MANU JOSEPH.

THE ILLICIT.

HAPPINESS.

OF OTHER.

PEOPLE.

1.

The Underdog Family.

OUSEP CHACKO, ACCORDING TO Mariamma Chacko, is the kind of man who has to be killed at the end of a story. But he knows that she is not very sure about this sometimes, especially in the mornings. He sits at his desk, as usual, studying a large pile of cartoons, trying to solve the only mystery that matters to her. He does not ask for coffee, but she brings it anyway, landing the glass on the wooden desk with minor violence to remind him of last night's disgrace. She flings open the windows, empties his ashtray and arranges the newspapers on the table. And when he finally leaves for work without a word, she stands in the hall and watches him go down the stairs.

On the playground below, a hard brown earth with stray grass, Ousep walks with quick short strides towards the gate. He can see the other men, the good husbands and the good fathers, their black shoes polished, serious shirts already damp in the humid air. They walk to the scooter shed, carrying inverted helmets that contain their outrageously small vegetarian lunches. More men emerge from the stairway tunnels of Block A, which is an austere white building with three floors. Their tidy, auspicious wives in cotton saris now appear in the balconies to bid goodbye. They are mumbling prayers, smiling at other women, peeping with one eye into their own blouses.

The men never greet Ousep. They turn away, or become interested in the ground, or wipe their spectacles. But among their own, they have great affection. They are a fellowship, and they can communicate by just clearing the phlegm in their throats.

'Gorbachev,' a delicate man says.

'Gorbachev,' the other one says.

Having thus completed the analysis of the main story in The Hindu, which is Mikhail Gorbachev's election as the first executive president of the Soviet Union, they walk towards their scooters. A scooter in Madras is a man's promise that he will not return home drunk in the evening. Hard-news reporters like Ousep Chacko consider it an insult to be seen on one, but these men are mostly bank clerks. They now hold the handlebars of their scooters and stand in a languid way. Then they kick suddenly as if to startle the engine into life. They kick many times, some even appear to bounce in the air. Eventually, the engines roar and they ride out, one by one, sitting at the very edge of the front seat as if that is the cheaper option. They will return the same way at six in the evening carrying jasmine flowers for their wives, who will wear them in their freshly washed hair, filling their homes with an aphrodisiacal odour and stirring the peace of their fathers-in-law who live with them, those old men who are so starved for flesh that they fondle children, fondle fully grown men, furtively flap their thighs when they watch women's tennis on TV.

At the gates, the fragile watchman stands in a farcical paramilitary outfit that puffs in the wind, and he cautiously salutes his foe. Ousep nods without looking. That always gets the guard's respect. Ousep turns for a glimpse of the women on the balconies, and they pretend they were not looking at him. On his own balcony on the third floor there is no one.

As he walks towards the far end of the street he is in full view of all the balconies of the four identical buildings on Balaji Lane, in full view of all the housewives and the unmoving old wraiths, who watch with open mouths. Ousep walks fast in the mornings, the little finger of his right hand sticking out as if to receive a signal. From the other gates more scooters emerge. Some of the riders stare at him as if it is safer to meet his eyes when they are wearing helmets, which is true in a way. Women disappear from the balconies munching the final strands of prayer, women appear on the balconies preoccupied with many things. When they see him, their eyes rest on him a moment longer to accommodate a quick judgement. Considering everything, considering all that has passed and the way he is, it is reasonable that people should stare at him, but he hates it. They may find it hilarious if they are told this but the truth is that Ousep Chacko is a man who wants to be inconspicuous, who suffers when eyes are on him. But then the fate of shy people is that all their fears usually come true.

As things are, it does not take much to be a spectacle on this narrow tarred lane. It waits all day to be startled by the faintest hint of strangeness passing through. Such as a stray working woman in the revolutionary sleeveless blouse, who has the same aura here as a divorcee. A man with a ponytail. A north Indian girl in jeans so tight you can see daylight between her legs. It is as if such apparitions are a sign that the future, which has arrived in other places, is now prospecting the city. Here now is the final stand of an age, the last time one can profile a street in Madras and be correct. Men are managers, mothers are housewives. And all bras are white. Anglo-Indian girls who walk in floral frocks are Maria.

That is how the people on Balaji Lane would remember these days many years later. And when they remembered these times they would also remember, with a chuckle, the Malayalee Catholic family, the cuckoos among the crows the despicable man called Ousep Chacko, his stranded wife who told her bare walls all her reasonable grudges, and their son Thoma, who was weak in maths. What became of them, did they survive the sheer length of life, did they make it through?

And they would remember Unni, of course. They would never forget Unni Chacko. 'Remember Unni?' they would say. 'Did anybody ever find out why he did that? Why did Unni Chacko do what he did?' Nobody would ever mention what Unni actually did. It is such a terrifying word in any language.

Ousep does not want to think of his boy so early, at least not until the first interview of the day. If his mind drifted in that direction he would be lost once again in all its familiar traps, and he would be asking himself the same exasperating questions a thousand times. He wants to think of something else, something inconsequential. But the image of Unni Chacko is already assembling itself in Ousep's head, staring back at his father from a self-portrait. What Ousep sees is a boy with keen narrow eyes, a broad forehead and a high mop of thick hair. A seventeen-year-old cartoonist, an exceptional cartoonist, but too young to accept that subtlety is not always a mask of mediocrity. Like most cartoonists, the boy does not talk much, and when he does speak he is not very funny. Most of the time he is excruciatingly terse, even with his mother, whom he loves for exaggerated reasons the only way sons can love their mothers.

That is what Ousep sees; beyond this he knows very little about his son. There is no shame in accepting that. No matter what their delusions are, parents do not really know their children. Ousep is just a man who knows less than the other fathers. But he has studied every inch of the sixty-three cartoons and comics by Unni that lie about the house, most of them in a wooden trunk. Sixty-four if Ousep includes one inexplicable comic that has landed by chance in his hands, which he has hidden from Mariamma. Not an easy thing to do in that house. He has hidden it inside the radio. He has to unscrew the back panel every time he wants to take it out.

Somewhere in Unni's cartoons and comics is the clue that will explain everything. That is what Ousep believes. There is nothing else left to believe, really.

Most of Unni's works are comics, their stories told over several pages, through elaborate black-and-white sketches with a sudden dash of watercolour here and there. There is no single theme that unites all his works, and there are no dark superhero stories as people might imagine. But, for some reason, there is a disproportionate number of comics that lampoon the human search for the meaning of life.

In the comic that is titled Absolute Truth, a blank white envelope floats through deep space, orbits strange worlds and finally heads towards Earth. When it enters the Earth's atmosphere, the envelope burns and what emerges is another white envelope. It has 'Absolute Truth' written on it. It floats down and falls on an endless field. A bare-chested farmer picks it up, opens the envelope, takes out a sheet of paper. He reads it and starts laughing uncontrollably. He passes it on to his wife who, too, begins to laugh. She shows it to the infant in her arm, who becomes breathless with laughter. The farmer passes the Absolute Truth to his neighbour, who holds his stomach, rolls about his cabbage farm and laughs. The letter changes hands across homes, villages, across cities, across the whole world, leaving people hysterical with laughter at the long-awaited discovery of absolute truth.

In Enlightenment, a sage in robes is meditating; he is sitting on a high snowy peak. Seasons change, storms pass, but nothing bothers him. He gets a massive erection, which subsides in time, but the man is undisturbed, unaware of what is happening to him and around him. Mountain climbers arrive with their national flags and leave disappointed when they find someone already on the summit. The sage becomes very old, his beard turns white. Finally, he becomes radiant. A halo appears behind him. He has achieved enlightenment. He opens his eyes looking totally stunned. He screams, 'Shit, I am a cartoon.'

