He takes the screwdriver, opens the back panel of the long-defunct radio, and removes the folded sheets of paper. This is Unni's final comic, he finished it the morning he died. It is called How To Name It.

Ousep has not been able to make sense of the comic. Only Mariamma would be able to decipher it for him but the problem is that she plays a significant part in it, she is a part of the riddle, which is bizarre. She is probably hiding something about the boy, something important. But why? If Ousep is going to show her the evidence that implicates her in the mystery of Unni's death, he has to do it when the time is right. She is a crafty woman. But he too is crafty. Equals, that's what they are. To each other the only equals.

Three years ago, after Unni died, Ousep had set out to find an explanation. Through the memories of the people who knew the boy, he discovered a son whom he had not imagined. Unni Chacko, who appeared to possess a superior detachment, apparently also had an unnatural curiosity about the world around him, as if he could see something extraordinary hiding in plain sight. In the days that immediately followed the boy's death, people opened up to Ousep and told him what they knew. But nobody could explain why Unni did what he did.

They said, in their lame ways, he had dark thoughts, he spoke a lot about death, he went to the funerals of people he did not know to see the faces of the newly dead and draw their portraits. Friends insisted that Unni must have had a deep secret grief though he never showed any signs. Behind the light on his face there must have been an ordinary sorrow. Find his sorrow and you would find his reason, that was what they implied. Even now, people want to believe in the theory of Unni's sorrow because that is what they want his death to be about. The tragic defeat of the unusual, and so the triumph of the normal.

This is how people resolve suicides by considering it a consequence of unbearable grief or by manufacturing motives. Or through the inordinate importance given to the final note of the dead, which is usually only a confused half-truth.

There is something comical about a suicide note, the only known penultimate act of a living thing, and Ousep is glad that Unni had the artistic arrogance not to succumb to a cliche. But Mariamma does fear that the boy must have explained himself on a piece of paper which might have got blown away. It is a reasonable fear. Ousep has always marvelled at the confidence of people in their final moments, leaving a note behind in the complete faith that it would be found by the intended recipient.

But the truth is that every suicide remains a mystery for ever because the only person who really knows all the fragments of the motive is gone. That was why Ousep had to give up three years ago. He had tried hard to piece together the circumstances of his son's death but in the end he had to accept that he would never succeed. But about six weeks ago, something happened.

Ousep was going down the stairs when he saw the postman walking up, holding an envelope in his hand. It was a strange sight to see the postman so early in the day, and without his sack. The man was holding just one object a large envelope. But Ousep would not have thought much of it if he had not seen the name on the envelope Unni Chacko. The postman then told him the story of this mail, which was among the twelve letters he was returning that day to various homes in the area.

Three years ago, some boys had thrown firecrackers into the postbox attached to a lamp post on Pasumarthy Street. Most of the letters were burnt. But some were only slightly damaged and they lay in a cardboard box in the post office, until a new manager there finally decided to return some of the letters whose senders' details were still legible. So, three years after Unni had posted a letter to someone, it was coming back. But that was not extraordinary in itself.

On the front of the envelope was Unni's name and address, probably written by a clerk in the post office who had put the boy's mail inside a fresh envelope. The front of Unni's original envelope was badly damaged, its top half almost entirely gone, so nothing of the recipient's details had survived. But the bottom half of the envelope was intact. Here, Unni's name and address were written in his distinct extravagant hand. Inside the mutilated envelope was a bunch of papers that were in good condition, as if nothing had happened, like Unni's face when his lifeless body returned from the morgue.

What Unni had posted was a comic, fourteen pages in all, not including a covering note written on a page torn in half. It is a brief scribble that does not address anyone. The note says: 'Just finished it this morning. I know you will do it for me.' The note is dated 16 May, the day Unni died.

The comic begins with a giant portrait of a smiling, bald, middle-aged man, whom Ousep does not know. He is a tough, rustic man. He is sitting in his armchair, on the porch of his home, in the shade of a jackfruit tree. The setting is clearly a village in Kerala. Unni was born in Kerala but was brought to Madras when he was still an infant. He had not visited the land since. He had no reason to because his parents had slowly broken away from their large complicated families, much to the relief of almost everybody involved.

