The Illicit Happiness of Other People Read Online Free Page A

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 ofevil 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.’
    ‘It is a good idea.’
    ‘It’s a lousy story,’ Beta says. ‘In a story, good has to triumph over evil. You cannot start a story by saying that good is finished for ever. You have to give good a chance to defeat evil in the end. That’s the con. That’s the structure of every story in the history of stories. Every storyteller has to work within this con.’
    ‘That’s true,’ Ousep says. ‘That is very obviously true. I am so glad I am talking to you.’
    ‘I don’t think Unni was working on that comic,’ Beta says. ‘I think he really believed that.’
    ‘Believed what?’
    ‘What I just told you. It was not a comic. I think he really believed that good was destroyed thousands of years ago, and evil split into two.’
    ‘Why do you say that?’
    ‘Unni was like that. He used to tell me, “What if the meaning of life was realized ages ago by early man, the whole business of truth settled, and the world today is merely a post-Enlightenment residue?” I think that’s why he was very interested in delusions.’
    ‘Did you say “delusions”?’
    ‘Yes. He said every delusion has an objective, and the objective of a delusion is not merely to colonize one brain but to transmit itself to as many brains as possible. That is the purpose of every delusion, that is how a delusion survives, that is how it succeeds. By spreading, maximizing its colony, like a virus. According to Unni, any philosophy that can be transmitted to another person is a delusion. If two people believe in the same idea of truth, it is a delusion.’
    Ousep feels silly asking a young bearded man this but it is a reasonable question in the circumstances. ‘So what is truth, then?’
    ‘Truth is a successful delusion.’
    ‘According to Unni?’
    ‘That’s what he said.’
    ‘Do you know who Somen Pillai is?’
    ‘You ask this again. Who is that?’
    ‘He was in Unni’s school, his class. His closest friend, everyone says.’
    ‘Never heard of him.’
    ‘I do feel silly asking this, Beta, but I can’t help it. Why do you think Unni did what he did?’
    ‘Why have you started digging again, Mr Chacko?’
    ‘I never stopped.’
    ‘Is that the truth?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I have no idea why Unni did that, Mr Chacko. I am sorry. I know that’s why you are here.’
    And so it goes every day. People have a lot of things to say about Unni Chacko, they show his world as a surprisingly large place, but nobody can explain his final act. Ousep wonders whether anyone truly knows why his son died, if a day will ever come when he finally solves Unni.
    That a mystery must have a resolution is obviously not a requirement of