There are very few dialogues in Unni's comics and the absence of prose lends a brooding, abstract quality to his works, especially in one of his most ambitious stories, Beatles, Crossing, which is twenty-one pages long. It begins with a red beetle standing on one side of a broad black road. The beetle says, 'I want to go to the other side.' And it starts crossing the road. The comic then cuts to the four Beatles performing in various parts of the world, against backdrops of iconic monuments. Everywhere they go there are huge delirious crowds. At one point in the comic there is a question: 'Why Is Ringo Starr Not As Famous As The Other Three Beatles?' Under the question is a portrait of the four Beatles performing. At the bottom of the page is the answer: 'Because He Was Always Sitting'. Could this be true? As the story unfolds, it appears that the Beatles are slowly growing sad and discontent. They come to India and meet holy men, who are always in yogic poses. The Beatles begin to meditate, wear Indian clothes, get into extraordinary yogic contortions, play Indian classical instruments, shit on the banks of a river. But then they become sad and lost once again. They return to England, return to their old lives. And one day, they cross a road, they walk across a zebra crossing. All through this, the red beetle has been making its difficult progress across the same road, narrowly escaping violent death under the tyres of speeding vehicles. The final window of the comic has the triumphant red beetle, who has crossed the road and reached the pavement, which is strikingly identical to the pavement from which he had started his difficult journey. He says, 'I have crossed over to the other side.'

Ousep snaps out of the comic world because he is reminded of something unpleasant, something that vaguely resembles a herbivorous animal's petty fear of life, but he is not sure what has made him think of this. Then he recognizes what it is. The sight of three adolescent schoolboys who have just emerged from a gate and are now walking in his direction. One of them has sacred ash smeared on his forehead in three straight lines, as if a cycle has run over him. They are in school uniform white shirts that are already slipping out of their khaki trousers. They don't walk erect, there is no spring in them, there is no joy. The boys stare at him with meaning; he returns their stares without contempt.

The most foolish description of the young is that they are rebellious. The truth is that they are a fellowship of cowards. It is true anywhere in the world, but the fear of the adolescent boys on Balaji Lane is exceptional. They are terrified of everything, of life, of their future, of friends doing better than them, of falling off their cycles, of big trucks and large men, and of beautiful women. The only thing that does not scare them is calculus.

They might have turned out a bit differently if they had not been so retarded by a long torturous preparation for one engineering entrance exam. The day they were born and were diagnosed with having a penis, their fate was decided to one day take the Joint Entrance Exam. The toughest exam in the world, their fathers say. One in a hundred would make it. It has been over twenty years since anyone from the colony has got through. Their fathers tell them every day of their lives, sometimes holding a leather belt in their hands, that the JEE alone will decide their lives because it will eventually take them to America on a full scholarship. On a street where every boy knows that his future rests on a single test with multiple-choice questions, it is appropriate that the four identical buildings here are named A, B, C and D.

As the three boys pass Ousep, he hears one of them ask, 'Tan 2x is equal to?' The other two answer simultaneously in a burst of triumph, 'Two tan x by one minus tan square x.'

THE BOY SEES OUSEP walking towards him and turns his face away, like a wounded lover who truly does not wish reconciliation. Sai Shankaran, a close friend of Unni, according to general consensus, waits for his bus every morning at the Liberty bus stop. The last few weeks, Ousep has come here almost every morning to torment him. Sai claims he has revealed all that he knows and has nothing more to say. But Ousep does not believe that, he wants to break him. That should not be very difficult. Sai was seventeen when he was slapped by his father in front of his friends for playing cards. He is twenty now but he still looks like a boy who can be slapped around by an older male.

Sai stands in his spineless way, young but antiquated, studious but not clever, a thick steel watch on his wrist, his oiled black hair combed in the good-boy hairstyle. He looks like the past of an old man.

