Free The Illicit Happiness of Other People by Manu Joseph Page A

through the night. The next morning, the train passes through the green hills and the ancient villages of Kerala. Finally, it reaches Kollam station. The narrator, who is still invisible, now takes a crowded bus, then walks down the narrow paved lanes of a village. There he meets several people, and in some of the frames the characters are obviously talkingbecause there are dialogue bubbles, but the bubbles are blank. Unni probably thought he would fill them in later, a future which he denied himself. The villagers lead the invisible narrator to the banks of a stream. The narrator finally approaches the house that was shown at the beginning of the comic. But the bald rustic man is not sitting in his armchair on the porch. There is no one here. A large, amiable, middle-aged woman appears. Something strange happens next. There is the image of a giant bra as a suspension bridge that spans a wide river, linking two mountains. The comic then returns to the amiable middle-aged woman. She leads the invisible narrator into the house, gives him or her a cup of coffee, shows a wall where there are several photographs of the bald rustic man. Then she takes the narrator through the house, through the long dark corridors and empty rooms and finally a storeroom, which is filled with jackfruits and bananas. She points to a bulb on the high ceiling. The next panel, the penultimate page of the comic, has a giant image of the bald rustic, now looking benevolent. This man clearly exists somewhere, he cannot be a work of fiction because his eyes have the certainty of a creature that has seen life. The man is smiling and peaceful, and he is giving a thumbs-up sign, which is uncharacteristic of his age and place. But he is evidently a man who has won, won something. The final page is shocking. It has a dramatic colour portrait of Mariamma standing on one leg, the other leg raised as if she is about to leap, and her right hand is pointing upwards. Her blood-red sari is hitched up and folded at the waist, exposing a bit of her thighs. Her thick black hair is flying in tumult. Her lips are curled in and her eyes are wide and angry. She is placed like a trophy on a wooden stand that has inscribed on it a string of Malayalam letters that make no sense. Obviously, the comic needs prose to convey its meaning. Iteven has blank bubbles for dialogue and narration. Unni’s works usually are not so dependent on prose.
    So, what happened on the day Unni died? He completed the visuals of a comic, posted it to someone, went somewhere for three or four hours, got a haircut at noon at St Anthony’s Hair Stylists, as confirmed by the barber. He returned home, played a bit of cricket, went up the stairs, and twenty minutes later decided to die?
    The intended recipient of the comic remains a mystery. And what is the meaning of the final window of the comic – Mariamma in full tumult? The covering note, which shows no hint of affection, suggests that the recipient is a male, but Ousep is not sure. Maybe it was meant for a young lady who told Unni that her fat unhappy mother reads all her mail.
    From the day Unni’s mail returned, Ousep began to haunt the same boys he had interviewed three years ago, and some newer ones. He does not tell them about the mail, he lets out only stray hints. He wants to be careful with the information he holds until he fully understands what was going on in Unni’s life.
    The boys Ousep had met three years ago are almost men now, they are around twenty. That would be Unni’s age if he were alive today. Twenty. A handsome young man whose narrow, interested eyes might have surveyed the world with restrained amusement, a young artist with the opaque seriousness that cartoonists usually possess. Unni Chacko, if he had allowed himself to live, would have grown into a formidable man.
    Ousep thinks of the day ahead, the strangers he has to question. He finds it tiring to talk to people. That has always been his flaw as a journalist, his