The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

by Arundhati Roy

  Flying foxes hung from the branches of huge, old trees, like limp black flags from an old protest. There was nobody around. Tilo sat on a broken grave, trying to orient herself.

  A thin, bald man in a scarlet waiter’s coat clanked in on an old bicycle. He had a small bunch of marigolds clamped to the back seat of his cycle. He made his way to one of the graves with the flowers and a duster. After dusting it, he placed the flowers on it, stood in silence for a moment and then hurried away.

  Tilo walked over to the grave. It was the only one, as far as she could tell, whose tombstone was inscribed in English. It was the grave of Begum Renata Mumtaz Madam, the belly dancer from Romania who had died of a broken heart.

  The man was Roshan Lal on his day off from Rosebud Rest-O-Bar. Tilo would meet him seventeen years later, when she returned to the graveyard with Miss Jebeen the Second. Of course she wouldn’t recognize him. Nor would she recognize the graveyard, because by then, it was no longer a derelict place for the forgotten dead.

  Once Roshan Lal left, Tilo lay down on Begum Renata Mumtaz Madam’s grave. She cried a little and then fell asleep. When she woke she felt better prepared to go home and face the rest of her life.

  That included dinner downstairs, at least once a week, with Ambassador Shivashankar and his wife, whose views on almost everything, including Kashmir, made Tilo’s hands shake and the cutlery rattle on her plate.

  The stupidification of the mainland was picking up speed at an unprecedented rate, and it didn’t even need a military occupation.

  Then there was the changing of the seasons. “This is also a journey,” M said, “and they can’t take it away from us.”

  —NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM

  10

  THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS

  Word spread quickly in the poorer quarters that a clever woman had moved into the graveyard. Parents in the neighborhood flocked to enroll their children in the classes Tilo held at Jannat Guest House. Her pupils called her Tilo Madam and sometimes Ustaniji (Teacher, in Urdu). Although she missed the morning singing by the children from the school opposite her apartment, she didn’t teach her own pupils to sing “We Shall Overcome” in any language, because she wasn’t sure that Overcoming was anywhere on anyone’s horizon. But she taught them arithmetic, drawing, computer graphics (on three second-hand desktop computers she had bought with the minimal fees she charged), a bit of basic science, English and eccentricity. From them she learned Urdu and something of the art of happiness. She worked a long day and, for the first time in her life, slept a full night. (Miss Jebeen the Second slept with Anjum.) With each passing day Tilo’s mind felt less like one of Musa’s “recoveries.” Despite making plans every other day to do so, she had not visited her apartment since she left. Not even after receiving the message Garson Hobart had sent through Anjum and Saddam when they went (out of curiosity to see where and how the strange woman who had parachuted into their lives lived) to pick up some of her things. She continued to pay her rent into his account, which she thought was only fair until she moved her things out. When a few months had gone by with no news from Musa, she left a message with the fruit-seller who brought her his “recoveries.” But she still hadn’t heard from him. And yet, the burden of perpetual apprehension that she had carried around for years—of suddenly receiving news of Musa’s death—had lightened somewhat. Not because she loved him any less, but because the battered angels in the graveyard that kept watch over their battered charges held open the doors between worlds (illegally, just a crack), so that the souls of the present and the departed could mingle, like guests at the same party. It made life less determinate and death less conclusive. Somehow everything became a little easier to bear.

  Encouraged by the success and popularity of Tilo’s tuition classes, Ustad Hameed had begun, once again, to give music lessons to students he considered promising. Anjum attended these classes as though they were a call to prayer. She still wouldn’t sing, but hummed the way she used to when she was trying to get Zainab the Bandicoot to learn to sing. On the pretext of helping Anjum and Tilo look after Miss Jebeen the Second (who was growing up fast, getting naughty and being spoiled rotten), Zainab began to spend her afternoons, evenings and sometimes even nights at the graveyard. The real reason—not lost on anyone—was her heady love affair with Saddam Hussain. She had completed her course at the polytechnic and become a pudgy little fashionista who stitched ladies’ clothes to order. She inherited all Nimmo Gorakhpuri’s old fashion magazines as well as the hair curlers and cosmetics that had been put in Tilo’s room to welcome her when she first came. Saddam’s first, unspoken declaration of love had been to allow Zainab to flirtatiously paint his fingernails and toenails scarlet, both of them giggling all the while. He did not remove the nail polish until it chipped off by itself.

