Even a haircut is a form of humiliation. The St Anthony's hairstylist, who has an image of the centrally bald St Anthony on his signboard, has been instructed by the parish priest to cut Thoma's hair free of charge. So, the man there always makes Thoma wait for over an hour and cuts the hair of the people who have come after him. It is when there is no sign of a paying customer that the man asks Thoma to sit in his swivel chair. He never gives Thoma a white apron, never gives him a head massage as he does the others, and never holds a mirror behind him to show him his new haircut from all angles. In fact, when it is all done, he makes Thoma stand in front of him, and whips him hard several times with a short towel, making it look as if he is only dusting him.

An hour before Unni died, he had come here for a haircut. Ousep has interviewed the barber many times. 'What's your father looking for?' the man says. 'He keeps coming here to ask me if there was anything strange about Unni that day. I keep telling him Unni did not speak a word but your father keeps dropping in to ask the same questions again and again.'

'Was there anything unusual about Unni that day?' Thoma asks. The man whips him with the short towel harder than he usually does.

Thoma wants to investigate. He wants to ask questions, good questions, trick questions, he wants to probe, extract clues from the minds of people and find the reason why Unni did what he did. But when he thinks about it, he does not know where to begin. It is so difficult to solve mysteries. Will Thoma ever solve a mystery in his life?

IN HIS DREAM, WHICH Thoma knows is a morning dream, he is a tall, smart and deadly bodyguard walking with the chief minister down an endless corridor. Terrorists with machine guns appear from nowhere and take aim. Thoma, in slow motion, pulls the chief minister towards him and uses the man as a body shield. The chief minister is soon riddled with bullets, but Thoma is safe. He wakes up feeling sorry for the old man.

He has a long, nervous bath, washes his hair with soap and wears his best shirt, which was once Unni's. Thoma does not own a pair of trousers. Shorts are all right, he does not mind them, but then he has to sit very carefully when he is with Mythili. If she sees through the gaps in his shorts, sees the old checked curtain of the Chacko household now reborn as his underwear, he will have no choice but to go to the terrace and jump head first.

That makes him wonder whether Unni had actually killed himself out of shame. There cannot be a better reason for a person to die than shame. But it is hard to imagine Unni being ashamed of anything. He was so strong, so superior to everything around him, even though he was as poor as Thoma.

At ten, the ominous maths textbook in his hand, he rings Mythili's doorbell. His mother is watching from her doorway. He whispers to her, 'Go inside.' But she stands there because she is a curious person. When Mrs Balasubramanium finally opens the door, the two women look at each other across the short corridor and they imagine that they have smiled.

Mythili's mother takes him to the door of her daughter's bedroom, where Mythili stands waiting. 'Very bad idea, Mythili,' she tells her daughter. 'You've so much work to do. Why are you taking on this burden?' Mythili glares at her mother, drags Thoma in by his wrist and bangs the door shut. Mythili's hand, he will always remember, is very cold.

She is in a half-skirt and T-shirt, the way she normally is at home. She does not wear such things when she is in full public view. She is a respectable girl, and Thoma likes respectable girls, though he is not sure why. She clasps a hairband in her mouth, and holds her thick black hair above her head as if she wants to lift herself in the air. She ties her hair in a ponytail because he has come Mythili has performed a set of actions as a reaction to Thoma. He feels a moment of uncontrollable joy around his temples.

She sits on her bed with her bare legs crossed, and asks for his maths book. 'Sit there, Thoma,' she says, pointing to a solitary chair facing her. He senses an affection in her tone. She said 'Thoma'. She need not have used his name but she did.

The last time Thoma was in her room was about three years ago, the day before Unni died. It has not changed since that day. Her windows are covered by a pink floral curtain that he does not remember, but her Godrej steel cupboard with a mirror on it, her tiny wooden desk and cot are in the same positions as before. Her bed is still the same, narrow even for a single bed, as if she should not share it with her own shadow.

She is going through the pages of the textbook carefully, with a smile, as if it is a family album. He has not seen anyone smile at a maths textbook before.

'Mythili,' he says.

'Yes.'

He does not know why he opened his mouth. He had just wanted to utter her name in his mind, he did not expect any sound to come out of his stupid mouth. He has nothing to say, really. She is looking at him now.

'What?' she says.

'Mythili, is it true that the home ministry is planning to change the value of pi from 3.14159 to just 3?'

'Who told you this?'

'Unni.'

She puts her hand on her mouth and laughs. Her fingers are clean and slender, and her nails are painted in a girlish colour whose name he does not know. 'Unni,' she says, and when she returns to the maths book he can see that she is somewhat distracted. She has a ghostly smile, which bursts into laughter again. 'Unni was such an idiot,' she says. She turns a few pages, her smile slowly receding. 'You are wearing his shirt,' she says without looking up. 'I remember this shirt.'

