The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

by Arundhati Roy

  It took Amrik Singh more than an hour to locate Biplab Dasgupta and speak to him on the hotline to the Forest Guest House in Dachigam. The fact that he was part of the Governor’s weekend entourage was cause for serious alarm. There was no question that the woman knew him. And well. The Deputy Director India Bravo seemed to know exactly what G-A-R-S-O-N H-O-B-A-R-T meant. But the predator in Amrik Singh smelled hesitation, diffidence even. He knew he could be in more trouble, big trouble, but it wasn’t too late for it to be undone if he released the woman unhurt. There was space to maneuver. He hurried back to the interrogation center to stall any further damage. He was a little late, but not too late.

  ACP Pinky had found a cheap, clichéd way around her problem. She called down the primordial punishment for the Woman-Who-Must-Be-Taught-a-Lesson. Her vindictiveness had very little to do with counter-terrorism or with Kashmir—except perhaps for the fact that the place was an incubator for every kind of insanity.

  Mohammed Subhan Hajam, the camp barber, was just leaving as Amrik Singh rushed into the room.

  Tilo was sitting on a wooden chair with her arms strapped down. Her long hair was on the floor, the scattered curls, no longer hers, mingled with the filth and cigarette butts. While he tonsured her, Subhan Hajam had managed to whisper, “Sorry, madam, very sorry.”

  Amrik Singh and ACP Pinky had a lovers’ tiff that almost came to blows. Pinky was sulky but defiant.

  “Show me the law against haircuts.”

  Amrik Singh untied Tilo and helped her to her feet. He made a show of dusting the hair off her shoulders. He put a huge hand protectively on her scalp—a butcher’s blessing. It would take Tilo years to get over the obscenity of that touch. He sent for a balaclava for her to cover her head. While they waited for it, he said, “Sorry about this. It shouldn’t have happened. We have decided to release you. What’s done is done. You don’t talk. I don’t talk. If you talk, I talk. And if I talk, you and your officer friend will be in a lot of trouble. Collaborating with terrorists is not a small thing.”

  The balaclava arrived along with a small pink tin of Pond’s Dreamflower talc. Amrik Singh powdered Tilo’s shaved scalp. The balaclava stank worse than a dead fish. But she allowed him to put it on her head. They walked out of the interrogation center, across the yard and up a fire escape to a small office. It was empty. Amrik Singh said it was the office of Ashfaq Mir of the Special Operations Group, Deputy Commandant of the camp. He was out on an operation, but would return shortly to hand her over to the person whom Biplab Dasgupta Sir was sending.

  Tilo politely refused Amrik Singh’s offers of tea and even water. He left her in the room, clearly keen for this particular chapter to end. It was the last she saw of him, until she opened the morning papers more than sixteen years later, to the news that he had shot himself and his wife and three young sons in their home in a small town in the US. She found it hard to connect the newspaper photograph of the puffy, fat-faced, clean-shaven man with frightened eyes to the same one who had murdered Gul-kak and then solicitously, almost tenderly, powdered her scalp.

  She waited in the empty office, staring at the whiteboard with a list of names against which it said (killed), (killed), (killed) and a poster on the wall which said:

  We follow our own rules

  Ferocious we are

  Lethal in any form

  Tamer of tides

  We play with storms

  U guessed it right

  We are

  Men in Uniform

  —

  It was two hours before Naga walked through the door, followed by the cheerful Ashfaq Mir who was accompanied by the scent of his cologne. It took another hour for Ashfaq Mir to complete his histrionics with the wounded Lashkar militant as his prop, for the omelettes and kebabs to be served and for the “handover” to be completed. All through the meeting and the dawn ride to Ahdoos through the empty streets while Naga held her hand, all she could think of was Gul-kak’s head lolling forward in a Surya Brand Basmati Rice bag (for some reason the handles, particularly the handles, of the bag seemed demonically disrespectful) and Musa lying at the bottom of a small boat covered by empty baskets, being rowed to eternity.

