Arundhati Roy: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

When the teasing became unbearable Aftab stopped going to his music classes. But Ustad Hameed, who doted on him, offered to teach him separately, on his own. So the music classes continued, but Aftab refused to go to school any more. By then Jahanara Begum’s hopes had more or less faded. There was no sign of healing anywhere on the horizon. She had managed to put off his circumcision for some years with a series of inventive excuses. But young Saqib was waiting in line for his, and she knew she had run out of time. Eventually she did what she had to. She mustered her courage and told her husband, breaking down and weeping with grief as well as relief that she finally had someone else to share her nightmare with.

Her husband, Mulaqat Ali, was a hakim, a doctor of herbal medicine, and a lover of Urdu and Persian poetry. All his life he had worked for the family of another hakim — Hakim Abdul Majid, who founded a popular brand of sherbet called Rooh Afza (Persian for “Elixir of the Soul”). Rooh Afza, made of khurfa seeds (purslane), grapes, oranges, watermelon, mint, carrots, a touch of spinach, khus khus, lotus, two kinds of lilies and a distillate of damask roses, was meant to be a tonic. But people found that two tablespoons of the sparkling ruby-colored syrup in a glass of cold milk or even just plain water not only tasted delicious, but was also an effective defense against Delhi’s scorching summers and the strange fevers that blew in on desert winds. Soon what had started out as medicine became the most popular summer drink in the region. Rooh Afza became a prosperous enterprise and a household name. For forty years it ruled the market, sending its produce from its headquarters in the old city as far south as Hyderabad and as far west as Afghanistan. Then came Partition. God’s carotid burst open on the new border between India and Pakistan and a million people died of hatred. Neighbors turned on each other as though they’d never known each other, never been to each other’s weddings, never sung each other’s songs. The walled city broke open. Old families fled (Muslim). New ones arrived (Hindu) and settled around the city walls. Rooh Afza had a serious setback, but soon recovered and opened a branch in Pakistan. A quarter of a century later, after the holocaust in East Pakistan, it opened another branch in the brand-new country of Bangladesh. But eventually, the Elixir of the Soul that had survived wars and the bloody birth of three new countries, was, like most things in the world, trumped by Coca-Cola.

Although Mulaqat Ali was a trusted and valued employee of Hakim Abdul Majid, the salary he earned was not enough to make ends meet. So outside his working hours he saw patients at his home. Jahanara Begum supplemented the family income with what she earned from the white cotton Gandhi caps she made and supplied in bulk to Hindu shopkeepers in Chandni Chowk.

Mulaqat Ali traced his family’s lineage directly back to the Mongol Emperor Changez Khan through the emperor’s second-born son, Chagatai. He had an elaborate family tree on a piece of cracked parchment and a small tin trunk full of brittle, yellowed papers that he believed verified his claim and explained how descendants of shamans from the Gobi Desert, worshippers of the Eternal Blue Sky, once considered the enemies of Islam, became the forefathers of the Mughal dynasty that ruled India for centuries, and how Mulaqat Ali’s own family, descendants of the Mughals, who were Sunni, came to be Shia. Occasionally, perhaps once every few years, he would open his trunk and show his papers to a visiting journalist who, more often than not, neither listened carefully nor took him seriously. At most the long interview would merit an arch, amusing mention in a weekend special about Old Delhi. If it was a double spread, a small portrait of Mulaqat Ali might even be published along with some close-ups of Mughal cuisine, long shots of Muslim women in burqas on cycle rickshaws that plied the narrow filthy lanes, and of course the mandatory bird’s-eye view of thousands of Muslim men in white skullcaps, arranged in perfect formation, bowed down in prayer in the Jama Masjid. Some readers viewed pictures like these as proof of the success of India’s commitment to secularism and inter-faith tolerance. Others with a tinge of relief that Delhi’s Muslim population seemed content enough in its vibrant ghetto. Still others viewed them as proof that Muslims did not wish to “integrate” and were busy breeding and organizing themselves, and would soon become a threat to Hindu India. Those who subscribed to this view were gaining influence at an alarming pace.

Regardless of what appeared or did not appear in the newspapers, right into his dotage Mulaqat Ali always welcomed visitors into his tiny rooms with the faded grace of a nobleman. He spoke of the past with dignity but never nostalgia. He described how, in the thirteenth century, his ancestors had ruled an empire that stretched from the countries that now called themselves Vietnam and Korea all the way to Hungary and the Balkans, from Northern Siberia to the Deccan plateau in India, the largest empire the world had ever known. He often ended the interview with a recitation of an Urdu couplet by one of his favorite poets, Mir Taqi Mir:

Most of his visitors, brash emissaries of a new ruling class, barely aware of their own youthful hubris, did not completely grasp the layered meaning of the couplet they had been offered, like a snack to be washed down by a thimble-sized cup of thick, sweet tea. They understood of course that it was a dirge for a fallen empire whose international borders had shrunk to a grimy ghetto circumscribed by the ruined walls of an old city. And yes, they realized that it was also a rueful comment on Mulaqat Ali’s own straitened circumstances. What escaped them was that the couplet was a sly snack, a perfidious samosa, a warning wrapped in mourning, being offered with faux humility by an erudite man who had absolute faith in his listeners’ ignorance of Urdu, a language which, like most of those who spoke it, was gradually being ghettoized.

Mulaqat Ali’s passion for poetry was not just a hobby separate from his work as a hakim. He believed that poetry could cure, or at least go a long way towards curing, almost every ailment. He would prescribe poems to his patients the way other hakims prescribed medicine. He could produce a couplet from his formidable repertoire that was eerily apt for every illness, every occasion, every mood and every delicate alteration in the political climate. This habit of his made life around him seem more profound and at the same time less distinctive than it really was. It infused everything with a subtle sense of stagnancy, a sense that everything that happened had happened before. That it had already been written, sung, commented upon and entered into history’s inventory. That nothing new was possible. This could be why young people around him often fled, giggling, when they sensed that a couplet was on its way.

When Jahanara Begum told him about Aftab, perhaps for the first time in his life Mulaqat Ali had no suitable couplet for the occasion. It took him a while to get over the initial shock. When he did, he scolded his wife for not having told him earlier. Times had changed, he said. This was the Modern Era. He was sure that there was a simple medical solution to their son’s problem. They would find a doctor in New Delhi, far away from the whisper and gossip that went on in the mohallas of the old city. The Almighty helps those who help themselves, he told his wife a little sternly.

A week later, dressed in their best clothes, with an unhappy Aftab fitted out in a manly steel-gray Pathan suit with a black embroidered waistcoat, a skullcap and jootis with toes curled like gondolas, they set off for Nizamuddin basti in a horse-drawn tanga. The ostensible purpose of their day out was that they were going to inspect a prospective bride for their nephew Aijaz — the youngest son of Mulaqat Ali’s older brother, Qasim, who had moved to Pakistan after Partition and worked for the Karachi branch of Rooh Afza. The real reason was that they had an appointment with a Dr. Ghulam Nabi, who called himself a “sexologist.”