'I don't know,' she said. 'But in a way, that comic has ended, hasn't it?'

IT IS A HOT morning, and the day is lit as if it is the afterlife; faraway windows and the metal poles of bus stops glow. Ousep's walk is brisk, even fast, but then he stops. He would always remember this moment, its stab of cold fear. He realizes that he does not know where he is going. There is no appointment, there is nowhere to go. He has been walking for over an hour, imagining a meeting with a newly discovered acquaintance of Unni. He knows the acquaintance, the face is clear in his head. But the young man does not exist. Ousep does not remember how he ended up on this road. He was thinking about Unni, and somewhere along the way he had started imagining an amiable person waiting to tell him something more about Unni. It is not the delusion alone that scares Ousep. It is the final realization that he has probably met all the people who knew the boy. He has met many of them at least twice. There is none left to be interviewed, except Somen Pillai, whose importance anyway rests purely on his unavailability. That is how small the life of an adolescent is. A persistent father can get to all of them. What must he do now? Where was he going so fast, what was he thinking? A man who does not know where he is going, what kind of a man is that?

Ousep goes to a bus stop, sits on the aluminium bench. He does not know how it happens, he begins to cry, pressing his wrists to his eyes. Why, Unni? Strangers look at him far longer and more intently than they do when he walks drunk on the road and stops the Madras traffic. He thinks of the time when Unni was an infant and he used to look up at his father and extend his arms. But Ousep never carried him. They would stare at each other in silence and unequal love.

What is Ousep searching for? An honourable reason for Unni's death, a happy reason? The truth?

He realizes that there is someone standing by his side. A scrawny man with a file under his arm is holding out a bottle of cold soda. 'Take it, sir,' the man says. The marble-bottle soda, the panacea of Madras for people hit by trucks, stunned by sunstroke, for men who are having an epileptic fit on the road, and even for the dead. It is a bottle that reminds the fallen that something bad has happened to them. Ousep Chacko, finally, a recipient of the soda.

But by the evening he has recovered. His lungs are clear and his eyes clean. He is even happy, and somewhat ashamed of his ordinary everyday happiness, as if fathers of dead sons do not have that crass right.

With nowhere to look, Ousep abandons his investigation as he has done many times before, and sinks into the banalities of city reporting. He eats with apprentice politicians, whispers with disgruntled bureaucrats, drinks with cops and friends. He fills his days with work he need not do. He visits crime scenes, covers interminable second-rung cricket matches, attends the lectures of space scientists, who never tuck their shirts into their trousers. He even goes to Koovagam to cover the annual festival of amiable eunuchs. They come in thousands as spectacular brides in glittering saris, stand in long queues to get married to a minor god, offer free or discounted sex all through the wedding night to the hordes of desperate men who have come to stand in for the divine groom. Next morning, the joyous brides become wailing widows in white saris, who break their bangles and pray with eyes shut tight that in their next lives they are born as complete women. But even they are happy, Ousep can tell, they are much happier than people imagine. Everybody is happy, Unni, everybody is fine.

At the chief minister's press conference, Ousep asks, out of boredom and disrespect, 'Are you happy?' The chief minister, a frail poet who never suffered the indignity of being young, a man with two living wives and several worthless squabbling sons, is puzzled only for a moment. 'Yes, Ousep, I am happy that the Indian government has ceased all military activities in Sri Lanka and that we are not at war with our own Tamil brothers.'

Ousep begins to spend more time with his friends, sitting with them in the cheap bars long after midnight, and together they sing about their own obsolescence, and the approaching end of a type of man, a type of alcoholic male writer. 'We are the last of the real men, the kings of our times, and our stories will never be told.'

But, despite his best efforts, despite doing all that he can to clog his time with mindless things, one morning he walks to the Liberty bus stop to confront Sai Shankaran again. There is something this bastard is not telling, and Ousep wants to break him.

