'The syndicate also responds to the rogue brain by inflicting a condition that is widely known as depression the idea is to switch off all the delusions of pleasure and make life itself seem so dull and meaningless that the organism will be influenced to self-terminate. The syndicate tries many other methods of quelling the rebellion of potential rogue brains. In most brains, including conformist brains, the system has seeded the delusions of many philosophies and the delusion of enlightenment. The idea here is to satisfy the curiosity of the brain by providing a false sense of intellectual quest. Through philosophy, God and rationality, the syndicate efficiently ensures that the curiosity of almost every neurological system is satisfied.'

Who is left, then? No one, except Unni and Somen?

'But there are rare rogue brains, which are not fooled yet,' Somen says. 'And the syndicate responds through more powerful delusions. In such rogues, the syndicate enhances all the senses and shows a life that is extraordinarily pleasurable. That is what happened to Unni. Soon after he began to blank out and see the flashes of something he could not explain, he also began to feel moments of unnatural power within him. In these moments he would be filled with great happiness and he would see the world in all its colours and beauty. Even a touch of the breeze or the movement of ants would seem to him as if it were a deep experience. Life made him feel every moment it had to offer. He also became supernaturally sexual. He did not tell me much about his sexual cravings, all he told me was that he was filled with the filthiest thoughts, dangerous thoughts, but very pleasurable thoughts.'

But Unni knows what is happening to him. He has seen the other side and he knows that the syndicate of life is trying to delude him. He believes that there are more like him in the world and begins to search for them. He searches among the seemingly normal, and among the mad. He searches for the unnaturally happy and the inexplicably sad. But he finds no one who is like him.

THOMA CHACKO STANDS IN the doorway of the kitchen and wonders whether it is a good time to make the confession. His mother looks peaceful by her standards, but she is clearly lost in her own thoughts, which is what he wants. She has just returned from the Sacred Heart Family Store and is transferring things into jars and bottles. She takes the one-kilo sachet of sunflower oil in her hand and bites the tip off. This is the best time to confess, Thoma knows, because when she is pouring sunflower oil into a bottle she does it with ascetic concentration. 'Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name,' he says. She does not turn, she is not listening to him. Thoma must do it now. 'Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. I told Mythili about Philipose, I don't know why I did that. Hope I did not do anything wrong. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts ...'

Mariamma stops pouring the oil into the bottle, puts the sachet on the kitchen counter and stares at him. 'What did you say, Thoma?'

'I was praying.'

'What did you say?'

'I said, "Give us this day our daily bread and ..."'

'Before that?'

'I have something to confess,' he says.

'What is it?'

'I told Mythili about Philipose, about what he did to you, about Unni and Philipose and the comic and everything.'

'Why did you do that, Thoma?' she asks. She is not angry, she is sad and hurt, which is worse.

'I don't know. Did I do something bad?'

'You cannot go around saying these things to other people, Thoma.'

'I don't know what happened to me,' he says. 'She asked me, "Thoma, what has your father found about Unni?" And I don't know why I told her everything I know. Mythili was very angry. She still loves us, she was very angry. She hates Philipose. She said Philipose should have killed himself, not Unni. That's what she said. She still loves all of us very much, I think.'

He stops talking because his mother looks as if she has seen a ghost behind him. Thoma turns nervously to see what has terrified her but he sees nothing. Then she takes the oil sachet and begins to pour its contents into the bottle again.

'What happened?' he asks, but she does not say anything.

After she has put the bottle back on the shelf, she begins to walk up and down the hall. She does not make any violent movements, she does not talk or wag her finger. She is calm, but she is also disturbed. He has never seen her this way. He sits on a chair at the dining table and watches her for nearly an hour. He wonders what it is that he has said that has made her behave in this manner.

She will explain this moment to Thoma many years later, when they stand together facing Unni's grave in the churchyard that lies in the shade of the high eucalyptus trees. She will by then be one of those calm, dignified, affluent middle-aged women who emerge from their long silver cars. 'If one half of your life has been tough,' she will tell Thoma another time, 'the chances are that the other half will turn out all right. As Unni told me once, "In this world, you cannot escape happiness."'

'YOU MUST REMEMBER,' SOMEN says, 'you must remember what I said in the beginning, Ousep. Unni was normal most of the time. And when he was in control of himself, which was most of the time, he was hopelessly in love with all those who mattered to him. Like anybody else. They could affect him and he wanted to be affected by them.'

