Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Anjum cackled her appreciation when Saddam told her what those names were. She gave him the room she had built around her sister Bibi Ayesha’s grave.

Saddam built a temporary stable abutting the bathhouse for Payal. She stood there all night, snuffling and harrumphing, a pale night mare in the graveyard. In the daytime she was Saddam’s business partner. Saddam and she did the rounds of the city’s larger hospitals. He stationed himself outside the hospital gates and busied himself with one of her hooves, tapping it worriedly with a small hammer, pretending he was re-shoeing it. Payal went along with the charade. When the anxious relatives of seriously ill patients approached him Saddam would reluctantly agree to part with the old horseshoe to bring them good luck. For a price. He also had a supply of medicines — some commonly prescribed antibiotics, Crocin, cough syrup and a range of herbal remedies — that he sold to the people who flocked to the big government hospitals from the villages around Delhi. Most of them camped in the hospital grounds or on the streets because they were too poor to rent any kind of accommodation in the city. At night Saddam rode Payal home through the empty streets like a prince. In his room he had a sack of horseshoes. He gave Anjum one that she hung on her wall next to her old catapult. Saddam had other business interests too. He sold pigeon-feed at certain spots in the city where motorists stopped to seek quick benediction by feeding God’s creatures. On his non-hospital days Saddam would be there with small packets of grain and ready change. After the motorist sped away, he would, quite often, much to the chagrin of the pigeons, sweep up the grain and put it back into a packet, ready for his next customer. All of it — short-changing pigeons and exploiting sick people’s relatives — was tiring work, especially in summer, and the income was uncertain. But none of it involved having a boss and that was the main thing.

Soon after Saddam moved in, Anjum and he, partnered by Imam Ziauddin, began another initiative. It started by accident and then evolved on its own. One afternoon Anwar Bhai, who ran a brothel nearby on GB Road, arrived in the graveyard with the body of Rubina, one of his girls, who had died suddenly of a burst appendix. He came with eight young women in burqas, trailed by a three-year-old boy, Anwar Bhai’s son by one of them. They were all distressed and agitated, not just by Rubina’s passing, but also because the hospital returned her body with the eyes missing. The hospital said that rats had got to them in the mortuary. But Anwar Bhai and Rubina’s colleagues believed that Rubina’s eyes had been stolen by someone who knew that a bunch of whores and their pimp were unlikely to complain to the police. If that wasn’t bad enough, because of the address given on the death certificate (GB Road), Anwar Bhai could not find a bathhouse to bathe Rubina’s body, a graveyard to bury her in, or an imam to say the prayers.

Saddam told them they had come to the right place. He asked them to sit down and got them something cold to drink while he created an enclosure behind the guest house with some of Anjum’s old dupattas wrapped around four bamboo poles. Inside the enclosure he put out a piece of plywood raised off the ground on a few bricks, covered it with a plastic sheet and asked the women to lay Rubina’s corpse on it. He and Anwar Bhai collected water from the handpump in buckets and a couple of old paint cans and ferried them to the improvised bathhouse. The corpse was already stiff, so Rubina’s clothes had to be cut open. (Saddam produced a razor blade.) Lovingly, flapping over her body like a drove of ravens, the women bathed her, soaping her neck, her ears, her toes. Equally lovingly they kept a sharp eye out for anyone among them who might be tempted to slip off and pocket a bangle, a toe-ring or her pretty pendant. (All jewelry — fake as well as real — was to be handed over to Anwar Bhai.) Mehrunissa worried that the water might be too cold. Sulekha insisted Rubina had opened her eyes and closed them again (and that shafts of divine light shone out from where her eyes had been). Zeenat went off to buy a shroud. While Rubina was being prepared for her final journey, Anwar Bhai’s little son, dressed in denim dungarees and a prayer cap, paraded up and down, goose-stepping like a Kremlin guard, in order to show off his new (fake) mauve Crocs with flowers on them. He made a great production of noisily crunching Kurkure from the packet Anjum had given him. Occasionally he tried to peep into the shed to see what his mother and his aunties (whom he had never seen in burqas in all his short life) were up to.

