The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

by Arundhati Roy

  By the time someone remembered how it had all begun, the baby was gone.

  * * *

  * Motherfucker sisterfucker your mother’s cunt your sister’s cock.

  4

  DR. AZAD BHARTIYA

  The last person to see the baby was Dr. Azad Bhartiya, who had just entered, according to his own calculations, the eleventh year, third month and seventeenth day of his hunger strike. Dr. Bhartiya was so thin as to be almost two-dimensional. His temples were hollow, his dark, sunbaked skin slunk over the bones of his face and the prominent cartilage of his long, reedy neck and collarbone. Searching, fevered eyes stared out at the world from deep shadow bowls. One of his arms, from shoulder to wrist, was encased in a filthy white plaster cast supported by a sling looped around his neck. The empty sleeve of his grimy striped shirt flapped at his side like the desolate flag of a defeated country. He sat behind an old cardboard sign covered with a dim, scratched, plastic sheet. It said:

  My Full Name:

  Dr. Azad Bhartiya. (Translation: The Free Indian)

  My Home Address:

  Dr. Azad Bhartiya

  Near Lucky Sarai Railway Station

  Lucky Sarai Basti

  Kokar

  Bihar

  My Current Address:

  Dr. Azad Bhartiya

  Jantar Mantar

  New Delhi

  My Qualifications: MA Hindi, MA Urdu (First Class First), BA History, BEd, Basic Elementary Course in Punjabi, MA Punjabi ABF (Appeared But Failed), PhD (pending), Delhi University (Comparative Religions and Buddhist Studies), Lecturer, Inter College, Ghaziabad, Research Associate, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Founder Member Vishwa Samajwadi Sthapana (World People’s Forum) and Indian Socialist Democratic Party (Against Price-rise).

  I am fasting against the following issues: I am against the Capitalist Empire, plus against US Capitalism, Indian and American State Terrorism/ All Kinds of Nuclear Weapons and Crime, plus against the Bad Education System/ Corruption/ Violence/ Environmental Degradation and All Other Evils. Also I am against Unemployment. I am also fasting for the complete obliteration of the entire Bourgeois class. Each day I remember the poor of the world, Workers/ Peasants/ Tribals/ Dalits/ Abandoned Ladies and Gents/ including Children and Handicapped People.

  The yellow plastic Jaycees Sari Palace shopping bag that sat next to him upright, like a small yellow person, contained papers, typed as well as handwritten, in English and Hindi. Several copies of a document—a newsletter or a transcript of some sort—were laid out on the pavement, weighed down by stones. Dr. Azad Bhartiya said it was available for sale at cost price for normal people and at a discount for students:

  “MY NEWS & VIEWS.” (UPDATE)

  My original name as given to me by my parents is Inder Y. Kumar. Dr. Azad Bhartiya is the name I have given myself. It was registered in court on October 13th 1997 along with the English translation i.e.: Free/Liberated Indian. My affidavit is attached. It is not the original; it is a copy attested by a Patiala House magistrate.

  If you accept this name for me, then you have the right to think that this is no place for an Azad Bhartiya to be found, here in this public prison on the public footpath—see, it even has bars. You may think a real Azad Bhartiya should be a modern person living in a modern house with a car and a computer, or maybe in that tall building there, that five-star hotel. That one is called Hotel Meridian. If you look up at the twelfth floor you will be able to see the AC room with attached breakfast and bathroom where the US President’s five dogs stayed when he came to India. Actually we are not supposed to call them dogs because they are officers of the American Army, of the rank of Corporal. Some people say those dogs can smell hidden bombs and that they know how to eat with knives and forks sitting at a table. They say the hotel manager has to salute them when they come out of the lift. I don’t know if this information is true or false, I have not been able to verify it. You might have heard that the dogs went to visit Gandhi’s memorial in Rajghat? That is confirmed, it was in the newspaper. But I don’t care. I don’t admire Gandhi. He was a reactionary. He should be happy about the dogs. They are better than all those World Killers who regularly place flowers at his memorial.

  But why is this Dr. Azad Bhartiya here on the footpath while the American dogs are in the Five Star hotel? This must be the question uppermost on your mind.