  Naga had very considerately booked her a room next to his in Ahdoos. He asked her whether she wanted him to stay with her (“On a purely secular basis,” as he put it). When she said no, he hugged her and gave her two sleeping pills. (“Or would you prefer a joint? I have one rolled and ready.”) He called and asked housekeeping to bring her two buckets of hot water. Tilo was touched by this caring, kind-hearted side of him. She had never encountered it before. He left her an ironed shirt and a pair of his trousers in case she wanted to change. He suggested they take the afternoon flight to Delhi. She said she’d let him know. She knew she couldn’t leave without hearing from Musa. She just couldn’t. And she knew that a message would come. Somehow it would come. She lay on her bed unable to close her eyes, almost too scared to even blink, for fear of what apparition might appear before her. A part of herself that she didn’t recognize wanted to go back to the Shiraz and have a fair fight with ACP Pinky. It was like thinking of something clever to say long after the moment has passed. She realized that it was also cheap and mean. ACP Pinky was just a violent, unhappy woman. She wasn’t Otter, the killing machine. So why the misguided revenge fantasy?

  She missed her hair. She would never grow it long again. In memory of Gul-kak.

  At about ten o’clock that morning there was a quiet, barely audible knock on her door. She thought it would be Naga, but it was Khadija. They hardly knew each other, but there was nobody in the world (other than Musa) that Tilo would have been happier to see. Khadija explained quickly how she had found Tilo: “We have our people too.” In this case they included the pilot of one of the boats on the cordon-and-search team and people on neighboring houseboats and all along the way, who had relayed information, almost in real time. In the Shiraz Cinema, there was Mohammed Subhan Hajam the barber. And in Ahdoos there was a bellboy.

  Khadija had news. The army had announced the capture and killing of the dreaded militant Commander Gulrez. Musa was still in Srinagar. He would be at the funeral. Militants from several groups would attend to give Commander Gulrez a farewell gun salute. It was safe for them to move around because there would be tens of thousands of people out on the streets. The army would have to pull back to avoid an all-out massacre. Tilo was to go with her to a safe house in Khanqah-e-Moula where Musa would meet her after the funeral. He said it was important. Khadija had brought Tilo a set of fresh clothes—a salwar kameez, a pheran and a lime-green hijab. Her matter-of-factness jolted Tilo out of the little swamp of self-pity she had allowed herself to sink into. It reminded her that she was among a people for whom her ordeal of the previous night was known as normal life.

  The hot water came. Tilo bathed and put on her new clothes. Khadija showed her how to pin the hijab around her face. It made her look regal, like an Ethiopian queen. She liked it, although she much preferred the look of her own hair. Ex-hair. Tilo slipped a note under Naga’s door saying she would be back by evening. The two women stepped out of the hotel and into the streets of the city that came alive only when it had to bury its dead.

  The City of Funerals was suddenly awake, animated, kinetic. All around was motion. The streets were tributaries; small rivers of people, all flowing towards the estuary—the Mazar-e-Shohadda. Little contingents, large contingents, people from the old city, the new city, from villages and from other cities were converging quickly. Even in the narrowest by-lanes, groups of women and men and even the smallest children chanted Azadi! Azadi! Along the way young men had set up water points and community kitchens to feed those who had come from far away. As they distributed water, as they filled the plates, as people ate and drank, as they breathed and walked, to a drumbeat that only they could hear, they shouted: Azadi! Azadi!

  Khadija seemed to have a detailed map of the back streets of her city in her head. This impressed Tilo enormous
ly (because she herself had no such skills). They took a long, circuitous route. The chants of Azadi! became a reverberating boom that sounded like the coming of a storm. (Garson Hobart, holed up in Dachigam with the Governor’s entourage, unable to return to the city until the streets had been secured, heard it on the phone held out to the street by his secretary.) Nine months after Miss Jebeen’s funeral, here was another one. This time there were nineteen coffins. One of them empty, for the boy whose body the Ikhwanis had stolen. Another one full of the shredded remains of a little man with emerald eyes who was on his way to join Sultan, his beloved bewakoof, in heaven.

