‘His first story was about a boy whose identity we could guess through the descriptions. He had molested the servant maid when she was sleeping in his house. She did not complain because she feared she would be sacked. So he did it again. Some stories were sad and infuriating, some were funny. There was one about a boy who used to take his sister’s school uniform, put it over a pillow and do things to it. Another guy took a pomegranate from the kitchen, made a hole in it and made love to it, and actually returned it to the kitchen.’
‘Were there any stories in which the protagonist was probably Unni?’
‘No.’
At some point in the final year of school, Balki had distanced himself from Unni. He says that in an uncharacteristically obtuse way, with a hint of lame pride about his decision, about his discipline, the way some people would say, expecting a compliment in return, ‘I don’t eat meat.’
‘There was something about him,’ Balki says. ‘Obviously, there was something going on inside his head. And everything he said, everything he did, somehow affected me. He distracted me. And the exams were just a few months away. So I thought it was best to keep away from him. Actually, he didn’t care. He probably didn’t even notice. He was the star, I was just the brilliant guy.’
Unni was increasingly drawn to the shadowy Somen Pillai, and the unremarkable Sai Shankaran. The three spoke in whispers in class, they were rumoured to meet in Somen’s house every evening, they went places together, they had a mysterious purpose. They were on to something, everybody said. Ousep has heard this many times in different forms.
This answers a question Ousep has been waiting to ask. Why did everyone describe Somen and Sai as the closest friends of
Unni and not mention Balki at all? The Unni that everybody remembers is the indecipherable boy of seventeen, and it turns out that in this period Balki was not around Unni.
Balki dismisses Sai as an idiot who was perpetually unhappy because he was afraid that he was an idiot. ‘You know the kind of guy who would not play chess with you because he is afraid that he would be exposed? That’s Sai. Actually, that’s most guys in the world, but you know what I mean.’
Somen Pillai, on the other hand, is more complicated than Ousep had imagined. He had first walked into St Ignatius when he was six, the same year as Unni and Balki. Through a huge expanse of time, his entire boyhood, Somen sat quietly in his place, spoke only reluctantly, did nothing memorable – he never ran, never played, never sang, never danced or acted in a play, and he barely managed to pass every test. He hopped from year to year in a shroud of silence and insignificance. There is a Somen in every class, in every room of the world where men congregate – the quiet one whose opinions are never known. Wherever he exists, he creates a dim corner out of his space. It is not surprising that when Simion Clark was being assaulted by the entire class, Somen was the only student who did nothing. He sat in his place, in his safe corner. In the ten years that they were together in the class, Balki does not remember a single conversation that even mentioned Somen in passing.
‘But he is the key,’ Balki says. ‘Somen Pillai is the person who knows what happened to Unni in the months before he died. The question “why did Unni do what he did” has an answer. I think Somen Pillai knows the answer.’
‘What about Sai?’
‘I think the other two used him as an errand boy. Sai might know something more than he lets on, but I don’t think he is important. Somen Pillai is the person who can help you.’
‘I can’t find him.’
‘I’ve heard.’
‘How do I meet him?’
‘I don’t know.’
Balki rubs his eyebrows, glares intensely at the desk. Unexpectedly, he rises. He says, ‘I have to go now.’ But he stands there, lingering, which is odd. He pouts his lips and stares at Ousep, who decides to say nothing, but he gets the sense that it is important not to take his eyes off the boy as he struggles to make a decision. There is nothing Ousep can do but wait.
The boy, finally, makes the decision.
‘I’ve something to say,’ Balki says.
Ousep points to the chair; the boy lands hard on it. He looks nervous and his breathing is perceptible. He appears his age now. ‘I’ve to get it out of my head. I think I trust you, I don’t know why, but I trust you. I have to say it now or I’ll never say it.’
‘Tell me, Balki.’
‘Unni used to wander in the night,’ Balki says, ‘late in the night, sometimes he would get back home at dawn. You may know this.’
