The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

by Arundhati Roy

  “So we are remembered as the forgotten ones?” Ustad Kulsoom Bi said. “Wah! Wah!”

  Anjum remembered her first visit to the Red Fort vividly for reasons of her own. It was her first outing after she had recovered from Dr. Mukhtar’s surgery. While they queued for tickets most people gawked at the foreign tourists, who had a separate queue and more expensive tickets. The foreign tourists in turn gawked at the Hijras—at Anjum in particular. A young man, a hippy with a piercing gaze and a wispy Jesus beard, looked at her admiringly. She looked back at him. In her imagination he became Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed. She pictured him standing proud and naked, a slim, slight figure, before the jury of malevolent bearded Qazis, not flinching even when they sentenced him to death. She was a little taken aback when the tourist walked up to her.

  “You are fery beautiful,” he said. “A photo? May I?”

  It was the first time anybody had ever wanted to photograph her. Flattered, she threw her red-ribboned braid over her shoulder coyly and looked at Ustad Kulsoom Bi for permission. It was granted. So she posed for the photograph, leaning awkwardly against the sandstone ramparts, her shoulders thrown back and her chin tilted up, brazen and timorous all at once.

  “Sankyou,” the young man said. “Sankyou very much.”

  She never saw it, but it was the beginning of something, that photograph.

  Where was it now? God only knew.

  —

  Anjum’s drifting mind returned to the meeting in Ustad Kulsoom Bi’s room.

  It was the decadence and indiscipline of our Rulers that brought ruin on the Mughal Empire, Ustad Kulsoom Bi was saying. Princes frolicking with slave women, emperors running around naked, living lives of opulence while their people starved—how could an empire like that have hoped to survive? Why should it have survived? (Nobody who had heard her playing Prince Salim in Mughal-e-Azam would have guessed that she disapproved of him so thoroughly. Nor would anybody have suspected that, notwithstanding her pride about the Khwabgah’s vintage and its proximity to royalty, she harbored a socialist’s anger about the Mughal Rulers’ profligacy and their people’s penury.) She then went on to make a case for principled living and iron discipline, the two things that according to her were the hallmark of the Khwabgah—its strength and the reason it had survived through the ages, while stronger, grander things had perished.

  Ordinary people in the Duniya—what did they know about what it takes to live the life of a Hijra? What did they know about the rules, the discipline and the sacrifices? Who today knew that there had been times when all of them, including she, Ustad Kulsoom Bi herself, had been driven to begging for alms at traffic lights? That they had built themselves up, bit by bit, humiliation by humiliation, from there? The Khwabgah was called Khwabgah, Ustad Kulsoom Bi said, because it was where special people, blessed people, came with their dreams that could not be realized in the Duniya. In the Khwabgah, Holy Souls trapped in the wrong bodies were liberated. (The question of what would happen if the Holy Soul were a man trapped in a woman’s body was not addressed.)

  However, Ustad Kulsoom Bi said, however—and the pause that followed was one that was worthy of the lisping Poet–Prime Minister—the central edict of the Khwabgah was manzoori. Consent. People in the Duniya spread wicked rumors about Hijras kidnapping little boys and castrating them. She did not know and could not say whether these things happened elsewhere, but in the Khwabgah, as the Almighty was witness, nothing happened without manzoori.

  She then turned to the specific subject at hand. The Almighty has sent our Anjum back to us, she said. She won’t tell us what happened to her and Zakir Mian in Gujarat and we cannot force her to. All we can do is surmise. And sympathize. But in our sympathy we cannot allow our principles to be compromised. Forcing a little girl to live as a boy against her wishes, even for the sake of her own safety, is to incarcerate her, not liberate her. There is no question of that happening in our Khwabgah. No question at all.

  “She’s my child,” Anjum said. “I will decide. I can leave this place and go away with her if I want to.”

  Far from being perturbed by this declaration, everybody was actually relieved to see a sign that the old drama queen in Anjum was alive and well. They had no reason to worry because she had absolutely nowhere to go.

  “You can do as you like, but the child will stay here,” Ustad Kulsoom Bi said.

  “All this time you spoke about manzoori, now you want to decide on her behalf?” Anjum said. “We’ll ask her. Zainab will want to come with me.”

