She sees herself, too, as she was then. She is trying to smile at him without showing her teeth. She is showing off. 'Bonjour, Unni, comment allez-vous?'
She remembers the evening when she is walking in the playground. Unni comes from behind and puts his arm around her shoulder, as he sometimes does. Her hawk mother must have seen it or her hawk friends must have told her. Mother walks in concentric circles all evening in the kitchen until daughter returns home. She says, 'Why are you still wearing frocks, Mythili, like an Anglo-Indian?'
'Girls wear frocks. That's why.'
'Only little girls wear frocks.'
'Is that true?'
'And why was that boy putting his arm around you?'
The next day, Mother starts a conversation purely to find a reason to say, 'Unni is like your brother, he is like the brother you never had, Mythili. What a nice boy even though he has insane parents.' Unni as brother is a repulsive thought for some reason, but Mythili keeps her mouth shut. Finally, one morning, in the middle of chopping tomatoes, Mother tells her what she really wants to say. 'You can't go to that boy's house any more. And I don't want him coming here. People have started talking.'
'What are they saying?'
'Doesn't matter what they are saying, you can't go to his house.'
'Why?'
'He has grown like a mountain.'
'So?'
'You are not a little girl any more, Mythili. A thirteen-year-old girl is a child only to her dumb father. You and I know you are not a child.'
But Mythili defies her. She has sat in the Chacko home almost every day of her life, even before her memories began. She has crawled across the short corridor to their door and wailed until Mariamma appeared. She still remembers the day Thoma was brought home, an infant with the odour of a raw egg. She was four. Unni was eight and ecstatic at the idea of owning a baby. She has eaten with Unni and Thoma, she has slept there some nights, brushed her teeth with the boys. She has listened to their mother tell them the stories of her village, and even the brief history of the Indian rupee. When Mariamma used to get into one of her moods, and Unni tried to make her laugh, Mythili was part of his plots. She has sat with Mariamma on quiet afternoons and tried to understand why she went nuts sometimes. 'I am only a bit more energetic than other women,' she said once. 'If I was in a country where a woman is allowed to run a mile now and then, I think I would be all right.'
Mariamma used to run, a long time ago, when she was an adolescent. She used to run across hills and river bridges and tiny villages that were silenced by the apparition of a barefooted young girl in full skirt running as if an invisible mob were chasing her. Some days, Mariamma used to hear people say, in a good-natured way, 'Run away if you must, but haven't you left your lover somewhere behind?' or, 'It's all right, if your mama does not want you, we will adopt you'. But, eventually, she had to stop running. People talked. Girls had to walk, apparently, holding colourful umbrellas and handkerchiefs in their fists.
Mythili fought every day with her mother to retain her right to go to that house. It was worth it. So what if Unni was almost a man. She even liked the idea of Unni as a man. She still likes the idea of Unni as a man. Or, maybe, what she really wants to say is that she likes the idea of a man as an artist, a man who is beautiful, who is somewhat unaware that he is beautiful, who smells like ginger on very hot days, and whose conceit is that he would never be afraid.
That is a seventeen-year-old boy next door as remembered by a thirteen-year-old girl. At the heart of her memory of Unni is the stillness of time he is always seventeen, she is always thirteen. Even though she has known him for most of her life, it is Unni at seventeen, Unni in the final year of his life, that is her central memory of him. The boy before that time was a very similar person, as endearing and important but another person. She does not know why she feels that way. She is not sure whether he changed in the last months of his life, changed physically, became a mountain of a boy as her mother accused. Or was it just that Mythili had newly arrived, as a thirteen-year-old, to the outer edges of womanhood? It could be both. Unni and Mythili had come to their own crossings at the same moment in time.
An enduring memory from this time is of ambiguous innocence a moment on Pasumarthy Street, where in the mornings there is the confluence of the boys of St Ignatius and the girls of Fatima Convent on their last lap to their schools, and with them a swarm of Romeos malnourished young men, their groundnut arses in tight jeans, all of them in black sunglasses, all of them clones of film actors, saying things, singing songs, offering eternal love, marriage in faraway temples and exactly two healthy children each.