Ousep knows, though he learnt about this long after the boy died. Unni did it only on some nights. He would wait for his father to come home, wait to stand with his mother, and for the storm to pass, and Ousep to fall into his bed. When Unni began to slip out of the house at midnight, or sometimes at dawn, he was probably fifteen, a time when he was still a child in many ways and was fragile enough to be saddened by the ways of his father. His mother tried to stop him but she had no control over him. According to her, and she says it in an accusing way, Unni walked in the peace of the night to relieve
his pain, to be far away from home and to dream of his future, his whole life that lay ahead, which made him happy. But in time he began to enjoy walking down the abandoned lanes and seeing his world emptied of the tame people and replaced by another kind who did not belong to the day. He told his friends about what he saw, the long stretches of time when absolutely nothing happened, nothing stirred, then the appearance of beautiful eunuchs in bridal splendour, and the solitary women going somewhere with a smile. And how he was questioned once by cops and how they turned respectful and offered to drop him home when he spoke to them in English.
‘I had been hearing the night stories of Unni for months,’ Balki says, ‘and I was curious to go with him into the night. Like the boys of my type in Madras I was brought up as if I was a girl. I was not allowed to step out of the house after dark. So, when my parents decided to go to a wedding and leave me alone in the house for a week, I decided to wander with Unni one night and see for myself what he had been talking about. I took my father’s TVS-50 and we went all around Madras. We were breaking the law but the cops did not care. I realized the rules were very different late in the night. We were passing along a dark narrow lane under the Arcot Road flyover when we saw something strange. A woman in a red sari was lying on the pavement. I wanted to know why she was lying there but I didn’t stop. I went straight ahead but Unni asked me to go back. So we went back, parked the TVS and walked to where she was lying. Unni squatted very close to her. So I did the same. All we could do was stare. She was a young, slim woman. Not very pretty or anything but not bad at all. We could smell liquor. She had probably got drunk and passed out. She was a prostitute, I think. I have never seen a prostitute, but if a woman is so drunk that she has passed out on the road, she
must be a prostitute. Unni said, “Do you want to squeeze her breasts?” That’s what he said. I had never touched a woman’s little finger before, as in touched it in an impure way. But now all I had to do was extend my hand and I could squeeze a real woman. “Have you done this before?” I asked Unni. He said, “No. They usually don’t lie around like this.”
‘I was not sure if I should do it but I wanted to. Very badly. I could see her legs. I wanted to do things to her, I was desperate. I was not in control. “Do it,” Unni said. I shook her shoulder and said, “Excuse me madam, wake up, please.” Unni burst out laughing. He knew that I didn’t want to wake her up, I just wanted to touch her. I tried to wake her up by touching her stomach, her arms, her legs, and finally I stopped pretending. I squeezed her breasts. She started mumbling something, I could not understand what she was saying but it was something very sad. We fled. That’s it. That’s what I wanted to tell you.’
‘You said that you were breaking the law when you took your father’s TVS-50 out. What did you mean by that?’
Balki looks baffled, probably because he was expecting a deeper question. ‘It was my father’s TVS-50.’
‘But it’s not illegal to ride your father’s TVS.’
‘I didn’t have a licence,’ he says.
‘You said, “We were breaking the law.”’
‘Neither of us had a licence.’
‘Did Unni squeeze her?’
‘No. That’s the whole point. That’s the way he was. He wanted others to do things, so that he could watch.’
Balki rubs his face with his fat palms. ‘What I did, was it wrong?’ he asks. ‘Did I molest a woman?’
‘Yes.’
Balki raises his voice. ‘But she was lying on the road and I was so desperate.’
Two weeks after the incident, unable to contain his guilt, Balki went to the Kodambakkam police station and confessed. The inspector called several of his men and asked Balki to repeat his confession. And they laughed at him. They said he should be sentenced to death by hanging, and they tried to chase him away. But Balki stood there, he insisted that he be punished. So they let him write down his confession, which he wrote in Tamil. They said they would get in touch with him. But he never heard from them.
‘In your confession, Balki, you obviously gave your name and your address?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the names of the other two?’
‘Yes.’
Balki stares at Ousep unpleasantly. He rises, but then decides to sit down.