  The answer for that is that I am here because I’m a revolutionary. I have been on hunger strike for more than eleven years. This is my twelfth year running. How can a man survive for twelve years on hunger strike? The answer is that I have developed a scientific technique of fasting. I eat one meal (light, vegetarian) either every 48 or 58 hours. That is more than sufficient for me. You may wonder how an Azad Bhartiya with no job and no salary manages a meal every 48 or 58 hours. Let me tell you, here on the footpath, no day goes without somebody who has nothing offering to share it with me. If I wanted, just sitting here I could become a fat man like the Maharaja of Mysore. By God. That would be easy. But my weight is forty-two kilos. I eat only to live and I live only to struggle.

  I try my best to tell the truth, so I should clarify that the Doctor part of my name is actually pending, like my PhD. I’m using that title a little bit in advance only in order to make people listen to me and believe what I say. If there were no urgency in our political situation, I would not do this because, technically speaking, it is dishonest. But sometimes, in politics, one has to cut poison with poison.

  I have been sitting here in Jantar Mantar for eleven years. I only leave this place sometimes to attend seminars or meetings on subjects of my interest in Constitution Club or Gandhi Peace Foundation. Otherwise I am permanently here. All these people from every corner of India come here with their dreams and demands. There is nobody to listen. No one listens. The police beats them, the government ignores them. They cannot stay here these poor people, as they are mostly from villages and slums and they have to earn a living. They have to go back to their land, or to their landlords, to their moneylenders, to their cows and buffaloes who are more expensive than humans, or to their jhuggis. But I stay here on those people’s behalf. I fast for their progress, for the acceptance of all their demands, for the realization of their dreams and for the hope that some day they will have their own government.

  What caste am I? That is your question? With such a huge political agenda as mine, you tell me, what caste should I be? What caste were Jesus and Gautam Buddh? What caste was Marx? What caste was Prophet Mohammed? Only Hindus have this caste, this inequality contained in their scriptures. I am everything except for a Hindu. As an Azad Bhartiya, I can tell you openly that I have renounced the faith of the majority of the people in this country only for this reason. For that my family does not talk to me. But even if I was President of America, that world class Brahmin, still I would be here on hunger strike for the poor. I don’t want dollars. Capitalism is like poisoned honey. People swarm to it like bees. I don’t go to it. For this reason I have been put under twenty-four-hours surveillance. I am under twenty-four-hours remote control electronic surveillance by the American Government. Look behind you. Can you see that blinking red light? That’s their camera battery light. They have installed their camera in that traffic light also. They have their control room for their cameras in the Meridian hotel, in the dogs’ room. The dogs are still there. They never went back to America. Their visas were extended indefinitely. Now because the American Presidents come to India so often, they keep their dogs here, permanently stationed. At night when the lights are on they sit on the windowsills. I see their shadows, their outline. My distance vision is very good and getting better. Every day I can see further and further. Bush, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Ceausescu are members of a one hundred member club of leaders that are plotting to destroy all the good governments in the world. All the American presidents are members, even this new one.

  Last week I was hit by a white car, Maruti Zen DL 2CP 4362 belonging to an Indian TV Channel funded b
y Americans. It crashed through the iron railing and drove onto me. You can see that part of the railing is still broken. I was sleeping, but alert. I rolled to one side like a commando, and so I escaped that attempt on my life, only my arm was crushed. It is now under repair. The rest of me was saved. The driver tried to escape. The people stopped him and forced him to take me to Ram Manohar Lohia hospital. Two people sat in the car and slapped him all the way to the hospital. The government doctors treated me very well. In the morning when I came back, all the revolutionaries who were here that night, bought me samosas and a glass of sweet lassi. They all signed or put their thumb impressions on my plaster. See, here are Santhal tribals from Hazaribagh, displaced by East Parej coal mines, these are Union Carbide Gas victims who walked here all the way from Bhopal. It took them three weeks. That Gas-Leak company has a new name now, Dow Chemicals. But these poor people who were destroyed by them, can they buy new lungs, new eyes? They have to manage with their same old organs, which were poisoned so many years ago. But nobody cares. Those dogs just sit there on that Meridian Hotel windowsill and watch us die. This is Devi Singh Suryavanshi’s signature; he is like me, a nonaligned. He has given his phone number also. He is fighting against corruption and the cheating of the nation by politicians. I don’t know what his other demand is; you can phone him directly and ask. He has gone to visit his daughter in Nashik, but he will come back next week. He is a eighty-seven years old man, but for him, still, the nation comes first. This is the rickshaw union Rashtravadi Janata Tipahiya Chalak Sangh. This thumb impression belongs to Phoolbatti from Betul, Madhya Pradesh. She’s a very good lady. She was working in a field as a daily laborer when a BSNL—Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited—telephone pole fell on her. Her left leg had to be amputated. The Nigam gave her money for the amputation, fifty thousand rupees, but how is she to work now, with only one leg? She is a widow, what will she eat, who will feed her? Her son doesn’t want to keep her so he has sent her here to do a satyagraha to demand a sedentary job. She has been here for three months. No one comes to see her. No one will. She will die here.

