Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“Saddam Hussein was a bastard,” Anjum said. “He killed so many people.”

“Maybe. But he was brave…See…Look at this.”

Saddam took out his fancy new smartphone with its fancy big screen and pulled up a video. He shaded the screen with a cupped palm to cut the glare. It was a TV clip that began with an advertisement for Vaseline Intensive Care moisturizing cream in which a pretty girl oiled her elbows and shins and seemed extremely pleased with the results. Next up was an advertisement by the Jammu & Kashmir Tourism Department — snowy landscapes and happy people in warm clothes sitting in snow sledges. The voice-over said, “Jammu & Kashmir. So White. So Fair. So Exciting.” Then the TV announcer said something in English and Saddam Hussein, former President of Iraq, appeared, elegant, with a salt-and-pepper beard, in a black overcoat and white shirt. He towered over the group of murmuring men wearing peaked, black executioner’s hoods who surrounded him and looked at him through eye-slits. His hands were tied behind his back. He stood still while one of the men tied a black scarf around his neck, making gestures that seemed to suggest that the scarf would help to prevent the skin on his neck getting chafed by the hangman’s rope. Once it was knotted, the scarf made Saddam Hussein look even more elegant. Surrounded by the jabbering, hooded men, he walked to the gallows. The noose was looped over his head and tightened around his neck. He said his prayers. The last expression on his face before he fell through the trapdoor was one of absolute disdain for his executioners.

“I want to be this kind of a bastard,” Saddam said. “I want to do what I have to do and then, if I have to pay a price, I want to pay it like that.”

“I have a friend who lives in Iraq,” Anjum said, seemingly more impressed by Saddam’s phone than with the execution video. “Guptaji. He sends me his photos from Iraq.” She pulled out her phone and showed Saddam the pictures that D. D. Gupta sent her regularly — Guptaji in his flat in Baghdad, Guptaji and his Iraqi mistress on a picnic, and a series of portraits of the blast walls that Guptaji had constructed all over Iraq for the US Army. Some were new and some were already pockmarked with bullet holes and covered with graffiti. Across one of them, someone had scrawled an American army general’s famous words: Be professional, be polite and have a plan to kill everybody you meet .

Anjum couldn’t read English. Saddam could, if he paid careful attention. On this occasion he didn’t.

Anjum finished her tea and then lay on her back with her forearms crossed over her eyes. She seemed to have dozed off, but she hadn’t. She was worried.

“And in case you didn’t know,” she said after a while, as though she was continuing a conversation — actually she was, except that it was one she had been having with herself in her head. “Let me tell you that we Muslims are motherfuckers too, just like everyone else. But I suppose one additional murderer won’t harm the reputation of our badnaam qoam , our name is mud already. Anyway, take your time, don’t do anything in a hurry.”

“I won’t. But Sehrawat must die.”

Saddam took off his glasses and closed his eyes, screwing them up against the light. He played an old Hindi film song on his phone and began to sing along tunelessly but confidently. Biroo slurped up the cold tea remaining in the saucepan and trotted off with boiled tea leaves on his nose.

When the sun grew hot, they returned indoors where they continued to float through their lives like a pair of astronauts, defying gravity, limited only by the outer walls of their fuchsia spaceship with its pale pistachio doors.

It isn’t as though they didn’t have plans.

Anjum waited to die.

Saddam waited to kill.

And miles away, in a troubled forest, a baby waited to be born…

It was peacetime. Or so they said.

All morning a hot wind had whipped through the city streets, driving sheets of grit, soda-bottle caps and beedi stubs before it, smacking them into car windscreens and cyclists’ eyes. When the wind died, the sun, already high in the sky, burned through the haze and once again the heat rose and shimmered on the streets like a belly dancer. People waited for the thundershower that always followed a dust storm, but it never came. Fire raged through a swathe of huts huddled together on the riverbank, gutting more than two thousand in an instant.

Still the Amaltas bloomed, a brilliant, defiant yellow. Each blazing summer it reached up and whispered to the hot brown sky, Fuck You.

She appeared quite suddenly, a little after midnight. No angels sang, no wise men brought gifts. But a million stars rose in the east to herald her arrival. One moment she wasn’t there, and the next — there she was on the concrete pavement, in a crib of litter: silver cigarette foil, a few plastic bags and empty packets of Uncle Chipps. She lay in a pool of light, under a column of swarming neon-lit mosquitoes, naked. Her skin was blue-black, sleek as a baby seal’s. She was wide awake, but perfectly quiet, unusual for someone so tiny. Perhaps, in those first short months of her life, she had already learned that tears, her tears at least, were futile.

A thin white horse tethered to the railing, a small dog with mange, a concrete-colored garden lizard, two palm-striped squirrels who should have been asleep and, from her hidden perch, a she-spider with a swollen egg sac watched over her. Other than that, she seemed to be utterly alone.

Around her the city sprawled for miles. Thousand-year-old sorceress, dozing, but not asleep, even at this hour. Gray flyovers snaked out of her Medusa skull, tangling and untangling under the yellow sodium haze. Sleeping bodies of homeless people lined their high, narrow pavements, head to toe, head to toe, head to toe, looping into the distance. Old secrets were folded into the furrows of her loose, parchment skin. Each wrinkle was a street, each street a carnival. Each arthritic joint a crumbling amphitheater where stories of love and madness, stupidity, delight and unspeakable cruelty had been played out for centuries. But this was to be the dawn of her resurrection. Her new masters wanted to hide her knobby, varicose veins under imported fishnet stockings, cram her withered tits into saucy padded bras and jam her aching feet into pointed high-heeled shoes. They wanted her to swing her stiff old hips and re-route the edges of her grimace upwards into a frozen, empty smile. It was the summer Grandma became a whore.

She was to become supercapital of the world’s favorite new superpower. India! India! The chant had gone up — on TV shows, on music videos, in foreign newspapers and magazines, at business conferences and weapons fairs, at economic conclaves and environmental summits, at book festivals and beauty contests. India! India! India!

Across the city, huge billboards jointly sponsored by an English newspaper and the newest brand of skin-whitening cream (selling by the ton) said: Our Time Is Now . Kmart was coming. Walmart and Starbucks were coming, and in the British Airways advertisement on TV, the People of the World (white, brown, black, yellow) all chanted the Gayatri Mantra: