Arundhati Roy: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Is it possible for a mother to be terrified of her own baby? Jahanara Begum was. Her first reaction was to feel her heart constrict and her bones turn to ash. Her second reaction was to take another look to make sure she was not mistaken. Her third reaction was to recoil from what she had created while her bowels convulsed and a thin stream of shit ran down her legs. Her fourth reaction was to contemplate killing herself and her child. Her fifth reaction was to pick her baby up and hold him close while she fell through a crack between the world she knew and worlds she did not know existed. There, in the abyss, spinning through the darkness, everything she had been sure of until then, every single thing, from the smallest to the biggest, ceased to make sense to her. In Urdu, the only language she knew, all things, not just living things but all things — carpets, clothes, books, pens, musical instruments — had a gender. Everything was either masculine or feminine, man or woman. Everything except her baby. Yes of course she knew there was a word for those like him— Hijra . Two words actually, Hijra and Kinnar . But two words do not make a language.

Was it possible to live outside language? Naturally this question did not address itself to her in words, or as a single lucid sentence. It addressed itself to her as a soundless, embryonic howl.

Her sixth reaction was to clean herself up and resolve to tell nobody for the moment. Not even her husband. Her seventh reaction was to lie down next to Aftab and rest. Like the God of the Christians did, after he had made Heaven and Earth. Except that in his case he rested after making sense of the world he had created, whereas Jahanara Begum rested after what she created had scrambled her sense of the world.

It wasn’t a real vagina after all, she told herself. Its passages were not open (she checked). It was just an appendage, a baby-thing. Perhaps it would close, or heal, or go away somehow. She would pray at every shrine she knew and ask the Almighty to show her mercy. He would. She knew He would. And maybe He did, in ways she did not fully comprehend.

The first day she felt able to leave the house, Jahanara Begum took baby Aftab with her to the dargah of Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed, an easy, ten-minute walk from her home. She didn’t know the story of Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed then, and had no idea what turned her footsteps so surely in the direction of his shrine. Perhaps he had called her to him. Or perhaps she was drawn to the strange people she had seen camped there when she used to walk past on her way to Meena Bazaar, the kind of people who in her earlier life she would not have deigned to even glance at unless they’d crossed her path. Suddenly they seemed to be the most important people in the world.

Not all the visitors to Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed’s dargah knew his story. Some knew parts of it, some none of it and some made up their own versions. Most knew he was a Jewish Armenian merchant who had traveled to Delhi from Persia in pursuit of the love of his life. Few knew the love of his life was Abhay Chand, a young Hindu boy he had met in Sindh. Most knew he had renounced Judaism and embraced Islam. Few knew his spiritual search eventually led him to renounce orthodox Islam too. Most knew he had lived on the streets of Shahjahanabad as a naked fakir before being publicly executed. Few knew the reason for his execution was not the offense caused by his public nakedness but the offense caused by his apostasy. Aurangzeb, emperor at the time, summoned Sarmad to his court and asked him to prove he was a true Muslim by reciting the Kalima: la ilaha illallah, Mohammed-ur rasul Allah —There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His Messenger. Sarmad stood naked in the royal court in the Red Fort before a jury of Qazis and Maulanas. Clouds stopped drifting in the sky, birds froze in mid-flight and the air in the fort grew thick and impenetrable as he began to recite the Kalima. But no sooner had he started than he stopped. All he said was the first phrase: la ilaha . There is no God. He could not go any further, he insisted, until he had completed his spiritual search and could embrace Allah with all his heart. Until then, he said, reciting the Kalima would only be a mockery of prayer. Aurangzeb, backed by his Qazis, ordered Sarmad’s execution.

To suppose from this that those who went to pay their respects to Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed without knowing his story did so in ignorance, with little regard for facts and history, would be a mistake. Because inside the dargah, Sarmad’s insubordinate spirit, intense, palpable and truer than any accumulation of historical facts could be, appeared to those who sought his blessings. It celebrated (but never preached) the virtue of spirituality over sacrament, simplicity over opulence and stubborn, ecstatic love even when faced with the prospect of annihilation. Sarmad’s spirit permitted those who came to him to take his story and turn it into whatever they needed it to be.

When Jahanara Begum became a familiar figure at the dargah she heard (and then retailed) the story of how Sarmad was beheaded on the steps of the Jama Masjid before a veritable ocean of people who loved him and had gathered to bid him farewell. Of how his head continued to recite his poems of love even after it had been severed from his body, and how he picked up his speaking head, as casually as a modern-day motorcyclist might pick up his helmet, and walked up the steps into the Jama Masjid, and then, equally casually, went straight to heaven. That is why, Jahanara Begum said (to anyone who was willing to listen), in Hazrat Sarmad’s tiny dargah (clamped like a limpet to the base of the eastern steps of the Jama Masjid, the very spot where his blood spilled down and collected in a pool), the floor is red, the walls are red and the ceiling is red. More than three hundred years have gone by, she said, but Hazrat Sarmad’s blood cannot be washed away. Whatever color they paint his dargah, she insisted, in time it turns red on its own.

The first time she made her way past the crowd — the sellers of ittars and amulets, the custodians of pilgrims’ shoes, the cripples, the beggars, the homeless, the goats being fattened for slaughter on Eid and the knot of quiet, elderly eunuchs who had taken up residence under a tarpaulin outside the shrine — and entered the tiny red chamber, Jahanara Begum became calm. The street sounds grew faint and seemed to come from far away. She sat in a corner with her baby asleep on her lap, watching people, Muslim as well as Hindu, come in ones and twos, and tie red threads, red bangles and chits of paper to the grille around the tomb, beseeching Sarmad to bless them. It was only after she noticed a translucent old man with dry, papery skin and a wispy beard of spun light sitting in a corner, rocking back and forth, weeping silently as though his heart was broken, that Jahanara Begum allowed her own tears to fall. This is my son, Aftab , she whispered to Hazrat Sarmad. I’ve brought him here to you. Look after him. And teach me how to love him.

Hazrat Sarmad did.

FOR THE FIRST FEW YEARS of Aftab’s life, Jahanara Begum’s secret remained safe. While she waited for his girl-part to heal, she kept him close and was fiercely protective of him. Even after her younger son, Saqib, was born she would not allow Aftab to stray very far from her on his own. It was not seen as unusual behavior for a woman who had waited so long and so anxiously for a son.

When Aftab was five he began to attend the Urdu — Hindi madrassa for boys in Chooriwali Gali (the bangle-seller’s lane). Within a year he could recite a good part of the Quran in Arabic, although it wasn’t clear how much of it he understood — that was true of all the other children too. Aftab was a better than average student, but even from the time he was very young it became clear that his real gift was music. He had a sweet, true singing voice and could pick up a tune after hearing it just once. His parents decided to send him to Ustad Hameed Khan, an outstanding young musician who taught Hindustani classical music to groups of children in his cramped quarters in Chandni Mahal. Little Aftab never missed a single class. By the time he was nine he could sing a good twenty minutes of bada khayal in Raag Yaman, Durga and Bhairav and make his voice skim shyly off the flat rekhab in Raag Pooriya Dhanashree like a stone skipping over the surface of a lake. He could sing Chaiti and Thumri with the accomplishment and poise of a Lucknow courtesan. At first people were amused and even encouraging, but soon the snickering and teasing from other children began: He’s a She. He’s not a He or a She. He’s a He and a She. She-He, He-She Hee! Hee! Hee!