Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

One day, in answer to a phone call, he and his father, along with three other men, hired a Tempo to drive out to a nearby village to collect the carcass of a cow that had died on someone’s farm.

“This was what our people did,” Saddam said. “When cows died, upper-caste farmers would call us to collect the carcasses — because they couldn’t pollute themselves by touching them.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Anjum said, in a tone that sounded suspiciously like admiration. “Some of them are very neat and clean. They don’t eat onions, garlic, meat…”

Saddam ignored that intervention.

“So we would go and collect the carcasses, skin them, and turn the hides into leather…I’m talking about the year 2002. I was still in school. You know better than me what was going on then…what it was like…Yours happened in February, mine in November. It was the day of Dussehra. On our way to pick up the cow we passed a Ramlila maidan where they had built huge effigies of the demons…Ravan, Meghnad and Kumbhakaran, as high as three-storeyed buildings — all ready to be blown up in the evening.”

No Old Delhi Muslim needed a lesson about the Hindu festival of Dussehra. It was celebrated every year in the Ramlila grounds, just outside Turkman Gate. Every year the effigies of Ravan, the ten-headed “demon” King of Lanka, his brother Kumbhakaran and his son Meghnad grew taller and were packed with more and more explosives. Every year the Ramlila, the story of how Lord Ram, King of Ayodhya, vanquished Ravan in the battle of Lanka, which Hindus believed was the story of the triumph of Good over Evil, was enacted with greater aggression and ever-more generous sponsorship. A few audacious scholars had begun to suggest that the Ramlila was really history turned into mythology, and that the evil demons were really dark-skinned Dravidians — indigenous rulers — and the Hindu gods who vanquished them (and turned them into Untouchables and other oppressed castes who would spend their lives in service of the new rulers) were the Aryan invaders. They pointed to village rituals in which people worshipped deities, including Ravan, that in Hinduism were considered to be demons. In the new dispensation however, ordinary people did not need to be scholars to know, even if they could not openly say so, that in the rise and rise of the Parakeet Reich, regardless of what may or may not have been meant in the scriptures, in saffron parakeetspeak, the evil demons had come to mean not just indigenous people, but everybody who was not Hindu. Which included of course the citizenry of Shahjahanabad.

When the giant effigies were blown up, the sound of the explosions would boom through the narrow lanes of the old city. And few were in doubt about what that was meant to mean.

Every year, the morning after Good had vanquished Evil, Ahlam Baji, the midwife-turned-wandering-queen with filthy hair, would go to the Ramlila grounds, sift through the debris, and return with bows and arrows, sometimes a whole handlebar mustache, or a staring eye, an arm, or a sword that stuck out of her fertilizer bag.

So when Saddam spoke of Dussehra, Anjum understood it in all its vast and varied meanings.

“We found the dead cow easily,” Saddam said. “It’s always easy, you just have to know the art of walking straight into the stink. We loaded the carcass on to the Tempo and started driving home. On the way we stopped at the Dulina police station to pay the Station House Officer — his name was Sehrawat — his cut. It was a previously-agreed-upon sum, a per-cow rate. But that day he asked for more. Not just for more, for triple the amount. Which meant we would have actually been losing money to skin that cow. We knew him well, that Sehrawat. I don’t know what came over him that day — maybe he wanted the money to buy alcohol that night, to celebrate Dussehra, or maybe he had a debt to pay off, I don’t know. Maybe he was just trying to take advantage of the political climate of the time. My father and his friends tried to plead with him, but he wouldn’t listen. He got angry when they said they didn’t even have that much money on them. He arrested them on the charge of ‘cow-slaughter’ and put them in the police lock-up. I was left outside. My father didn’t seem worried when he went in, so I wasn’t either. I waited, assuming they were just doing some hard bargaining and would soon come to an agreement. Two hours went by. Crowds of people passed by on their way to the evening fireworks. Some were dressed as gods, Ram, Laxman and Hanuman — little kids with bows and arrows, some with monkey’s tails and their faces painted red, some were demons with black faces, all going to take part in the Ramlila. When they walked past our truck, they all held their noses because of the stink. At sunset, I heard the explosions of the effigies being blown up and the cheers of the people watching. I was upset that I had missed all the fun. In a while people began to return home. There was still no sign of my father and his friends. And then, I don’t know how it happened — maybe the police spread the rumor, or made a few phone calls — but a crowd started to collect outside the police station demanding the ‘cow-killers’ be turned over to them. The dead cow in the Tempo, stinking up the whole area, was proof enough for them. People began to block traffic. I didn’t know what to do, where to hide, so I mingled with the crowd. Some people started shouting Jai Shri Ram! and Vande Mataram! More and more joined in and it turned into a frenzy. A few men went into the police station and brought my father and his three friends out. They began to beat them, at first just with their fists, and with shoes. But then someone brought a crowbar, someone else a carjack. I couldn’t see much, but when the first blows fell I heard their cries…”

Saddam turned to Anjum.

“I have never heard a sound like that…it was a strange, high sound, it wasn’t human. But then the howling of the crowd drowned them. I don’t need to tell you. You know…” Saddam’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Everybody watched. Nobody stopped them.”

He described how once the mob had finished its business the cars switched their headlights on, all together, like an army convoy. How they splashed through puddles of his father’s blood as if it were rainwater, how the road looked like a street in the old city on the day of Bakr-Eid.

“I was part of the mob that killed my father,” Saddam said.

Anjum’s desolate fort with its humming walls and secret dungeons threatened to rise around her again. Saddam and she could almost hear each other’s heartbeats. She couldn’t bring herself to say anything, not even to utter a word of sympathy. But Saddam knew she was listening. It was a while before he spoke again.

“A few months after all this my mother, who was already unwell, died. I was left in the care of my uncle and my grandmother. I dropped out of school, stole some money from my uncle and came to Delhi. I arrived in Delhi with just a little money and the clothes I was wearing. I had only one ambition — I wanted to kill that bastard Sehrawat. Someday I will. I slept on the streets, worked as a truck cleaner, for a few months even as a sewage worker. And then my friend Neeraj, who is from my village, now he works in the Municipal Corporation, you’ve met him—”

“Yes,” Anjum said, “that tall, beautiful-looking boy—”

“Yes, him. He tried to get into modeling but couldn’t…even for that you have to pay pimps. Now he drives a truck for the Municipal Corporation…Anyway, Neeraj helped me to get a job here, in the mortuary, where we first met…A few years after I came to Delhi I was passing a TV showroom, and one of the TVs in the window was playing the evening news. That’s when I first saw the video of the hanging of Saddam Hussein. I didn’t know anything about him, but I was so impressed by the courage and dignity of that man in the face of death. When I got my first mobile phone, I asked the shopkeeper to find that video and download it for me. I watched it again and again. I wanted to be like him. I decided to become a Muslim and take his name. I felt it would give me the courage to do what I had to do and face the consequences, like him.”