Read Online The Illicit Happiness of Other People by Manu Joseph - Free Book Online

His elder son Unni Chacko died three years ago in mysterious circumstances.’
    ‘Get down,’ she says. ‘And go to sleep.’
    Ousep removes the noose, somewhat gloriously, as if it is the garland of his fans, those garlands he used to receive when he was much younger. She helps him off the chair. He drags his chair back to the table.
    ‘Why are you looking so sad, Mariammo,’ he says. ‘Don’t look so sad.’
    ‘I am not sad.’
    ‘The secret to happiness is not to have any expectations from people.’
    ‘I know that.’
    ‘Especially from the people who matter most to you.’
    ‘I know that, too.’
    ‘Go away, go.’
    She leaves quietly. He changes, turns off the lights, bangs the door shut, and goes to sleep.
    Mariamma stands facing the large portrait of Unni in the hall. She runs her hand over its surface, though he seems more lifeless when she does that. He surveys his mother with a knowing smile. He has her beautiful nose, her skin of high pedigree, her colour. He has his father’s high forehead. Some people think Unni was arrogant, which is not such a bad thing, not as bad as people make it out to be. But people have their way of thinking. So they have a faint triumph in their voices when they speak of Unni’s death, his fall from the height. It is such a defeat, it seems, to die.
    There is nothing that she understands about his death. People say something must have happened in those twenty minutes when he was home, or something must have happened on the stairway. Or maybe he got a phone call. Maybe he saw something. But what could have happened, really? Nothing makes sense. Some people say he was not normal, he was drifting towards dark thoughts, he was too clever for his age.
    In the days that followed Unni’s death, his father tried his best to find out what had happened. He spoke to almost all the classmates and friends of Unni, but in the end nothing could explain what the boy had done. And Ousep gave up. ‘Some boys don’t make it, that’s all there is to it,’ he said, and closed the chapter.
    So what has happened now? What has landed on Ousep’s lap? ‘An unexpected message,’ he tells the walls in his drunken moments, ‘provided by the unnatural level of incompetence ofthe Indian postal department.’ He does not say anything more, she has asked him several times, she has even asked him through crafty whispers during his deep sleep, but he does not say what he has found. Whatever it is, it has made him knock on doors again, he is asking questions again.
    There is only one clue that Mariamma holds, and she knows it is not as insignificant as Ousep imagines. Unni left without leaving a note for his mother, he left without explaining his action to her.
    She turns off the lights and wanders in the hall, wanders in the darkness, feeling the peace of the quiet, imagining that she sees the same emptiness that Unni sees. What is so great about the light that falls on the world, what is so great about what we see that a woman must mourn her son? But then she cries.
    She wakes up early in the morning, to the fragrance of paradisiacal breakfasts and the long whistles of steam from the kitchens of happy people, and the monologues of children memorizing their lessons. And Subbulakshmi’s morning chant from a thousand bad radios, which sounds like a medieval woman’s list of complaints in Sanskrit about the men of her time.
    THOMA AND HIS MOTHER tiptoe into Ousep’s bedroom. His lungi is still hanging from the fan as a noose. Ousep is sleeping fully naked, his mouth slightly open, legs spread wide. They can see his large luminous testicles, which look rough and industrial. ‘Like something the Soviets have made,’ Mariamma says. She covers her man with a bedsheet, muttering, ‘He has no shame even when he is asleep.’ Thoma wonders whether one day his own organ will be so large, and assume this weird asymmetricshape that has no name even in Euclid’s geometry. He is too shy to ask his mother