  Between Zainab and Saddam, they had turned the graveyard into a zoo—a Noah’s Ark of injured animals. There was a young peacock who could not fly, and a peahen, perhaps his mother, who would not leave him. There were three old cows that slept all day. Zainab arrived one day in an autorickshaw with several cages stuffed with three dozen budgerigars that had been absurdly colored in luminous dyes. She had bought them in a fit of anger from a bird-seller who had the cages stacked on the back of his bicycle and was peddling the birds in the old city. Colored like that, they couldn’t be set free, Saddam said, because they’d attract predators in seconds. So he built them a high, airy cage that spanned the breadth of two graves. The budgerigars flitted about in it, glowing at night like fat fireflies. A small tortoise—an abandoned pet—that Saddam had found in a park, with a sprig of clover in one nostril, now wallowed on the terrace in a mud-pit of his own. Payal-the-mare had a lame donkey for a companion. He was called Mahesh for no reason that anyone knew. Biroo was getting old, but his and Comrade Laali’s progeny had multiplied, and they tumbled around the place. Several cats came and went. As did the human guests in Jannat Guest House.

  The vegetable garden behind the guest house was doing well too, the soil of the graveyard being as it was a compost pit of ancient provenance. Although nobody was particularly keen on eating vegetables (least of all Zainab), they grew brinjals, beans, chilies, tomatoes and several kinds of gourds, all of which, despite the smoke and fumes from the heavy traffic on the roads that abutted the graveyard, attracted several varieties of butterflies. Some of the more able-bodied addicts were recruited to help with the garden and the animals. It seemed to bring them some temporary solace.

  Anjum mooted the idea that Jannat Guest House should have a swimming pool. “Why not?” she said. “Why should only rich people have swimming pools? Why not us?” When Saddam pointed out that water was a key element in swimming pools and the lack of it might prove to be a problem, she said poor people would appreciate a swimming pool even without water. She had one dug, a few feet deep, the size of a large water tank, and had it lined with blue bathroom tiles. She was right. People did appreciate it. They came to visit it and prayed for the day (Insha’Allah, Insha’Allah) when it would be full of clean blue water.

  So all in all, with a People’s Pool, a People’s Zoo and a People’s School, things were going well in the old graveyard. The same, however, could not be said of the Duniya.

  Anjum’s old friend D. D. Gupta had returned from Baghdad, or what was left of it, with horror stories of wars and massacres, bombings and butchery—of a whole region that had been deliberately and systematically turned into hell on earth. He was grateful to be alive and to have a home to return to. He no longer had the stomach for blast walls, or for that matter for any kind of business enterprise, and was delighted to see how the desolate, ravaged specter that he had left behind when he went to Iraq had blossomed and prospered. He and Anjum spent hours together, shooting the breeze, watching old Hindi films on TV, and overseeing new plans for expansion and construction (it was he who supervised the construction of the swimming pool). Mrs. Gupta, for her part, had also retreated from worldly love and spent all her tim
e with Lord Krishna in her puja room.

  Hell was closing in on the home front too. Gujarat ka Lalla had swept the polls and was the new Prime Minister. People idolized him, and temples in which he was the presiding deity began to appear in small towns. A devotee gifted him a pinstriped suit with LallaLallaLalla woven into the fabric. He wore it to greet visiting Heads of State. Every week he addressed the people of the country directly in an emotional radio broadcast. He disseminated his message of Cleanliness, Purity and Sacrifice for the Nation, either with a fable, a folk tale, or an edict of some sort. He popularized the practice of mass yoga in community parks. At least once a month he visited a poor colony and swept the streets himself. As his popularity peaked, he became paranoid and secretive. He trusted nobody and sought no advice. He lived alone, ate alone, and never socialized. For his personal protection, he hired food-tasters and security guards from other countries. He made dramatic announcements and took drastic decisions that had far-reaching effects.

