The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

by Arundhati Roy

  Miss Jebeen the Second was passed from arm to arm, hugged, kissed and overfed. In this way she embarked on her brand-new life in a place similar to, and yet a world apart from where, over eighteen years ago, her young ancestor Miss Jebeen the First had ended hers.

  In a graveyard.

  Another graveyard, just a little further north.

  And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true.

  —JAMES BALDWIN

  9

  THE UNTIMELY DEATH OF MISS JEBEEN THE FIRST

  Ever since she was old enough to insist, she had insisted on being called Miss Jebeen. It was the only name she would answer to. Everyone had to call her that, her parents, her grandparents, the neighbors too. She was a precocious devotee of the “Miss” fetish that gripped the Kashmir Valley in the early years of the insurrection. All of a sudden, fashionable young ladies, especially in the towns, insisted on being addressed as “Miss.” Miss Momin, Miss Ghazala, Miss Farhana. It was only one of the many fetishes of the times. In those blood-dimmed years, for reasons nobody fully understood, people became what can only be described as fetish-prone. Other than the “Miss” fetish, there was a nurse fetish, a PT (Physical Training) instructor fetish and a roller-skating fetish. So, in addition to checkposts, bunkers, weapons, grenades, landmines, Casspirs, concertina wire, soldiers, insurgents, counter-insurgents, spies, special operatives, double agents, triple agents and suitcases of cash from the Agencies on both sides of the border, the Valley was also awash with nurses, PT instructors and roller-skaters. And of course Misses.

  Among them Miss Jebeen, who didn’t live long enough to become a nurse, nor even a roller-skater.

  In the Mazar-e-Shohadda, the Martyrs’ Graveyard, where she was first buried, the cast-iron signboard that arched over the main gate said (in two languages): We Gave Our Todays for Your Tomorrows. It’s corroded now, the green paint faded, the delicate calligraphy flecked with pinholes of light. Still, there it is, after all these years, silhouetted like a swatch of stiff lace against the sapphire sky and the snowy, saw-toothed mountains.

  There it still is.

  Miss Jebeen was not a member of the Committee that decided what should be written on the signboard. But she was in no position to argue with its decision. Also, Miss Jebeen hadn’t notched up very many Todays to trade in for Tomorrows, but then the algebra of infinite justice was never so rude. In this way, without being consulted on the matter, she became one of the Movement’s youngest martyrs. She was buried right next to her mother, Begum Arifa Yeswi. Mother and daughter died by the same bullet. It entered Miss Jebeen’s head through her left temple and came to rest in her mother’s heart. In the last photograph of her, the bullet wound looked like a cheerful summer rose arranged just above her left ear. A few petals had fallen on her kaffan, the white shroud she was wrapped in before she was laid to rest.

  Miss Jebeen and her mother were buried along with fifteen others, taking the toll of their massacre to seventeen.

  At the time of their funeral the Mazar-e-Shohadda was still fairly new, but was already getting crowded. However, the Intizamiya Committee, the Organizing Committee, had its ear to the ground from the very beginning of the insurrection and had a realistic idea of things to come. It planned the layout of the graves carefully, making ordered, efficient use of the available space. Everyone understood how important it was to bury martyrs’ bodies in collective burial grounds and not leave them scattered (in their thousands), like birdfeed, up in the mountains, or in the forests around the army camps and torture centers that had mushroomed across the Valley. When the fighting began and the Occupation tightened its grip, for ordinary people the consolidation of their dead became, in itself, an act of defiance.

  The first to be laid to rest in the graveyard was a gumnaam shaheed, an anonymous martyr, whose coffin was brought out at midnight. He was buried in the graveyard-which-wasn’t-yet-a-graveyard with full rites and honors before a solemn knot of mourners. The next morning, while candles were lit and fresh rose petals scattered on the fresh grave, and fresh prayers were said in the presence of thousands of people who had gathered following the post-Friday-prayer announcements in the mosques, the Committee began the business of fencing off a large swathe of land the size of a small meadow. A few days later the sign went up: Mazar-e-Shohadda.

  Rumor had it that the unidentified martyr who was buried that night—the founder-corpse—was not a corpse at all, but an empty duffel bag. Years later, the (alleged) mastermind of this (alleged) plan was questioned by a young sang-baaz, a rock-thrower, a member of the new generation of freedom fighters, who had heard this story and was troubled by it: “But jenaab, jenaab, does this not mean that our Movement, our tehreek, is based on a lie?” The grizzled mastermind’s (alleged) reply was, “This is the trouble with you youngsters, you have absolutely no idea how wars are fought.”

