Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

The police kicked him over (as a matter of routine) and confiscated all the copies of his News & Views as well as his Jaycees Sari Palace bag and all the papers in it.

Once they left, Dr. Azad Bhartiya didn’t lose a moment. He immediately set to work, starting the laborious process of documentation from scratch.

Though they didn’t have a suspect (the name and address of S. Tilottama, publisher of Dr. Azad Bhartiya’s News & Views , jumped out at them at a later stage), the police registered a case under Section 361 (Kidnapping from Lawful Guardianship), Section 362 (Abducting, Compelling, Forcing or Deceitfully Inducing a Person from a Place), Section 365 (Wrongful Confinement), Section 366A (a Crime Committed against a Minor Girl Who Has Not Attained Eighteen Years of Age), Section 367 (Kidnapping in Order to Cause Grievous Hurt, Place in Slavery or Subject the Kidnapped Person to Unnatural Lust), Section 369 (Kidnapping a Child under Ten Years of Age in Order to Steal from Them).

The offenses were cognizable, bailable and trialable by Magistrates of the First Class. The punishment was imprisonment for not more than seven years.

They had already registered one thousand one hundred and forty-six similar cases in the city that year. And it was only May.

A horse’s hooves echoed on an empty street.

Payal the thin day-mare clop-clipped through a part of the city she oughtn’t to be in.

On her back, astride a red cloth saddle edged with gold tassels, two riders: Saddam Hussain and Ishrat-the-Beautiful. In a part of the city they oughtn’t to be in. No signs said so, because everything was a sign that any fool could read: the silence, the width of the roads, the height of the trees, the unpeopled pavements, the clipped hedges, the low white bungalows in which the Rulers lived. Even the yellow light that poured from the tall street lights looked encashable — columns of liquid gold.

Saddam Hussain put on his sunglasses. Ishrat said it looked silly to wear goggles at night.

“You call this night?” Saddam asked. He explained that he wasn’t wearing his sunglasses in order to look good. He said the glare from the lights hurt his eyes and that he’d tell her the story of his eyes later.

Payal pinned her ears back and twitched her hide even though there weren’t any flies around. She sensed her transgression. But she liked this part of the city. There was air to breathe. She could have galloped, if they’d let her. But they wouldn’t.

They were on a slow-goose chase, she and her riders. Their mission was to follow an autorickshaw and its passengers.

They kept their distance from it as it sputtered like a lost child around vast roundabouts landscaped with sculptures, fountains and flower beds, and down avenues that spiked off them, each lined with different kinds of trees — Tamarind, Jamun, Neem, Pakad, Arjun.

“Look, they even have gardens for their cars,” Ishrat said as they circled a roundabout.

Saddam laughed, delighted, into the night.

“They have cars for their dogs and gardens for their cars,” he said.

A cavalcade of black Mercedes with tinted, bulletproof windows appeared as if from nowhere and scorched past them like a serpent.

Past the Garden City the chasees and chasers approached a bumpy flyover. (Bumpy for vehicles, that is, not horses.) The row of lights running down the middle looked like mechanical cherubs’ wings mounted on long poles. The rickshaw chugged uphill, then dipped down and disappeared from view. To keep up, Payal broke into a gentle, happy trot. A slim unicorn inspecting the cherub brigade.

Beyond the flyover the city grew less sure of itself.

The slow chase threaded past two hospitals so full of sickness that patients and their families had spilled out and were camped on the roads. Some were on makeshift beds and in wheelchairs. Some wore hospital gowns and had bandages and IV drips. Children, bald from chemotherapy, wore hospital masks and clung to their empty-eyed parents. People crowded the counters of the all-night chemists, playing Indian Roulette. (There was a 60:40 chance that the drugs they bought were genuine and not spurious.) Families cooked on the street, cutting onions, boiling potatoes gone gritty with dust on small kerosene stoves. They hung their washing on tree guards and railings. (Saddam Hussain took note of all this — for professional reasons.) A bunch of emaciated twig-thighed villagers in dhotis squatted on their haunches in a circle. In the center, perched like a wounded bird, was a wizened old lady in a printed sari and enormous dark glasses that were sealed along the edges with cotton wool. A thermometer angled out of her mouth like a cigarette. They paid no attention to the white horse and her riders as they cantered past.

Another flyover.

This time the goose-chase party went under it. It was packed tight with sleeping people. A bare-bodied bald man with a purple crust of congealed talcum powder on his head and a long, gray, bushy beard beat out a rhythm on an imaginary drum, flinging his head around like Ustad Zakir Hussain.

“Dha Dha Dhim Ti-ra-ki-ta Dhim!” Ishrat called out to him as they went past. He smiled and rewarded her with a complicated flourish of percussion.

A shuttered market, a midnight egg-paratha stall. A Sikh Gurdwara. Another market. A row of car-repair shops. The men and dogs asleep outside were covered in car grease.

The rickshaw turned into a residential colony. And then leftrightleftrightleft. A lane. Construction material stacked along it. The houses were all three and four storeys high.

The rickshaw stopped outside a barred iron gate painted a dull shade of lavender. Payal stopped in the shadows, many gates away. A snuffling specter. A pale mare-ghost. The gold thread on her saddle glinting in the night.

A woman got out, paid and went into the house. After the rickshaw left, Saddam Hussain and Ishrat-the-Beautiful approached the lavender gate. Two black bulls with wobbling humps lolled outside.

A light came on in the second-floor window.

Ishrat said, “Write down the house number.” Saddam said he didn’t need to because he never forgot places he’d been to. He’d be able to find it in his sleep.

She wriggled against him. “ Wah! What a man!”

He squished her breast. She slapped his hand away. “Don’t. They cost a lot. I’m still paying my installments.”

The woman silhouetted against the rectangle of light on the second floor looked down and saw two people on a white horse. They looked up and saw her.

As though to acknowledge the glance that passed between them, the woman (who was beautiful, who was not, who was tall, who was short) inclined her head and kissed the stolen goods she held in her arms. She waved to them and they waved back. Of course she recognized them as the team from the scrum at Jantar Mantar. Saddam dismounted and held up a small white rectangle — his visiting card with the address of Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services. He dropped it into the tin letter box that said S. Tilottama. Second Floor .

The baby had fretted most of the way, but had finally fallen asleep. Tiny heartbeats and a black velvet cheek against a bony shoulder. The woman rocked her as she watched the horse and its riders exit the lane.

She could not remember when last she had been this happy. Not because the baby was hers, but because it wasn’t.

When the Baby Seal grew older, when she was (say) crowded around an ice-cream cart on a burning afternoon, one among a press of schoolgirls clamoring for an orange bar, might she get a sudden whiff of the heady scent of ripe Mahua that had infused the forest the day she was born? Would her body remember the feel of dry leaves on the forest floor, or the hot-metal touch of the barrel of her mother’s gun that had been held to her forehead with the safety catch off?