by Manu Joseph
In time, Ousep stops loving home, he becomes the other men, men who sink into the company of other men, the veteran husbands, men who drink late into the night with their friends, men with frail thighs who have never played football but talk about football, and at other times about the superiority of Marx over Keynes, and about the unattainable prose of the new Spanish writers.
Mariamma knows he has changed. She tries to make her home as beautiful as possible, she wakes up at dawn and grinds things in large stone boulders, stands sweating in the charcoal fumes of the kitchen and cooks for hours so that she can watch him eat like a boy. She tries to be happy enough so that she does not enact the moments from another time. She makes love to him in the mornings. But Ousep has gone too far the Malayalee way. In the mornings he does wish to be a good person, a decent man, but in the nights he returns as a corpse. She becomes bitter and angry. To punish him she takes the tailoring scissors and chops off the sleeves of his best shirt. They have a big fight. He holds his amputated shirt and calls her names, which makes her cry. He returns that night drunk. She chops off the legs of his best trousers. He continues to return drunk and she continues to cut his clothes. She stops cleaning the house, leaves things lying around, puts things in disorder, arranges the furniture in crooked ways.
Ousep’s tiny avian mother has been waiting to torment Mariamma by right, but he has never let her stay in the house for too long. She smells trouble in his home, so she is persistent, says she wants to live with her son, her great writer son for whom she has toiled all her life, milked buffaloes on so many dawns. Eventually, he gives up and the woman comes and straightens the furniture, cleans the house, cooks for her son. His nine parasitic sisters too move in, one after the other, to harass the weird girl who talks to herself. They insult her, treat her poorly in her own home. He does not know how he allowed it but he does not deny he did – he does nothing as they torture his wife every day. Those petty women, he let them do all that. She suffers in silence but she does not forget. Their full Christian names enter her insane monologues, she repeats what they tell her, hangs their memories on the wall and asks them pointed questions. Even now, after all these years, she says almost every day, ‘You got away, Annamol, you got away.’ That is at the heart of Mariamma’s lament, the grouse against all who committed crimes against her and got away.
Mariamma abandons her proud rationality. She throws away the enchanted items, she calls a controversial Catholic priest to purify her home, who utters things in Sanskrit. But nothing changes.
Ousep and Mariamma are not ethereally fused any more, they drift apart, but when they attain a distance between themselves, from where they cannot always hear the other but can still see, they drift no more. They begin to orbit each other, like two equal planets that cannot let go. The distance separates them in their bed too, but there are times when they collide, searching for flesh.
The night Unni is born, Ousep comes fully drunk to the hospital, he goes to the wrong ward and abuses the baby in the crib, calls it an ugly monkey. The new mother screams for help. Men and women hold him by his arms and carry him to Mariamma’s bed. He mumbles something to her but leaves without seeing the baby.
Around this time he gets a lead from an altar boy that the powerful archbishop is a paedophile. Ousep chases the story for months, convinces several boys and parish workers to speak to him, promising them anonymity. When he finally files the story, the editor, a venerated old man, calls Ousep to his office and asks him the identity of his unnamed sources. Ousep is reluctant. ‘I am not asking you to give it in writing, Ousep,’ the editor says. ‘Just tell me who these people are. Their names would dissolve in air. I’ve a right to know, you have a duty to tell, it is journalistic tradition.’ Ousep reveals the names. The story is then killed. The archbishop had long known of the story, and had been waiting patiently to learn the names of those who had ratted on him. Ousep gets drunk one night and tries to break into the archbishop’s residence to beat him up. He loses his job in disgrace. To his surprise, he finds himself unemployable. He has suddenly acquired the reputation of being an arrogant, uncontrollable young man, who fabricates stories. There are tales about him in the newsrooms, most of them exaggerations of things he has said and done under the influence of alcohol. The men who were waiting for Ousep to fall, including some friends, ensure that he will never rise again in Kerala. He finds a modest job with the United News of India, moves to Madras, and begins to live in the midst of austere vegetarians.
NOT FOR THE FIRST time since he was brought here, he wakes up and accepts that he is in an impressive hospital ward and that he has not slept on a better bed than this. He is probably heavily drugged; everything around him is in a tidy white haze. He enjoys his own physical frailty, which reminds him of a sleepy rainy day, enjoys the fact that he is being cared for by strangers to whom he owes nothing, especially money. His body is too feeble even to think, he is filled with what has to be deep serenity, and he is worried that he has been transformed into someone better. Is this clarity? Is clarity a single transparent thought or is it the absence of thought? Was Unni right after all – could it be that thoughts are truly the corrupt dominant species of the world that have colonized man, relentlessly mutating into increasingly complex ideas and making him do things so that they can finally intrude into the material world as marvellous objects?
Ousep loves the drug the hospital has given him, but then his palm circles his hairy chest, which means what he needs now is a small nip.
The white door opens and an almost beautiful nurse enters the ward holding a pen over a notebook as if she knows what she is going to write but will not do so until she sees it with her own eyes. Unlike the older nurses she does not seem lampooned in the starched white frock and white stockings. She looks forbidden and unattainable, even important. As the door shuts behind her, there is something deeply carnal about the decisive click of the knob. It is the first time in years that he has been alone in a sealed room with a young woman, and he feels he must do something inappropriate. The eyes of the nurse fall on different objects in the room, including him. She makes some quick notes in her book and leaves.