‘I am sorry, Balki, I didn’t mean to trick you. So, that night there were three boys on the TVS-50, not two. Isn’t that true?’
Balki does not answer. He toys again with the paperweight.
‘No cop in Madras will fine you for riding a moped without a licence. You know that, Balki,’ Ousep says. ‘The only way you can break the law in the night is by having three people on that thing. Who is the third boy?’
‘I cannot tell you that. It would be unfair to that person.’
‘But you wrote his name in the confession you gave to the police.’
‘Yes. I had gone mad. I don’t know why I did it. But that was a long time ago. I am sure that piece of paper no longer exists.’
‘It exists in the police files. That is the nature of papers and police. I can retrieve it for you if you want.’
‘How will you do that?’
‘A reporter has his ways.’
‘I don’t want you to do anything. I want to forget the matter.’
‘I understand. But, Balki, I’ve run out of people who will talk to me. I want to know the name of this person. He may want to cooperate with me if he knows I have this information.’
‘Then this is going to disappoint you. It is not someone you have not met.’
‘Who is it?’
‘It is not fair to reveal his name.’
‘That’s all right. Be unfair, for Unni’s sake.’
‘You’ve met him before. So what use is this?’
‘He may want to talk at length now.’
‘You’re going to twist his arm now?’
‘I may try and persuade him.’
‘That would compromise my identity.’
‘Yes, but to a person who already knows what you have done.’
Balki looks at the church spire and tries to make a decision. He does not take long. He says, ‘It was Sai.’
‘Thank you, Balki. I have one more question. Did Unni ever talk to you about a corpse?’
‘Yes,’ Balki says, still preoccupied with his guilt. ‘But I think he was just fooling around.’
He has not recovered from his confession. He does not want to talk about anything else now. ‘Unni had this theory,’ he says. ‘According to him, every man, even a regular decent man, has harmed a woman at least once, or will in his lifetime. He really believed that for some reason. I used to argue with him that such statements are plain moronic. I think he made me do that thing on the road so that he could prove his point.’
‘You don’t have to take everything he ever said so seriously.’
‘But he turned out to be right, didn’t he?’
‘Don’t whip yourself,’ Ousep says. ‘Men do things. We can’t help it. That’s all there is to it. As you will discover in time, Balki, the primary choice every man has to make is whether he wants to be himself or if he wants peace.’
THE EIGHTEEN WOMEN AND the clean-shaven evangelist are on their knees, in a tight circle around a small golden cross. They raise their hands and sing ‘Praise the lord’. The woman whose house it is sings the loudest and the other women are careful not to eclipse her voice. Mariamma Chacko does not want to raise her hands because the underarms of her blouse are darned, so she raises her head in compensatory devotion.
This Sunday she will report what she has seen in the room to the parish priest to further milk him and also reconfirm his fear that the light of his authority has been diminished by the more energetic Protestant evangelists. But she must admit that there is something to his fear, there is something eerie about what is happening to the Catholic women of the Kodambakkam circle these days. The daily mass in the church does not satisfy them, they want more than the soft hymns, the sermons and the murmurs of prayers. They want what the young hallelujah evangelists make them do, they want all that dancing and clapping and screaming. And the evangelists are drawing more and more women into their fold.
The evangelist who is with them this afternoon is famous for converting hundreds of Hindu villagers, stunning them with a blessed white powder that makes the sick feel better. It is surprising what crushed paracetamol can do to parched, starving people. In his spell, the Catholic women of Kodambakkam,
too, are now trying to convert their servants and the slum women, and anybody they can find.
How is it that an ordinary man can cast such a spell on women who are far cleverer than him? She wonders whether Unni was right, after all. He told her once, during one of his biblical moods, ‘Truly I say unto you, Mariamma. The fundamental quality of a delusion is that it is contagious. The very purpose of every delusion is to transmit itself to other brains. That is how a delusion survives. On the other hand, Mariamma Chacko, truth can never be transmitted, truth can never travel from one brain to another. Movement is a quality of delusion alone.’
‘What nonsense you talk, Unni. Are you saying that if two people believe in something it simply cannot be the truth?’