The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

by Arundhati Roy

  Brig Anil Mehra, Commander 81 Mountain Brigade, while addressing the tour participants, told them to make full use of the excellent opportunity provided to them. He also asked them to keenly observe the progress made by other states and to see themselves as ambassadors of peace. Also present on the occasion to give a warm send off were Colonel Prakash Singh Negi, Commanding Officer, 14 Rashtriya Rifles, elected sarpanches of the two villages and parents of all the participants along with a gathering of local populace.

  The Reader’s Digest Book of English Grammar and Comprehension for Very Young Children was two beedis and four cigarettes long. Adjusting of course for reading/smoking speed, both of which are variables.

  Tilo smiled to herself, remembering another Good Will excursion like the one described in the press release that the army had very kindly organized for the boys from Muskaan, the army orphanage in Srinagar. Musa had sent a message asking her to meet him at the Red Fort. It must have been about ten years ago. She was still living with Naga at the time.

  On that occasion, Musa, at his most audacious, was one of the civilian escorts to the group. They were passing through Delhi on their way to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. While they were in Delhi the orphans were taken to see the Qutb Minar, Red Fort, India Gate, Rashtrapati Bhavan, Parliament House, Birla House (where Gandhi was shot), Teen Murti (where Nehru had lived) and 1 Safdarjung Road (where Indira Gandhi was shot by her Sikh bodyguards). Musa was unrecognizable. He called himself Zahoor Ahmed, smiled more often than he needed to and had cultivated a bent, slightly oafish, obsequious air.

  He and Tilo met as strangers who sat next to each other by chance, on a bench in the dark at the Sound and Light Show at the Red Fort. Most of the rest of the audience were foreign tourists. “This is a collaborative venture between us and the Security Forces,” Musa whispered to her. “Sometimes, in these kinds of collaborations, the partners don’t know that they are partners. The army thinks it is teaching the children love for their Motherland. And we think we are teaching them to know their Enemy, so that when it is their generation’s turn to fight, they won’t end up behaving like Hassan Lone.”

  One of the orphans, a tiny boy with huge ears, climbed on to Musa’s lap, gave him a thousand kisses and then sat very still, regarding Tilo from a distance of about three inches, with intense, expressionless eyes. Musa was gruff with him, unresponsive. But Tilo saw his face muscles twitch and, for a moment, his eyes grow bright. She let the moment pass.

  “Who’s Hassan Lone?”

  “He was my neighbor. Great guy. A brother.”

  “Brother” was Musa’s highest form of praise.

  “He wanted to join the militancy, but on his first trip to India, to Bombay, he saw the crowds at VT station and he gave up. When he returned he said, ‘Brothers, have you seen how many of them there are? We have no chance! I surrender.’ He actually gave up! He’s doing some small textile business now.”

  Musa, smiling broadly in the dark, gave the child on his lap a smacking kiss on his head in memory of his friend Hassan Lone. The little fellow stared straight ahead, glowing like a lamp.

  On the soundtrack the year was 1739. Emperor Mohammed Shah Rangeela had been on the Peacock Throne in Delhi for almost thirty years. He was an interesting emperor. He watched elephant fights dressed in ladies’ clothes and jeweled slippers. Under his patronage a new school of miniature painting depicting explicit sex and bucolic landscapes was born. But it wasn’t all sex and debauchery. Great kathak dancers and qawwals performed in his court. The scholar-mystic Shah Waliullah translated the Quran into Persian. Khwaja Mir Dard and Mir Taqi Mir recited their verse in the teahouses of Chandni Chowk:

  Le saans bhi ahista ki nazuk hai bahut kaam

  Afaq ki iss kargah-e-shishagari ka

  Breathe gently here, for with fragility all is fraught,

  Here, in this workshop of the world, where wares of glass are wrought

  But then, the sound of horses’ hooves. The tiny boy stood up on Musa’s lap and turned around to see where the sound was coming from. It was Nadir Shah’s cavalry galloping from Persia to Delhi, pillaging cities that lay on its route. The Emperor on the Peacock Throne was unperturbed. Poetry, music and literature, he believed, ought not to be interrupted by the banality of war. The lights in the Diwan-e-Khas changed color. Purple, red, green. On the soundtrack the laughter of women in the zenana. Bells on the ankles of dancing girls. The unmistakable, deep, coquettish giggle of a court eunuch.

