'Did Unni's stones hit the dog?'

'No. After all of us came down from the terrace he didn't throw any more stones.'

'Interesting that you remember that. A minor detail in a minor incident, after so long.'

'I don't know why I remember that.'

'Did you hit the dog?'

'Just once. I aimed at the wall but the dog got in the way.'

The dog got in the way, he says. A stray dog, probably very ugly, which is a bad thing to be in such a situation, is trapped. It is powerless, comically terrified, almost singing. What would a bunch of boys with stones in their hands want to do? This boy says he aimed at the wall. He only wanted to see the dog react, he did not want to hurt it, he did not want to hear the sound of stone against its flesh and its brief responsive shriek.

'Why do you think he did that, the whole game, why do you think he started it?' Ousep asks.

The boy studies his cup. For a moment there he looks intelligent, the way he looks with unhappy eyes at the cup, the way he lurks in his own silence. He says, 'You used the word "game", why did you use that word?'

'I think sometimes Unni did things just to see how others reacted.'

'Yes,' the boy says, relieved for some reason. 'That's what I think. He had an abnormal interest in how people reacted. It was a game for him. Yes, that's the word.'

'The day the dog was stoned, were the other two present?'

'Which two?'

'Somen Pillai and Sai Shankaran.'

'They were there, yes. Those three were always together. Always whispering and laughing among themselves. As if they were playing a secret game and the others were just fools who didn't know what was happening. Unni had that attitude more than the other two. He could make you feel small and silly.'

There is a surprising strength in the boy's tone now, the impotence of nostalgia is gone, and in its place is the force of contempt, the contempt of a male for a smarter friend.

'People used to say that those three were up to something,' the boy says. The way he says 'those three', it is as if he has forgotten that one of them is Ousep's dead son.

'Those three,' Ousep says in a soft voice. 'What exactly was it about them? What do you think they were doing?'

'It was as if they were a part of something, something others won't understand. Like that day. After we went back to the terrace and watched the dog run down the road, they looked at each other, made eyes, smiled. There was always something going on between them.'

'A lot of people have told me this but nobody is able to say what exactly they were up to.'

'Even I am not clear. They spent a lot of time together just talking, going somewhere, doing things. I don't know what they did. Someone told me they were involved in betting.'

'Do you remember who told you this?'

'No.'

'What kind of betting?'

'I don't know. I think they bet among themselves that some events were going to occur in a particular way.'

'I don't understand.'

'I'm not clear myself. We were not very close, actually.'

'Are you in touch with them?'

Ousep feels stupid for a moment because when he said 'them' he had seen the faces of three boys. But one of them, of course, nobody is in touch with.

'No,' the boy says, 'I've not seen them in a long time.'

'Tell me what you know about Somen Pillai.'

'There is nothing that I remember of Somen Pillai. It's funny, actually. You know, some guys are like that, they are so silent, they are invisible. They don't talk, they don't do anything in the class, they just sit and watch.'

Ousep has heard this before. Apart from the fact that he was Unni's friend, Somen Pillai has no claim to the memory of his classmates. In the ten years that he studied in St Ignatius, there is nothing that he said or did that anybody can recall.

'Have you met him?' Ilango asks.

'Yes, once. Very briefly. I've been trying to meet him again but he is refusing to meet me. Would you know why he would refuse me?'

'Maybe he doesn't like talking,' Ilango says. 'Some boys are like that.'

Ilango wants to leave. He takes one large decisive gulp of the tea, which is surely cold now. Ousep looks at him carefully, now willing to take a chance.

'Did Unni ever send anyone his comics, did he ever post his comics to someone, maybe for a reaction or something?'

'I don't know.'

'Did he have a girlfriend?'

Ilango lets out a shy chuckle. 'I don't know, I was not that close to him. But I heard these Fatima School girls, they used to talk about him, I heard that from my cousin.'

'Really?'

'Yes.'

'Ilango, I know you've already answered this question but I can't help asking this. Why do you think Unni killed himself?'

'I don't know.'

'Can you guess?'

'I don't know. I really have no idea. But since you ask me to guess, I think he was probably not as happy and confident and superior as everyone thought. He was not good at useful things, you know, he was not the type who would have got into IIT or any engineering college. All he did was draw. You asked if Unni sent his cartoons to anyone. Now that I am talking about it, yes, I think he used to send his cartoons to some magazines. But he got rejected, I heard. Got rejected by all of them.'

'His works were rejected?'

'Yes. I heard he sent some stuff to an American magazine called New Yorker. And they sent it back to him. Unni said they wrote him a nice long letter, but they didn't want to publish his cartoons.'

'And you think Unni was depressed because of all this?'

'Yes. Just think about it. What would Unni have done with his life?'

'What do you plan to do in your life, Ilango?'

'Me? I am going to become an engineer. Then I will write my GMAT and go to the US. Why do you ask?'

'Just curious.'

