Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Anjum watched the Trapped Rabbit — who barely had a chest at all — standing in his bulletproof enclosure with the Red Fort looming behind him, reeling off dense statistics about imports and exports to a restive crowd that had no idea what he was talking about. He spoke like a marionette. Only his lower jaw moved. Nothing else did. His bushy white eyebrows looked as though they were attached to his spectacles and not his face. His expression never changed. At the end of his speech he raised his hand in a limp salute and signed off with a high, reedy Jai Hind! (Victory to India!) A soldier, who was almost seven feet tall and had a bristling mustache as broad as the wingspan of a baby albatross, unsheathed his sword from its scabbard and shouted a salute at the little Prime Minister, who seemed to shudder in fright. When he walked away, only his legs moved, nothing else did. Anjum switched off the TV in disgust.

“Let’s go up to the roof,” Saddam said hastily, sensing the approach of one of her moods, which usually spelled trouble for everybody within a half-kilometer range.

He went on ahead and put out an old rug and a few hard pillows with flowered pillowcases that smelled of rancid hair oil. There was a hint of a breeze and the Independence Day kite-flyers were already out. There were some kite-flyers in the graveyard too, not doing too badly. Anjum arrived with a saucepan of fresh, hot tea and a transistor. Saddam and she lay down, staring up (Saddam in his sunglasses) at the dirty sky dotted with bright paper kites. Lolling next to them, as though he too had decided to take a day off after a hard, working week, was Biroo (sometimes called Roobi), a dog Saddam had found wandering down the pavement of a busy road, wild-eyed and disoriented, with a mess of transparent tubes dangling out of him. Biroo was a beagle who had either escaped from or outlived his purpose in a pharmaceuticals testing lab. He looked worn and rubbed out, like a drawing someone had tried to erase. The usually rich black, white and tan beagle colors were dimmed by a smoky, greyish patina that may of course have had nothing to do with the drugs that were tested on him. When Biroo first came to live in Jannat Guest House he was troubled by frequent epileptic fits and snorting, debilitating reverse sneezes. Each time he recovered from the exhaustion of a seizure, he emerged as a different character — sometimes friendly, sometimes horny, sometimes sleepy, sometimes snarly or lazy — as unreasonable and unpredictable as his adopted mistress. Over time his fits had grown less frequent and he had stabilized into what became his more or less permanent Lazy Dog avatar. The reverse sneezes lived on.

Anjum poured a little tea into a saucer and blew into it to cool it down for him. He slurped it up noisily. He drank everything Anjum drank, ate everything that she ate — biryani, korma, samosas, halwa, falooda, phirni, zamzam, mangoes in summer, oranges in winter. It was terrible for his body, but excellent for his soul.

In a while the breeze picked up and the kites soared, but then the mandatory Independence Day drizzle began. Anjum roared at it as though it was an uninvited guest— Ai Hai! Motherfucking whore rain! Saddam laughed but neither of them moved, waiting to see if it was a major or a minor. It was a minor, and soon stopped. Absent-mindedly, Anjum began to rub down Biroo’s coat, wiping off the delicate frost of raindrops on it. Getting wet in the rain reminded her of Zainab and she smiled to herself. Uncharacteristically, she began to tell Saddam about the Flyover Story (the edited version) and how much the Bandicoot had loved it when she was a little girl. She went on sunnily, describing Zainab’s pranks, her love of animals, and how quickly she had picked up English at school. All of a sudden, when her reminiscence was at its most cheerful, Anjum’s voice(s) broke and her eyes filled with tears.

“I was born to be a mother,” she sobbed. “Just watch. One day Allah Mian will give me my own child. That much I know.”

“How is that possible?” Saddam said, reasonably, entirely unaware that he was entering treacherous territory. “Haqeeqat bhi koi cheez hoti hai.” There is, after all, such a thing as Reality.

“Why not? Why the hell not?” Anjum sat up and looked him in the eye.

“I’m just saying…I meant realistically…”

“If you can be Saddam Hussain, I can be a mother.” Anjum didn’t say it nastily, she said it smilingly, coquettishly, sucking on her white tusk and her dark red teeth. But there was something steely about the coquetry.

Alert, but not worried, Saddam looked back at her, wondering what she knew.

“Once you have fallen off the edge like all of us have, including our Biroo,” Anjum said, “you will never stop falling. And as you fall you will hold on to other falling people. The sooner you understand that the better. This place where we live, where we have made our home, is the place of falling people. Here there is no haqeeqat. Arre , even we aren’t real. We don’t really exist.”

Saddam said nothing. He had grown to love Anjum more than he loved anyone else in the world. He loved the way she spoke, the words she chose, the way she moved her mouth, the way her red, paan-stained lips moved over her rotten teeth. He loved her ridiculous front tooth and the way she could recite whole verses of Urdu poetry, most — or all — of which he didn’t understand. Saddam knew no poetry and very little Urdu. But then, he knew other things. He knew the quickest way to skin a cow or buffalo without damaging the hide. He knew how to wet-salt the skin and marinate it with lime and tannin until it began to stretch and stiffen into leather. He knew how to calibrate the sourness of the marinade by tasting it, how to scud the leather and strip it of hair and fat, how to soap it, bleach it, buff, grease and wax it till it shone. He also knew that the average human body contains between four and five liters of blood. He had watched it spill and spread slowly across the road outside the Dulina police post, just off the Delhi-Gurgaon highway. Strangely, the thing he remembered most clearly about all that was the long line-up of expensive cars and the insects that flitted in the beams of their headlights. And the fact that nobody got out to help.

He knew it was neither plan nor coincidence that had brought him to the Place of Falling People. It was the tide.

“Who are you trying to fool?” Anjum asked him.

“Only God.” Saddam smiled. “Not you.”

“Recite the Kalima…” Anjum said imperiously, as though she were Emperor Aurangzeb himself.

“La ilaha…” Saddam said. And then, like Hazrat Sarmad, he stopped. “I don’t know the rest. I’m still learning it.”

“You’re a Chamar like all those other boys you worked with in the mortuary. You weren’t lying to that Sangeeta Madam Haramzaadi Bitch about your name, you were lying to me and I don’t know why, because I don’t care what you are…Muslim, Hindu, man, woman, this caste, that caste, or a camel’s arsehole. But why call yourself Saddam Hussain? He was a bastard, you know.”

Anjum used the word Chamar and not Dalit, the more modern and accepted term for those that Hindus considered to be “untouchable,” in the same spirit in which she refused to refer to herself as anything other than Hijra. She didn’t see the problem with either Hijras or Chamars.

For a while they lay side by side, in silence. And then Saddam decided to trust Anjum with the story he had not told anybody before — a story about saffron parakeets and a dead cow. His too was a story about luck, not butchers’ luck perhaps, but some similar strain.

She was right, he told Anjum. He had lied to her and told the truth to Sangeeta Madam Haramzaadi Bitch. Saddam Hussain was his chosen name, not his real name. His real name was Dayachand. He was born into a family of Chamars — skinners — in a village called Badshahpur in the state of Haryana, only a couple of hours away by bus from Delhi.