She has walked with Unni down this road for years. She in white shirt and olive-green skirt, he in white shirt and khaki trousers. In time, as they walked, their bodies slowly grew apart by inches. They have walked holding hands, they have walked with Unni's arm on her shoulder, he has carried her in his arms and run the entire stretch of the road, they have walked without holding hands, and finally they have walked with an arm's length between them, as mandated by her mother.
'My arm or his arm?'
'Shut up, Mythili.'
The moment that endures is from the period when they were separated by the phantom arm. She saw a boy by the wayside, a half-naked labourer digging up the pavement to lay pipes. He was lean and powerful, and she could see the ripple of muscles on his abdomen. She thought what a beautiful sight he was, and she thought, a moment later, he has almost the same body as Unni. That made her feel shy and very aware of Unni, and she felt the stab of a nameless longing, but then the moment passed and she was a child again.
By that time, Unni was some kind of a folk hero on Pasumarthy Street, who caused a small flutter among the olive-green pleated skirts walking to school. Even the Romeos studied him through long unhappy drags on their cigarettes. One day a Romeo stared hard at him and said, 'Hero, come here, hero, I want to talk to you.' That made Mythili laugh. 'He just Eve-teased you, Unni,' she said. And Unni laughed so hard, it made her proud. It was the first time she had made him laugh through her own joke.
The seniors in her school began to draw her into quiet corners to ask questions about him, his postal address, his telephone number, the character of his mother. They called him 'cartoonist hottie'. Mythili scrutinized the seniors carefully because if he must have a girlfriend it had to be a girl she approved of. She was unhelpful to the fat, excited ones with moustaches, and more generous with the pretty, modern girls whose skirts were two inches shorter than the school average.
Mythili is in the Reading Circle Lending Library. She checks the spines of the books on the shelf but what she is thinking is that Unni used to have an account here. She wonders whether there is a register somewhere in the drawers that still bears his name, she wonders what the last book he borrowed was. Did he return it?
She disliked what he read. She used to see the pile of books on his desk and feel repulsed. He never read fiction, never read anything that people generally read. He read a lot about the brain not just the human brain, all kinds of brains. Even about the future of the brain. His books were a part of his life she did not know much about, the only part of his life that she thought was boring and dreary.
'What is it that you're reading, Unni?'
'This.'
'Folie-a-deux by Philippe Boulleau?'
'That's correct.'
'Vous lisez Folie-a-deux par Philippe Boulleau?'
'Oui.'
'It sounds like a French book, Unni.'
'I can't read French, Mythili. It's in English.'
'I know. But what does Folie-a-deux mean?'
'The Folly of Two.'
'And what does that mean?'
'It is a neuropsychiatric phenomenon.'
'You look funny when you use big words, Unni.'
'Neuropsychiatric phenomenon.'
'But what does it mean?'
'A mad person transfers his delusion to another person, and both of them begin to see the same delusion. And they mutually corroborate what they see as true. That is the Folly of Two.'
'Do you think that is really possible?'
'All around you, Mythili, is the Folly of Two.'
'"Folie-a-deux". I don't like this word.'
'I was thinking, Mythili. All those syllables at the end of French words, all those syllables that are wasted because they are not pronounced by the French, where do they go?'
'Where do they go, Unni?'
'They join the underground Union of Insulted French Syllables.'
'Really?'
'Yes.'
'What does the underground union do?'
'The syllables try to influence mankind. Over centuries, over vast ages, they try to influence man. They give humans ideas, thoughts, doubts, eureka moments. All this to help man create something, a machine probably, that would have such a name, such a word that all the syllables in the Union of Insulted French Syllables would be included and pronounced. Humans think all of science is their creation, but no, Mythili. The insulted French syllables are the ones who are giving us those ideas.'