He failed all the engineering entrance exams that he had taken, and scored just eighty-nine per cent in the twelfth-standard board exams. So he endures the terrifying ignominy of studying physics in just another obsolete arts and science college where Jesuit brothers and blind people go to study English literature. He is in the final year now, but, still unaccustomed to failure, he goes through life like a ghost and probably avoids all the cousins and friends who go to engineering colleges. Sai will learn to be happy again one day, he will even imagine that he is not worthless. He does not know it yet but the simple fact is that he will make it. Ambition is the capacity for unhappiness and Sai has a lot of that to pull through.

And one day he will land in the United States, just like almost everybody else from his class. And one evening he will meet his old friends at a vegetarian restaurant. When they run out of things to say, someone will say, with a gentle smile, 'Remember Unni Chacko?' And through the silence that the name will cast he will tell himself that Unni Chacko may have laughed at him once upon a time but as things stand, Sai has won. And Unni had long ago lost.

Sai and Unni, taken together, must have been an odd sight. Sai, always tense, toiling, afraid that he is a moron and groomed from childhood to believe that intelligence is purely a mathematical ability. Unni, handsome in a careless way, and passing through life with the lethargy of an artist. It is hard to accept there was any love or respect between them. That any two men in the world have real affection between them is itself a myth, chiefly of the two men. But Sai and Unni, especially, are impossible friends. One must have used the other.

'I am here,' Ousep says. Sai's head is already turned away, so he cranes his neck and looks beyond the horizon to stress that he is not interested in talking. 'I hope you've changed your mind, Sai. Hope you've something more to tell me.'

This is how it goes every morning. Ousep talking, Sai silent. 'I hate doing this, Sai, I hate bothering you like this, but I have no choice. I know there is something you're not telling me.'

Sai's chest heaves, he shuffles a bit and makes an exaggerated gesture of putting his palm over his eyes and trying to divine the number of an approaching bus. But it appears that it is not his bus, and he makes another dramatic face of great dismay. The city is full of terrible actors. That is what historians never say about Madras, it is filled with hams. The bus arrives fully packed, spilling a swarm of tiny starved young men who would not have made it this far in life if it had not been for all those free vaccinations. Dozens of them, some in trousers, many in lungis, are still dangling from the doors and windows. Two cops in plain clothes who have been waiting on the road take the sticks they had hidden in the back of their shirts, and start hitting the legs of the danglers, who now try to surge into the bus, screaming and laughing.

The commotion passes and there is reasonable quiet for the moment. Just speeding vehicles, and their horns. 'I heard something yesterday,' Ousep says. 'You, Unni and Somen Pillai went to meet a nun who had taken a lifelong vow of silence. You didn't tell me about this. See, this is what I mean. There are some things you didn't tell me. Why, Sai? Why didn't you tell me?' Sai remains silent, as expected, and cranes his neck again. 'Why would three boys go to meet a nun who does not speak?' Ousep asks. 'Say something, talk to me. I am meeting her tomorrow. What must I ask her?'

Sai's stoic silence is a clever strategy. It does frustrate Ousep and make him feel silly. Or is Ousep imagining things? Maybe it is not a strategy, maybe the boy has truly told him everything that he thought was significant.

'OK, don't tell me anything, Sai. Just tell me how I can meet Somen Pillai. Take me to Somen Pillai. That's all I ask. Somen Pillai.'

A look of immense relief comes over Sai. His bus has finally arrived. He looks without affection at Ousep and says what he has said before. 'Why have you started probing again? What happened?'

'Nothing has happened.'

'People say you've found something. That's why you're hounding all his classmates again.'

'They don't know what they are talking about.'

'I hear you have been trying to meet everyone.'

'That's true.'

'Why are you doing this now? Why now? After three years. Why?'

Why now? Why now? That is what people ask Ousep every day.

'Just give up,' Sai says. 'Get on with your life. That's all I can say.'

