Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Occupying a substantial part of the pavement quite close to the bald men were fifty representatives of the thousands of people who had been maimed in the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal. They had been on the pavement for two weeks. Seven of them were on an indefinite hunger strike, their condition deteriorating steadily. They had walked to Delhi all the way from Bhopal, hundreds of kilometers in the searing summer sun, to demand compensation: clean water and medical care for themselves and the generations of deformed babies who were born after the gas leak. The Trapped Rabbit had refused to meet the Bhopalis. The TV crews were not interested in them; their struggle was too old to make the news. Photographs of deformed babies, misshapen aborted fetuses in bottles of formaldehyde and the thousands who had been killed, maimed and blinded in the gas leak were strung up like macabre bunting on the railings. On a small TV monitor (they had managed to get an electricity connection from a nearby church) grainy old footage played on a loop: a jaunty young Warren Anderson, the American CEO of the Union Carbide Corporation, arriving at Delhi airport days after the disaster. “I’ve just arrived,” he tells the jostling journalists. “I don’t know the details yet. So hey! Whaddya want me to say?” Then he looks straight into the TV cameras and waves, “Hi Mom!”

On and on through the night he went: “Hi Mom! Hi Mom! Hi Mom! Hi Mom! Hi Mom…”

An old banner, faded from decades of use, said, Warren Anderson is a war criminal . A newer one said, Warren Anderson has killed more people than Osama bin Laden .

Next to the Bhopalis was the Delhi Kabaadi-Wallahs’ (Waste-recyclers’) Association and the Sewage Workers’ Union, protesting against the privatization and corporatization of the city’s garbage and the city’s sewage. The corporation that bid for and won the contract was the same one that had been given farmers’ land for its power plant. It already ran the city’s electricity and water distribution. Now it owned the city’s shit and waste-disposal systems too.

Right next to the waste-recyclers and the sewage workers was the plushest part of the pavement, a glittering public toilet with float glass mirrors and a shiny granite floor. The toilet lights stayed on, night and day. It cost one rupee for a piss, two for a shit and three for a shower. Not many on the pavement could afford these rates. Many pissed outside the toilet, against the wall. So, though the toilet was spotlessly clean inside, from the outside it gave off the sharp smoky smell of stale urine. It didn’t matter very much to the management; the toilet’s revenue came from elsewhere. The exterior wall doubled up as a billboard that advertised something new every week.

This week it was Honda’s newest luxury car. The billboard had its own personal guard. Gulabiya Vechania lived under a small blue plastic sheet right next to the billboard. This accommodation was a step up from where he’d begun. When he first arrived in the city a year ago, out of abject terror as well as necessity, Gulabiya had lived in a tree. Now he had a job, and some semblance of shelter. The name of the security agency he worked for was embroidered on the epaulettes of his stained blue shirt: TSGS Security. (A rival concern to Sangeeta Madam Haramzaadi Bitch’s SSGS.) His job was to prevent vandalism, in particular, to thwart repeated attempts being made by certain miscreants to urinate right on to the billboard. He worked seven days a week, twelve hours a day. That night Gulabiya was drunk and had dropped off to sleep when someone sprayed Inqilab Zindabad! Long Live Revolution! right across the silver Honda City. Below that, someone else scrawled a poem.

Gulabiya would lose his job in the morning. Thousands like him would line up hoping to replace him. (One might even be the street poet himself.) But for now, Gulabiya slept soundly and dreamed deep. In his dream he had enough money to feed himself and send a little home to his family in his village. In his dream his village still existed. It wasn’t at the bottom of a dam reservoir. Fish didn’t swim through his windows. Crocodiles didn’t knife through the high branches of the Silk Cotton trees. Tourists didn’t go boating over his fields, leaving rainbow clouds of diesel in the sky. In his dream his brother Luariya wasn’t a tour-guide at the dam-site whose job was to showcase the miracles the dam had wrought. His mother didn’t work as a sweeper in a dam-engineer’s house that was built on the land that she once owned. She didn’t have to steal mangoes from her own trees. She didn’t live in a resettlement colony in a tin hut with tin walls and a tin roof that was so hot you could fry onions on it. In Gulabiya’s dream his river was still flowing, still alive. Naked children still sat on rocks, playing the flute, diving into the water to swim among the buffaloes when the sun grew too hot. There were leopard and sambar and sloth bear in the Sal forest that clothed the hills above the village, where during festivals his people would gather with their drums to drink and dance for days.

All he had left from his old life now were his memories, his flute and his earrings (which he was not allowed to wear to work).

Unlike the irresponsible Gulabiya Vechania, who had failed in his duty to protect the silver Honda City, Janak Lal Sharma, the toilet “in-charge,” was wide awake and working hard. His dog-eared logbook was updated. The money in his wallet was organized carefully, by denomination. He had a separate pouch for coins. He supplemented his salary by allowing activists, journalists and TV cameramen to recharge their mobile phones, laptops and camera batteries from the power point in the toilet for the price of six showers and a shit (i.e., twenty rupees). Sometimes he allowed people to shit for the price of a piss and didn’t enter it in the logbook. At first he was a little careful with the anti-corruption activists. (They were not hard to identify — they were less poor and more aggressive than everybody else. Though they were fashionably dressed in jeans and T-shirts, most of them wore white Gandhi caps stamped with a solarized print of the old man — baby smiling his Farex-baby smile.) Janak Lal Sharma took care to charge them the proper rates and log the nature of each one’s ablution correctly and carefully. But some of them, especially the second batch of new arrivals, who were even more aggressive than the first, grew resentful that they were being charged more than the others. Soon, with them too, it became business as usual. With his extra income he subcontracted his toilet-cleaning duties, which were unthinkable for a man of his caste and background to perform (he was a Brahmin), to Suresh Balmiki who, as his name makes clear, belonged to what most Hindus overtly, and the government covertly, thought of as the shit-cleaning caste. With the increasing unrest in the country, the endless stream of protesters arriving on the pavement, and all the TV coverage, even after setting aside what he paid Suresh Balmiki, Janak Lal had earned enough to make a down payment on an LIG flat.

Opposite the toilet, back on the TV-crew side of the road (but some serious ideological distance away), was what people on the pavement called the Border: Manipuri Nationalists asking for the revocation of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which made it legal for the Indian Army to kill on “suspicion”; Tibetan refugees calling for a free Tibet; and, most unusually (and most dangerously, for them), the Association of Mothers of the Disappeared, whose sons had gone missing, in their thousands, in the war for freedom in Kashmir. (Spooky, then, to have a soundtrack that went “Hi Mom! Hi Mom! Hi Mom!” However, the Mothers of the Disappeared did not register this eeriness because they thought of themselves as Moj—“Mother” in Kashmiri — and not “Mom.”)