'You are mad, Unni.'
'The leader of the union is X.'
'X?'
'Yes, the most humiliated letter in French even today. There was a time when nobody in France used to pronounce it. Don't laugh at X, Mythili. He waited for centuries and patiently fed ideas across many generations. And finally mankind discovered the X-ray. Now the French have to pronounce X. They have no choice.'
'You're mad, Unni.'
'What if I am not?'
When she leaves the library she tells herself that she will go home but she knows where she is going. She walks down the school lane, which is quiet today because of the weekend, turns right towards the church and heads to the graveyard that lies in the scented shade of eucalyptus trees. Nothing unusual about a decent Brahmin girl walking down a narrow path through a pretty ancient Christian graveyard. Nothing odd about the girl casting a glance at one grey tombstone, and nothing wrong at all if she clears a speck of dirt from her eyes.
The afternoon he did what he did, she was having a shower. She heard the faint murmur of people, then the yells and screams. She turned off the shower and listened to the sounds more carefully. She heard snatches of what people were trying to say, and she began to shiver. She put on her clothes and ran to the front balcony, and she saw Unni lying in a small pool of blood, his eyes shut. Unni, what an idiot you turned out to be.
3.
The Album of the Dead.
MARIAMMA CHACKO IN THE mornings is a faction of sounds of furious water colliding with stainless steel, the rain of spoons, the many omens of steam, and the murmur of the huge boulder mortar in which she annihilates grains with inhuman strength. In between, there are satanic whispers about his mother and thick motiveless footsteps outside his door, and sweet lullabies from another time. But it is Sunday morning and the house is in the stunned peace of her absence. She is in the church, her head probably tilted, pious eyes looking up, knees on thin rubber slippers. Or, maybe, she has finally found a way to desert him. Ousep will soon know. At the moment, though, he does not care where she is and only hopes she does not return any time soon. Unni's cartoons are scattered on his desk. In the thick mist of smoke, with two forgotten cigarettes in his fingers, he stares hard at one particular work, a rare single-panel cartoon.
It is a scene in the confession box. A girl in a white dress is on her knees, her palms joined and her head bent. On the other side of the net partition is a sly priest, who is enjoying her confession, as evident from a remarkable bump in his crotch. As always in Unni's works, the characters are carefully drawn, they are very real. So, the aspiration of the cartoon to be a farce fails, defeated by the potent body of the adolescent girl. A girl on her knees, her high heels removed and placed by her side, healthy legs bare, a girl humbled, revealing her secrets, seeking pardon from a man, asking to be punished. Did Unni, too, see her this way? Are sons and fathers stirred by the same thoughts?
The cartoon is part of a series that Unni created in a few intense weeks, probably when he was sixteen. In this period he started going to church. He would sit in the last pew for hours, absolutely still. Some people saw him draw, but mostly he did nothing. His unnatural stillness comes up often in the interviews, though Ousep himself had never noticed that about the boy.
Unni was probably not interested in sketching the giant stained-glass windows or the arches, or the high yellow spire, which is visible from Ousep's desk. The spire does figure in a cartoon, but as a faint rudimentary backdrop. The focus of the scene is an electric wire where nine crows are sitting in line as crows do, their heads turned towards a luminous white dove sitting isolated at a distance on the same wire, an olive branch in its beak. One of the crows is whispering to another, 'Kalia has converted.'
Among the other cartoons inspired by the church, there is a full-length portrait of a young man standing in the aisle. He is in an extravagant shirt with large flowers on it, and his black trousers have the glow of leather. He is dashing, but looks stiff and uncomfortable. His left cheek is fully puffed. Unni had told a friend that boys from the slums came in their best clothes for the Sunday mass, and they stood in a self-conscious way in the suspicion of their own good looks, rubbing their noses, constantly touching the sleeves and collars of their shirts, and puffing a cheek involuntarily. Some of them used to have their sunglasses on during mass until the parish priest banned them, making an exception only for those who were blind beyond reasonable doubt.