Sai wades through the layers of damp bodies on the footboard of the bus, and makes his way in. He will squeeze himself safely between the men, feel his wallet at all times, and take great care to ensure that he does not brush against the women because he is precisely the sort of harmless fruit the ladies in the bus wait to slap and punch and stab with the sharp end of their floral umbrellas for the times when they are touched and poked, the elastic of their underwear pulled and released like a catapult by the flying squads of college boys who board the packed buses just to do that.

There is an untitled comic by Unni about one of these squads, which shows how they do what they do, and how much they enjoy it. The comic ends in the distant future of the five boys of the gang. All of them are respectable men who go home every evening to a loving traditional wife and two adoring children.

After Sai's bus leaves, only a young woman and her little daughter are left at the bus stop. The woman and the girl have yellow faces from a turmeric treatment the previous night to make them fairer. The daughter is playing a private game. She pats her mother's buttocks and runs away giggling, returns to pat again and run a few feet. She keeps doing it. The mother stands looking in one direction, hoping to see her bus. A man appears and stands behind the woman. The daughter stops playing the game now and begins to toy with a chocolate wrapper she has found on the ground. The man gently pats the woman's back. She thinks it is her daughter, so she stands there without any expression. The man pats her again and looks away. He pats her at short intervals, and finally he lets his hand stay on her. Ousep stares at the scene without opinion, without outrage. A man's hand on a woman's arse and the woman, yawning now, looking at the world go by.

It is a moment that has no meaning. It is as if the tired charade of human life with its great pursuits and history and wounds and deep convictions has collapsed, and the world has been suddenly revealed as a place that has no point, that does not need the hypothesis of meaning to explain its existence.

IT IS A MISFORTUNE to be in the presence of a writer, even a failed writer, to be seen by him, be his passing study and remain in his corrupt memory. It is like the insult of a corpse on the road by a war photographer. Ousep wonders whether cartoonists are writers, he hopes they have different minds. He is with a lot of them and all of them are looking at him. What do they see? A man with silver-and-black hair that falls in curls at his nape, and a journalistic French beard. Surely a creative type, like them. Or do they see more than that, do they see a man illuminated by failure, a tragic father who is still probing the life of his son? Should he try to achieve a feeble stoop and somewhat moist eyes, look weak and dependent, make them careless about what they choose to say?

The Society of Amateur Cartoonists meets once a month in the Madras Christian College, in a portion of a long corridor. The far end of the sunlit corridor frames a huddle of ancient trees that pretends to hide a thick forest within its darkness. Usually, not more than twenty cartoonists attend these meetings but today, because word had spread that Unni Chacko's father wanted to see them, there are nearly fifty cartoonists of various ages, all of them sitting in a crescent on the ground. Ousep is among them, he has refused the offer of a foldable chair. In the small crowd, there are five identical bald Buddhist monks in saffron robes, who look like giant infants. And just two girls in jeans and T-shirt who survey the others with the amused look of a newsreader who is finished with political news and is about to announce that the lioness in the Vandalur Zoo has delivered four healthy cubs.

Ousep did not know that his son was a member of such a group until a few days ago when someone mentioned it to him in passing. Unni was in the society for just a few months, he was among the youngest they have ever admitted, but people here remember him in a way that suggests he was important. When Ousep walked into the gathering, everyone stood up and clapped. After the fuss ended and Ousep did not have to nod graciously any more, the president of the society formally introduced him as 'chief reporter of the UNI'.

Ousep cannot deny that, but it reminds him that he would never be introduced as the greatest writer Kerala has ever produced. When he was young, everybody said that was his destiny. But then the years passed and somehow he did not write his great novel. He decayed in a state of gentle happiness. Or is it just that he did not truly believe he could write a brilliant novel? Many years ago, when Mariamma was still interested in him, she had told him, while sticking a stamp on an envelope, 'Strong people write bad stories.' Why has the comment stayed with him? Was she calling him strong or was it a cruel review of his short stories?