Unni is seventeen when he finally charms out of his mother her secret, and he is filled with a great rage at the injustice. He wants to punish Philipose. But he can also see the sexual criminality of men as a powerful force of the syndicate. His own body is desperate for women, any women, and there are times when he fears that he could do anything to satisfy it. But that does not mean he will pardon Philipose. He goes to find him but Philipose is gone. Dead after a good life. Unni seethes for days. He feels violent towards all men, he is disgusted by them. One afternoon he finds Simion Clark in the lab, massaging a boy. 'He was more than massaging, actually,' Somen says with a giggle. The next day, Unni dispenses justice to the man. He is somewhat comforted by his action, his desire for vengeance is quenched. And he resumes his search for people like him, people whom the syndicate has chosen to torment through abilities and disabilities, through moments of ecstatic happiness and deep destructive sorrow.

He decides to be less discreet in his search. He walks into the class one morning and reveals the rudiments of what he has seen, what he knows. Something about him, something about what he says, affects them all. Everyone is disturbed, some even feel the transient fright of coming close to a forbidden truth, some are affected in a deeper way, but they are too ensconced in the syndicate to fully see what Unni has tried to show them. There is no one who can fully understand him. Except one. Somen Pillai.

'That moment in the class is when I really looked at Unni Chacko. And I told myself, "I think I know what that boy is talking about." Why do I say that, Ousep? To understand that you need to know something about me.

'I, too, was born with a condition. I was always filled with unreasonable sorrow, even when I was a child in a very happy home. I had no reason to be this way, but I was. The world around me seemed bleak and pointless. Nothing interested me. Nothing. I was a corpse. A corpse inside a living body. I thought of killing myself many times but I didn't because I knew what it was to be dead. All my life I have been dead. What's the point in merely shedding the body? That's what I would say every time I thought of killing myself.

'I went through life in silence and a pointless loneliness, wondering what all the fuss around me was about. Then one day, Unni walked into the class and said, "Something is happening around us, there is a secret we must know, everything that we know is false." For the first time in my life I felt the excitement of hope. I thought if there was another reality, maybe I belonged to that, maybe that was what was wrong with me, I was trapped in the wrong place.

'I started talking to Unni. In the beginning, I did not understand many things he said, but we talked for hours. He was trying to tell me something, and I tried hard to understand. He was very interested in knowing how I perceived the world and I told him things I had not told anybody. I told him I was a corpse, and I told him how a corpse sees the world. I slowly began to understand what he was trying to say and I was stunned. It was clear to me that the syndicate had attacked me long before my brain could see the true nature of reality. The syndicate of life was afraid that I would see the truth.

'Being with Unni was bliss. For the first time in my life I felt the excitement of living in this decaying body. Unni and I went in search of many people who are considered abnormal. His search for someone like him was also a search for someone like me. Even with the normal people we became very curious about some of their quirks. There are traces of the syndicate's safeguards in all of us. There is God in all of us.

'Sai Shankaran was a lot of fun. We used him to understand how a confused conformist brain really worked. The corpse could finally laugh at the living. That was Unni's gift to me.'

But Unni now increasingly believes that he has been defeated by the syndicate, he feels that the material forces inside him are very strong. He is extraordinarily happy and desperate to live. 'Like a drug addict is desperate for his drug, Unni was desperate to live.'

He decides to fight the syndicate. He thinks that the exhilaration of near-death will give him the powers to take on the primordial forces of the syndicate. Somen joins him in this fight. They swim in powerful ocean currents and almost drown. They ride Somen's scooter at top speed across busy junctions. They stand on railway tracks and watch trains hurtle towards them. Then, Unni claims that there is a more powerful way to fight the syndicate, a Gandhian way that he says is more powerful than near-death. Near-sex. 'Lying with a naked woman without screwing her.'

The idea comes to him one morning when he is in Somen's house. No one is home but the two of them. Somen's parents have gone to meet their relatives in Pondicherry. 'Sakhi comes home, unexpectedly, because she has realized that one of her earrings is missing. Do you know who Sakhi is?'

'No.'

'Sakhi is our maid. You have seen her. She is very hot.'

As she searches for the earring in the hall, Unni keeps staring at her. He feels a powerful desperation. He is fascinated by how aroused he is and how hard it is for him to restrain himself from tearing her clothes off. Somen tells him, 'Unni, she is broad-minded.'