  After the show the orphans and their escorts spent the night in a dormitory in the Vishwa Yuvak Kendra in Diplomatic Enclave. It happened to be just down the road from Tilo’s (and Naga’s) home.

  When Tilo got home, Naga was asleep with the TV on. She switched it off and lay down next to him. That night she dreamed of a winding desert road that had no reason to wind. She and Musa were walking down it. There were buses parked along one side and shipping containers on the other—each with an entrance door and a tattered, gauze curtain. There were whores in some of the doorways and soldiers in the others. Long Somali soldiers. Badly harmed people were being brought out and chained people taken in. Musa stopped to speak to a man in white. He seemed to be an old friend. Musa followed him into a shipping container while Tilo waited outside. When he didn’t come out she went in looking for him. The light in the room was red. A man and woman were having sex on a bed in a corner of the container. There was a big dressing table with a mirror. Musa wasn’t in the room, but his image was reflected in the mirror. He was hanging from the roof by his arms, swinging around and around. There was a lot of talcum powder in the room, including in Musa’s armpits.

  Tilo woke up wondering how she came to be on a boat. She looked at Naga for a long time and was briefly overcome by something that felt like love. She didn’t understand it and didn’t do anything about it.

  SHE CALCULATED that it had been thirty years since all of them—Naga, Garson Hobart, Musa and she—had first met on the set of Norman, Is That You? And still they continued to circle around each other in these peculiar ways.

  —

  The last box wasn’t a fruit carton and wasn’t a “recovery” from the flood. It was a small Hewlett-Packard printer-cartridge carton that contained the Amrik Singh documents that Musa had left with her after he returned from one of his trips to the US. She opened it to double-check that her memory served her right. It did. There was a sachet of old photographs, a folder of press clippings reporting Amrik Singh’s suicide. One of the reports had a photograph of the Singhs’ house in Clovis with police cars parked outside it and policemen milling around inside the No Go zone they had marked off with the yellow tape you saw in TV serials and crime films. There was an inset photograph of Xerxes, the robot with a camera mounted on to it that the California police had sent into the house before they went in to make sure nobody was lurking around waiting to ambush them. Other than the press clippings there was a file with copies of Amrik Singh’s and his wife’s applications for asylum in the US. Musa had given her a long, comical account of how he had got the file. He, along with a lawyer who had argued hundreds of asylum cases on the West Coast—the friend of a “brother”—visited the American social worker in Clovis who had been dealing with Amrik Singh’s case. The social worker was a wonderful man, Musa said, old and infirm, but dedicated to his job. He had socialist leanings and was furious with his government’s immigration policy. His small office was lined with files—the legal records of the hundreds of people he had helped to get asylum in the US, most of them Sikhs who had fled India after 1984. He was familiar with the stories of police atrocities in Punjab, the army invasion of the Golden Temple and the 1984 massacre of Sikhs that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi. He lived in a time warp and wasn’t up to date on current affairs. So he had conflated Punjab and Kashmir and viewed Mr. and Mrs. Amrik Singh through that prism—as yet another persecuted Sikh family. He had leaned across his desk and whispered that he believed the tragedy occurred because neither Amrik Singh nor h
is wife had come to terms with the rape that Mrs. Amrik Singh was bound to have suffered while she was in police custody. He had tried to convince her that mentioning it would greatly enhance their chances of getting asylum. But she wouldn’t admit to it and had grown agitated when he suggested that there was no shame in talking about it.

  “They were simple good folks, those two, all they needed was some counseling, they and their little ones,” he said, handing over copies of their papers to Musa. “Some counseling and some good friends. Just a little help and they would still have been alive. But that’s too much to expect from this great country, isn’t it?”

  Right at the bottom of the printer-cartridge carton was a fat, old-fashioned legal file that Tilo didn’t remember having seen before. It was a set of loose, unbound pages, perhaps fifty or sixty pages, stacked on a piece of cardboard and tied down with red straps and white string. Witness testimonies in the Jalib Qadri case from nearly twenty years ago:

  Memorandum of Statement by Ghulam Nabi Rasool s/o Mushtaq Nabi Rasool, r/o Barbarshah. Occupation—Service in Tourism Department. Age 37 years. Statement recorded under Section 161/CrPC

  The witness states as under:

  I am a resident of Barbarshah in Srinagar. On 8.03.1995 I saw a military contingent positioned at Parraypora. They were frisking vehicles there. An army truck and armored vehicle were also parked there. One tall Sikh army officer surrounded by many military personnel in uniform was conducting the frisking. A private taxi was also parked there. In the taxi there were some civilian personnel wrapped in a red blanket. On account of fear I remained some distance away from this scene. Then I saw a white Maruti car coming. Jalib Qadri was driving and his wife was in the passenger seat. On seeing Jalib Qadri the tall army officer stopped his vehicle and made him to get out. They pushed him in the armored vehicle and all the vehicles including the private taxi went away in a convoy via the Bypass.