OUSEP TELLS THE CARTOONISTS, 'I don't want you to solve the puzzle for me,' which is a lie, of course. 'I want you to tell me what you remember. I want to know Unni Chacko better, that's all there is to this.'

Nobody speaks after that, they stare at him. It is as if he is a wounded presence. But then, slowly, the silence gives way to festive murmurs and even laughter. Through all this, Ousep's eye scans the gathering for the quiet ones, who may know what he really wants to know.

'Way beyond his age,' the president is saying. He is a large man with an enormous paunch and a thick moustache. 'Unni was way beyond seventeen.' The man is probably in his late thirties and Ousep finds it hard to accept that his child used to know such men, grown men, fat men. 'Unni didn't like to get into the conventional superhero-supervillain kind of stuff, you know,' the man says. 'But he created a superhero series. Stunning work, stunning.'

Unni's superheroes, according to this man, did not have any useful powers. They could not fly, they did not have muscles, they did not even wear tight outfits. They wore shirts and trousers, and they possessed silly gifts. The Styleman, for instance, could comb his hair by just moving the skin on his scalp. The Staplerman could staple anything with his fingers. These heroes somehow valiantly fought equally ridiculous villains. Ousep has not seen the series, it is not among the collection at home. There were probably several works that Unni destroyed for some reason.

'I remember a single-panel cartoon by Unni,' a pleasant boy with affluent skin says. 'It has an old woman telling her old husband, "Let's go to a restaurant for dinner tonight and talk about you, you and you."' There is mild laughter, like a passing breeze.

A delicate silence falls as people decide what they want to share. Someone begins to giggle. It is a slender effeminate boy with a jovial face. He says, 'Unni had a very serious problem. He had this artistic objection to the love symbol. He said it doesn't look like a heart, he said it looks more like a red arse.' Everybody laughs but soon a debate erupts over the red heart. Some like the symbol, they think it is a stroke of genius on a par with something called the Smiley. But others take Unni's side. They do see it as a red arse. As the debate collapses into a good-natured commotion, the jovial boy stands up and threatens to take off his clothes to prove his point. Everybody begs him not to do it. Some cartoonists throw nervous glances at Ousep, probably to check whether they are being disrespectful, insensitive maybe. So Ousep maintains a sporting smile. The boy bends forward, raising his arse in the air. 'Look at it from this angle,' he says, and runs his long thin hand over the shape of his haunches. 'See, can you see, my bum is the symbol of love.'

As the debate continues, Ousep whispers to the president, who is sitting beside him, and asks why the two girls have nothing to say about Unni. 'They joined us long after Unni stopped coming here,' the president says. 'They don't know him but they have heard of him. Everybody has heard about him. We talk a lot about Unni.'

It appears, at least for now, there is not a single girl in Madras who knows Unni well. How unfortunate it is for Unni that he does not live in the extravagant memory of an infatuated young woman.

There is a full-bearded young man in the gathering, who is somehow isolated from all that is going on, but he has been staring at Ousep for a while. He looks away when Ousep catches his gaze. 'Who is that?' Ousep asks in a whisper. 'That bearded boy in the T-shirt which has a cow's skull on it.'

'That's Beta,' the president says. 'It's his pen name. Nobody knows his real name.'

'Beta as in alpha, beta, gamma?'

'I think so. Yes. I am surprised he is here. He does not come often. Mr Chacko, if he says anything about Unni, don't mind him. Something is wrong with him.'

Soon, the cartoonists forget Ousep, which is a good development. They are still talking about Unni but they are talking among themselves and not putting on a show any more. They have even stopped throwing glances at him, except Beta, who stares like a child. Ousep listens with full attention to what the cartoonists are saying, though he has heard versions of all this before, many times Unni's theory that the unfortunate are not as miserable as the world imagines. That urchins, the handicapped, orphans, prisoners and others are much happier than people think. And that language is a trap, that a dark evolutionary force has created language to limit human thought. That writers are overrated fools. That all religions came from ancient comic writers. And that the ultimate goal of comics is the same as the purpose of humanity to break free from language.