As always, Sai pretends that he has not seen him, but his unhappy face grows tense. Ousep stands with him. For some reason there are more people than usual at the bus stop this morning and they spill onto the road. A yellow autorickshaw skids to a halt in front of the bus stop. The driver searches the crowd without conviction for someone who may want to sit in his auto. His eyes fall on a striking young girl in a dark-green half-sari, her oiled hair braided, standing at the front of the crowd and waiting meekly for her bus. The auto driver stares at her breasts and smiles, and slowly squeezes the air horn, and laughs. She hugs her books to her chest and looks away with a quick turn of her head, like a sparrow, exactly the way Sai looks away every time he sees Ousep. The auto leaves with a laughing man.

'Have you made up your mind, Sai?' Ousep asks. The same pointless question. Sai takes a deep breath. As expected, he does not say anything. He looks into the distance. 'Sai, there is something you are not telling me. I know that.'

Ousep takes the folded pages of How To Name It from his trouser pocket and gives it to Sai, but the boy does not accept it. So Ousep unfolds the pages and holds them to Sai's face. 'This was Unni's final comic. Does this make any sense to you?' he says. Sai's large obtuse eyes stay on the comic for a moment but he does not react.

Ousep stalks him every day, boards the bus with him, stands close to him all the way to Loyola College. When Sai returns from college, Ousep walks him home. But the whole time, Sai maintains his unhappy silence. On the evening of the eighth day of the relentless stalking there is, finally, a scene.

Ousep is walking a foot behind the boy. Sai is going home. He has the walk of slow cattle. One of those people whose feet are pointed outwards when they land on the ground, and there is something barefooted about him even though he wears shoes.

Sai stops walking, and pants heavily. He has had enough, which makes Ousep glad. 'Look,' the boy screams, 'there is nothing I have to say. Nothing. You have to believe me. Unni died because he was sad. There is no deeper reason. If there is a reason, you are the reason. Think about it. There is no food in his house most days. His mother begs for money from everyone. The only reason Unni made friends was to eat in their homes. His whole schooling was sponsored by the church. His mother is a nut, and his father is an alcoholic who makes an ass of himself every night. And on top of all this, Unni was not very good in MPC. He had a useless talent, which was to draw cartoons which were not so funny actually.'

'What is MPC?'

'Maths-Physics-Chemistry.'

'I see.'

'He had no future, he had no hope. So he jumped. It's time you accept it. Three years have passed. You've got to accept it. Go and take care of your other son before he too jumps off the building.'

'Sai, all I want to know is this. What is it that you, Somen Pillai and Unni used to do together?'

'For the last time I am telling you. Nothing. We were just three guys who used to chat about this and that.'

'What did you chat about?'

'Nothing, nothing.'

Sai walks away. Ousep shadows him until the boy reaches the gates of his building, where the guard has been instructed not to let Ousep in.

Ousep is at the bus stop next morning. Sai arrives in a few minutes, pretends that he has not seen him, and stands at a distance. Sai, the error in nature's trial and error. Ousep does not go to him as he usually does. He stands where he is and stares. Sai is probably thinking of the great abbreviations that define his life GRE, GMAT, CAT. Without exams that have multiple-choice questions his life would not move, without them he does not understand himself. Even to accept that he is a worthless piece of rag he needs the exams to inform him.

You must see this, Unni. In a world full of Sai Shankarans, you would have become king, if only you had waited. Look at Sai, he does not know why he lives but he lives, and he lives because he does not know why he must die. He will go on this way, doing his little things, enjoying the little victories, adopting morals invented by other people, secretly supporting the ideologies of third-rate men and, at dinner time, quoting the philosophies of the extraordinary whom people like him have never allowed to live in peace. How can you, Unni, let Sai Shankaran guard your secrets, let him keep a fragment of your memory in his dim head where he waits for it to rot away?

MYTHILI DOES NOT DENY that she has made an extraordinary request but must her father begin to tremble and yell out for his wife? 'How are you bringing up your daughter?' he says.