Around this time, a span of about two months according to some accounts, Unni developed an interest in the dead. He had a network of informers who contacted him the moment they got wind of a funeral mass. He would rush to the church, stand near the coffin, and stare at the corpse as the mourners in the pews behind him probably asked each other who the boy was. It was an uncharacteristically conspicuous thing for him to do, and it is not surprising that several people remember seeing his lone figure peering into a coffin. At least once he took his notebook out and attempted to draw the face of the corpse in that case, an old lady in thick spectacles. A mourner went up to him and asked him to stop. Unni continued to sketch; soon other mourners joined the quarrel, and the priest had to interrupt the service to ask him to get out.
Seeing corpses in their coffins probably inspired his longest work, The Album of the Dead. As it progressed he showed it to several friends, who were disturbed by his idea of humour. In the Album, he imagined family, friends and other familiar people dead in their coffins.
Every person has a whole vertical page, and there are thirty-two caricatures in all, including a self-portrait. The Album of the Dead is his only comic that has been granted its own exclusive book. The portraits occupy only one half of the book; the other half is blank. He planned it as a continuing series that would keep growing as newer people came his way. He even wished to draw some of the people again as they slowly aged. He wanted to frame the passage of time inside unchanging coffins. If he had lived long, as he once certainly hoped, The Album of the Dead would have been an enormous work contained in several books.
It begins with his mother, drawn with a son's bias. It is a top-angle scene, like the other caricatures. She is lying peacefully in a black coffin, a bit thinner than she is in reality. Her arms are folded over her stomach. There is a solemn dignity about her, which is how everybody is portrayed, except Ousep. He does not emerge very well from his caricature. He is lying in his coffin with his hands and legs hanging out of the box. He is bare-chested, and below the waist he is covered by a lungi instead of a white shroud. His left hand is connected to an intravenous fluid system that stands near the coffin. The fluid is in the unmistakable golden bottle of Honeydew Rum.
The humour of the Album lies in its entirety, in seeing page after page of people lying in their black diamond coffins. But not everyone found it funny.
Mariamma had seen her portrait soon after Unni had finished it, and she was hurt. She said no son in the world would draw his own mother in a coffin, especially when she was alive. Ousep remembers hearing fragments of the fuss one morning. Long ago, it seems. How would she react if she knew what Unni had told a friend about her? He had told the friend, in the middle of pumping air into a cycle tyre, that if his mother died the same evening he would not be affected. 'I will have no problem using her skull as a pen-holder,' he said. He surely did not mean it. He was probably trying to make a larger point by using the skull of the person he loved the most as an example, but the friend remembered the incident through moral outrage.
'He was a good person, Unni was a good person, but some of the things he said were horrible. His own mother, the skull of his own mother. A pen-holder?'
'Did he imagine her skull as anything else? Or was it only as a pen-holder?'
'No. Only a pen-holder.'
'Are you sure about that? Did he say "pencil-holder" or "pen-holder"?'
'Pen-holder.'
Thoma must have been eight when he was included in the Album. He occupies less than half of the coffin. His hair is combed, and his face has an angelic radiance, which he does not possess in reality. Ousep accepts the general hilarity of The Album of the Dead, but not of Thoma this way. He feels the fear of losing this one too. When boys want to jump head first, who can stop them?
The others in the Album are Mythili from a different time, Somen Pillai, Sai Shankaran, and many of Unni's friends, teachers and neighbours, including Mythili's parents. There are four unidentified people, including a dignified old man who really does look dead. None of Unni's friends have been able to identify these four.
It is a melodramatic coincidence that the final cartoon in the series is the self-portrait Unni in his casket. And it is natural for his mother to wonder whether this was her deserved suicide note. Did the boy draw himself in the coffin the day he went to the terrace to jump? Is there a message here, a clue that has to be cracked? It is a reasonable thought, but Unni's friends remember seeing the self-portrait months before he died, they are very sure.