  Talking back to Ustad Kulsoom Bi in this way was considered unacceptable. Even for someone who had survived a massacre. Everybody waited for the reaction.

  Ustad Kulsoom Bi closed her eyes and asked for the rolled-up razai to be removed from behind her. Suddenly tired, she turned to the wall and curled up, using the crook of her arm as a pillow. With her eyes still shut and her voice sounding as though it was coming from far away, she instructed Anjum to see Dr. Bhagat and to make sure that she took the medicines he prescribed.

  The meeting ended. The members dispersed. The Petromax lantern was carried out of the room hissing like an annoyed cat.

  ANJUM HADN’T MEANT what she said, but having said it, the idea of leaving took hold and coiled around her like a python.

  She refused to go to Dr. Bhagat, so a little delegation headed by Saeeda went on her behalf. Dr. Bhagat was a small man with a clipped military mustache who smelled overwhelmingly of Pond’s Dreamflower talcum powder. He had a quick, birdy manner and a way of interrupting his patients as well as himself every few minutes with a dry, nervous sniff accompanied by three staccato taps of his pen on the tabletop. His forearms were covered with thick black hair but his head was more or less hairless. He had shaved a broad strip of hair off his left wrist, over which he wore a tennis player’s toweling sweatband, over which he wore his heavy gold watch so that he had a clear, unobscured view of the time. That morning he was dressed the way he dressed every day—in a spotless white terry cotton safari suit and shiny white sandals. A clean white towel hung over the back of his chair. His clinic was in a shithole locality, but he was a very clean man. And a good one too.

  The delegation trooped in and sat down on what chairs were available, some perched on the arms of the others’ chairs. Dr. Bhagat was used to seeing his patients from the Khwabgah in twos and threes (they never came alone). He was a little taken aback at the multitude that descended on him that morning.

  “Which one of you is the patient?”

  “None of us, Doctor Sahib.”

  Saeeda, the spokesperson, with occasional clarifications and elucidations from the others, described Anjum’s altered behavior as carefully as she could—the brooding, the rudeness, the reading and, most seriously, the insubordination. She told the doctor about Zainab’s illnesses and Anjum’s anxiety. (Of course she had no means of knowing about Anjum’s sifli jaadu theory and her own part in it.) The delegation had, after detailed consultations with each other, decided to leave Gujarat out of it because:

  (a) They didn’t know what, if anything, had happened to Anjum there.

  And,

  (b) Because Dr. Bhagat had a biggish silver (or perhaps it was only silver-plated) statue of Lord Ganesh on his table and there was always smoke from a fresh incense stick curling up his trunk.

  Certainly there were no concrete conclusions to be drawn from this latter fact, but it made them unsure of his views on what had happened in Gujarat. So they decided to err on the side of abundant caution.

  Dr. Bhagat (who, like millions of other believing Hindus, was in fact appalled by the turn of events in Gujarat) listened attentively, sniffing and tapping the table with his pen, his bright, beady eyes magnified by thick lenses set in gold-framed spectacles. He furrowed his brow and thought for a minute about what he had been told and then asked whether Anjum’s wanting to leave the Khwabgah had led to the Reading or the Reading had led to her wanting to leave. The delegation was divided on the issue. One of the
younger delegates, Meher, said that Anjum had told her that she wanted to move back to the Duniya and help the poor. This set off a flurry of merriment. Dr. Bhagat, not smiling, asked them why they thought it so funny.

  “Arre, Doctor Sahib, which Poor would want to be helped by us?” Meher said, and they all giggled at the idea of intimidating poor people with offers of help.

  On his prescription pad Dr. Bhagat wrote in tiny, neat handwriting: Patient formerly of outgoing, obedient, jolly-type nature now exhibits disobedient, revolting-type of personality.

  He told them not to worry. He wrote them a prescription. The pills (the ones that he always prescribed to everybody) would calm her down, he said, and give her a few good nights’ sleep, after which he would need to see her personally.

  —

  Anjum flatly refused to take the pills.