  Many of course maintained that the rumor about the martyr-bag was just another of those endless rumors generated and disseminated by the Rumours Wing in Badami Bagh, Military HQ, Srinagar; just another ploy by the occupation forces to undermine the tehreek and keep people destabilized, suspicious and racked by self-doubt.

  Rumor had it that there really was a Rumours Wing with an officer of the rank of Major in charge of it. There was a rumor that a dreaded battalion from Nagaland (themselves subjects of another occupation in the east), legendary eaters of pigs and dogs, occasionally enjoyed a snack of human flesh as well, especially the meat of “oldies,” those in the know said. There was a rumor that anybody who could deliver (to somebody, address unknown) an owl in good health that weighed three or more kilos (owls in the region weighed only half that, even the fat ones) would win a million-rupee prize. People took to snaring hawks, falcons, small owls and raptors of all kinds, feeding them rats, rice and raisins, injecting them with steroids and weighing them on the hour, every hour, even though they were not quite sure whom to deliver the birds to. Cynics said it was the army again, always looking for ways to keep gullible people busy and out of trouble. There were rumors and counter-rumors. There were rumors that might have been true, and truths that ought to have been just rumors. For instance, it really was true that for many years the army’s Human Rights Cell was headed by a Lieutenant Colonel Stalin—a friendly fellow from Kerala, son of an old communist. (The rumor was that it was his idea to set up Muskaan—which means “smile” in Urdu—a chain of military “Good Will” centers for the rehabilitation of widows, half-widows, orphans and half-orphans. Infuriated people, who accused the army of creating the supply of orphans and widows, regularly burned down the “Good Will” orphanages and sewing-centers. They were always rebuilt, bigger, better, plusher, friendlier.)

  In the matter of the Martyrs’ Graveyard, however, the question of whether the first grave contained a bag or a body turned out to be of no real consequence. The substantive truth was that a relatively new graveyard was filling up, with real bodies, at an alarming pace.

  —

  Martyrdom stole into the Kashmir Valley from across the Line of Control, through moonlit mountain passes manned by soldiers. Night after night it walked on narrow, stony paths wrapped like thread around blue cliffs of ice, across vast glaciers and high meadows of waist-deep snow. It trudged past young boys shot down in snowdrifts, their bodies arranged in eerie, frozen tableaux under the pitiless gaze of the pale moon in the cold night sky, and stars that hung so low you felt you could almost touch them.

  When it arrived in the Valley it stayed close to the ground and spread through the walnut groves, the saffron fields, the apple, almond and cherry orchards like a creeping mist. It whispered words of war into the ears of doctors and engineers, students and laborers, tailors and carpenters, weavers and farmers, shepherds, cooks and bards. They listened carefully, and then put down their books and implements, their needles, their chisels, their staffs, their plows, their cleavers and their spangled clown costumes. They stilled the looms on which they had woven th
e most beautiful carpets and the finest, softest shawls the world had ever seen, and ran gnarled, wondering fingers over the smooth barrels of Kalashnikovs that the strangers who visited them allowed them to touch. They followed the new Pied Pipers up into the high meadows and alpine glades where training camps had been set up. Only after they had been given guns of their own, after they had curled their fingers around the trigger and felt it give, ever so slightly, after they had weighed the odds and decided it was a viable option, only then did they allow the rage and shame of the subjugation they had endured for decades, for centuries, to course through their bodies and turn the blood in their veins into smoke.

  The mist swirled on, on an indiscriminate recruitment drive. It whispered into the ears of black marketeers, bigots, thugs and confidence-tricksters. They too listened intently before they reconfigured their plans. They ran their sly fingers over the cold-metal bumps on their quota of grenades that was being distributed so generously, like parcels of choice mutton at Eid. They grafted the language of God and Freedom, Allah and Azadi, on to their murders and new scams. They made off with money, property and women.

  Of course women.

  Women of course.