  You see this English signature? This is S. Tilottama. She is a lady who comes here and goes. I have seen her for many years. Sometimes she comes in the day. Sometimes she comes in the late night or in the early morning. She is always alone. She has no schedule. She has this very good handwriting. She is also a very good lady.

  These are the Latur earthquake victims whose cash compensation has been eaten up by corrupt collectors and tehsildars. Out of three crore rupees only three lakh rupees reached the people, 3 percent. The rest was eaten by cockroach people on the way. They have been sitting here since 1999. Can you read Hindi? You can see what they have written, Bharat mein gadhey, giddh aur sooar raj kartein hain. It means India is ruled by donkeys, vultures and pigs.

  This is the second assassination attempt on me. Last year on 8th April, Honda City DL 8C X 4850, drove onto me. That same car you see in the advertisement there on the toilet except that my car was maroon, not silver. Driven by an American agent. On 17th July, Hindustan Times city section, HT City reported it. My right leg was fractured in three places. Even now it’s hard for me to walk. I have to limp. People joke and say that I should marry Phoolbatti so that we have one healthy left leg and one healthy right leg for two of us. I laugh with them even though I don’t find it funny. But it is important to laugh sometimes. I am against the institution of marriage. It was invented to subjugate women. I was married one time. My wife eloped with my brother. They call my son their son now. He calls me Uncle. I never see them. After they eloped I came here.

  Sometimes I cross the road and fast on the other side, with the Bhopalis. But it’s much hotter there.

  Do you know what this place is, this Jantar Mantar? In the old days it was a sun-dial. It was built by some Maharaja, I have forgotten his name, in the year 1724. Foreigners still come to see it with tour guides. They walk past us but they don’t see us, sitting here on the side of the road, fighting for a better world in this Democracy Zoo. Foreigners only see what they want to see. Earlier it was snake charmers and sadhus, now it is the superpower things, the Bazaar Raj. We sit here like caged animals, and the government feeds us useless little pieces of hope through the bars of this iron railing. Not enough to live on, but just enough to prevent us from dying. They send their journalists to us. We tell our stories. For a while that lightens our burden. This is how they control us. Everywhere else in the city there is Section 144 of Criminal Procedure Code.

  See this new toilet they have built? For us, they say. Separate for ladies and gents. We have to pay to go inside. When we see ourselves in those big mirrors, we get afraid.

  DECLARATION

  I do hereby declare that all the information given herein above are true to the best of my knowledge and no material has been concealed therefrom.

  FROM HIS VANTAGE POINT on the pavement Dr. Azad Bhartiya had seen that far from being alone, the baby that had disappeared had three mothers on the pavement that night, all three stitched together by threads of light.

  The police, who knew that he knew everything that happened at Jantar Mantar, descended on him to question him. They slapped him around a little—not seriously, just from habit. But all he would say was:

  Mar gayee bulbul qafas mein

  Keh gayee sayyaad se

  Apni sunehri gaand mein

  Tu thoons le fasl-e-bahaar

  She died in her cage, the little bird,

  These words she left for her captor—

  Please take the spring harvest

  And shove it up your gilded arse

  The police kicked him over (as a matter of routine) and confiscated all the copies of his News & Views as well as his Jaycees Sari Palace bag and all the papers in it.