There is now a sudden silence as if everybody has finished talking at once. And it appears that nobody has anything more to say. But then a feeble voice from somewhere in the last row says, 'He read my mind, he actually read my mind.' It is a boy with expensive rimless spectacles. He tries to laugh to convey that he does not really believe in the paranormal.

Ousep has heard this, too. Unni's classmates have told him about his son's rumoured ability but Ousep has met only three before this day who have experienced it first-hand. The cartoonist here is the fourth. The boy says, 'He asked me to think of a number. I thought of a number and he guessed it. Simple.'

'Do you remember what the number was?' Ousep asks, though he is certain that the answer is 'thirty-three'.

'Interesting question,' the boy says.

'Do you remember the number?'

'I will never forget the number,' the boy says. 'It was thirty-three.'

As the evening grows, the silences stretch longer, and the cartoonists clearly have very little left to say. Ousep asks, 'Does any of you know who Somen Pillai is?' The cartoonists shake their heads. Nobody knows Somen Pillai here.

The silence that follows is long and decisive. The society looks restless now, the cartoonists want to leave. Some boys are wearing their bags around their shoulders, ready to stand. How long can people talk about a seventeen-year-old boy, really? The president grabs the chance to raise his oversized black pen and says, 'Unni Chacko.' The cartoonists raise their pens and repeat, 'Unni Chacko.' The president makes a squiggle on a sheet of paper and gives it to Ousep. It is a caricature of Unni, a very good one considering that it was made in just seconds. Others stand in line to hand their quick squiggles to Ousep. In most of these comic portraits, his boy has acquired angelic wings and a halo. One has him sitting in the clouds, looking bored. That breaks Ousep's heart. To imagine the eternal boredom of his child. He wishes there to be no eternity, he wishes that even for his foes.

Beta is not part of the queue of cartoonists who are handing in their tributes. But he stands leaning on a fat, ancient pillar and looks on. When everybody is done with their tributes, Ousep holds the thick bunch of papers in his hand and walks to Beta.

'What is your name?' Ousep asks.

'Beta.'

'What's your real name?'

'What's real about a name?'

'Why are you not Alpha?'

'Because I am Beta.'

Some of the cartoonists who are leaving look with passing curiosity at Beta, who does not meet their eyes. He appears clever and formidable, the type of bearded young man who would call himself Alpha. But he has restive eyes and they throw suspicious glances at distant objects. He is now staring at the five monks who are walking away down the lawns in a swarm of college girls.

'I feel you want to say something to me,' Ousep says.

'Yes,' Beta says, returning his steady gaze to Ousep. 'I've something to say but it is nothing important, is that all right?'

'That's all right. I am not here to dig out important things.'

'That's not true. You're here to solve the puzzle.'

'I am here to understand my son better.'

'As you say. I won't argue with you,' Beta says. 'I remember once when I attended one of these dumb meetings, Unni told me that he was working on a graphic novel. He had an idea but he didn't know how to get into it.'

'What was the idea?'

Ousep takes a moment to realize that Beta has launched straight into the story. Thousands of years ago in the history of man, a great darkness has fallen. The war between good and evil has ended. And it has ended with the complete triumph of evil and a total, irrevocable extermination of good. Evil is cunning, it quickly splits itself into two into apparent good and evil, so that mankind is under the delusion that the great conflict is still raging and it will not go in search of the truth.

'So all that we think is good,' Beta says, 'love and art and enlightenment, and all that we think is the pursuit of truth is actually a form of evil. That was the idea. He had to work characters into it. Make something out of it.'

'It is a good story.'

'It's an idea. It's not a story. He had to find the story.'