Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

It was the Association’s first visit to the Super Capital. They weren’t all mothers; the wives, sisters and a few young children of the Disappeared had come too. Each of them carried a picture of their missing son, brother or husband. Their banner said:

The Story of Kashmir

DEAD = 68,000

DISAPPEARED = 10,000

Is this Democracy or Demon Crazy ?

No TV camera pointed at that banner, not even by mistake. Most of those engaged in India’s Second Freedom Struggle felt nothing less than outrage at the idea of freedom for Kashmir and the Kashmiri women’s audacity.

Some of the Mothers, like some of the Bhopal gas leak victims, had become a little jaded. They had told their stories at endless meetings and tribunals in the international supermarkets of grief, along with other victims of other wars in other countries. They had wept publicly and often, and nothing had come of it. The horror they were going through had grown a hard, bitter shell.

The trip to Delhi had turned out to be an unhappy experience for the Association. The women were heckled and threatened at their roadside press conference in the afternoon and eventually the police had had to intervene and throw a cordon around the Mothers. “Muslim Terrorists do not deserve Human Rights!” shouted Gujarat ka Lalla’s undercover janissaries. “We have seen your genocide! We have faced your ethnic cleansing! Our people have been living in refugee camps for twenty years now!” Some young men spat at photographs of the dead and missing Kashmiri men. The “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” they referred to was the mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir Valley when the freedom struggle had turned militant in the 1990s and some Muslim militants had turned on the tiny Hindu population. Several hundred Hindus had been massacred in macabre ways and when the government announced that it could not ensure their safety, almost the entire population of Kashmiri Hindus, almost two hundred thousand people, had fled the Valley and moved into refugee camps in the plains of Jammu where many of them still lived. A few of Lalla’s janissaries on the pavement that day were Kashmiri Hindus who had lost their homes and families and all they had ever known.

Perhaps even more hurtful to the Mothers than the Spitters were the three beautifully groomed, pencil-thin college girls who walked past that morning on their way to shop at Connaught Place. “Oh wow! Kashmir! What funnn ! Apparently it’s completely normal now, ya , safe for tourists. Let’s go? It’s supposed to be stunning.”

The Association of Mothers had decided to get through the night somehow and never come back to Delhi. Sleeping out on the street was a new experience for them. Back home they all had pretty houses and kitchen gardens. That night they had a meager meal (that was a new experience too), rolled up their banner and tried to sleep, waiting for day to break, longing to begin their journey back to their beautiful, war-torn valley.

It was there, right next to the Mothers of the Disappeared, that our quiet baby appeared. It took the Mothers a while to notice her, because she was the color of night. A sharply outlined absence in the shadows under the street light. More than twenty years of living with crackdowns, cordon-and-search operations and the midnight knock (Operation Tiger, Operation Serpent Destruction, Operation Catch and Kill) had taught the Mothers to read the darkness. But when it came to babies, the only ones they were used to looked like almond blossoms with apple cheeks. The Mothers of the Disappeared did not know what to do with a baby that had Appeared.

The whisper was passed around the pavement like a parcel. The question grew into an announcement: “Bhai baccha kiska hai?” Whose baby is this?

Silence.

Then someone said they had seen the mother vomiting in the park in the afternoon. Someone else said, “Oh no, that wasn’t her.”

Someone said she was a beggar. Someone else said she was a rapevictim (which was a word in every language).

Someone said she had come with the group that had been there earlier in the day organizing a signature campaign for the release of political prisoners. It was rumored to be a Front organization for the banned Maoist Party that was fighting a guerrilla war in the forests of Central India. Someone else said, “Oh no, that wasn’t her. She was alone. She’s been here for some days.”

Someone said she was the former lover of a politician who had thrown her out after she got pregnant.

Everybody agreed that politicians were all bastards. That didn’t help address the problem:

What to do with the baby?

Perhaps aware that she had become the center of attention, or perhaps because she was frightened, the quiet baby finally wailed. A woman picked her up. (Later, about her it was said that she was tall, she was short, she was black, she was white, she was beautiful, she was not, she was old, she was young, she was a stranger, she was often seen at Jantar Mantar.) A piece of paper folded many times into a small square pellet, taped down along one edge, was threaded on to the thick black string tied around the baby’s waist. The woman (who was beautiful, who was not, who was tall, who was short) untaped it and handed it to someone to read. The message was written in English and was unambiguous: I cannot look after this child. So I am leaving her here.

Eventually, after a lot of murmured consultation, hesitantly, sadly, rather reluctantly, the people decided that the baby was a matter for the police.

Before Saddam could stop her, Anjum stood up and began to walk fast towards what seemed to have become a spontaneously constituted Baby Welfare Committee. She was a head taller than most people, so it wasn’t hard to follow her. As she walked through the crowd, the bells on her anklets, not visible below her loose salwar, went chhann-chhann-chhann . To Saddam, suddenly terrified, each chhann-chhann sounded like a gunshot. The blue street light lit up the faint shadow of white stubble on Anjum’s dark, pitted skin, shiny now with sweat. Her nose-pin flashed on her magnificent nose that curved downwards like the beak of a bird of prey. There was something unleashed about her, something uncalibrated and yet absolutely certain — a sense of destiny perhaps.

“Police? We’re going to give her to the police ?” Anjum said in both her voices, separate, yet joined, one rasping, one deep, distinct. Her white tusk shone out from between her betel-nut-red stumps.

The solidarity of her “We” was an embrace. Predictably, it was met with an immediate insult.

A wit from the crowd said, “Why? What will you do with her? You can’t turn her into one of you, can you? Modern technology has made great advances, but it hasn’t got that far yet…” He was referring to the widely held belief that Hijras kidnapped male babies and castrated them. His waggishness earned him an eddy of spineless laughter.

Anjum didn’t balk at the vulgarity of the comment. She spoke with an intensity that was as clear and as urgent as hunger.

“She’s a gift from God. Give her to me. I can give her the love she needs. The police will just throw her in a government orphanage. She’ll die there.”

Sometimes a single person’s clarity can unnerve a muddled crowd. On this occasion, Anjum’s did. Those who could understand what she was saying were a little intimidated by the refinement of her Urdu. It was at odds with the class they assumed she came from.