Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Next to Ahlam Baji’s grave was the grave of a woman on whose tombstone it said (in English) “Begum Renata Mumtaz Madam.” Begum Renata was a belly dancer from Romania who grew up in Bucharest dreaming of India and its classical dance forms. When she was only nineteen she hitchhiked across the continent and arrived in Delhi where she found a mediocre Kathak guru who exploited her sexually and taught her very little dance. To make ends meet she began to perform cabarets in the Rosebud Rest-O-Bar located in the rose garden — known to locals as No-Rose Garden — in the ruins of Feroz Shah Kotla, the fifth of the seven ancient cities of Delhi. Renata’s nom de cabaret was Mumtaz. She died young after being thwarted in love by a professional cheat who disappeared with all her savings. Renata continued to long for him even though she knew he had deceived her. She grew distraught, tried to cast spells and call up spirits. She began to go into long trances during which her skin broke out in boils and her voice grew deep and gravelly like a man’s. The circumstances of her death were unclear, though everybody assumed it was suicide. It was Roshan Lal, the taciturn headwaiter of the Rosebud Rest-O-Bar, gruff moralizer, scourge of all the dancing girls (and the butt of all their jokes), who surprised himself by organizing her funeral and visiting her grave with flowers, once, twice and then, before he knew it, every Tuesday (his day off). It was he who organized the tombstone with her name on it and who maintained its “keep-up,” as he called it. It was he who added “Begum” and “Madam,” the posthumous prefix and suffix to her name(s) on the tombstone. Seventeen years had gone by since Renata Mumtaz died. Roshan Lal had fat varicose veins running up his thin shins and had lost the hearing in one ear, but still he came, clanking into the graveyard on his old black bicycle, bringing fresh flowers — gazanias, discounted roses and, when he was pressed for money, a few strings of jasmine that he bought from children at traffic lights.

Other than the main graves, there were a few whose provenance was contested. For example the one that simply said “Badshah.” Some people insisted Badshah was a lesser Mughal prince who had been hanged by the British after the rebellion of 1857, while others believed he was a Sufi poet from Afghanistan. Another grave bore only the name “Islahi.” Some said he was a general in Emperor Shah Alam II’s army, others insisted he was a local pimp who had been knifed to death in the 1960s by a prostitute whom he had cheated. As always, everybody believed what they wanted to believe.

On her first night in the graveyard, after a quick reconnaissance, Anjum placed her Godrej cupboard and her few belongings near Mulaqat Ali’s grave and unrolled her carpet and bedding between Ahlam Baji’s and Begum Renata Mumtaz Madam’s graves. Not surprisingly, she didn’t sleep. Not that anyone in the graveyard troubled her — no djinns arrived to make her acquaintance, no ghosts threatened a haunting. The smack addicts at the northern end of the graveyard — shadows just a deeper shade of night — huddled on knolls of hospital waste in a sea of old bandages and used syringes, didn’t seem to notice her at all. On the southern side, clots of homeless people sat around fires cooking their meager, smoky meals. Stray dogs, in better health than the humans, sat at a polite distance, waiting politely for scraps.

In that setting, Anjum would ordinarily have been in some danger. But her desolation protected her. Unleashed at last from social protocol, it rose up around her in all its majesty — a fort, with ramparts, turrets, hidden dungeons and walls that hummed like an approaching mob. She rattled through its gilded chambers like a fugitive absconding from herself. She tried to dismiss the cortège of saffron men with saffron smiles who pursued her with infants impaled on their saffron tridents, but they would not be dismissed. She tried to shut the door on Zakir Mian, lying neatly folded in the middle of the street, like one of his crisp cash-birds. But he followed her, folded, through closed doors on his flying carpet. She tried to forget the way he had looked at her just before the light went out of his eyes. But he wouldn’t let her.

She tried to tell him that she had fought back bravely as they hauled her off his lifeless body.

But she knew very well that she hadn’t.

She tried to un-know what they had done to all the others — how they had folded the men and unfolded the women. And how eventually they had pulled them apart limb from limb and set them on fire.

But she knew very well that she knew.

They.

They, who?

Newton’s Army, deployed to deliver an Equal and Opposite Reaction. Thirty thousand saffron parakeets with steel talons and bloodied beaks, all squawking together:

Anjum, feigning death, had lain sprawled over Zakir Mian. Counterfeit corpse of a counterfeit woman. But the parakeets, even though they were — or pretended to be — pure vegetarian (this was the minimum qualification for conscription), tested the breeze with the fastidiousness and proficiency of bloodhounds. And of course they found her. Thirty thousand voices chimed together, mimicking Ustad Kulsoom Bi’s Birbal:

Bad luck!

Nothing scared those murderers more than the prospect of bad luck. After all, it was to ward off bad luck that the fingers that gripped the slashing swords and flashing daggers were studded with lucky stones embedded in thick gold rings. It was to ward off bad luck that the wrists wielding iron rods that bludgeoned people to death were festooned with red puja threads lovingly tied by adoring mothers. Having taken all these precautions, what would be the point of willfully courting bad luck?

So they stood over her and made her chant their slogans.

She did. Weeping, shaking, humiliated beyond her worst nightmare.

Victory to Mother India! Salute the Mother!

They left her alive. Unkilled. Unhurt. Neither folded nor unfolded. She alone. So that they might be blessed with good fortune.

Butchers’ Luck.

That’s all she was. And the longer she lived, the more good luck she brought them.

She tried to un-know that little detail as she rattled through her private fort. But she failed. She knew very well that she knew very well that she knew very well.

The Chief Minister with cold eyes and a vermilion forehead would go on to win the next elections. Even after the Poet — Prime Minister’s government fell at the Center, he won election after election in Gujarat. Some people believed he ought to be held responsible for mass murder, but his voters called him Gujarat ka Lalla. Gujarat’s Beloved.

FOR MONTHS ANJUM LIVED in the graveyard, a ravaged, feral specter, out-haunting every resident djinn and spirit, ambushing bereaved families who came to bury their dead with a grief so wild, so untethered, that it clean outstripped theirs. She stopped grooming herself, stopped dyeing her hair. It grew dead white from the roots, and suddenly, halfway down her head, turned jet black, making her look, well… striped . Facial hair, which she had once dreaded more than almost anything else, appeared on her chin and cheeks like a glimmer of frost (mercifully a lifetime of cheap hormone injections stopped it from growing into an all-out beard). One of her front teeth, stained dark red from chewing paan, grew loose in her gums. When she spoke or smiled, which she did rarely, it moved up and down terrifyingly, like a harmonium key playing a tune of its own. The terrifyingness had its advantages though — it scared people and kept nasty, insult-hurling, stone-throwing little boys at bay.