The bald rustic in the comic now stops smiling and slowly turns serious, as if he has seen an apparition. He is clearly terrified. He begins to run. He runs down a winding path, through a forest of rubber trees. He falls down and looks increasingly terrified as the apparition approaches him. The comic then abruptly cuts to Egmore railway station in Madras. Someone, probably the narrator, who is not shown but from whose point of view the entire story is being told, boards the train and travels through the night. The next morning, the train passes through the green hills and the ancient villages of Kerala. Finally, it reaches Kollam station. The narrator, who is still invisible, now takes a crowded bus, then walks down the narrow paved lanes of a village. There he meets several people, and in some of the frames the characters are obviously talking because there are dialogue bubbles, but the bubbles are blank. Unni probably thought he would fill them in later, a future which he denied himself. The villagers lead the invisible narrator to the banks of a stream. The narrator finally approaches the house that was shown at the beginning of the comic. But the bald rustic man is not sitting in his armchair on the porch. There is no one here. A large, amiable, middle-aged woman appears. Something strange happens next. There is the image of a giant bra as a suspension bridge that spans a wide river, linking two mountains. The comic then returns to the amiable middle-aged woman. She leads the invisible narrator into the house, gives him or her a cup of coffee, shows a wall where there are several photographs of the bald rustic man. Then she takes the narrator through the house, through the long dark corridors and empty rooms and finally a storeroom, which is filled with jackfruits and bananas. She points to a bulb on the high ceiling. The next panel, the penultimate page of the comic, has a giant image of the bald rustic, now looking benevolent. This man clearly exists somewhere, he cannot be a work of fiction because his eyes have the certainty of a creature that has seen life. The man is smiling and peaceful, and he is giving a thumbs-up sign, which is uncharacteristic of his age and place. But he is evidently a man who has won, won something. The final page is shocking. It has a dramatic colour portrait of Mariamma standing on one leg, the other leg raised as if she is about to leap, and her right hand is pointing upwards. Her blood-red sari is hitched up and folded at the waist, exposing a bit of her thighs. Her thick black hair is flying in tumult. Her lips are curled in and her eyes are wide and angry. She is placed like a trophy on a wooden stand that has inscribed on it a string of Malayalam letters that make no sense. Obviously, the comic needs prose to convey its meaning. It even has blank bubbles for dialogue and narration. Unni's works usually are not so dependent on prose.

So, what happened on the day Unni died? He completed the visuals of a comic, posted it to someone, went somewhere for three or four hours, got a haircut at noon at St Anthony's Hair Stylists, as confirmed by the barber. He returned home, played a bit of cricket, went up the stairs, and twenty minutes later decided to die?

The intended recipient of the comic remains a mystery. And what is the meaning of the final window of the comic Mariamma in full tumult? The covering note, which shows no hint of affection, suggests that the recipient is a male, but Ousep is not sure. Maybe it was meant for a young lady who told Unni that her fat unhappy mother reads all her mail.

From the day Unni's mail returned, Ousep began to haunt the same boys he had interviewed three years ago, and some newer ones. He does not tell them about the mail, he lets out only stray hints. He wants to be careful with the information he holds until he fully understands what was going on in Unni's life.

The boys Ousep had met three years ago are almost men now, they are around twenty. That would be Unni's age if he were alive today. Twenty. A handsome young man whose narrow, interested eyes might have surveyed the world with restrained amusement, a young artist with the opaque seriousness that cartoonists usually possess. Unni Chacko, if he had allowed himself to live, would have grown into a formidable man.

