house last night. Probably everyone. He stands facing the front door, too ashamed to open it and step out for all to see. But he has to endure the shame, as he does every morning. 'Fight, Thoma, put fight,' he says. And he opens the door.

2.

How To Name It.

THERE ARE THINGS MARIAMMA tells Ousep, looking him in the eye and addressing him in the third person, which have a stinging literary quality to them that reminds him of what they used to say in his village all wives are writers. His favourite is her description of the way he walks in the morning despite the shame of the previous night. 'As if he is going to collect a lifetime achievement award from the president.' It is true, that is how he walks in the morning. With healthy strides, feet landing with purpose, head held high. But he is more aware than she imagines of his disgrace. She may laugh if he tells her this but the truth is that, as he irons his shirt this morning, smoking two cigarettes at once, what is on his mind is an old question. Can he be a better person, a responsible man, a good father? Is it so hard to be all that, to be regular, to be everyman?

Through the bedroom window he sees her marching towards the gate in her thin rubber slippers, going somewhere earlier than usual. He does not remember ever seeing her from this distance. What happens to men when they see their wives from afar? Mariamma looks like any other person in the world. Small, harmless, unremarkable, which she is not. It makes him feel oddly triumphant that she does not know he is watching her Mariamma, up to something, going about her day, resolute and solitary.

She is not part of the sisterhood here. She is not included in their evening chatter, no one tells her gossip. Women do not call out her name, they do not wait at the gates for her to come down so that they can go to the market together. No one gives her recipes. She is only a subject of their compassion, which is a cowardly form of self-congratulation. She makes them feel they are better than her. They pity her for her man, for the loss of her child, for the way she walks along the road talking to herself, scowling sometimes, smiling sometimes. And her poverty, who can understand her poverty?

She owns many volumes of hardbound books. Those she reads with great relish, though she moves a finger beneath every line as if she is semi-literate, which she is not. She has a telephone. She has a glowing fair peel of the high class, she is an economics postgraduate, and in her demented moments she evokes the name of Milton Friedman to complain to him about the imbecility of socialism. Yet, in that house, the life of Colgate is squeezed out of it until it is a flat strip of thin tortured metal. Then it is violated by toothbrushes and even index fingers for several days. The brushes are not thrown away until almost all the bristles disappear, and after the brushes do die in this autumnal way, the two postgraduates and their son use their fingers to clean their teeth until Mariamma somehow makes new brushes appear. Soaps are used until they go missing in the crevices of the body. Ousep has seen the strange sight of Mariamma staring at an empty oil bottle left standing inverted on a frying pan.

She said, without turning, 'The last drop, Ousep Chacko, is not a literary hyperbole in your home. Apparently, it really exists.'

'How grotesque this looks, Mariamma Chacko. I thought you had more class.'

That made both of them laugh, their laughter rising in pitch in competition, neither willing to stop and grant victory to the other.

The foam sofa in the hall, which is shrouded by an old bedsheet, has a giant secret hole in the centre. The landlord, who arrives every month and screams for his rent, was invited in by Mariamma only once; she made him sit on the sofa, and as he sank into the hole she laughed. Other men come asking for their money, including an enormous red-faced Afghan moneylender in his Pathani suit who twists Thoma's hand only partly in jest. And there is a sad book salesman who begs to be paid for the books he delivered five years ago a complete set of William Shakespeare, all the great Greek tragedies, fifteen volumes of the Encylopaedia Britannica and the best English short stories from an innocent age when short stories were really stories.

The Chackos are poor because Ousep is poor and too proud to live within his means, not because he drinks. People who do not drink do not understand drunkards. He does not have to buy his drinks, he has many friends who want to buy him liquor. That is the quality of drunkards, they have a lot of friends. Because what men find most endearing in other men are their tragic flaws. That is why alcoholics never run out of friends. In the light of day, Ousep is too strong, too clever, a solitary man. But when night falls he belongs to all men.