  The Organization that had brought him to power took a dim view of personality cults, and a long view of history. It continued to support him, but quietly began to groom a successor.

  The saffron parakeets that had been biding their time were set loose. They swooped into university campuses and courtrooms, disrupted concerts, vandalized cinema halls and burned books. A parakeet committee of pedagogy was set up to formalize the process of turning history into mythology and mythology into history. The Sound and Light show at the Red Fort was taken into the workshop for revision. Soon the centuries of Muslim rule would be stripped of poetry, music and architecture and collapsed into the sound of the clash of swords and a bloodcurdling war cry that lasted only a little longer than the husky giggle that Ustad Kulsoom Bi had hung her hopes on. The remaining time would be taken up by the story of Hindu glory. As always, history would be a revelation of the future as much as it was a study of the past.

  Small gangs of thugs, who called themselves “defenders of the Hindu Faith,” worked the villages, gaining what advantage they could. Aspiring politicians jump-started their careers by filming themselves making hateful speeches or beating up Muslims and uploading the videos on to YouTube. Every Hindu pilgrimage and religious festival turned into a provocative victory parade. Armed escort teams rode beside pilgrims and revelers on trucks and motorcycles, looking to pick fights in peaceful neighborhoods. Instead of saffron flags they now proudly waved the national flag—a trick they had learned from Mr. Aggarwal and his tubby Gandhian mascot in Jantar Mantar.

  The Holy Cow became the national emblem. The government backed campaigns to promote cow urine (as a drink as well as a detergent). News filtered in from Lalla strongholds about people accused of eating beef or killing cows being publicly flogged and often lynched.

  Given his recent experiences in Iraq, the worldly Mr. D. D. Gupta’s considered assessment of all this activity was that in the long run it would only end up creating a market for blast walls.

  Nimmo Gorakhpuri came over one weekend with a (literally) blow-by-blow fourth-person account of how the relative of a neighbor’s friend had been beaten to death in front of his family by a mob that accused him of killing a cow and eating beef.

  “You had better chase out these old cows that you have here,” she said. “If they die here—not if, when they die—they’ll say you killed them and that will be the end of all of you. They must have their eyes on this property now. That’s how they do it these days. They accuse you of eating beef and then take over your house and your land and send you to a refugee camp. It’s all about property, not cows. You have to be very careful.”

  “Careful in what way?” Saddam shouted. “The only way you can be careful with these bastards is by ceasing to exist! If they want to kill you they will kill you whether you are careful or not, whether you’ve killed a cow or not, whether you have even set eyes on a cow or not.” It was the first time anybody had ever heard him lose his temper. Everybody was taken aback. None of them knew his story. Anjum had told nobody. As a keeper of secrets, she was nothing short of Olympic class.

  On Independence Day, in what had grown to be a ritual, Saddam sat next to Anjum on the red car sofa with his sunglasses on. He switched channels between Gujarat ka Lalla’s bellicose speech at the Red Fort and a massive, public protest in Gujarat. Thousands of people, mainly Dalit, had gathered in a district called Una to protest the public flogging of five Dalits who had been stopped on the road because they had the carcass of a cow in their pickup truck. They hadn’t killed the cow. They had only picked up the carcass like Saddam’s father had, all those years ago. Unable to bear the humiliation of what was done to them, all five men had tried to commit suicide. One had succeeded.

  “First they tried to finish off the Muslims and Christians. Now they’re going for the Chamars,” Anjum said.

  “It’s the other way around,” Saddam said. He did not explain what he meant, but looked thrilled as speaker after speaker at the protest swore on oath that they would never again pick up cow carcasses for upper-caste Hindus.

  What didn’t make it to TV were the gangs of thugs that had positioned themselves on the highways leading away from the venue of the gathering, waiting to pick off the protesters as they dispersed.

  —

  Anjum and Saddam’s Independence Day TV-watching ritual was interrupted by wild shrieks from Zainab, who was outside, hanging up some washing. Saddam raced out, followed by a slower, worried Anjum. It took them a while to believe that what they saw was real and not a specter. Zainab, her gaze directed skyward, was transfixed, terrified.