  Memorandum of Statement by Rehmat Bajad s/o Abdul Kalam Bajad, r/o Kursoo Rajbagh, Srinagar. Occupation—Agriculture Department. Age 32 years. Statement recorded under Section 161/CrPC

  The witness states as under:

  I am the inhabitant of Kursoo Rajbagh and work in the Agriculture Department as field assistant officer. Today, on 27.03.1995, I was at my home when I heard noise coming from outside. I came out and found people were gathered around a dead body which was tucked into a sack-bag. The dead body had been recovered by local youth from the Jhelum Flood Channel. The youth removed the body from the sack-bag. I found it to be the body of Jalib Qadri. I recognized him because he had been living in my neighborhood for the past twelve years. After inspection I identified the following apparel:

  1. Woolen sweater khaki colored

  2. White shirt

  3. Gray pants

  4. White undershirt.

  Besides this both eyes were missing. His forehead was bloodstained. Body was shrunk and decomposed. Police came and took custody and prepared a custody memo which I signed.

  Memorandum of Statement by Maroof Ahmed Dar s/o Abdul Ahad Dar, r/o Kursoo Rajbagh, Srinagar. Occupation—Business. Age 40 years. Statement recorded under Section 161/CrPC

  The witness states as under:

  I am a resident of Kursoo Rajbagh and deal with business. On 27.03.1995 I heard noise coming from the bank of the Jhelum Flood Channel. I went to the spot and found that the dead body of Jalib Qadri was lying on the bund tucked in a sack bag. I could identify the deceased because he was residing in my neighborhood for a period of twelve years and we offered prayers in the same local mosque. On the deceased body the following apparels were seen:

  1. Woolen sweater khaki colored

  2. White shirt

  3. Gray pants

  4. White undershirt.

  Besides this both eyes were missing. His forehead was bloodstained. Body was shrunk and decomposed. Police came and took custody and prepared a custody memo which I signed.

  Memorandum of Statement by Mohammed Shafiq Bhat s/o Abdul Aziz Bhat, r/o Ganderbal. Occupation—Mason. Age 30 years. Statement recorded under Section 161/CrPC

  The witness states as under:

  I hail from Ganderbal. I am a mason by profession and presently I am working in the house of Mohammed Ayub Dar in Kursoo Rajbagh. Today, on 27.03.1995 at about 6:30 a.m. in the morning I went to the Jhelum Flood Channel for washing my face. I saw a dead body in a sack-bag floating in the river. One leg and one arm was visible from outside. On account of fear I did not report this to anybody. Later I went to Mohammed Shabir War’s house to perform my labor as a mason. I found the same dead body in a sack-bag which was recovered by the locals from the Jhelum Flood Channel. The dead body was decomposed and soaked. The apparel on the body was as follows:

  1. Woolen sweater khaki colored

  2. White shirt

  3. Gray pants

  4. White undershirt.

  Besides this both eyes were missing. His forehead was bloodstained. Body was shrunk and decomposed. Police came and took custody and prepared a custody memo which I signed.

  Memorandum of Statement by brother of the deceased, Parvaiz Ahmed Qadri s/o Altaf Qadri, r/o Awantipora. Occupation—Service in Academy of Arts, Culture and Languages. Age 35 years. Statement recorded under Section 161/CrPC

  The witness states as under:

  I am a resident of Awantipora and the brother of the deceased Jalib Qadri. Today after the identification and Postmortem I took the dead body of my brother Jalib Qadri from the Police. The police separately filed an injury memo and receipt for the dead body. The contents of the memos were read to me which I acknowledge to be correct.