  As the days passed, her quietness gave way to something else, something restless and edgy. It coursed through her veins like an insidious uprising, a mad insurrection against a lifetime of spurious happiness she felt she had been sentenced to.

  She added Dr. Bhagat’s prescription to the things she had piled up in the courtyard, things she had once treasured, and lit a match. Among the incinerated items were:

  Three documentary films (about her)

  Two glossy coffee-table books of photographs (of her)

  Seven photo features in foreign magazines (about her)

  An album of press clippings from foreign newspapers in more than thirteen languages including the New York Times, the London Times, the Guardian, the Boston Globe, the Globe and Mail, Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, La Stampa and Die Zeit (about her).

  The smoke from the fire rose and made everybody, including the goat, cough. When the ash cooled, she rubbed it into her face and hair. That night Zainab moved her clothes, shoes, school bag and rocket-shaped pencil box into Saeeda’s cupboard. She refused to sleep with Anjum any more.

  “Mummy’s never happy,” was the precise, merciless reason she gave.

  Heartbroken, Anjum emptied her Godrej almirah and packed her finery—her satin ghararas and sequined saris, her jhumkas, anklets and glass bangles—into tin trunks. She made herself two Pathan suits, one pigeon gray and one mud brown; she bought a second-hand plastic anorak and a pair of men’s shoes that she wore without socks. A battered Tempo arrived and the almirah and tin trunks were loaded on to it. She left without saying where she was going.

  Even then, nobody took her seriously. They were sure she’d be back.

  ONLY A TEN-MINUTE TEMPO RIDE from the Khwabgah, once again Anjum entered another world.

  It was an unprepossessing graveyard, run-down, not very big and used only occasionally. Its northern boundary abutted a government hospital and mortuary where the bodies of the city’s vagrants and unclaimed dead were warehoused until the police decided how to dispose of them. Most were taken to the city crematorium. If they were recognizably Muslim they were buried in unmarked graves that disappeared over time and contributed to the richness of the soil and the unusual lushness of the old trees.

  The formally constructed graves numbered less than two hundred. The older graves were more elaborate, with carved marble tombstones, the more recent ones, more rudimentary. Several generations of Anjum’s family were buried there—Mulaqat Ali, his father and mother, his grandfather and grandmother. Mulaqat Ali’s older sister Begum Zeenat Kauser (Anjum’s aunt) was buried next to him. She had moved to Lahore after Partition. After living there for ten years she left her husband and children and returned to Delhi, saying she was unable to live anywhere except in the immediate vicinity of Delhi’s Jama Masjid. (For some reason Lahore’s Badshahi Mosque did not work out as a substitute.) Having survived three attempts by the police to deport her as a Pakistani spy, Begum Zeenat Kauser settled down in Shahjahanabad in a tiny room with a kitchen and a view of her beloved mosque. She shared it with a widow roughly her own age. She earned her living by supplying mutton korma to a restaurant in the old city where foreign tour groups came to savor local food. She stirred the same pot every day for thirty years and smelled of korma the way other women smelled of ittar and perfume. Even when life left her, she was interred in her grave smelling like a delicious Old Delhi meal. Next to Begum Zeenat Kauser were the remains of Bibi Ayesha, Anjum’s oldest sister, who had died of tuberculosis. A little distance away was the grave of Ahlam Baji, the midwife who’d delivered Anjum. In the years before her death, Ahlam Baji had grown disoriented and obese. She would float regally down the streets of the old city, like a filthy queen, her matted hair twisted into a grimy towel as though she had just emerged fresh from a bath in ass’s milk. She always carried a tattered Kisan Urea fertilizer sack that she crammed with empty mineral-water bottles, torn kites, carefully folded posters and streamers left behind by the big political rallies that were held in the Ramlila grounds nearby. On her grimmer days Ahlam Baji would accost the beings she had helped bring into the world, most of whom were grown men and women with children of their own, and abuse them in the foulest language, cursing the day they were born. Her insults never caused offense; people usually reacted with the wide, embarrassed grins of those who are called on stage to be guinea pigs in magic shows. Ahlam Baji was always fed, always offered shelter. She accepted food—rancorously—as though she was doing the person who offered it a great favor, but she turned down the offer of shelter. She insisted on remaining outdoors through the hottest of summers and the bitterest of winters. She was found dead one morning, sitting bolt upright outside Alif Zed Stationers & Photocopiers, with her arms around her Kisan Urea sack. Jahanara Begum insisted she be buried in the family graveyard. She organized for the body to be bathed and dressed and for an imam to say the final prayers. Ahlam Baji had, after all, midwifed all her five children.