  Once they left, Dr. Azad Bhartiya didn’t lose a moment. He immediately set to work, starting the laborious process of documentation from scratch.

  Though they didn’t have a suspect (the name and address of S. Tilottama, publisher of Dr. Azad Bhartiya’s News & Views, jumped out at them at a later stage), the police registered a case under Section 361 (Kidnapping from Lawful Guardianship), Section 362 (Abducting, Compelling, Forcing or Deceitfully Inducing a Person from a Place), Section 365 (Wrongful Confinement), Section 366A (a Crime Committed against a Minor Girl Who Has Not Attained Eighteen Years of Age), Section 367 (Kidnapping in Order to Cause Grievous Hurt, Place in Slavery or Subject the Kidnapped Person to Unnatural Lust), Section 369 (Kidnapping a Child under Ten Years of Age in Order to Steal from Them).

  The offenses were cognizable, bailable and trialable by Magistrates of the First Class. The punishment was imprisonment for not more than seven years.

  They had already registered one thousand one hundred and forty-six similar cases in the city that year. And it was only May.

  5

  THE SLOW-GOOSE CHASE

  A horse’s hooves echoed on an empty street.

  Payal the thin day-mare clop-clipped through a part of the city she oughtn’t to be in.

  On her back, astride a red cloth saddle edged with gold tassels, two riders: Saddam Hussain and Ishrat-the-Beautiful. In a part of the city they oughtn’t to be in. No signs said so, because everything was a sign that any fool could read: the silence, the width of the roads, the height of the trees, the unpeopled pavements, the clipped hedges, the low white bungalows in which the Rulers lived. Even the yellow light that poured from the tall street lights looked encashable—columns of liquid gold.

  Saddam Hussain put on his sunglasses. Ishrat said it looked silly to wear goggles at night.

  “You call this night?” Saddam asked. He explained that he wasn’t wearing his sunglasses in order to look good. He said the glare from the lights hurt his eyes and that he’d tell her the story of his eyes later.

  Payal pinned her ears back and twitched her hide even though there weren’t any flies around. She sensed her transgression. But she liked this part of the city. There was air to breathe. She co
uld have galloped, if they’d let her. But they wouldn’t.

  They were on a slow-goose chase, she and her riders. Their mission was to follow an autorickshaw and its passengers.

  They kept their distance from it as it sputtered like a lost child around vast roundabouts landscaped with sculptures, fountains and flower beds, and down avenues that spiked off them, each lined with different kinds of trees—Tamarind, Jamun, Neem, Pakad, Arjun.

  “Look, they even have gardens for their cars,” Ishrat said as they circled a roundabout.

  Saddam laughed, delighted, into the night.

  “They have cars for their dogs and gardens for their cars,” he said.

  A cavalcade of black Mercedes with tinted, bulletproof windows appeared as if from nowhere and scorched past them like a serpent.

  Past the Garden City the chasees and chasers approached a bumpy flyover. (Bumpy for vehicles, that is, not horses.) The row of lights running down the middle looked like mechanical cherubs’ wings mounted on long poles. The rickshaw chugged uphill, then dipped down and disappeared from view. To keep up, Payal broke into a gentle, happy trot. A slim unicorn inspecting the cherub brigade.

  Beyond the flyover the city grew less sure of itself.

  The slow chase threaded past two hospitals so full of sickness that patients and their families had spilled out and were camped on the roads. Some were on makeshift beds and in wheelchairs. Some wore hospital gowns and had bandages and IV drips. Children, bald from chemotherapy, wore hospital masks and clung to their empty-eyed parents. People crowded the counters of the all-night chemists, playing Indian Roulette. (There was a 60:40 chance that the drugs they bought were genuine and not spurious.) Families cooked on the street, cutting onions, boiling potatoes gone gritty with dust on small kerosene stoves. They hung their washing on tree guards and railings. (Saddam Hussain took note of all this—for professional reasons.) A bunch of emaciated twig-thighed villagers in dhotis squatted on their haunches in a circle. In the center, perched like a wounded bird, was a wizened old lady in a printed sari and enormous dark glasses that were sealed along the edges with cotton wool. A thermometer angled out of her mouth like a cigarette. They paid no attention to the white horse and her riders as they cantered past.