Thoma is ashamed, he feels he is going to faint. He says, 'My mother has bought me a lot of shirts but I like wearing Unni's old shirts. You know, an old shirt feels softer than a new one. This was not altered. This was the shirt he used to wear when he was as old as me.'

'I know, I know this shirt. You look like him in it,' she says. Her large, serious eyes scan his face and he hopes she does not doubt her own analysis. Unni was handsome beyond ambiguity, and it is a good sign that Mythili sees his brother in him.

'Do I look exactly like him? Or is it fifty per cent. Or is it ten per cent?'

'In a very mathematical mood, are we?'

'I am very mathematical actually. When I think, deep inside my mind, I am mathematical.'

'When Unni was your age he used to look a lot like you. Now that you are wearing his shirt, I feel I am talking to him. It feels a bit strange. But then he had a bigger forehead and his eyes were more narrow, and they were not as innocent as yours. Even when he was a little boy he had the eyes of an old man who has seen it all.'

'You remember so much, Mythili?' he says, and uses his fingers to make a quick calculation. 'When Unni was twelve, you were just eight.'

'Girls remember,' she says.

'That's what Unni used to say. Girls remember everything. I am beginning to forget his face, can you believe that? Some days when I try to think of him I cannot remember his face. I have to come home and see his photograph on the wall. You know where the frame of Jesus Christ used to be, we have a big picture of Unni there now.'

'I remember his face very well,' she says.

'But when he died you were only as old as I am now.'

'I was thirteen, you are twelve. Big difference.'

'It's just one year.'

'Big difference.'

She says they must now stop chatting and focus on the maths. 'Angles,' she says.

'That night,' Thoma says, remembering something, 'my father and I saw you walking to your door that night. Where were you coming from?'

'Nowhere,' she says. 'I thought I heard a sound outside our door. I went to look. I went up the steps to see if the sound was coming from the terrace.'

'You were wearing proper clothes.'

'What does that mean, Thoma?'

'You were wearing clothes you usually wear when you are outside your house.'

'I was outside my house, wasn't I?'

Thoma whispers, 'What do you think the sound was?'

'I don't know.'

'You are very brave, Mythili.'

She shows him her palm and says that there are angles between her fingers.

Thoma wonders whether he is in love with her. Strangely, he has not thought of it before. And the question terrifies him because the fate of love in Madras is neatly divided into four kinds of suicide. Lovers who know that their parents will never let them marry go to a cheap hotel room, get into wedding clothes and eat rat poison. If they elope instead, their parents will consume the same rat poison. If it is only the girl's parents who object to the marriage, she is most likely to immolate herself. Men who are spurned by girls almost always hang themselves from a ceiling fan. Men very rarely set fire to themselves for a girl.

'If there are no angles between two lines, the value of the angle is either zero or 180 degrees. Thoma, idiot, are you listening?'

'Mythili, you think Unni died because of some love problem?'

She makes a fist and knocks his head with her knuckles. How do all the bloody women in Madras know how to do this? He feels humiliated for a moment but then Mythili rubs his head.

He is glad he washed his hair with soap. 'You must listen, Thoma,' she says.

But they do chat about this and that. He has figured out that the best way to get her to talk is to talk about Unni.

'Mythili, do you know the names of all the players in the national women's basketball team?'

'Of course not. Who would know something like that?'

'That's what Unni said. He said nobody would know the women's basketball team. He said when you want to impress someone just make up ten names of girls and claim that this is the Indian women's basketball team. Nobody will be able to check.'

She takes a thick strand of hair that is falling over her face and pushes it behind her ear. 'Unni was always up to something,' she says. 'Remember how he used to read my mind? How do you think he did that, Thoma?'

Yes, he remembers. Unni would ask her to pick a card from a pack and put it back. He would then stare deep into her eyes, as she giggled or fluttered her eyelids in an exaggerated way. And he would guess the card she had picked. He was right every time, and Mythili would be stunned. She would ask him to leave the room when she was about to pick the card, and she would hide the card, chew it or even tear it into many pieces, but Unni would just walk in and guess it right. She even started going up to the terrace to pick the card in private, but Unni always guessed the card. Some days he would pretend that he was unable to read her mind because of too much activity inside her head. But the next morning, when she opened her school bag or a notebook, she would find the card she had picked. And she would shriek so loudly that Thoma and Unni could hear her in their house.

'You think he could really read minds, Thoma?'

Thoma cannot bear it, but he doesn't say anything.

'You know what he told me?' she says. 'He told me that once upon a time in this world there lived a secret race of humans with supernatural powers. They invented cheap magic tricks and spread them far and wide so that people believed all supernatural acts to be just magic tricks. That's what Unni told me. I still remember because I used to think that Unni was one of those supernatural people.'

'I think Unni was good at some tricks. He did not have supernatural powers. I am very sure he had no supernatural powers, Mythili. I think only Pele is supernatural.'

'Pele?' she says, spitting out the word. 'From where did you pick Pele?'

'Pele is a great man,' he says. 'Do you know who he is?'

'Yes, Thoma, I know who Pele is. Everybody knows Pele.'

'He is a genius.'

'Yes, he is a genius.'

Thoma is comforted that he has created reasonable competition for Unni.

'Pele is mind-blowing,' he says. 'Only Pele is supernatural.'

'But what a dumb name, though,' she says. 'Pele. How funny.'

Thoma cannot believe it. This is the moment he has always been waiting for but now he feels he is going to faint. This is a miracle. The first miracle in his life.

'Not his real name,' he says softly.

'Pele is not his name?'

'His real name is Edson Arantes do Nascimento.'

'How do you know these things, Thoma? Not bad.'

'He was a Russian spy,' he says.

'That's rubbish.'

'He used to work for the KGB. KGB is the Russian secret service.'

'I know what KGB is,' she says.

'Usually girls do not know what KGB is,' he says. 'In fact, very few people in the world know what KGB stands for.'

'What does it stand for?'

'Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti.'

She rubs his head fondly. 'I think you read a lot, Thoma.'

'A lot. I read all the time.'

The whole day, Thoma wanders down the lanes of Kodambakkam with a Sense of Well-being and with sympathy for everybody he sees on the road because Mythili does not know them. He chooses only the short lanes because he fears that if he walks down a long street, Mythili will appear at the other end and he will forget how to walk, and she will know that he is just an ass. In the days that follow, he walks up and down his house, from the front balcony to the rear, for a glimpse of Mythili. Sometimes his path crosses that of his wandering mother, and they smile politely as if they are pedestrians greeting each other. He develops a nervous reverence for Mythili's school uniform, which she hangs out to dry every evening. He looks at it only discreetly. The best part of his day is the time before he goes to sleep when he imagines that he is dying and that Mythili, in her school uniform, is crying softly for him, hiding in her bathroom. And the times when he is with her, he tries to distract her from maths by talking about Unni. And when she is not looking, he looks carefully at her, the way she used to stare at Unni when he was not looking with a blank, serious face.

IT IS NOT THAT Ousep Chacko has abandoned the investigation again, it is just that he does not know how to proceed. After he was discharged from the hospital he resumed the probe, though he did not know what he was looking for any more. He has met everyone who appears to matter, except for Somen Pillai. There is no one else left to meet or to confront. He has met Simion Clark, too. That was a week ago.

Simion Clark turned out to be a tall, fit man in his forties who was at once Caucasian and Indian, with cautious eyes behind square glasses, thin severe lips, hair the colour of dirt, and a pronounced arse. He stood in the doorway, unnaturally erect, and stared with mild hostility. There was a bit of unpleasantness at first as Simion insisted he was Albert Fernandes. But he slowly relented because he knew his cover was blown and he knew it was silly to defend his position. Also, he was curious.

His flat was small and it was further diminished by three massive leather sofas that faced each other. Simion pretended to be relaxed. It is easier for men with long legs to appear that way.

'How did you find me?' he asked.

'You don't have a scar, Simion, which is surprising.'

'I said, "How did you find me?"'

'Usually, men like you in Madras have scars.'

Scars from the times when they were attacked by cruel mobs of men who did not understand their way. The description of Simion as given by Balki had suggested to Ousep a pattern he was familiar with. The descriptions of the others later only confirmed that. Simion was one of those classy men in Madras who liked to be teachers in a boys' school, who were very strict, who inflicted pain, who spanked boys, who liked to teach subjects that needed a lab, where they could meet young boys behind shut doors. And in Madras, men like Simion are accustomed to fleeing. When Ousep began asking around in the gay underground, it turned out that Simion was not hard to find. A gay Anglo-Indian was just too conspicuous in the city. Simion also wrote for the editorial pages of the Indian Express under the name of Roy Gidney, tirelessly demanding legitimacy for homosexuality. The man even had a big following.

'I want to know why Unni did that to you in the class,' Ousep said.

'Is that why you are here?'

'Yes.'

'Why do you want to know?'

'I want to know my son better.'

'Why don't you just ask him?'

'Because he is dead.'

Ousep had not expected Simion to be stunned by the news. His farcical composure was gone and there was no strength in him. 'How did that happen?' he asked. When Ousep told him, Simion looked lost and confused. He went to the bathroom and shut himself in for over ten minutes. When he emerged, his nose was red, as if he had had a good cry. He asked Ousep to leave but did not insist. He sat with his hands folded and took several minutes to weigh his options. Ousep had not conveyed any direct threats to make his life hell, but Simion was smart enough to see the sense in cooperating.