By the time the body had been bathed, dried, perfumed and wrapped in a shroud, Saddam, with the help of two of the addicts, had dug a respectably deep grave. Imam Ziauddin said the prayers and Rubina’s body was interred. Anwar Bhai, relieved and grateful, pressed five hundred rupees on Anjum. She refused to take it. Saddam refused too. But he was not one to pass up a business opportunity.

Within a week Jannat Guest House began to function as a funeral parlor. It had a proper bathhouse with an asbestos roof and a cement platform for bodies to be laid out on. There was a steady supply of gravestones, shrouds, perfumed Multani clay (which most people preferred to soap) and bucket-water. There was a resident imam on call night and day. The rules for the dead (same as for the living in the guest house) were esoteric — warm, welcoming smiles or irrational roars of rejection, depending on nobody-really-knew-what. The one clear criterion was that Jannat Funeral Services would only bury those whom the graveyards and imams of the Duniya had rejected. Sometimes days went by with no funerals and sometimes there was a glut. Their record was five in one day. Sometimes the police themselves — whose rules were as irrational as Anjum’s — brought bodies to them.

When Ustad Kulsoom Bi passed away in her sleep she was buried in grand fashion in the Hijron Ka Khanqah in Mehrauli. But Bombay Silk was buried in Anjum’s graveyard. And so were many other Hijras from all over Delhi.

(In this way, Imam Ziauddin finally received the answer to his long-ago question: “Tell me, you people, when you die, where do they bury you? Who bathes the bodies? Who says the prayers?”)

Gradually Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services became so much a part of the landscape that nobody questioned its provenance or its right to exist. It existed. And that was that. When Jahanara Begum died at the age of eighty-seven, Imam Ziauddin said the prayers. She was buried next to Mulaqat Ali. Bismillah, when she died, was buried in Anjum’s graveyard too. And so was Zainab’s goat, who could have made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for accomplishing an unheard-of feat (for a goat): dying of natural causes (colic) after surviving a record sixteen Bakr-Eids in Shahjahanabad. The credit for that of course belonged not to him, but to his fierce little mistress. Of course the Guinness Book had no such category.

Though Anjum and Saddam shared the same home (and graveyard), they rarely spent time together. Anjum enjoyed lazing around, but Saddam, stretched between his many enterprises (he had sold his pigeon-feed business, it being the least remunerative), had no time to spare and hated TV. On one unusual morning of enforced leisure Anjum and he sat on an old red taxi seat that they used as a sofa, drinking tea and watching TV. It was the 15th of August, Independence Day. The timid little Prime Minister who had replaced the lisping Poet — Prime Minister (the party he belonged to did not officially believe India was a Hindu Nation) was addressing the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort. It was one of those days when the insularity of the walled city had been invaded by the rest of Delhi. Massive crowds organized by the Ruling Party filled the Ramlila grounds. Five thousand schoolchildren dressed in the colors of the national flag did a flower drill. Petty influence-peddlers and smallwigs who wanted to be seen on TV seated themselves in the front rows so they could convert their visible proximity to power into business deals. A few years ago, when the lisping Poet — Prime Minister and his party of bigots were voted out of office, Anjum had rejoiced and lavished something close to adoration on the timid, blue-turbaned Sikh economist who replaced him. The fact that he had all the political charisma of a trapped rabbit only enhanced her adulation. But of late she had decided that it was true what people said — that he really was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings. His ineffectualness was strengthening the forces of darkness that had begun to mass on the horizon and slouch through the streets once again. Gujarat ka Lalla was still the Chief Minister of Gujarat. He had developed a swagger and begun to talk a lot about avenging centuries of Muslim Rule. In every public speech, he always found a way to bring in the measurement of his chest (fifty-six inches). For some odd reason it did seem to impress people. There were rumors that he was getting ready for his “March to Delhi.” On the subject of Gujarat ka Lalla, Saddam and Anjum were in perfect sync.