  In this way the insurrection began. Death was everywhere. Death was everything. Career. Desire. Dream. Poetry. Love. Youth itself. Dying became just another way of living. Graveyards sprang up in parks and meadows, by streams and rivers, in fields and forest glades. Tombstones grew out of the ground like young children’s teeth. Every village, every locality, had its own graveyard. The ones that didn’t grew anxious about being seen as collaborators. In remote border areas, near the Line of Control, the speed and regularity with which the bodies turned up, and the condition some of them were in, wasn’t easy to cope with. Some were delivered in sacks, some in small polythene bags, just pieces of flesh, some hair and teeth. Notes pinned to them by the quartermasters of death said: 1 kg, 2.7 kg, 500 g. (Yes, another of those truths that ought really to have been just a rumor.)

  Tourists flew out. Journalists flew in. Honeymooners flew out. Soldiers flew in. Women flocked around police stations and army camps holding up a forest of thumbed, dog-eared, passport-sized photographs grown soft with tears: Please sir, have you seen my boy anywhere? Have you seen my husband? Has my brother by any chance passed through your hands? And the Sirs swelled their chests and bristled their mustaches and played with their medals and narrowed their eyes to assess them, to see which one’s despair would be worth converting into corrosive hope (I’ll see what I can do), and what that hope would be worth to whom. (A fee? A feast? A fuck? A truckload of walnuts?)

  Prisons filled up, jobs evaporated. Guides, touts, pony owners (and their ponies), bellboys, waiters, receptionists, toboggan-pullers, trinket-sellers, florists and the boatmen on the lake grew poorer and hungrier.

  Only for gravediggers there was no rest. It was just workworkwork. With no extra pay for overtime or night shifts.

  —

  In the Mazar-e-Shohadda, Miss Jebeen and her mother were buried next to each other. On his wife’s tombstone, Musa Yeswi wrote:

  ARIFA YESWI

  12 September 1968–22 December 1995

  Wife of Musa Yeswi

  And below that:

  Ab wahan khaak udhaati hai khizaan

  Phool hi phool jahaan thay pehle

  Now dust blows on autumn’s breeze

  Where once were flowers, only flowers

  Next to it, on Miss Jebeen’s tombstone it said:

  MISS JEBEEN

  2 January 1992–22 December 1995

  Beloved d/o Arifa and Musa Yeswi

  And then right at the bottom, in very small letters, Musa asked the tombstone-engraver to inscribe what many would consider an inappropriate epitaph for a martyr. He positioned it in a place where he knew that in winter it would be more or less hidden under the snow and during the rest of the year tall grass and wild narcissus would obscure it. More or less. This is what he wrote:

  Akh daleela wann

  Yeth manz ne kahn balai aasi

  Na aes soh kunni junglas manz roazaan

  It’s what Miss Jebeen would say to him at night as she lay next to him on the carpet, resting her back on a frayed velvet bolster (washed, darned, washed again), wearing her own pheran (washed, darned, washed again), tiny as a tea cozy (ferozi blue with salmon-pink paisleys embroidered along the neck and sleeves) and mimicking precisely her father’s lying-down posture—her left leg bent, her right ankle on her left knee, her very small fist in his big one. Akh daleela wann. Tell me a story. And then she would begin the story herself, shouting it out into the somber, curfewed night, her raucous delight dancing out of the windows and rousing the neighborhood. Yeth manz ne kahn balai aasi! Na aes soh kunni junglas manz roazaan! There wasn’t a witch, and she didn’t live in the jungle. Tell me a story, and can we cut the crap about the witch and the jungle? Can you tell me a real story?

  Cold soldiers from a warm climate patrolling the icy highway that circled their neighborhood cocked their ears and uncocked the safety catches of their guns. Who’s there? What’s that sound? Stop or we’ll shoot! They came from far away and did not know the words in Kashmiri for Stop or Shoot or Who. They had guns, so they didn’t need to.

  The youngest of them, S. Murugesan, barely adult, had never been so cold, had never seen snow and was still enchanted by the shapes his breath made as it condensed in the frozen air. “Look!” he said on his first night patrol, two fingers to his lips, pulling on an imaginary cigarette, exhaling a plume of blue smoke. “Free cigarette!” The white smile in his dark face floated through the night and then faded, deflated by the bored disdain of his mates. “Go ahead, Rajinikant,” they said to him, “smoke the whole pack. Cigarettes don’t taste so good once they’ve blown your head off.”

  They.

  They did get him eventually. The armored jeep he was riding in was blown up on the highway just outside Kupwara. He and two other soldiers bled to death by the side of the road.