  Memorandum of Statement by Mushtaq Ahmed Khan alias Usman alias Bhaitoth, r/o Jammu City. Age 30 years. Statement recorded on 12.06.95 under Section 164/CrPC

  The witness states as under:

  Sir, I am a baker. I had a shop at Rawalpora and used to supply bread to the army personnel from 1990–91. Then the situation in Kashmir deteriorated and the militants threatened me for supplying bread to army personnel. Since that was the only lifeline for my business, as such I closed down my bakery and went to my native village in Uri. After three months of my stay there militants started to victimize my wife. Not only this, they forcibly kidnapped my 15 years old sister and forced her to marry one of their companions. On this account I left my native village and returned to Srinagar where I stayed in a rented house in Magarmal Bagh. In some time militants of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) reached there and forced me to join their cadre. Later on during the mutual conflicts among different militant factions the militants of Al-Umar outfit picked me up and I got associated with it for two years. Then the security forces started troubling me and picked up my children. As such I surrendered before India Bravo IB and handed over my AK-47 rifle to them. I was kept in custody for 8 months in Baramulla and then released but was bound to report to IB every fifteen days. I did this for three months but then ran away on account of fear because if anybody would have seen me with IB it would have been fatal to my life. In Srinagar, one person, namely Ahmed Ali Bhat alias Cobra met me and introduced me to the DySP of Kothi Bagh police station who took me and sent me for work with the Special Operations Group SOG in the Rawalpora camp. Cobra and Parwaz Bhat were Ikhwanis and used to work in the camp along with Major Amrik Singh. They provoked Major Amrik Singh against me and told him I knew all the militants and should help him in their arrest. One day Major Amrik Singh took me along with him for purpose of raid on militants’ hideout at Wazir Bagh wherein two militants were captured and released after payment of Rs 40,000. I worked with Major Amrik Singh for many months and was witness to the elimination by him of the following people:

  1. Ghulam Rasool Wani.

  2. Basit Ahmed Khanday who was working in Century Hotel.

  3. Abdul Hafeez Pir.

  4. Ishfaq Waza.

  5. One Sikh tailor whose name was Kuldeep Singh.

  All they have been registered as disappeared since then.

  After
wards on one occasion in March 1995 Major Amrik Singh and his friend Salim Gojri who was also like me a surrendered militant and frequent visitor to the camp picked up one person who was wearing a coat, white shirt and tie and gray pant. At that time Sukhan Singh, Balbir Singh and Doctor were also there. The coat-pant man was a very learned person. He argued with them in the camp saying “Why did you got me arrested and brought me here?” Upon which Major Amrik Singh got furious and beat him ruthlessly and took him to a separate room. After confining him he came out and said, “Do you know that person is the famous advocate Jalib Qadri. We have arrested him because whosoever maligns the army and helps militants will not be spared whatever may be his status.” That evening I heard cries and shouting from the same room in which Jalib Qadri was confined. I further heard sounds of gunshots in that room. Later I observed one sack-bag was loaded into a vehicle.

  Few days later when the dead body of Jalib Qadri was recovered and news were published in the papers in this regard, Major Amrik Singh in regret said to me that he did wrong, and that he should not have killed Jalib Qadri but he was helpless in this regard because other officers had entrusted that job to him and Salim Gojri. When he said this to me I felt a threat to my life.

  Then Salim Gojri and his associates, Mohammed Ramzan who was illegal immigrant from Bangladesh, Muneer Nasser Hajam and Mohammed Akbar Laway, stopped coming to the camp. Major Amrik Singh sent me along with Sukhan Singh and Balbir Singh in vehicles to find them and bring them to the camp. We found Salim Gojri sitting in a shop in Budgam and asked him why he had not come to the camp for one week. He said he was busy with raids and he would come the next day. Next day he came with his three associates. They came in an Ambassador taxi. Their weapons were held at the gate. Major Amrik Singh told them this was due to the impending visit of the CO of the camp. After that Major Amrik Singh, Salim Gojri and his associates sat in chairs at the compound and started drinking. After two hours Major Amrik Singh took Salim Gojri and his associates to the dining room. I was in the verandah. Sukhan Singh, Balbir Singh, one Major Ashok and Doctor tied Salim Gojri and his associates with ropes and closed the door. The next day their bodies were recovered in a field in Pampore along with the body of the taxi driver Mumtaz Afzal Malik. Afterwards I moved my wife and children to the house of my friend who was residing at Bypass. Then I escaped to Jammu. Further I do not know.