'I will work in the US, I will get a Green Card. I have planned out my whole life. I will get married at twenty-eight.'

'Good, good. Any other reason you can think of? Any other reason why he chose to die?'

'I've nothing more to say. The truth is I didn't know him that well.'

'Everybody tells me that.'

'Because the truth is that nobody knew him well.'

'Except those two boys?'

'Yes, except those two. Somen Pillai and Sai Shankaran.'

'Ilango, do you know that the three of them used to go to meet a nun in St Teresa's Convent, who had taken a vow of silence?'

'No,' the boy says with a chuckle, shaking his head. 'I am sure they did many such things that have no meaning.'

A man appears on the road, stark naked, holding a can, and walking as if he is just passing through. When he is sure that all eyes are on him he empties the can over his head. It must be kerosene. He is gleaming now in the sun. He begins to jog, screaming that he will set himself on fire if the Tamils in Sri Lanka are not saved today. He runs through the small crowd asking for a matchbox, scattering the people, who are not sure whether they must flee or stand there and watch. 'Matchbox,' the naked man says as he jogs in large circles. When he approaches, Ousep, with great lethargy, hands him his matchbox. The man ignores him and runs ahead asking for a light. And he looks ecstatic when the policemen finally carry him away.

FOR THE FIRST TIME in his life, Ousep Chacko waits for a nun. He is in St Teresa's Convent, sitting on a wooden bench in the visitors' gallery, which is deserted. There are ghostly echoes in the air, and they have a dark antiquity about them, as if they are from another time, the violent ages when religions were born, when evil finally defeated good, and in an ingenious trick split itself into good and evil.

At the far end of the room is a small door, as if little people live inside. The door is so defiantly shut that it is hard to believe that it ever opens. But it does, without a sound, and six black cassocks emerge and stare at him. One nods to the others, and walks towards him. The others go back in and shut the door. He is all right, they have decided. A harmless man from long ago. That offends him somehow, to be considered innocuous in a fraction of a second by a sisterhood of virgins.

The middle-aged nun is holding a notebook and a fountain pen. She sits on the bench with him, one foot farther away than necessary. He has not seen her in twenty-four years, but there are still fragments he can see from her youth. He wonders how she sees him now.

She is from his village. He remembers her as a sleepy girl with eight younger sisters who used to walk behind their mother like piglets, passing by his house on their way to the Sunday market. Then she flowered into one of those young girls, their thick dark hair still wet from a long bath, who stood at the bus stop holding college books and giggled at bus conductors who had fair skin. One day, her father decided to make her a nun to save her from poverty. Days before she left for the convent, as she walked down the alleys of the village, men had only one thought, even the pious had only that thought the wasting of a firm young body so far untouched by any man. After she was sent to the convent, she ran back home twice. But the third time she was deposited in the convent, she accepted her fate.

Now she has a vacant peace on her face that does not look like defeat. She is fine, she is happy, they all are. That is Unni's hypothesis the inevitability of happiness, the persistence of happiness. Happiness as an inescapable fate, not a pursuit.

She was at Ousep's wedding, the only nun present that day, pretty by the standards of nuns, and as famous for fleeing the convent as some legendary girls who had eloped with Hindu men. He has not seen her since. But Mariamma used to write to her and even meet her, probably with the insane caution of a woman encountering her husband's family circle but also with the eager nervousness of a good Christian in the presence of a habit.

The good thing about the nun's vow of silence is that she and Ousep do not have to endure the warming up, and the imagined hilarity of calling each other old.

'You can speak,' Ousep says in a good-natured way. 'Nobody is watching, and both of us know there is no God.'

Her smile informs him that she has already forgiven him. He tells her what he wants. She looks as though she knew he would come for this one day. She writes on her notebook in good Malayalam, and in a beautiful miserly hand. She writes that she will go to a far corner and write down everything she remembers. That is exactly what Ousep wants from everyone. People liberating him from their company, and going away to a far corner and writing down everything they remember of Unni in small precise paragraphs.

She gives a quick written apology for not offering him tea because that is not a privilege she has. She goes about twenty feet away and sits on a bench, which is attached to a desk. After thirty minutes, she gives him a bunch of papers.

Unni Chacko, Somen Pillai, Sai Shankaran that is the order in which she has named them. He asks her why she wrote Somen's name ahead of Sai's. She curls her lips to suggest the order is not important. She sits staring at the floor. It does not appear that she wants him to leave yet. She writes in her notebook, 'Why did he do it?'

'I want to find out,' Ousep says.

'Can you take a guess?' she writes.

'No. Can you?'

She shakes her head.

'Unni told his friends something very odd,' he says. 'He told them that he knew a corpse. Does it make any sense to you?'

She shakes her head. Then rises, joins her palms and leaves. As she walks away she rubs her eyes like a child.

Ousep reads what she has written. About fifteen years ago, she was transferred to Madras from Kerala. She had not taken the vow of silence then. Somehow, Mariamma came to know that the nun was in Madras, and she began to visit her at least once a month, and they would chat about the people they knew. At some point she started taking Unni along to meet her. The first time Unni came to the convent and sat here in the same hall, he was probably eight years old. He was 'an extraordinarily beautiful boy with soft, curly hair'. He was probably fascinated by her, he would keep staring. As he grew older, and taller, his visits grew rarer, though Mariamma continued to visit every month. He would accompany his mother only in the rains, to hold her umbrella on their way to the convent. Once when Mariamma came to visit, the nun gave her a note saying that she had taken a vow of silence as her sacrifice to Christ. Mariamma understood that there was no point in meeting her any more, for what use is a silent nun? But, two years later, when Unni was seventeen, he came here with the other two boys. They met her six times, and every time they came unannounced. They asked her many questions but all their questions had only one objective. They wanted to know whether anything extraordinary happened to her because of her silence.

She presumes that they expected her to make startling revelations but she had very unremarkable things to say. 'There is a peace in your chest when you are silent for vast amounts of time, a sweet sadness, but nothing beyond this.' They were very disappointed when she wrote on a piece of paper that she did speak, though rarely, when demanded by the Mother Superior. It was very tiring to write down answers to their questions, and her meeting three adolescent boys did not go down very well in the convent. Eventually, she asked them not to visit her.

'There was something about them, there was the light of God on their faces, but still there was also something odd about them. They were searching for something and it seemed to me I could not show them the path. Unni was relaxed, polite. He asked very few questions but he listened very carefully. I think he was very amused by me. Once, he asked me if I was happy. Strange, nobody had ever asked me that question before. "Yes," I told him. Somen Pillai seemed to be a serious boy. He never spoke. I found his eyes very disturbing. He seemed to believe that he knew something deeper about the world than the others. Sai was simple, excited and very curious. He spoke in quick short bursts.'

SOMEN PILLAI LIVES IN a stout independent house with a pink front. It stands at the end of a narrow mud lane, which is flanked by similar homes. From their dark windows and doorways people stand and gaze, looking bored, expecting a greater boredom to reach them; it is as if they know that the extraordinary does not exist.

Somen's home is one of those houses that have eyes the guest is fifty feet away, a cheap unchanging blue curtain behind the large front windows moves an inch, and the main door opens slowly, as if much thought has gone into the act. The hosts then emerge to greet or repel. Behind the squat house, tall apartment blocks loom.

After the return of Unni's comic, Ousep has been here probably eight times. And every time, before he can reach the gate, the door would open and Somen's father would step out or the boy's mother would, or the two of them together, or the door would not open at all. When they do appear, they step on to the porch and stand with their elbows on the short iron gate, and wait for him. But the only thing they have to say to him is that Somen is not home, and that he does not want to meet anyone.

Ousep has met the boy only once three years ago, a week after Unni's death. Somen, with a mop of accidental stylish hair that rolled dreamily, large moist eyes, a deep dimple on the right cheek and a smile of discomfort, listened with a piercing stare, but when he spoke it was as if he had not been listening. He spoke slowly, carefully, with an inarticulate superiority, as if his thoughts were too complex for words. And he had the same complicated self-regard when he said something as excruciatingly ordinary as 'We were just three friends who lazed around and talked.'

The door opens before Ousep has reached the gate. Somen's parents step out, amble to the gate, looking in many directions, and stand with their elbows on the gate. They do not speak a word but they look conspiratorial, which is what man and wife truly are; when they stand together that is what they are accomplices.

They have never called him in, and in return they give him their honest shame. They are Malayalees and they know Ousep Chacko as the promising young writer from long ago.

'He is not home,' the father says with a feeble glance from behind thick spectacles. He is in his formal office trousers but is bare chested, and there is a small towel on his shoulders. He is a manager in Canara Bank, and his wife is a teller in the same branch. She is looking grim right now, as if she is counting cash. A tidy, dignified woman, like most women in the world. She may have never stood even for a moment in her life in any of the gymnastic ways of Mariamma. What is it like to sleep with a calm, feminine woman, who does not address the walls?

Ousep is distracted by someone who has appeared at the doorway. The boy's parents panic for a second, they turn to the door and seem relieved when they realize it is just the maid. She is mopping the doorstep, her slim fair back fully bent from the hip. Ousep feels a stab of longing. Her face has an austere diminished beauty about it, as if it is not her place to be any prettier. How could she be allowed to be? A maid in Madras has to be ugly because that is her assurance to the mistress that she will not awaken the egalitarian muscle of the man in the house.

'What must I do to meet your son?' Ousep says.

'Maybe you should call first,' the father says.

'Nobody ever picks up the phone.'

'You say that, Ousep, but that is so strange. We are at home in the mornings and evenings.'

'When exactly is he home?'

'I don't know, Ousep. He has his ways.'

'You say he does not go to college.'

'That is what I say.'