  His body was delivered in a coffin to his family in his village in Thanjavur district, Tamil Nadu, along with a DVD of the documentary film Saga of Untold Valor directed by a Major Raju and produced by the Ministry of Defense. S. Murugesan wasn’t in the film, but his family thought he was because they never saw it. They didn’t have a DVD player.

  In his village the Vanniyars (who were not “untouchable”) would not allow the body of S. Murugesan (who was) to be carried past their houses to the cremation ground. So the funeral procession took a circuitous route that skirted the village to the separate Untouchables’ cremation ground right next to the village dump.

  One of the things that S. Murugesan had secretly enjoyed about being in Kashmir was that fair-skinned Kashmiris would often taunt Indian soldiers by mocking their dark skins and calling them “Chamar nasl” (Chamar breed). He was amused by the rage it provoked among those of his fellow soldiers who considered themselves upper caste and thought nothing of calling him a Chamar, which was what North Indians usually called all Dalits, regardless of which of the many Untouchable castes they belonged to. Kashmir was one of the few places in the world where a fair-skinned people had been ruled by a darker-skinned one. That inversion imbued appalling slurs with a kind of righteousness.

  To commemorate S. Murugesan’s valor, the army contributed towards building a cement statue of Sepoy S. Murugesan, in his soldier’s uniform, with his rifle on his shoulder, at the entrance to the village. Every now and then his young widow would point it out to their baby, who was six months old when her father died. “Appa,” she’d say, waving at the statue. And the baby would smile, mimicking precisely her mother’s wave, a fold of babyfat spilling over her babywrist like a bracelet. “Appappappappappappappa,” she’d say, smiling.

  Not everyone in the village was happy with the idea of having an Untouchable man’s statue put up at the entrance. Particularly not an Untouchable who carried a weapon. They felt it would give out the wrong message, give people ideas. Three w
eeks after the statue went up, the rifle on its shoulder went missing. Sepoy S. Murugesan’s family tried to file a complaint, but the police refused to register a case, saying that the rifle must have fallen off or simply disintegrated due to the use of substandard cement—a fairly common malpractice—and that nobody could be blamed. A month later the statue’s hands were cut off. Once again the police refused to register a case, although this time they sniggered knowingly and did not even bother to offer a reason. Two weeks after the amputation of its hands, the statue of Sepoy S. Murugesan was beheaded. There were a few days of tension. People from nearby villages who belonged to the same caste as S. Murugesan organized a protest. They began a relay hunger strike at the base of the statue. A local court said it would constitute a magisterial committee to look into the matter. In the meanwhile it ordered a status quo. The hunger strike was discontinued. The magisterial committee was never constituted.

  In some countries, some soldiers die twice.

  The headless statue remained at the entrance of the village. Though it no longer bore any likeness to the man it was supposed to commemorate, it turned out to be a more truthful emblem of the times than it would otherwise have been.

  S. Murugesan’s baby continued to wave at him.

  “Appappappappa…”

  —

  As the war progressed in the Kashmir Valley, graveyards became as common as the multi-story parking lots that were springing up in the burgeoning cities in the plains. When they ran out of space, some graves became double-deckered, like the buses in Srinagar that once ferried tourists between Lal Chowk and the Boulevard.

  Fortunately, Miss Jebeen’s grave did not suffer that fate. Years later, after the government declared that the insurrection had been contained (although half a million soldiers stayed on just to make sure), after the major militant groups had turned (or been turned) on each other, after pilgrims, tourists and honeymooners from the mainland began to return to the Valley to frolic in the snow (to be heaved up and whisked down steep snow banks—shrieking—in sledges manned by former militants), after spies and informers had (for reasons of tidiness and abundant caution) been killed by their handlers, after renegades were absorbed into regular day jobs by the thousands of NGOs working in the Peace Sector, after local businessmen who had made fortunes supplying the army with coal and walnut wood began to invest their money in the fast-growing Hospitality Sector (otherwise known as giving people “Stakes in the Peace Process”), after senior bank managers had appropriated the unclaimed money that remained in dead militants’ bank accounts, after the torture centers were converted into plush homes for politicians, after the martyrs’ graveyards grew a little derelict and the number of martyrs had reduced to a trickle (and the number of suicides rose dramatically), after elections were held and democracy was declared, after the Jhelum rose and receded, after the insurrection rose again and was crushed again and rose again and was crushed again and rose again—even after all this, Miss Jebeen’s grave remained single-deckered.