  “I would like to attend the funeral,” Tilo said to Khadija.

  “We could. But it will be a risk. We may get late. And we won’t get anywhere close. Women are not allowed near the grave. We can visit it afterwards, once everyone has left.”

  Women are not allowed. Women are not allowed. Women are not allowed.

  Was it to protect the grave from the women or the women from the grave?

  Tilo didn’t ask.

  —

  After forty-five minutes of driving around, Khadija parked her car and they walked quickly through a maze of narrow, winding streets in a part of town that seemed to be interconnected in several ways—underground and overground, vertically and diagonally, via streets and rooftops and secret passages—like a single organism. A giant coral, or an anthill.

  “This part of town is still ours,” Khadija said. “The army can’t come in here.”

  They stepped through a small wooden doorway into a bare, green-carpeted room. An unsmiling young man greeted them and ushered them in. He walked them quickly through two rooms and as they entered the third, he opened what looked like a large cupboard. There was a trapdoor through which steep, narrow steps led into a secret basement. Tilo followed Khadija down the steps. The room had no furniture, but there were a couple of mattresses on the floor and some cushions. There was a calendar on the wall, but it was two years old. Her backpack was propped up in a corner. Someone had risked salvaging it from the HB Shaheen. A young girl came down the steps and rolled out a plastic lace dastarkhan. An older woman followed with a tray of tea and teacups, a plate of rusks and a plate of sliced sponge cake. She took Tilo’s face in her hands and kissed her forehead. Not much was said, but both mother and daughter stayed in the room.

  When Tilo finished her tea, Khadija patted the mattress they were sitting on.

  “Sleep. He will take at least two or three hours to get here.”

  Tilo lay down and Khadija covered her with a quilt. She reached out and held Khadija’s hand under the quilt. In the years that followed, they would become fast friends. Tilo’s eyes closed. The murmur of women’s voices saying things she couldn’t understand was like balm on raw skin.

  She was still asleep when Musa came. He sat cross-legged next to her, looking down at her sleeping face for a long time, wishing he could wake her up to another, better world. He knew it would be a long time before he saw her again. And then only if they were lucky.

  There wasn’t much time. He had to leave while the tide was high and the streets still belonged to the people. He woke her as gently as he could.

  “Babajaana. Wake up.”

  She opened her eyes and pulled him down next to her. For a long time there was nothing to say. Absolutely nothing.

  “I’ve just come from my own funeral. I gave myself a twenty-one-gun salute,” Musa said.

  And then in a voice that would not rise above a whisper because each time it did it broke under the weight of what it was trying to say, Tilo told him what had happened. She forgot nothing. Not a single thing. Not a sound. Not a feeling. Not a word that had or had not been said.

  Musa kissed her head.

  “They don’t know what they’ve done. They really have no idea.”

  And then it was time for him to leave.

  “Babajaana, listen carefully. When you go back to Delhi you must not on any account stay alone. It’s too dangerous. Stay with friends…maybe Naga. You’ll hate me for saying this—but either get married or go to your mother. You need cover. For a while at least. Until we deal with Otter. We’ll win this war, and then we’ll be together, you and I. I’ll wear a hijab—although you look lovely in this one—and you can take up arms. OK?”

  “OK.”

  Of course it didn’t work out that way.

  Before Musa left he gave Tilo a sealed envelope.

  “Don’t open it now. Khuda Hafiz.”

  It would be two years before she saw him again.

  —

  The sun had not yet set when Khadija and Tilo went to the Mazar-e-Shohadda. Commander Gulrez’s grave stood out from the others. A small bamboo framework had been erected over it. It was decorated with strings of silver and gold tinsel and a green flag. A temporary shrine to a beloved freedom fighter who had given his todays for his people’s tomorrows. A man with tears streaming down his face looked at it from a distance.

  “He’s an ex-militant,” Khadija said, under her breath. “He was in jail for years. Poor man, he’s crying for the wrong person.”

