Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

The advantage of the guest house in the graveyard was that unlike every other neighborhood in the city, including the most exclusive ones, it suffered no power cuts. Not even in the summer. This was because Anjum stole her electricity from the mortuary, where the corpses required round-the-clock refrigeration. (The city’s paupers who lay there in air-conditioned splendor had never experienced anything of the kind while they were alive.) Anjum called her guest house Jannat. Paradise. She kept her TV on night and day. She said she needed the noise to steady her mind. She watched the news diligently and became an astute political analyst. She also watched Hindi soap operas and English film channels. She particularly enjoyed B-grade Hollywood vampire movies and watched the same ones over and over again. She couldn’t understand the dialogue of course, but she understood the vampires reasonably well.

Gradually Jannat Guest House became a hub for Hijras who, for one reason or another, had fallen out of, or been expelled from, the tightly administered grid of Hijra Gharanas. As word spread about the new guest house in the graveyard, friends from the past reappeared, most incredibly, Nimmo Gorakhpuri. When they first met, Anjum and she held each other and wept like star-crossed sweethearts reunited after a long separation. Nimmo became a regular visitor, often spending two or three days at a stretch with Anjum. She had grown into a resplendent figure, large, jeweled, perfumed and immaculately groomed. She came in her own little white Maruti 800 from Mewat, a two-hour drive from Delhi, where she owned two flats and a small farm. She had become a goat-magnate who traded in exotic goats that she sold for serious money to wealthy Muslims in Delhi and Bombay for slaughter on Bakr-Eid. She chuckled as she told her old friend the tricks of the trade and described the spurious techniques of overnight goat-fattening and the politics of goat-pricing in the pre-Eid goat-market. She said that from next year her business would go online. Anjum and she agreed that for old times’ sake they would celebrate the next Bakr-Eid together in the graveyard with the best specimen in Nimmo’s stock. She showed Anjum goat portraits on her swanky new mobile phone. She was as obsessed with goats as she had once been with Western women’s fashion. She showed Anjum how to tell a Jamnapari from a Barbari, an Etawa from a Sojat. Then she showed her an MMS of a rooster who seemed to say “Ya Allah!” each time he flapped his wings. Anjum was floored. Even a simple rooster knew! From that day onwards her faith deepened.

True to her word, Nimmo Gorakhpuri presented Anjum with a young black ram with biblical, curled horns — the same model, Nimmo said, as the one Hazrat Ibrahim had sacrificed on the mountain in place of his only begotten son, Ishaq, except that theirs was white. Anjum put the ram in a room of his own (with a grave of his own) and reared him lovingly. She tried to love him just as much as Ibrahim had loved Ishaq. Love, after all, is the ingredient that separates a sacrifice from ordinary, everyday butchery. She wove him a tinsel collar and put bells on his ankles. He loved her too, and followed her wherever she went. (She took care to take the bells off his ankles and conceal him from Zainab when she visited, because she knew what that would lead to.) By the time Eid came around that year, the old city was teeming with retired camels with faded tattoos, buffaloes and goats as big as small horses, waiting to be slaughtered. Anjum’s ram was full-grown, almost four feet tall, all lean meat and muscle and slanting yellow eyes. People came to the graveyard just to have a look at him.

Anjum booked Imran Qureishi, the rising star among the new crop of young butchers in Shahjahanabad, to perform the sacrifice. He had several prior bookings and said he would not be able to come until late afternoon. When the day of Bakr-Eid dawned, Anjum knew that unless she went to the old city and brought him herself, interlopers would snatch him away out of turn. Dressed as a man, in a clean, ironed Pathan suit, she spent the whole morning trailing Imran from house to house, street corner to street corner while he went about his business. His last appointment was with a politician, a former member of the Legislative Assembly, who had lost the previous election by an embarrassing margin of votes. To minimize his defeat and show his constituency that he was already preparing for the next election, he had decided to put on an opulent display of piety. A sleek, fat water buffalo, her skin oiled and shining, was dragged through the narrow streets that were only as wide as she was, to a crossing where there was some room for maneuver. Positioned diagonally, tethered to a lamp post with her front legs hobbled, she just about fitted into what passed off as a street crossing. Excited people, dressed in new clothes, crowded doorways, windows, little balconies and terraces to watch Imran perform the sacrifice. He arrived, making his way through the crowd, slim, quiet, unassuming. As the murmur of the crowd grew louder the buffalo’s skin twitched and her eyes began to roll. Her huge head with its horns that swept backwards in an oblong arc began to sway back and forth, as though she was in a trance at a classical music concert. With a deft judo move Imran and his helper rolled her over on to her side. In a moment he had cut open her jugular and ducked out of the way of the fountain of blood that pumped up into the air, its rhythm matching the beating of her failing heart. Blood sprayed across the downed shutters of shops, on to the faces of smiling politicians on the tattered old posters pasted on the walls. It flowed down the street past parked motorcycles, scooters, rickshaws and cycles. Little girls in jeweled slippers squealed and stepped out of its way. Little boys pretended not to mind and the more naughty ones stamped their feet softly in the red puddles and admired their bloody shoe-prints. It took a while for the buffalo to bleed to death. When she did, Imran opened her up and laid her organs out on the street — heart, spleen, stomach, liver, entrails. Since the street sloped downwards, they began to slip away like odd-shaped boats on a river of blood. Imran’s helper rescued them and put them on more even ground. The skinning and cutting-up would be done by the supporting cast. The superstar wiped his cleaver on a piece of cloth, scanned the crowd, caught Anjum’s eye and nodded imperceptibly. He slipped through the crowd and walked away. Anjum caught up with him at the next chowk. The streets were busy. Goatskins, goat horns, goat skulls, goat brains and goat offal were being collected, separated and stacked. Shit was being extruded from intestines that would then be properly cleaned and boiled down into soap and glue. Cats were making off with delectable booty. Nothing went to waste.

Imran and Anjum walked up to Turkman Gate from where they took an autorickshaw to the graveyard.

Anjum, Man of the House for the moment, held a knife over her beautiful ram and said a prayer. Imran slit his jugular, and held him down while he shuddered and the blood flowed out of him. Within twenty minutes the ram was skinned, cut up into manageable pieces, and Imran was gone. Anjum made little parcels of mutton to distribute the sacrifice in the way it is Written: a third for the family, a third for nears and dears, a third for the poor. She gave Roshan Lal, who had arrived that morning to greet her on Eid, a plastic packet containing the tongue and part of a thigh. She kept the best pieces for Zainab, who had just turned twelve, and for Ustad Hameed.

The addicts ate well that night. Anjum, Nimmo Gorakhpuri and Imam Ziauddin sat out on the terrace and feasted on three kinds of mutton dishes and a mountain of biryani. Nimmo gifted Anjum a mobile phone with the rooster MMS already installed on it. Anjum hugged her and said she now felt she had a direct line to God. They watched the MMS a few more times. They described the video in detail to Imam Ziauddin, who listened with his eyes but was not as enthusiastic as they were about its evidentiary value. Then Anjum tucked her new phone safely into her bosom. This one she did not lose. In a few weeks, through the good offices of his driver, who still brought messages from his boss to Anjum, D. D. Gupta got her new number and was back in touch with her from Iraq where he seemed to have decided to live.