A few months earlier, in the backyard of the house, as she was squatting and washing clothes, Somen had lost control of himself and grabbed her. Not such a corpse after all, this boy. She screamed and ran away, but did not complain. She appeared the next day as if nothing had happened. When she was cleaning his room, she whispered to the floor that she might consider letting him squeeze her again if he gave her fifty rupees an offer he accepted. But he was so disgusted with himself that he did not pursue her again.

When Unni hears this, he gets an idea. He negotiates with her and it is decided that, for a hundred rupees, she will sit naked with him in Somen's room for exactly thirty minutes. He promises that he will not touch her. When he emerges after thirty minutes, he feels it is the toughest thing he has ever done. To have a beautiful woman, completely naked, by his side, and keep his hands off her. He claims that the exercise will give them the power to triumph over sexual desperation. Somen, too, tries the experiment. She tries to convince him to pay her five hundred rupees and do what he pleases with her. But he resists, he claims, successfully.

Unni leaves early that day because he has things to do. He borrows thirty rupees from Somen for his haircut. 'That was the last time I saw him. Less than two hours after he left my house he was dead. As I told you right at the beginning, Ousep, I don't know what happened to him. I do not know what happened to him after he left my house.'

When Ousep finds his voice he feels as if it belongs to someone else. Somen says, 'Can you repeat what you said, Ousep? You've lost your voice, it seems to me.'

'Can you guess what may have happened to Unni after he left your house?'

'No, I can't.'

'Why have you shut yourself up in this room?'

'To diminish the forces of the syndicate. I don't want to see or hear the delusion of life. One day I will escape my corpse state and see what Unni saw the true nature of reality.'

'Somen, what makes you think Unni did not suffer from a powerful delusion?'

'Which takes us to the inevitable religious moment, Ousep. I believe.'

'What do you believe?'

'That there is truth and that Unni saw it. I believe.'

When Ousep had first told the boy what he knew about Unni's life, he told him everything except Unni's association with Krishnamurthy Iyengar. Somen, too, has not mentioned the doctor. In all probability, as Ousep expected, the boy is unaware of that part of Unni's life. It is now time to shake the ascetic. Ousep has nothing to lose. He has a vague idea how this meeting is going to end. It would end, as Somen had put it, in a religious moment.

'Did Unni tell you that he used to meet a neuropsychiatrist? The man's name is Krishnamurthy Iyengar. Also known as Psycho among some cartoonists.'

There is a look of surprise on Somen's face. 'No,' he says.

'Why do you think he did not mention him to you?'

'He didn't tell me everything. He didn't have to tell me everything. He only told me what I needed to know.'

'Unni used to discuss you with the doctor.'

'So?'

'Somen, your condition has a name. It is called the Cotard Delusion, the Corpse Syndrome. It is a rare mental disorder.'

Somen's face cracks into an unhappy smile. 'You have not understood anything I have said, Ousep. I think you must leave.'

'It can be treated, Somen. The pursuit of truth, in most cases, is a mental disorder. Unni knew that. Trust me.'

'As expected, the syndicate of life infiltrates my fortress. As I grow powerful and see beyond the limits of delusion, the syndicate sends its pathetic agent. Leave, Ousep. You are being used, can't you see? You are being used by the dark forces of life to draw me out of my state. Get out.'

'I lost a son,' Ousep says. 'I don't want another boy to die because he did not understand what was happening to him.'

'Goodbye, Ousep.'

'Come,' Ousep says, extending a firm hand. 'Come, Somen. You, too, are my son. Step out of your room.'

'Ousep, the world that you will show me outside is merely a larger room than mine.'

Ousep leaves without a word. When he emerges into the dim hall, shutting the door behind him, Somen's parents rise from their chairs with tired faces, expecting a conversation. But he just walks out, into the relief of the night. And he goes down the narrow mud lane, probably for the last time in his life.

WHEN HE WALKS INTO his home, he startles his wife, who is leaning on the sofa, with her hands on her hips. She is still emerging from a thought and takes a moment to understand that Ousep has come home, silently, without being preceded by laments.

'Why are you not drunk?' she says.

'I forgot. I don't know how,' he says.

'Are you not well?'

'I am tired. Where is Thoma?'

'He is sleeping in his room,' she says.