Ousep thinks of the day ahead, the strangers he has to question. He finds it tiring to talk to people. That has always been his flaw as a journalist, his secret weakness. It makes him uncomfortable, especially when he is not fortified by good rum, to stand in front of a person, to be seen, judged. How nice it would be if he could sit in the confession box of the Catholic priests, behind its ecclesiastical mosquito net, and listen to the old friends of Unni those intimidating new men who are boys one moment, adults the next. Some even have fully grown moustaches, their voices have changed, and there is something about their manliness that makes his heart ache for Unni. Unni, who will never shave, who will never stuff his wallet in the back pocket of his jeans with all the preoccupation of a man. What is it about life that even Ousep Chacko believes it is a lottery?

On his way out, he sees Mythili Balasubramanium going down the stairs. Does she know why Unni died? He has asked the question many times but without conviction. The way she is now, with her adolescent reserve, and circumspect walk, and breasts whose time has begun, it is easy to forget that she was just a child when Unni died. That child still survives as a dark portrait by Unni. In the portrait, she is in a coffin, her large interested eyes shut, her hands clutching an unidentifiable flower resting on her chest.

Almost every day, all through her entire childhood, until the day Unni died, she spent hours with the two boys. She was Mariamma's imagined daughter, Unni's assistant, Thoma's matron. She used to pretend to be frightened of Ousep, she would never meet his eyes. Some days, in the mornings, she would stand outside his room and peep in, and when his head turned she would run away. But when he managed to meet her eyes and smile, she always returned the smile. She did not hate him as others did. But that was then. A little girl who probably believed all fathers must be nice.

The girl whom he imagines this way is a bit younger than the one in the coffin. She was twelve or thirteen when Unni drew her in the Album of the Dead. In the black diamond coffin, she lies in a blue frock that reaches to her knees, her hair is tied in two flying plaits by red ribbons, and she is wearing silver anklets around her wrists, as she used to then because her mother did not let her wear them around her ankles. Her mother said Mythili was too young to wear anklets. Even now the girl is not allowed to wear them. Mythili's mother, like the mothers of all daughters, has the same pornographic eye as men. They see sexual omens in anklets and skirts and flowing hair and long earrings that nod in the wind. They imagine, correctly, that the sex of their daughters is hidden in innocent places, as the soul of a vampire is stored in improbable objects.

IT IS THE FIRST day of the 'fast-unto-death', and not many people have turned out to watch, but if it lasts another two days there will be great crowds on the road men screaming and laughing, alcoholics singing, women weeping without sorrow, boys hurling stones in the air. But now there is peace, and a deep sullen silence that has the quality of a mishap. Ousep scans the area for a sturdy young man, smartly dressed and not very clever.

Not more than fifty people stand behind the wooden barricades and gape at the ten men on the pavement, who are sitting in line on the mats they have brought from their homes. One of them is special, there is a table fan by his side. They claim they will starve to death unless the state government clearly spells out how it plans to protect the Tamils of Sri Lanka. The men are in starched white shirts stitched for the event and veshtis that are bunched in a way that magnifies their groins. There is a long silver torch beside every fasting man. The reporters know that the torches contain stuffed bananas instead of batteries, which will be consumed when the martyrs go to urinate.

The fasting men return the stares of the spectators through a distant blank gloom, and when they grow tired of looking sad they take sips of water from plastic cups or join their palms for the photographers. Behind these men, young subordinates stand nervously, as if they are afraid that if they sit they too would have to fast.

Two large muscular goons are setting up a sound system, stringing a Casio keyboard to loudspeakers. The goons are in lungis, which are folded over their knees, and the hems of their long striped underwear are visible. They have a problem, it appears, as the man who knows how to play the keyboard has not turned up.

'Do you know how to play this thing, you motherfucker?' one goon asks the other, somewhat fondly, as he extracts a wire from his sack.

'No.'

'Doesn't matter, motherfucker,' the first goon says, looking at the keyboard without fear. 'You play white. I'll play black.'

The fasting men and their supporters have occupied a fifty-metre stretch on the pavement, between a public urinal and a giant five-storey-high plywood cut-out of superstar Rajinikanth, who looks over the city in a golden leather jacket and tights, and dark glasses, his face pink because hoarding painters do not have the courage to paint him black. Vehicles have been diverted from this section of the road, and policemen are lingering on the deserted stretch, wondering, as always, what they must do to kill time. On the other side of the road, facing the fasting men, a row of crude food stalls has sprung up on the pavement, where reporters and photographers and some of the curious spectators are stuffing hot food into their wide-open mouths.