Ousep, his chin resting on a palm, looks with affection at the portrait, which has acquired an aching sweetness about it. Unni, with his enormous head and high mop of hair, a clear handsome face, and the austere body of a rustic. This was how he had looked when he was taken to the church in a plywood coffin.
She has not returned yet, though it is time. What if she never returns, what if she has somehow found a way to desert him? But that is unlikely. Where will she go? Everybody wants to flee, but for Mariamma to flee her home, a lot must happen.
First, some socialists have to die. And the nation that they destroyed has to go to the very brink with all its reserve dollars slowly vanishing, a slide that has already begun. With no money left for imports, the government would do what Mariamma has done all her life. Pawn gold to buy oil. The surrender of gold would be a humiliation the whole nation would understand and the new young men would then craftily use the moment of collective shame to convince the old obsolete men that they have no choice but to open up the Indian market to foreign companies. In the liberation that would ensue, Thoma would have to play his cards right. Then he could take his mother somewhere far away and put her in a beautiful new house. For a woman to flee, a lot must happen.
So, in all probability, she is still in the church, together with the maids, the dandy slum boys and the other new converts who attend the Tamil mass. She prefers the English mass, but she feels too small when she stands among the rich. They in their sparkling ironed clothes and happy fragrances, and she in a tired old sari and rubber slippers. After mass, she will go to the confession box to perplex the priest once again by refusing to tell him her sins, demanding instead that she be handed the penance anyway. She will correct him if the punishment is too harsh or too mild, and help him arrive at the correct number of prayers she must utter. It was Unni who had discovered this about his mother. The undercover misanthrope could somehow charm the most insignificant information from the hearts of people. He would have probably solved his own death in no time.
Ousep shuts the Album more violently than he intended and puts it on top of the pile of cartoons on his desk. He stares without hope at the haphazard array of lampoons that grudgingly tells the story of a boy. He considers getting the other works from the wooden trunk and going through all of them one more time. He may spot something, a simple clue that was always in plain sight. Are not mysteries solved this way, through a moment of accidental discovery? No one ever solves a riddle by thinking too hard about it.
He opens the back panel of the radio and extracts the pages of How To Name It. He goes through the pages, not sure what he is searching for. The familiar scenes pass the tough rustic man on a rubber farm who begins to run for his life, the journey of the mysterious narrator, the amiable middle-aged woman, the giant bra as suspension bridge over a river, the walk through the woman's house, the rustic man now raising his thumb in triumph, and finally Mariamma Chacko in tumult, standing on the wooden stand, like a trophy, looking up and wagging a finger, her leg raised in a valiant leap.
Ousep goes through the comic again, then again, as he has done a thousand times. He stops on every page and tries to piece together the story. Most of the panels in the comic have blank spaces at the top, probably for the narration. The dialogue bubbles, when they appear, are all of the same size. Did Unni imagine that every piece of dialogue was going to be of the same length? And why are they blank? The same questions, every moment of Ousep's life.
According to Mariamma, the fact that her son did not leave a note behind for her is a significant decision, even a vital clue. Ousep takes her far more seriously than she imagines. So, he wonders once again, can it be true? Does the absence of an explanation contain within its baffling emptiness a simple message that Unni presumed his parents would be smart enough to see?
THOMA CHACKO STANDS NAKED in the bathroom and asks himself whether he will remember this moment forever. Many years later, will he remember this Sunday evening when he was filling a bucket with water? Will he look back across a whole lifetime one day and say to the boy he once was, 'Yes, I remember the moment. You were shorter than the fridge those days. It was a blue bucket, wasn't it? And, Thoma, by the way, if you want to know. You made it, Thoma, you made it. You're very famous and reasonably rich.'
