‘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.
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.