The voice of Ilango comes from behind. Ousep barely recognizes him; he had met Ilango three years ago. How boys grow. As Unni becomes soil, the sons of other fathers, how they grow.

He is a healthy boy with new powerful muscles and he sways in his own private gale of youthful forces inside him. Somewhat happy, unlike the other vanquished boys like him who go to third-rate engineering colleges. His little, exaggerated gestures have a phoney rustic servility about them, as if he is about to ask for a loan. It is tiring just to watch him, and Ousep feels a great relief at the thought that he will probably never meet him again.

'I am sorry I asked you to come here,' Ousep says.

The boy puts his hands on his mouth, and says, 'How can you say "sorry" and all that. You are Unni's father. You can ask me to come anywhere.'

'I am working, Ilango. I have to file a story about the fast. That's why I asked you to come here.'

Ilango looks at the fasting men but he has no curiosity about what is happening here.

Ousep lights two cigarettes and leads the boy to a tea stall on the concrete pavement, where they sit facing each other on wooden stools that have unequal legs, a rugged aluminium-plated table between them. For a while they stare in silence at the fasting men on the other side of the road.

'You know why I wanted to meet you,' Ousep says.

'Yes. Please ask me anything you want, Uncle. But I am very curious. What happened? Why are you asking questions about Unni? I hear you have spoken to almost everybody in the class. I hope everything is all right.'

'Everything is fine. Let's imagine it is not important why I am asking about Unni.'

'I don't know why he did that,' Ilango says, 'I really don't know. After the twelfth-standard board exams I was not in touch with him. He did what he did a few weeks after the exams. I heard about it much later.'

'I didn't come for that. I want to know more about Unni. That's all there is to this. Tell me what you remember. When he was in the twelfth standard, the final year of school, just months before he died, that's the Unni I want to know. When he was seventeen, how was he in class?'

Ilango's eyes focus on a spot on the road. He is probably trying to extract something important from his memory, something significant. Everybody wants to tell a good story. That is the problem.

When Ilango speaks, his voice has lost all its elaborate modesty. He speaks with a severe fondness for a friend who was shy, who liked to sit in a corner and sketch, but could be interrupted any time. Ousep has heard this many times. The reserve of Unni that yielded to the faintest tug of friendship.

'Unni didn't talk much,' Ilango says. 'I think he liked to be left alone. But if you went to Unni and if you talked to him, he would let you talk. And he would listen carefully, like a girl. He was interested in what you were saying. When you spoke to him you knew he was imagining what you were seeing in your head. And you would wonder, what's so important about what I am saying?'

'Can you recall a conversation?'

'Once, I told him about a cat on my street that did not have a tail. He asked me a lot of questions about the cat. How it behaved, how it ran, stuff like that. I don't know why. He asked me if I thought the cat knew it didn't have a tail. How can I know something like that? That was the way he was.'

'Why do you think he was that way?'

'I don't know. I think he liked to collect a lot of information. And he did know a lot of strange facts. Actually, I don't know if they were really facts. One day he told me that the most powerful booze in the world is found in Kerala. He said it is called Jesus Christ.'

'It's true,' Ousep says.

'Why is it called Jesus Christ?'

'If you drink it you will rise only on the third day.'

Ilango scratches his chin with an open mouth, and looks around.

'Sometimes he did say things that were totally strange, which simply cannot be true,' he says.

'Like?'

Ilango rubs his nose. He is not trying to remember, he is probably coming to a decision. 'One day he came up to me and said, "I know a corpse." I asked him what he meant by that and he just laughed.'

'What did he mean?'

'God knows.'

'He said, "I know a corpse"?'

'Yes.'

'What does that mean?'

'I've no idea.'

