When they reach the clinic, the guard sees the state Ousep is in and will not let them in. Ousep throws his press card at him and says, ‘Do you know who I am?’ The guard screams to another guard inside, ‘A man here has forgotten who he is. Is the psychiatrist on duty?’ And the guards laugh. Ousep threatens to call the chief minister. The guard

‘No. That’s the whole point. That’s the way he was. He wanted others to do things, so that he could watch.’

It is a moment that has no meaning. It is as if the tired charade of human life with its great pursuits and history and wounds and deep convictions has collapsed, and the world has been suddenly revealed as a

As the three boys pass Ousep, he hears one of them ask, ‘Tan 2x is equal to?’ The other two answer simultaneously in a burst of triumph, ‘Two tan x by one minus tan square x.’

She remembers the advertisement for a sunflower cooking oil – ‘A Gentleman’s Cholesterol Is In The Hands Of His Wife’. But then Ousep Chacko is not a man who can be killed by oil. He does not eat much. He smokes a lot, though, which may have thickened his blood, or thinned his arteries, she always forgets which of the two happens. A man’s heart can

the Corpse Syndrome had an opposite condition. Are there people in this world who feel very alive, who feel every moment of their days as if life inside them is the greatest force in the universe. People who are hopelessly happy. I told him that for some strange reason neuropsychiatry does not deal with such conditions – it deals with conditions

resist. He walked with them, ate with them, sat on the steps of the Fatima

It seems odd to him that other men, the simple men, men who are not writers, they too can make their women laugh, make them glow.

He told me that the very objective of a delusion is to spread, to colonize other neurological systems. That is its purpose. There is no evidence to support this but it does appear sometimes that the boy was right.’