CHRONICLE OF A DEATH RETOLD
A father’s quest to understand his son’s suicide propels this darkly comical novel
South India has been called one of the suicide capitals of the world, with a suicide rate more than six times the world average. And the profile of the person most at risk is, apparently, 1529 years old, in the highest quartile of intelligence, and Malayali. The Illicit Happiness of Other People is the story of just one of those many suicides.
It is set in Balaji Lane, a neighbourhood where all boys, from the time they’re born, share the common destiny of sitting for the JEE exam, which will determine the trajectory of the rest of their lives. If they pass they’ll get into engineering college, go to the US, get a Green Card, and live happily ever after; if they fail, they’re doomed to study physics, and end up working for Canara Bank, like their fathers, riding a scooter to work, and returning to their pious, jasmined wives each evening. It’s a universe where you might get beaten by your father for getting only 90 per cent in the exams, and a typical adolescent conversation goes: “Tan 2 is equal to?” “Simple da, two tan x by one minus tan square x”. But Unni Chacko was different. Very different.
He was a careless student, but a brilliant cartoonist, whose cartoons revealed strange, hitherto unknown secrets of the universe. He held his classmates and friends in awe, with a wisdom and authority far beyond his years. And, as if to punctuate his differentness, he belonged to a Malayali family— cuckoos among the Tamilian crows of Balaji Street, as Manu Joseph describes them. Then one day, Unni Chacko had a haircut, came home, played a little cricket, climbed up to the terrace and calmly leaped from its railing, head- first, onto the pavment below. He was just six weeks short of his 18th birthday.
Unni’s father, Ousep Chacko, a failed journalist, sets out on a quest to understand his son’s suicide, studying every inch of Unni’s 63 known cartoons for clues, tracking down all the people who have ever known him, and coming home drunk and belligerent every night. It’s been three years now, but the answer still eludes him. The secret perhaps lies in Unni’s 64th, enigmatic cartoon and there is only one person who may— or may not— be able to shed light on its meaning, but he has been eluding Chacko for these past three years. Meanwhile, the family’s debts to their neighbours remain unsettled, their credit account with the Sacred Heart Family Store mounts, and the rubber slippers they wear grow ever thinner, held together now with safety pins.
Joseph’s first novel, the somewhat controversial Serious Men, was one of Huffington Post’s Best Books of 2010, and one wondered what he’d do for an encore. The Illicit Happiness of Other People is a worthy successor: A stylishly written book, which starts out as being darkly comical, and then grows progressively darker and more disturbing, as Ousep Chacko pursues the mystery of his beautiful, radiant son, peeling the onion, layer after layer after layer… until he finally arrives at the sad, shameful nothingness at its heart.
I have just one minor quibble: The book’s title, while effective enough by itself, is a trifle too reminiscent of Rahul Bhattacharya’s The Sly Comfort of People Who Care ( which itself was reminiscent of Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers). If this had been a lesser novel, it wouldn’t have mattered. But for one as accomplished as this, it seems an unnecessary irritant.