Ousep is startled by the laments of women. There are about twenty of them, village women, who stand in a swarm on the other side of the road, behind the wooden barricade. They are facing the fasting ringleader, the man who has the table fan beside him. They are beating their breasts and wailing, but they also show the mild wonder of recent arrival. They cry in a distracted way, throwing glances all around, even looking up at the sky, though they know it very well. They are in tattered saris, blouseless, their hair tangled in brown dirt. Most of them are old, some are very young, but in a bestial way. Their wails are composed of the same three words, which probably have no meaning when not delivered in a dirge. They keep kissing the tips of their fingers. It is as if they are begging for food from a man who is fasting to death. But then a woman shows him a banana and it is now clear that they are asking him to eat, they are begging him not to starve to death. They are probably from his village. Someone must have told them that a son of their soil has decided to sacrifice his life for the Tamil cause. So the gang of malnourished women have descended to dissuade this man, whose full belly sits on his lap as if it is something dear to him. He looks at the women with valiant gloom, and their laments grow. He is probably trying to suppress a laugh now, so his face turns more serious. Then, in a master stroke, he turns the table fan towards the women. In the burst of air the women break into giggles. They try to cry again but their lungs are tired now, and they soon fall silent. They sit on the road and start chatting among themselves.

All this will go one day, this animal poverty, it will vanish. And future generations will not know, will not even guess, the true nature of poverty, which is the longest heritage of man. Shouldn't this be preserved somehow, like old colonial buildings, shouldn't abject poverty be preserved as historical evidence? That is what socialists are trying to do in this country. Everybody misunderstands their intentions. They are noble conservationists, working hard to preserve a way of the world.

Ousep and Mariamma were socialists once, like all the informed young men and women of the time, slim people in love who thought they knew how to make the world a better place, a place as happy as their beds. But Mariamma was not as naive as him. One night she told him, her head on his bare chest, her hair all over his face, 'But an idea that overrates human character is bound to fail. Look around, Ousep, in every way of the world, only ideas that do not overestimate human nature succeed.' Ousep quoted her in his popular Sunday column. Not many young journalists could get away with quoting their own wives, but then every odd thing that Ousep Chacko did in those days was heralded as 'Style'. Other writers started quoting their wives in their serious political columns, and that became a brief journalistic trend. Until, inevitably, it became a farce and died.

Ilango is not affected by the women, he sees nothing in what has just happened. But he says, pointing to the women, 'According to Unni, those women are not as sad as we think they are. They are happy. According to him, everybody is happy. And people who are unhappy are only fooling themselves. For someone as clever as Unni it was a weird view.'

Ilango's eyes grow feeble as he quietly sips his tea. He does not speak for a while, then he begins to chuckle. Still he does not speak. Ousep does not push, he waits.

'There was something Unni started doing in the final year of school which he had never done before,' the boy says. 'If a teacher was absent, or during the lunch break, any time the class was not guarded, he would quietly go to the teacher's table, climb on it and stand in total silence, until all murmurs stopped and all eyes were on him. Then he would tell us stories, his own stories. And when Unni told a story ... now how do I say it? I am not a smart boy. I don't have the words to describe what I felt. When Unni told a story standing on top of that table, it was as if there was no other sound in the world. As he spoke you saw pictures in your head, you saw faces, and you could smell things that you did not know had smells.'

This, Ousep has heard many times. The class of adolescent boys falling quiet as Unni approached the table, his smooth athletic leap on to the table, and then his dramatic silence, which infected all and killed the final chuckles. But what is odd is that several boys claim this never happened, or that they do not remember seeing Unni do this. That is strange. An act of this nature would have many witnesses, and it did happen in all probability. Then why would many boys want to deny it? What is even more odd is that the boys who describe Unni's storytelling do not remember any of his stories.

'Do you remember one of his stories?'

'No.'

That was quick.

'You remember the little details of how Unni told his stories, but you don't remember any of the stories that he told?'

Ilango's large, expressive Adam's apple rolls, as if it has become self-aware.

'I don't remember. I wonder why.'