'What did she do?' Mother says, faking wifely fear, spreading her sari over her 36Ds.

'Ask her yourself,' he says, and goes to the bathroom with the newspaper, as if the key to good upbringing is having a quiet fatherly shit.

Mother wears her peacemaker mask. She is enjoying this. Something to do.

'What did you tell your father?'

'I want to go to Marina Beach tonight with Bindu and Gai.'

'Why?'

'To see Olive Ridley.'

'Who is he?'

'Olive Ridley is a turtle.'

'A turtle?'

'Endangered.'

'Why must you go to a beach at midnight to see a turtle?'

'The turtles swim in from the sea and walk on the beach at midnight to lay eggs.'

'Why are you interested in turtle eggs?'

'We have to ensure the eggs are safe. Or Olive Ridleys will become extinct.'

'Do boys, too, want to save the Olive Ridleys?'

'Yes.'

'Mythili, just think about it. You. Midnight. Marina Beach. Boys. How could you even ask your father?'

Mythili storms out of the house, which is a moment of comic rebellion because it contains within its drama the indestructible promise that she will return before the sun goes down.

She has to take a walk to release her rage. The option of shutting herself in her room is not available any more. The latch on her door was removed after Mother complained to Father that she was spending long hours locked up in her room. After Father removed the latch with a screwdriver, Mythili started blocking the door with her table. So Father held four sizes of screwdrivers in his hand and said, 'If you continue doing this I will remove the door.'

Maybe Mythili should find a sweet boy and fall in love, and have plentiful foreplay in vengeance. She decides to go to the Circular Road, gather two friends and discuss the matter, walking in large circles around a park filled with cheap bougainvilleas.

But right in front of her appears a familiar sight that puts her off boys for the week. A tall lanky thing, must be around fifteen, is flanked by his papa and mama, and they are going somewhere important, probably to a temple far away. He is much taller than his parents but they are, at this moment, giving him a good shaft up his arse. The boy is silent.

Father says, 'What is ninety-four per cent, what is ninety-four per cent these days? That, too, in maths. In Madras. What is ninety-four per cent? How can you come home and look into our eyes after doing something like this?'

Mother says, 'You are not working hard, look at all your friends, how hard they are working.'

Father says, 'And your JEE scores. What's happened to you? Do you want to go to IIT or not? Do you want to go to America or not? That is the decision you have to make. Do you want to rot here?'

'Do you want to be a failure?'

'You don't have the option of failure.'

The boy will not be a failure, Mythili knows. She has seen the generations before. The boy will make it. As his father has said, he does not have the option of failure. He will crack at least one entrance exam, and he will one day have a nice house in a suburb of San Francisco, or in a suburb of a suburb of San Francisco. He will find a cute Tamil Brahmin wife and make her produce two sweet children. He will drive a Toyota Corolla to work. And there, in the conference room of his office, he will tell his small team, with his hands stretched wide in a managerial way, 'We must think out of the box.'

Her future husband must be something like this boy. He would have endured the same endoscopic bamboo up his arse, and emerged more resolute about cracking life. Her husband, her man, he is probably somewhere in Madras at this very moment. She wonders what he must be doing right now. Is he sitting at home, with a pile of IIT study material and a calculator on his desk? Does he, too, call his calculator 'Calcy'? Is he taking breaks to jerk off, thinking of Silk Smitha. What are you doing right now, my lord?

Would he measure up to Unni? It is a question she does not want to ask, she does not like it. She wonders whether Unni will always haunt her. Or will she forget him in time, will he become just another tame memory? As of this evening, what she believes is that she will always remember him through the myths of a thirteen-year-old girl. And the men who will come her way, men who will be dull software engineers by the laws of probability, may not have a chance when set against Unni Chacko.

A surprising memory comes to her. She has not thought of this moment before. Since Unni died she has remembered him through the same set of images and events. It is as if the shock of the day had wiped clean many of her memories of him. But now and then some scenes come back to her and she wonders why she is being made to remember those ordinary moments, especially this. Even when she was thirteen, when it happened, she had not considered it important. But now that she remembers, now that she is older, she wonders whether there was more to it.

What she remembers is an evening in his house. She has been there for a few hours but Unni is busy at his desk, his bedroom door shut. So she is in the hall, sitting on the floor with Thoma and teaching him how to mix watercolours to create other colours. At some point she realizes that Unni is standing in his doorway and watching. She smiles at him.

'What are you thinking?' she says.

'I was thinking, you may never see what I see.'

'What do you see?'

'I see things that are very beautiful. And I was thinking, Mythili will go through her entire life without ever seeing what I see. Mythili will never know what she is meant to see.'

'You are mad, Unni.'

'What if I am not?'

THOMA CHACKO WAKES UP earlier than usual and tries to understand what has happened to him. His head is fully tilted to his right, as if he is looking at the world with affection. He walks dreamily to the kitchen, feeling like the ghost of a boy who has been hanged, who is searching for his mother to tell her what they have done to him.

His mother is washing the dishes, her sari hitched up well above her knees. She stops for a moment, stands absolutely still, the lid of the pressure cooker in one hand and a wet scrub in another. A smile crosses her face as her hand circles the bottom of the lid very slowly, and she sings a lullaby.

It is dawn and the world is otherwise still. The lullaby is sweet and sad, like all lullabies. It was Unni who introduced him to the true nature of lullabies. 'If you listen carefully, Thoma, you will realize that a lullaby is a sad song. That is the secret of the lullaby.'

'Why is it sad, Unni?'

'I cannot tell you, Thoma. You're too young. But I have information that when mothers first began to sing lullabies they did it to mourn the birth of their babies. It was a tradition. Some people will tell you, Thoma, lullabies only sound sad because they are sung softly to lull babies into sleep. But the truth is lullabies are sad because they are meant to be sad. Do you know something, Thoma, even today, in some African tribes, lullabies and funeral songs are the same.'

Now that Thoma is older, he knows that when people want to con you they bring in the African tribes. Unni, especially. But as he stands this dawn, listening to his mother, how can he deny that there is a stirring sorrow in the song that he hears, a song that is among his earliest memories. When she finally sees him, she says, 'What's wrong with you?'

'My neck is broken,' he says.

She approaches him with her strong open arms. 'You've got a crick in your neck, Thoma. It's nothing. Let us fix it the village way. One swift jerk of your head and you will be all right. You won't feel a thing.'

He screams, 'It is not a sprain. I promise you it is something more important.'

She looks at him carefully and gives him the benefit of doubt. She used to be very confident about her ways once, but after Unni's death she has become unsure of all her opinions about the world.

She grabs the coconut oil bottle from the shelf and before Thoma can react she pours some of it in his raised left ear. There is nothing he can do but just stand there as if his ear is a vat. He never lets her do it normally, but this morning she has grabbed her chance. 'Too much wax in your ear, Thoma.'

'Do we have any money to go to the clinic?'

'We must go to the clinic, Thoma. And for that we must first go quietly into Iago's chamber.'

They tiptoe into Ousep's bedroom. His lungi hangs from the fan as a noose. He is sleeping fully naked, his mouth open, legs spread wide, his balls lying on him like an extraterrestrial pet. She covers him with a bedsheet, and they stand there and stare at him. There is no sign of life in him, his breath is imperceptible, his eyes are half open. But then a toe wiggles, which makes Mariamma and Thoma leave his bedside.

She gently opens the table drawer and extracts Ousep's thin leather wallet. She pouts her lips at Thoma, which means there is some cash in it. She usually does not steal money from him because he gets furious and creates a big scene when he finds out.

They walk to the clinic on Arcot Road, which is not very far. The coconut oil is still in his ear because there is no way he can move his head to empty it. 'Let it stay there for a while, Thoma,' she says when they leave the house.

On the way she gets into one of her moods. She holds Thoma's hand in a fierce grip and starts marching furiously, thinking of her old foes, her lips curling into her mouth, her eyes looking insanely at the road. Occasionally, she wags a finger in the air. She does this in short bursts. She will mumble something, bite her own lips, wag a finger, and the next moment she is all elegant and sharp, her eyes alone preoccupied, lips smacking in preparation for the next bout. A man walking in their direction almost jumps in fright when she suddenly chews her lips and wags her finger. There are not many people on the road fortunately, because it is still very early in the morning, but the few who pass them by look at them curiously.

Thoma endures the shame, his head tilted, his left ear filled with coconut oil. Now and then, he tells her softly to behave like a normal person but she ignores him. There is a moment when her head, too, is fully tilted, and she raises her right arm as if she is doing a warming-up workout. People look at them in incomprehension. A woman and a boy going somewhere, both their heads fully tilted. Nobody knows why.

In Sai Polyclinic, there are only three doctors at this hour and they are busy with an emergency case. Thoma and his mother do not want to know what the case is, they wait for a while and decide to leave. They walk back home, the way they had come Thoma's head almost horizontal, Mariamma in occasional fury.

That night, Thoma is woken up by his father to write his obituary. Mariamma says, 'Leave him alone, his neck is broken.' But she has decided not to fight. Thoma follows his swaying and stumbling father to the bedroom, where there is a lungi noose ready and hanging from the ceiling fan, and a chair below it. Ousep takes his position on the chair and puts the noose around his neck. Thoma stands with his head tilted. They stare at each other. 'Bastard,' Ousep says. 'Are you making fun of me, you bastard?'

'My neck is broken,' Thoma says.

Ousep tries to step down but is pulled back by the noose. He extricates himself, gets down, and takes Thoma by his hand. 'I will take care of you, my son, I am your father.'

So Thoma walks to Sai Polyclinic once again; this time he is led by a man who can barely walk. It is late in the night and the long straight road to the clinic is deserted, but occasionally, a taxi or an autorickshaw passes by and people stare at the strange sight of a drunken man leading a boy with a tilted head. Thoma wants to cry. In the morning, he goes somewhere with a mad woman, in the night with a drunkard. What a life. He feels a ball of warm sorrow in his throat.

When they reach the clinic, the guard sees the state Ousep is in and will not let them in. Ousep throws his press card at him and says, 'Do you know who I am?' The guard screams to another guard inside, 'A man here has forgotten who he is. Is the psychiatrist on duty?' And the guards laugh. Ousep threatens to call the chief minister. The guard says, 'Call the president.' Ousep shakes his head at Thoma and says, 'This moron does not know the president has no powers in this country.'

Eventually, the guard wins. So they walk back. This time, Thoma has to lead his father, who stumbles many times and can barely stand. They go this way down the abandoned road the boy with the tilted head leading the drunkard.

Thoma sees two shadowy figures approach. An urchin girl of his age is leading her drunken father. As their paths cross, Thoma and the girl look at each other, and they smile as if to give the other the strength to survive the times. Many years later, Thoma will think of her and hope with all his heart that she, too, has somehow made it across.

Thoma leads his father carefully to the stairway of Block A. Ousep is too drunk and sleepy to scream, which is a blessing. They walk up the steps quietly. Ousep stops. 'Thoma,' he says, 'do you hate your father?'

'No.'

'Don't hate me, son. There are people in this world who set out to make an omelette but end up with scrambled eggs. I am just one of them.'

They resume their walk up the steps. They walk in silence. When they are about to reach the landing on the third floor, they see a strange sight. Mythili walks across the short corridor, like a midnight ghost, towards her door. She throws a look at Thoma but does not say anything. She slips into her home and shuts the door.

'Did that happen, Thoma?'

'Yes.'

Ousep studies the front door of his house carefully and looks up at the short flight of steps that leads to the terrace door, which is locked. Just for a moment he looks strong and clever, the way he is in the mornings.