  “Maybe not,” Tilo said. “The whole world should weep for Gul-kak.”

  They scattered rose petals on Gul-kak’s grave and lit a candle. Khadija found the graves of Arifa and Miss Jebeen the First, and did the same for them. She read the inscription on Miss Jebeen’s tombstone out to Tilo:

  MISS JEBEEN

  2 January 1992–22 December 1995

  Beloved d/o Arifa and Musa Yeswi

  And the almost-hidden one below it:

  Akh daleela wann

  Yeth manz ne kahn balai aasi

  Na aes soh kunni junglas manz roazaan

  Khadija translated it for Tilo, but neither of them understood what it really meant.

  The last lines of the Mandelstam poem she had read with Musa (and wished she hadn’t) floated back unbidden into Tilo’s brain.

  Death cleaner, misfortune saltier,

  And the earth more truthful, more awful.

  They returned to Ahdoos. Khadija would not leave until she saw Tilo back to her room. When Khadija had gone, Tilo called Naga to say she was back and that she was going to bed. For no reason she knew, she said a small prayer (to no god she knew) before opening the envelope Musa had given her.

  It contained a doctor’s prescription for eardrops and a photograph of Gul-kak. He was in a khaki shirt, combat fatigues and Musa’s Asal boot, smiling into the camera. He had a handsome leather ammunition belt slung across both his shoulders, and a pistol holster at his hip. He was armed to the teeth. In each leather bullet loop there was a green chili. Sheathed in his pistol holster was a juicy, fresh-leaved, white radish.

  On the back of the photograph Musa had written: Our darling Commander Gulrez.

  In the middle of the night Tilo knocked on Naga’s door. He opened it and put his arm around her. They spent the night together on a purely secular basis.

  TILO HAD BEEN CARELESS.

  She returned from the Valley of death carrying a little life.

  She and Naga had been married for two months when she discovered that she was pregnant. Their marriage had not been what was called “consummated” yet. So there was no doubt in her mind about who the father of the child was. She considered going through with it. Why not? Gulrez if it was a boy. Jebeen if it was a girl. She couldn’t see herself as a mother any more than she could see herself as a bride—although she had been a bride. She had done that and survived. So why not this?

  The decision she eventually took had nothing to do with her feelings for Naga or her love for Musa. It came from a more primal place. She worried that the little human she produced would have to negotiate the same ocean full of strange and dangerous fish that she had had to in her relationship with her mother. She did not trust that she would be a better parent than Maryam Ipe. Her clear-eyed assessment of herself was that she’d be a far worse one. She did not wish to inflict herself on a child. And she did not wi
sh to inflict a replication of herself on the world.

  Money was a problem. She had a little, but not much. She had been fired from her job for poor attendance, and hadn’t got another one. She didn’t want to ask Naga for any. So she went to a government hospital.

  The waiting room was full of distraught women who had been thrown out of their homes by their husbands for not being able to conceive. They were there to have fertility tests. When the women found out that Tilo was there for what was called MTP—Medical Termination of Pregnancy—they could not hide their hostility and disgust. The doctors too were disapproving. She listened to their lectures impassively. When she made it clear that she would not change her mind, they said they could not give her general anesthetic unless there was somebody with her to sign the consent form, preferably the father of the child. She told them to do it without anesthetic. She passed out with the pain and woke in the general ward. Someone else was with her in the bed. A child, with a kidney disorder, screaming in pain. There was more than one patient in every bed. There were patients on the floor, most of the visitors and family members who were crowded around them looked just as ill. Harried doctors and nurses picked their way through the chaos. It was like a wartime ward. Except that in Delhi there was no war other than the usual one—the war of the rich against the poor.

  Tilo got up and stumbled out of the ward. She lost her way in the filthy hospital corridors that were packed with sick and dying people. On the ground floor she asked a small man with biceps that seemed to belong to someone else whether he could show her the way out. The exit he pointed to led her to the back of the hospital. To the mortuary, and beyond it, to a derelict Muslim graveyard that seemed to have fallen into disuse.