He does not know whether it is night or day, or how long he has been here, lying like a transvestite in this ridiculous green gown, but he decides to stay awake and wait for Mariamma. He has a feeling that she is somewhere around, she would not leave him alone in a hospital ward. There is a lot that they have to talk about – that is, if she is willing to answer his questions.
He sits up on the bed and leans his back against the massive pillow. He tries to remember when exactly he had seen the apparition. A few hours ago, days ago? He is not clear what had woken him up at that moment but when he was awake the first thing he saw was Sai Shankaran standing in the doorway of the ward, meek and harmless, his hair wet and immovable as always in the mornings. Even as a sudden apparition, Sai was incapable of giving a fright. When he finally walked in, the room was filled with the smell of Lifebuoy soap.
‘Have you come to kill me, Sai?’
‘No,’ Sai said in a way that turned Ousep’s jest into a reasonable question.
‘Sai.’
‘Yes.’
‘Will you help me urinate?’
Sai looked terrified. So Ousep lied. ‘I was just kidding.’
The boy picked up a stool from the corner of the ward, sat a foot away from Ousep’s bed, and said, ‘I didn’t come here because you blackmailed me.’
‘I did no such thing, Sai. You’re imagining things.’
‘But what did you tell me at the bus stop? You said the cops would come to my home and ask me questions. You said I have to now mention in the US visa form that there is a police complaint against me.’
‘I was only trying to protect you. I was only trying to inform you of the possibilities so that you are on your guard.’
‘I didn’t come here because you blackmailed me, I want you to know that.’
‘I believe you, Sai.’
&
nbsp; ‘I know what I did to that woman on the road was wrong. I don’t know what happened to me. I am ashamed. I am ashamed because I am an upright person. I am a moral person, I believe that every man should touch only one woman in his entire life. I believe in morality.’
It occurred to Ousep that morality was probably the invention of unattractive men. Whom else does it benefit really?
‘What made you come here, Sai?’
‘I thought, what if you died, what if you died without knowing the real Unni? So I thought I would come here and talk to you. I owe Unni that much. So I don’t want you to think I am here because I am scared.’
Sai gaped without pride or hope but in his large dull eyes there was also unhappy compassion, which was not a good sign. Ousep was expecting fear.
‘I will tell you everything I know,’ Sai said, ‘but in the end what will be clear is that I may have hidden some things from you but I was not lying when I kept saying that there was no deep reason behind Unni’s death. He wanted to die and that is all there is to it. He killed himself for the same reason people always kill themselves. He did not wish to live.’
He fell silent for a while. Then, as if he had remembered something painful, his nostrils vibrated, his lips trembled, his eyes blinked several times. He blew his nose into his ironed handkerchief and licked his lips as he waited to gather his thoughts.
‘Why are you crying, Sai?’
Sai slouched his back and looked all around the ward. ‘What is everything?’ he said. ‘What is all this? What is life, what is space, what is finite, what is infinite?’
Through Sai’s mouth, philosophy was revealed in its true form – as a bunch of dim questions asked too early in the life of science. The boy fell silent again. And when he found his voice he spoke about himself, which was surprising. Sai, truly, had come here to talk.
Like Unni and Balki and many others in their class, Sai was enrolled at St Ignatius when he was six. He was a dull student, and his father believed that a thrashing with a leather belt every now and then would solve the problem. The man had the habit of holding his son’s report card in one hand and the belt in the other, reading out the scores aloud and whipping him. On occasion, he chased little Sai around the house with a heated serving spoon. Very often the spoon found Sai’s body, usually his arms and thighs. Like many other boys of his age, Sai eventually grew up into a fragile adolescent who was beaten up at home by a man who was shorter than him and was progressively getting shorter.
‘I was so miserable,’ Sai said, rubbing his nose and looking away. ‘I was so unhappy my hair began to change, it began to curl.’
‘Your hair?’
‘Yes. For a few months when I was sixteen, I was so stressed, my hair became very curly, like a black man’s hair. Unni used to call me Pubic Hair.’
The whole decade in school, until the very end, Unni did not mean much to Sai. Even after the Simion Clark incident, Unni was at best a curiosity, until the day he walked into the classroom and said that reality was not what it appeared, that something was going on, that everything people believed to be true was a lie.
Sai described Unni’s nervous declaration and his account was consistent with everything Ousep has heard before about the day. Unni must have spoken for less than a minute but something happened to Sai, something powerful went through him, it was as if a dangerous idea lurking in the darkness inside him had been shown a luminous light. ‘The first emotion I felt was fear and I don’t know why I looked behind me,’ he said.
Ousep wonders what it was about the moment that made such a lasting impression on so many boys. Its impact appears to have been out of proportion. He tries to imagine the scene, which has now been narrated to him by so many. All the accounts are the same except for Unni’s exact words, which will never be known. They all begin with how Unni walked into the classroom just before the first bell was about to ring. Did Unni plan it that way – to wait till everybody was seated and appear at the very end in a conspicuous way so that all eyes would be on him?
