Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

( And may everyone fly BA. )

When they finished chanting, the People of the World bowed low and joined their palms in greeting. Namaste , they said in exotic accents, and smiled like the turbaned doormen with maharaja mustaches who greeted foreign guests in five-star hotels. And with that, in the advertisement at least, history was turned upside down. (Who was bowing now? And who was smiling? Who was the petitioner? And who the petitioned?) In their sleep India’s favorite citizens smiled back. India! India! they chanted in their dreams, like the crowds at cricket matches. The drum major beat out a rhythm… India! India! The world rose to its feet, roaring its appreciation. Skyscrapers and steel factories sprang up where forests used to be, rivers were bottled and sold in supermarkets, fish were tinned, mountains mined and turned into shining missiles. Massive dams lit up the cities like Christmas trees. Everyone was happy.

Away from the lights and advertisements, villages were being emptied. Cities too. Millions of people were being moved, but nobody knew where to.

“People who can’t afford to live in cities shouldn’t come here,” a Supreme Court judge said, and ordered the immediate eviction of the city’s poor. “Paris was a slimy area before 1870, when all the slums were removed,” the Lieutenant Governor of the city said, rearranging his last-remaining swatch of hair across his scalp, right to left. (In the evenings when he went for a swim it swam beside him in the chlorine in the Chelmsford Club pool.) “And look at Paris now.”

So surplus people were banned.

In addition to the regular police, several battalions of the Rapid Action Force in strange, sky-blue camouflage uniforms (to flummox the birds perhaps) were deployed in the poorer quarters.

In slums and squatter settlements, in resettlement colonies and “unauthorized” colonies, people fought back. They dug up the roads leading to their homes and blocked them with rocks and broken things. Young men, old men, children, mothers and grandmothers armed with sticks and rocks patrolled the entrances to their settlements. Across one road, where the police and bulldozers had lined up for the final assault, a slogan scrawled in chalk said, Sarkar ki Maa ki Choot. The Government’s Mother’s Cunt.

“Where shall we go?” the surplus people asked. “You can kill us, but we won’t move,” they said.

There were too many of them to be killed outright.

Instead, their homes, their doors and windows, their makeshift roofs, their pots and pans, their plates, their spoons, their school-leaving certificates, their ration cards, their marriage certificates, their children’s schools, their lifetime’s work, the expression in their eyes, were flattened by yellow bulldozers imported from Australia. (Ditch Witch, they were called, the ’dozers.) They were State-of-the-Art machines. They could flatten history and stack it up like building material.

In this way, in the summer of her renewal, Grandma broke.

Fiercely competitive TV channels covered the story of the breaking city as “Breaking News.” Nobody pointed out the irony. They unleashed their untrained, but excellent-looking, young reporters, who spread across the city like a rash, asking urgent, empty questions; they asked the poor what it was like to be poor, the hungry what it was like to be hungry, the homeless what it was like to be homeless. “Bhai Sahib, yeh bataaiye, aap ko kaisa lag raha hai…?” Tell me, brother, how does it feel to be…? The TV channels never ran out of sponsorship for their live telecasts of despair. They never ran out of despair.

Experts aired their expert opinions for a fee: Somebody has to pay the price for Progress, they said expertly.

Begging was banned. Thousands of beggars were rounded up and held in stockades before being shipped out of the city in batches. Their contractors had to pay good money to ship them back in.

Father John-for-the-Weak sent out a letter saying that, according to police records, almost three thousand unidentified dead bodies (human) had been found on the city’s streets last year. Nobody replied.

But the food shops were bursting with food. The bookshops were bursting with books. The shoe shops were bursting with shoes. And people (who counted as people) said to one another, “You don’t have to go abroad for shopping any more. Imported things are available here now. See, like Bombay is our New York, Delhi is our Washington and Kashmir is our Switzerland. It’s like really like saala fantastic yaar .”

All day long the roads were choked with traffic. The newly dispossessed, who lived in the cracks and fissures of the city, emerged and swarmed around the sleek, climate-controlled cars, selling cloth dusters, mobile phone chargers, model jumbo jets, business magazines, pirated management books ( How to Make Your First Million, What Young India Really Wants ), gourmet guides, interior design magazines with color photographs of country houses in Provence, and quick-fix spiritual manuals ( You Are Responsible for Your Own Happiness …or How to Be Your Own Best Friend …). On Independence Day they sold toy machine guns and tiny national flags mounted on stands that said Mera Bharat Mahan , My India Is Great. The passengers looked out of their car windows and saw only the new apartment they planned to buy, the Jacuzzi they had just installed and the ink that was still wet on the sweetheart deal they had just closed. They were calm from their meditation classes and glowing from yoga practice.

On the city’s industrial outskirts, in the miles of bright swamp tightly compacted with refuse and colorful plastic bags, where the evicted had been “re-settled,” the air was chemical and the water poisonous. Clouds of mosquitoes rose from thick green ponds. Surplus mothers perched like sparrows on the debris of what used to be their homes and sang their surplus children to sleep.

Above the smog and the mechanical hum of the city, the night was vast and beautiful. The sky was a forest of stars. Jet aircraft darted about like slow, whining comets. Some hovered, stacked ten deep over the smog-obscured Indira Gandhi International Airport, waiting to land.

DOWN BELOW, on the pavement, on the edge of Jantar Mantar, the old observatory where our baby made her appearance, it was fairly busy even at that time of the morning. Communists, seditionists, secessionists, revolutionaries, dreamers, idlers, crackheads, crackpots, all manner of freelancers, and wise men who couldn’t afford gifts for newborns, milled around. Over the last ten days they had all been sidelined and driven off what had once been their territory — the only place in the city where they were allowed to gather — by the newest show in town. More than twenty TV crews, their cameras mounted on yellow cranes, kept a round-the-clock vigil over their bright new star: a tubby old Gandhian, former-soldier-turned-village-social-worker, who had announced a fast to the death to realize his dream of a corruption-free India. He lay fatly on his back with the air of an ailing saint, against a backdrop of a portrait of Mother India — a many-armed goddess with a map-of-India-shaped body. (Undivided British India, of course, which included Pakistan and Bangladesh.) Each sigh, each whispered instruction to the people around him, was being broadcast live through the night.