Ousep is about to go into his room but he lingers in the hall because she has been looking at him as if he is new. He returns her stare, trying to understand what is wrong with her. She now takes long breaths that she clearly cannot help, her eyes still on him, hands still on her hips.

'What?' he says.

She pants, a shudder runs through her body, but she says, 'It's nothing.' Ousep puts his arm on her shoulder. It is a powerful shoulder that has forgotten how to accept affection. It feels like stone, so he withdraws his hand.

Ousep goes to his room, changes, turns off the lights and goes to sleep. He is tired but it will be just a nap, he knows. And it is just that, a dreamless, thoughtless, shallow nap. As he had expected she wakes him up. He hears her voice say, 'I've something to tell you.'

When he rises, he can barely make out her figure leaving his room. All around him there is darkness, and the world outside is still. He is surprised by the deep, perfect calm of the night. What an assault he must be every night when he disturbs this solid quiet. He wears a shirt whose sleeves he has stitched himself, and he walks into the hall. It is as if he is stepping out to receive the news of another death.

The hall is lit by the kitchen light. She is sitting on the sofa, which is shrouded in the same old unchanging bedsheet. She is at one end. He sits carefully at the other end, trying to remember where the large hole in the foam is, into which their landlord had once sunk. They sit this way, staring ahead, like a couple about to be photographed, and waiting for their joyful sons to join them in the middle. She looks strong, even peaceful. 'Thoma told Mythili everything about Philipose,' she says. 'That's what the boy did today. Then Mythili said something to him. I have been thinking about it all evening. Mythili said, "Philipose should have killed himself, not Unni." That's what she said. That's what Mythili said.'

Ousep is too stunned to speak, he just sits there without a word. He feels the same heaviness in his chest that he had felt in Iyengar's car; it is as if he is in the fierce embrace of a powerful boy. He tries to imagine the chain of events that might have unfolded the day Unni died.

Mariamma turns to him, expecting a response, she is not sure whether he understood her. So he tells her, in a calm, steady voice, 'You were right. Unni presumed you would know, he thought everybody would come to know. But the girl chose to keep it to herself.'

'Yes,' Mariamma says, 'she chose to keep it to herself. She was just a child then. But one of these days she is going to tell me. That's what I feel, she is ready to tell me. I'll wait.'

'The day our boy died,' Ousep says, 'he was in Somen's house. He sat in a room with a naked woman. The idea was not to touch her. That was the game, a philosophical game. So, for thirty minutes, a seventeen-year-old boy sits with a naked woman. Then the boy comes home. He comes home in a state, doesn't he?'

And, even though she has not asked, he tells her the story of her son, at least what he thinks he knows.

MYTHILI SITS IN THE darkness, on her narrow bed, her legs folded under her. She has been trying to make a decision for months. But now she is stronger, and she knows that to be good is to be brave. And Mariamma deserves a bit of decency from this world, especially from the people she loves. Mythili has come very close to telling her. Thrice she has crossed the short corridor in the middle of the night as her parents slept. But every time she stood outside that door, she would lose her nerve and return. But at noon tomorrow she will walk down the ten-foot-long corridor, ring the doorbell and speak to Mariamma. For the first time since Unni died, Mythili will enter their house and will tell the most lovable woman in the world why her son died.

Three years ago, Mythili's mother hands the girl a new silk dress to try on. It is real silk, a sky-blue top and a full skirt with silver elephants embroidered on the hem. Mythili stands on the rear balcony wearing the top and skirt. She has let her thick long hair loose. When Mariamma appears, Mythili stands on a high stool to show her the full length of the dress. 'You look like a beautiful lady,' Mariamma says, and sings a brief song in Malayalam. Mythili tells herself that she probably does look beautiful today. She wants Unni to see her this way. But she wants their meeting to be accidental, so she does not call out to him from her balcony as she normally does. She waits for a long time on both the balconies but there is no sight of him. Her mother, as expected, keeps asking her to change because these clothes are new and they are meant for festivals. But then Mother leaves for the temple. She won't be back for over two hours.

It is late morning now. Mythili stands on her front balcony and calls out Unni's name in the many accents of the elders of the block. But he is not at home. It appears that nobody is at home. She waits on the balcony to see whether Unni will appear in the lane below, walking in his languid, arrogant way. She wonders whether he is inside his home, shut in his room and working on a comic, deaf to everything that is happening around him. So she decides to go to his house. She walks down the corridor and opens the door as she has done all her life. There is nobody in the hall. The door to Mr Ousep Chacko's room is open and she can see that there is no one there. The boys' bedroom door is shut. There she finds Thoma sleeping in the bed, but there is no sign of Unni. She decides to wait in the hall and surprise him. She will pretend that she just happened to be in these clothes, by pure chance. She takes a bunch of old issues of Readers' Digest from the shelf in the hall, and sits with them on the floor between the sofa and the two chairs. She lies on her stomach and starts reading the magazines. She is drowsy but she tries to keep her eyes open. If Unni sees her sleeping he will draw a moustache on her again, and that would be very inelegant. But in the gentle, steady breeze, her eyes slowly relent and shut, and she lets herself sleep.

When she feels the hand running through her hair and down her spine and legs, and all over her body, she is not sure whether it is a dream. She cannot deny she has had such dreams before, but then she knows it is not a dream. She gets up with a start and sees Unni staring at her. He holds her in his powerful arms and kisses her. She is so frightened she screams and tries to extricate herself from his grip, and in her struggle, her top tears at the shoulder. That is when Unni leaves her, something in him snaps. She looks at him just for a moment before she runs away. That would be the last time she would see him alive. What she sees in that minuscule moment is Unni standing without meeting her eye, looking at the space behind her with a gentle smile. She has thought of his expression many times and tried to find its meaning. But she does not understand the face.

She runs to her home, into the bathroom. She sits on the floor and cries, she is shivering. She decides to have a bath. She wonders what she should tell her mother about the torn top. She invents many excuses in the bath. That is when she hears the sounds of men, she hears the word 'Unni' several times, and she is too terrified even to guess what may have happened. What an idiot, Unni, what an idiot.

In a few hours, Mythili will tell Unni's mother everything about that day. But what she really wants to tell her, if she is not too shy to do that, is that she is sorry she abandoned her. The day Unni died, Mariamma lost a son and a daughter. Mythili is sorry she chose the comfort of hiding, she is sorry it turned out that way, but now the daughter has returned, and she will always watch over her till the end of her time. That is what she will say. She has the strength to say it now.

OUSEP HAS LONG FINISHED the story of Unni Chacko, and his wife has listened in silence but without any questions. Something about her tells him that she has finally made peace with Unni, she may even believe that his death has been resolved. But Ousep plans his day ahead.

He will wake up early and make a list of people he will meet all kinds of people, new people. What did Unni see? What did Unni know, what could make a boy so contemptuous of happiness, of his own extraordinary happiness, and of human life, which he considered so trivial that he needed merely one honourable reason to shed it? Ousep will go in search of the answers, he will not stop. A search without an end. What is so terrifying about a search without an end?

Ousep, finally, in the search for meaning. Resolute, even though he does see Unni Chacko in another place, arching his body and laughing.

Acknowledgements.

THE NOVEL LED ME to several people in Madras, or Chennai as it is now called. It is where I spent the first twenty years of my life. I am grateful it was not a paradise.

Among the people I met were neurosurgeons and neuropsychiatrists. Some of them were amused to learn that even novelists had to gather facts, but they gave me their days. Dr Krishnamoorthy Srinivas, an unforgettable patriarch with eight pens and a tiny torchlight in his shirt pocket, Dr Ennapadam Krishnamoorthy and Dr A.V. Srinivasan have contributed to the novel more than they will ever guess.

I am fortunate to have the unrelenting confidence of the finest editors in the world. Karthika V.K. of HarperCollins India, who was the first person in the publishing world to decide my fiction was fit to print. Roland Philipps of John Murrays. Amy Cherry of Norton. Iris Tupholme of HarperCollins Canada. Joost Nijsen of Podium. The novel is a beneficiary of their remarkable eye, and the care of their team, especially Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri of HarperCollins India and Joanne Gledhill of John Murrays.

But my primary editor is a person I am besotted with Anuradha, who was the first person to read the novel, and who began her analysis, as usual, with the words, 'Now don't growl ...'

Isobel Dixon of the Blake Friedmann literary agency has saved me in more ways than I have let her know.

For some reason, my mother, Kunjamma, and sister, Aswathy, the extraordinary women who raised me, found it hilarious every time I asked them to recount, once again, our family stories. But they always found the time for me. As did my father, Joseph Madapally, a storyteller himself.