  A crow hung frozen in mid-air, one of its wings spread out like a fan. A feathered Christ, hanging askew, on an invisible cross. The sky swarmed with thousands of agitated, low-flying fellow crows, their distraught cawing drowning out every other city sound. Above them in an upper tier, silent kites circled, curious perhaps, but inscrutable. The crucified crow was absolutely still. Very quickly a small crowd of people gathered to watch the proceedings, to frighten themselves to death, to advise each other about the occult significance of frozen crows, and to discuss the exact nature of the horrors that this ill-omen, this macabre curse, would visit upon them.

  What had happened was not a mystery. The crow’s wing feathers had snagged mid-flight on an invisible kite string that was laced across the branches of the old Banyan trees in the graveyard. The felon—a purple paper-kite—peeped guiltily through the foliage of one of them. The string, a new Chinese brand that had suddenly flooded the market, was made of tough, transparent plastic, coated with ground glass. Independence Day kite-warriors used it to “cut” each other’s strings, and bring each other’s kites down. It had already caused some tragic accidents in the city.

  The crow had struggled at first, but seemed to have realized that each time it moved, the string sliced deeper into its wing. So it stayed still, looking down with a bewildered, bright eye in its tilted head at the people gathered below. With every passing moment the sky grew denser with more and more distressed, hysterical crows.

  Saddam, who had hurried away after assessing the situation, returned with a long rope made of several odd pieces of parcel string and clothes line knotted together. He tied a stone to one end and, squinting into the sun through his sunglasses, lobbed the stone into the sky, using instinct to gauge the trajectory of the invisible kite-string, hoping to loop the rope over it and bring it down with the weight of the stone. It took several attempts and several changes of stone (it had to be light enough to spin high into the sky, and heavy enough to arc over the string and pull it through the foliage it was snagged on) before he succeeded. When he finally did, the kite-string fell to the ground. The crow first dipped down with it, and then, magically, flew away. The sky lightened, the cawing receded.

  Normalcy was declared.

  To those onlookers in the graveyard who were of an irrational and unscientific temper (which means all of them, including Ustaniji), it was clear that an apocalypse had been averted and a ben
ediction earned in its place.

  The Man of the Moment was feted, hugged and kissed.

  Not one to allow such an opportunity to pass, Saddam decided that his Time was Now.

  —

  Late that night he went to Anjum’s room. She was lying on her side, propped up on an elbow, looking tenderly down at Miss Jebeen the Second, who was fast asleep. (The unsuitable-bedtime-stories stage was still to come.)

  “Imagine,” she said, “but for the grace of God, this little creature would have been in some government orphanage right now.”

  Saddam allowed for a well-judged moment of respectful silence and then formally asked her for Zainab’s hand in marriage. Anjum responded a little bitterly, without looking up, suddenly revisited by an old ache.

  “Why ask me? Ask Saeeda. She’s her mother.”

  “I know the story. That’s why I’m asking you.”

  Anjum was pleased, but did not show it. Instead she looked Saddam up and down as though he was a stranger.

  “Give me one reason why Zainab should marry a man who is waiting to commit a crime and then be hanged like Saddam Hussein of Iraq?”

  “Arre yaar, that’s all over now. It’s gone. My people have risen up.” Saddam took out his mobile phone and pulled up the Saddam Hussein execution video. “Here, see. I’m deleting it now, right in front of you. See, it’s gone. I don’t need it any more. I have a new one now. Look.”

  As she cranked herself up on her bed and creaked into a sitting position, Anjum grumbled good-naturedly under her breath, “Ya Allah! What sin have I committed that I have to put up with this lunatic?” She put on her reading glasses.

  The new video Saddam showed her began with a shot of several rusty pickup trucks parked in the compound of a genteel old colonial bungalow—the office of a local District Collector in Gujarat. The trucks were piled high with old carcasses and skeletons of cows. Furious young Dalit men unloaded the carcasses and began flinging them into the deep, colonnaded verandah of the bungalow. They left a macabre trail of cow skeletons in the driveway, placed a huge, horned skull on the Collector’s office table and draped serpentine cow vertebrae like antimacassars over the backs of his pretty armchairs.