Ousep lights his cigarettes. 'Do you smoke?' he asks.

The boy shakes his head, almost wounded for being asked.

'Why do you smoke two cigarettes at once?' he asks with exaggerated respect in his tone.

'Because three is too much,' Ousep says.

The boy is not sure whether it is a joke; he nods. He looks away for a few seconds, then asks the inevitable question. 'People say you have found something about Unni, is that true?'

'I've always been searching, Ilango, I never stopped. Now I come back to you after three years because I thought age might make you see a few things differently.'

The tea arrives in the filthy hands of a bare-chested waiter, who is humming a film song about the relationship between flowers and honeybees. Ilango drinks in thoughtful sips. And he begins to describe a residential colony, he gives directions on how to get there, which is the Tamilian way of telling a story describe a place by almost giving its postal address. Several film directors live in this colony. 'Some of them have mistresses,' he says. Ilango pauses in a moment of embarrassment. He feels ashamed for using the word 'mistress' in the presence of a friend's father.

'It's all right, you are not a child any more,' Ousep says. 'We are men. You and I. We are men. What about the mistresses?'

'Unni said that the mistresses always lived on the ground floor. They were never on the higher floors. He used to wonder why. He really wanted to know why. That's it,' the boy says meekly, as if conceding that what he has just said does not deserve the tea Ousep has bought him. 'I know it does not mean anything. Such an ordinary thing, actually. I don't know how useful something like this is to you.'

'It's good. It's very good. What I need are bits like these.'

'Really?'

'The other boys I meet, they just don't understand what I want. They try to give me their opinions. But you are a smart guy. You have an interesting memory.'

'Thanks.'

'Did Unni find out why the mistresses are usually kept only in the ground-floor flats?'

'I don't know. But he was sure there is a reason.'

The boy sets his cup down, and wipes his mouth with his fingers. 'What else do I remember about Unni?' he says, and looks lost for a while. He is distracted by a memory, he is probably wondering whether he should give voice to it. He stares at the fasting men without looking at them. Then he makes his decision. 'There is something else I remember,' he says. And he speaks slowly, clearly.

One evening, he is at a friend's house with a few other boys, including Unni. It is a small house with an unpaved walkway that runs from the gate to a high boundary wall. The boys are on the terrace, which is not very high, just about twelve feet above the ground. The gate is locked, but a stray dog slips through the bars. It does not see the boys on the terrace. 'Dogs usually don't look up,' Ilango says. 'Unni used to say that often, I don't know why. Animals usually don't look up.' It wanders in, and goes down the walkway. The narrow path is about sixty feet long, and it is hemmed in by a high boundary wall on one side and the wall of the house on the other. So the gate is its only escape if a situation arises.

Unni jumps down and picks up a stone. He stands at the gate, blocking the dog's path, and flings the stone. The stone is not intended to hit but the dog does not know that. It runs to the back wall and tries to climb but the wall is too high and this dog has probably never climbed a wall before. It stands there with its tongue out, wondering what it must do. Unni flings another stone, which hits the wall. The dog tries to climb the wall again, it slips and falls. It runs towards the side wall, runs in circles, runs towards Unni and then away from him, confused and terrified. It finally goes to the boundary wall and stands facing him, awaiting its fate. The other boys now jump down and pick up stones. Their stones miss, they hit the wall, but the dog is terrified. It makes sounds that are normally not associated with a dog. It leaps at the wall, leaps in the air, it begins to behave like an alien beast. Some stones now hit the dog. It cries, running up and down the walkway. At this point Unni says that they should let the dog go. All go back to the terrace. The dog charges to the gate and escapes. It runs down the road, it keeps running until it vanishes round the bend. That is it. That is what Ilango wants to say.

'How did you feel about it?' Ousep says.

'About what?'

'The dog. The way it ran, the sounds it made, the fear in its eyes.'

'It was terrible.'

'Terrible, yes.'

'There is no other way of looking at it.'

'Is that true?'

'Yes. I don't know what had happened to us. We behaved like urchins who stone chameleons just for fun.'