The bucket is overflowing but he does not want to turn the tap off. He likes the roar of water, its ominous terror. In the bucket is the sea, about four kilometres deep. He stirs the water with his hand and makes a furious whirlpool, which leaves a calm eye at its heart. Thoma imagines he is in the eye of a giant ocean whirlpool. Ships and whales, mere specks on the enormous swirling wall of water, orbit him. He feels a deep fear in his stomach and screams.
But what is more terrifying than a whirlpool is a giant wave. Unni said that a powerful earthquake beneath the sea could create a sudden ocean wave one kilometre high. It could appear any time on the horizon. That is why Thoma sometimes looks carefully over the coconut trees and the building tops or as far as the eye can see. Such a wave would exterminate the entire human population. Millions of years later, new humans might rise and they might build a new world that would look very different from everything Thoma knows. But the pass mark in science and maths would still be thirty-five per cent. That is what Unni said. It astonishes Thoma that the human race will always arrive at a cut-off score that he can just about achieve. Unni said that there were many such things in the Universe that nobody could fully explain. For example, even though the sun is many times larger than the moon, they look the same size in the sky. How miraculous it is for a planet to be in a position in space where its sun and its moon appear to have the same size. 'Is there a reason, Thoma?' Unni would whisper, as if he knew the reason.
Thoma looks nervously at the bathroom window; through the iron bars he sees apartment blocks and the tops of independent homes and a distant forest of coconut trees. He looks carefully at the arc of land's end. He has seen something; it seems the horizon has risen, a giant blue mist is approaching. The Bay of Bengal is coming. He screams, jumps into his underwear, remembering through an inescapable moment that it was once his father's shirt. And he runs out of the bathroom. In the hallway he is stabbed by an old fear. Is he like his mother? Will he, too, go through life seeing great spectacles that others cannot see, will he live in the sorrows of the past, will he go through life talking to himself, crying and laughing, calling out the full Christian names of his relatives and asking them the same questions forever? He can hear his mother in the kitchen, her voice rising, and her words beginning to tremble.
He stands in the kitchen doorway and looks as Unni used to. 'Annamol Chacko,' she tells the exhaust fan. 'You and your nine daughters come to visit your son, Ousep, when we are living in Kottayam. I am eight months pregnant with Unni. Still I make tea for all of you. And you say I am too learned to make good tea. And all of you laugh.'
Thoma has never understood why this moment means so much to his mother. Criticism of tea is hardly a matter that should affect a clever woman like her. But Unni did tell him one day that in the words of some women there was great injustice that only other women could decipher. 'It is not about the tea, Thoma, it is never about the tea.'
Thoma has a hazy memory of his grandmother, who used to visit every summer. He remembers her as a tiny woman with the face of a pony and cruel eyes that had an opinion about all that they saw. And she was usually in a white blouse, shrouded in an expensive white cloth that had a cross pinned on it. Below the waist she was bound tightly by another white cloth that was bunched behind her like a bird's tail. 'Like a hand fan to cool her arse,' Unni said. She used to come by the night train from the village with her silent husband, who carried on his shoulders at least two jackfruits and all the fearless flies of Kerala. For some reason, she always walked ahead of him.
Unni said that their mother's enemy was their enemy, so Thoma decided to hate his grandmother, even though she appeared to love him very much. There was a reason why it was easy for Thoma to dislike her. In the first few minutes of her arrival, Mariamma would cane Thoma's legs for no good reason, then take him inside to kiss him and say she was sorry. She never hit Unni, probably because he was one of those people nobody wants to hit, or maybe she treated him differently because he was older than Thoma. Though, sometimes, she did chase Unni with a broom in her hand, both of them laughing. It disappointed Thoma that his mother, who was usually very kind, would behave in this puzzling manner with him every time Grandmother visited. But Unni told him one day that it was a Village Tradition. One way of insulting the mother-in-law was to beat up your kids in front of her. He was probably right because Annamol was deeply affected by the caning and it could not have been out of love for him. She would look sadly at the floor and weep with an occasional shiver of her nostrils.