  Next to Ahlam Baji’s grave was the grave of a woman on whose tombstone it said (in English) “Begum Renata Mumtaz Madam.” Begum Renata was a belly dancer from Romania who grew up in Bucharest dreaming of India and its classical dance forms. When she was only nineteen she hitchhiked across the continent and arrived in Delhi where she found a mediocre Kathak guru who exploited her sexually and taught her very little dance. To make ends meet she began to perform cabarets in the Rosebud Rest-O-Bar located in the rose garden—known to locals as No-Rose Garden—in the ruins of Feroz Shah Kotla, the fifth of the seven ancient cities of Delhi. Renata’s nom de cabaret was Mumtaz. She died young after being thwarted in love by a professional cheat who disappeared with all her savings. Renata continued to long for him even though she knew he had deceived her. She grew distraught, tried to cast spells and call up spirits. She began to go into long trances during which her skin broke out in boils and her voice grew deep and gravelly like a man’s. The circumstances of her death were unclear, though everybody assumed it was suicide. It was Roshan Lal, the taciturn headwaiter of the Rosebud Rest-O-Bar, gruff moralizer, scourge of all the dancing girls (and the butt of all their jokes), who surprised himself by organizing her funeral and visiting her grave with flowers, once, twice and then, before he knew it, every Tuesday (his day off). It was he who organized the tombstone with her name on it and who maintained its “keep-up,” as he called it. It was he who added “Begum” and “Madam,” the posthumous prefix and suffix to her name(s) on the tombstone. Seventeen years had gone by since Renata Mumtaz died. Roshan Lal had fat varicose veins running up his thin shins and had lost the hearing in one ear, but still he came, clanking into the graveyard on his old black bicycle, bringing fresh flowers—gazanias, discounted roses and, when he was pressed for money, a few strings of jasmine that he bought from children at traffic lights.

  Other than the main graves, there were a few whose provenance was contested. For example the one that simply said “Badshah.” Some people insisted Badshah was a lesser Mughal prince who had been hanged by the British after the rebellion of 1857, while others believed he was a Sufi poet from Afghanistan. Another grave bore only the name “Islahi.” Some said he was a general
in Emperor Shah Alam II’s army, others insisted he was a local pimp who had been knifed to death in the 1960s by a prostitute whom he had cheated. As always, everybody believed what they wanted to believe.

  On her first night in the graveyard, after a quick reconnaissance, Anjum placed her Godrej cupboard and her few belongings near Mulaqat Ali’s grave and unrolled her carpet and bedding between Ahlam Baji’s and Begum Renata Mumtaz Madam’s graves. Not surprisingly, she didn’t sleep. Not that anyone in the graveyard troubled her—no djinns arrived to make her acquaintance, no ghosts threatened a haunting. The smack addicts at the northern end of the graveyard—shadows just a deeper shade of night—huddled on knolls of hospital waste in a sea of old bandages and used syringes, didn’t seem to notice her at all. On the southern side, clots of homeless people sat around fires cooking their meager, smoky meals. Stray dogs, in better health than the humans, sat at a polite distance, waiting politely for scraps.

  In that setting, Anjum would ordinarily have been in some danger. But her desolation protected her. Unleashed at last from social protocol, it rose up around her in all its majesty—a fort, with ramparts, turrets, hidden dungeons and walls that hummed like an approaching mob. She rattled through its gilded chambers like a fugitive absconding from herself. She tried to dismiss the cortège of saffron men with saffron smiles who pursued her with infants impaled on their saffron tridents, but they would not be dismissed. She tried to shut the door on Zakir Mian, lying neatly folded in the middle of the street, like one of his crisp cash-birds. But he followed her, folded, through closed doors on his flying carpet. She tried to forget the way he had looked at her just before the light went out of his eyes. But he wouldn’t let her.