By the time the event occurred, Unni had stature, which was important to what was about to happen. Unni was many things. He was a storyteller, he played football as if it were important, he bowled with furious pace, and he had subdued a powerful sadistic teacher in an extraordinary fashion. It was such a person, not just anybody, who had walked into the class that day. And he told them, with fear and nervousness in the place of his indestructible cool, that there was something lurking out there in the world around them and that he might have seen it from very close. Ousep concedes that there is probably enough in the scene, and in the background of its protagonist, to make it an unforgettable moment.
By the time the incident occurred, Sai had long abandoned the idea of religion. ‘God did not make any sense to me,’ he said in the proud self-congratulatory way of young atheists. ‘I could see that life was merely an accident.’
Ousep waited for the inevitable sentence, the line that drags atheists back into the fold of religion without their knowing, the line that usually goes like this – ‘But I believe in a force.’
Sai looked intently at the floor and said with the sparkle of epiphany, ‘But there is a force, I believe in a force.’
The idea of an accidental life insulted God, and that comforted Sai, but it did not explain everything to him. He spent hours looking up at the sky. ‘Day sky, night sky,’ he said to show how comprehensive his study was. Thinking about the infinity of space made him go crazy for several hours every day. He imagined there was something deeply cerebral about his new obsession with the question ‘where does space end?’. He often thought about why there was something instead of nothing and what exactly was the meaning of human life on a speck of dust at the edge of just another galaxy.
‘So that was my life. Deep thoughts, belting by my father, very deep thoughts, more belting. I led a double life. The universe inside my head sometimes, other times red rashes on my arse.’
Ousep yawned to conceal a laugh.
It was in that period of gloom that Unni walked into the class one morning and said that something mysterious was going on. ‘An inner eye opened inside me,’ Sai said. ‘How can I explain what happened to me? I felt as if I could see for the first time in my life.’
He realized in an instant that all the philosophers he had read, all the religions, even Einstein, even J. Krishnamurti, were saying the same thing in different ways – there is a shocking truth hiding behind the world that we see, behind the ordinary days of our lives. God is not a lie but some kind of an abridged version of this reality, a beginner’s course that has been misunderstood.
Trapped in the trance, Sai thought he had become enlightened and that the full details of the universal truth would enter his head by lunchtime. When a teacher asked him a question in class, he remained silent, even smiled peacefully. He was thrashed by the man. ‘Yet another son of an illiterate farmer who had converted to Christianity in exchange for a bicycle or something. He kept slapping me but I could not speak. That made him go mad. He said, “Sai, say one word. One word and I will let you go. At least say A, B, C, D with the mouth that the Lord gave you or I am going to kill you today.”’
Despite the beating, Sai was unable to extricate himself from the moment. But by the time the day ended he had recovered. He realized he had not become enlightened. He asked Unni the meaning of what he had said in the morning. Unni told him that it was an insane moment and that he did not wish to speak about it. He said it was dangerous to talk about those things. That, naturally, made Sai even more obsessed.
For several days he begged Unni to explain. Unni said it was not a matter that could be explained, but that there were clues everywhere.
‘Unni told me, “Sai, have you ever wondered why animals don’t look at the sky? There must be a reason, there is a reason.”’ Unni showed him a series of portraits he had drawn of various mammals looking up at the sky. Unni said, ‘I drew these to show how weird it is for us to see animals looking up.
They never do it. Why?’ Sai begged him to explain but Unni said that language was not the medium through which to understand these things. ‘He said, “Language was created by nature to guard its secrets, not to reveal them. We are trapped in language. Even thought has become language. That is what nature wants, Sai. It has given us language because it has hidden the truth somewhere else.”’
‘Nature is the enemy?’ Sai asked, in a whisper.
Unni looked with caution around him. ‘You won’t believe it, Sai. When you see, you won’t believe it.’
Sai began to spend hours by himself trying to guess what Unni seemed to know. He shadowed Unni, called him up several times with questions, came to his house, sat beside him in class. In time, Unni loosened up a bit. ‘One day he told me, “Try walking on the streets without looking at girls, just do not look at them, do not look at their bodies. Don’t ask me why, just do it.”’
Sai stopped looking at young women, including some of his teachers. When he saw women on the road, he would lower his gaze and walk on. ‘Like a woman.’ In packed buses he would shut his eyes. When young mothers spoke to him he stared at his toenails and answered them. He began to look at the world differently and the world, too, seemed like another place. A world without women is a very different world.
One afternoon on the stairway of the school, Unni came from behind and whispered into his ear, ‘Now it is time for you to stop masturbating. Just quit it right now. Don’t go home and send out one last spurt. Start from this moment. You will begin to feel a powerful force inside you. That will take you to the next level.’
It was a surprisingly candid revelation by Sai to the father of a friend. Ousep saw a motive in this. The boy probably wanted to convince him that he was withholding nothing, and he was building this myth through the facility of sexual confession. Was Sai a cunning bastard, or was he just a boy who had dropped his guard?
