Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Or had her past been erased forever?

It’s cold. One of those dim, dirty winter days. The city is still stunned by the simultaneous explosions that tore through a bus stop, a café and the basement parking lot of a small shopping plaza two days ago, leaving five dead and very many more severely injured. It will take our television news anchors a little longer than ordinary folks to recover from the shock. As for myself, blasts evoke a range of emotions in me, but sadly, shock is no longer one of them.

I’m upstairs in this barsati, this small, second-floor apartment-on-the-roof. The Neem trees have shed their leaves; the rose-ringed parakeets seem to have moved to a warmer (safer?) place. The fog is hunched up against the windowpanes. A clot of blue rock pigeons huddles on the shit-crusted chhajja . Though it’s the middle of the day, nearly lunchtime, I’ve had to switch the lights on. I notice that my experiment with the red cement floor has failed. I wanted a floor with a deep, soft shine, like those graceful old houses down South. But here, over the years, the summer heat has leached the color from the cement and the winter cold has caused the surface to contract and shatter into a pattern of hairline cracks. The apartment is dusty and run-down. Something about the stillness of this hastily abandoned space makes it look like a frozen frame in a moving picture. It seems to contain the geometry of motion, the shape of all that has happened and everything that is still to come. The absence of the person who lived here is so real, so palpable, that it’s almost a presence.

The noise from the street is muted. The blades of the still ceiling fans are edged with grime, a paean to Delhi’s famously filthy air. Fortunately for my lungs, I’m only visiting. Or at least that’s what I hope. I have been sent home on leave. Though I don’t feel unwell, when I look at myself in the mirror I can see that my skin is dull and my hair has thinned noticeably. My scalp shines through it (yes, shines). Almost nothing remains of my eyebrows. I’m told this is a sign of anxiety. The drinking, I admit, is worrying. I have tested the patience of both my wife and my boss in unacceptable ways and am determined to redeem myself. I am booked into a rehabilitation center where I will be for six weeks with no phone, no internet and no contact whatsoever with the world. I was supposed to check in today, but I’ll do it on Monday.

I long to return to Kabul, the city where I will probably die, in some hackneyed, unheroic manner, perhaps while handing my Ambassador a file. BOOM. No more me. Twice they nearly got us; both times luck was on our side. After the second attack we received an anonymous letter in Pashtu (which I read as well as speak): Nun zamong bad qismati wa. Kho yaad lara che mong sirf yaw waar pa qismat gatta kawo. Ta ba da hamesha dapara khush qismata ve. That translates (more or less) as: Today we were unlucky. But remember we only have to be lucky once. You will need good luck all the time.

Something about those words rang a bell. I googled them. (That’s a verb now, isn’t it?) It was a close-to-verbatim translation of what the IRA said after Margaret Thatcher escaped their bomb attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984. It’s another kind of globalization, I suppose, this universal terrorspeak.

Every day in Kabul is a battle of wits and I’m addicted.

While I waited to be certified fit for service, I decided to visit my tenants and see how the house — I bought it fifteen years ago and more or less rebuilt it — was bearing up. At least that’s what I told myself. When I got here I found myself avoiding the main entrance and going all the way to the end of the road and around to the back, to take the gate that opens on to the service lane that runs behind the row of townhouses.

It was a quiet, pretty lane once. Now it’s like a construction site. Building material — steel reinforcement rods, slabs of stone and heaps of sand — occupies what little space parked cars do not. Two open manholes give off a stench that doesn’t quite complement the soaring price of property here. Most of the older houses have been torn down and plush new developers’ flats are coming up in their place. Some are on stilts, the ground floors given over to parking. It’s a good idea in this car-maddened city, but somehow it saddens me. I’m not sure why. Nostalgia for an older, quieter time perhaps.

A posse of dusty children, some carrying infants on their hips, amuse themselves by ringing doorbells and skittering away hiccuping with delight. Their emaciated parents, hauling cement and bricks around in the deep pits dug for new basements, would not look out of place on a construction site in ancient Egypt, heaving stones for a pharaoh’s pyramid. A small donkey with kind eyes walks past me carrying bricks in its saddlebags. The post-blast announcements being made in English and Hindi on the loudspeaker in the police booth in the market are fainter here: “Please report any unidentified baggage or suspicious-looking person to the nearest police post…”

Even in the few months since I was last here, the number of cars parked in the back lane has grown — and most are bigger, swisher. My neighbor Mrs. Mehra’s new driver, his whole head wrapped in a brown muffler with a slit for his eyes, is hosing down a new cream Toyota Corolla as though it’s a buffalo. It has a small saffron OM painted on its bonnet. Only a year ago Mrs. Mehra was flinging her garbage straight from her first-floor balcony on to the street. I wonder whether owning a Toyota has improved her sense of community hygiene.

I can see that most of the apartments on the second and third floors have been smartened up, glassed in.

The black bulls that lived around the concrete lamp post opposite my back gate for many years, fed and spoiled by Mrs. Mehra and her cow-worshipping cohorts, aren’t around. Maybe they’ve gone for a jog.

Two young women in smart winter coats and clicking high heels walk past, both smoking cigarettes. They look like Russian or Ukrainian whores, the kind you can dial up for farmhouse parties. There were a few at my old friend Bobby Singh’s stag party in Mehrauli last week. One of them, who walked around with a plate of tacos, was actually a Dip — she was topless, more or less — with hummus all over her chest. I thought it was a bit much, but the other guests seemed to enjoy it. The girl gave that impression too — although that may have been part of the job description. Hard to say.

Servants wearing their employers’ expensive cast-offs are being walked by even better-dressed dogs — Labradors, German shepherds, Dobermans, beagles, dachshunds, cocker spaniels — with wool coats that say things like Superman and Woof! Even some of the street mongrels have coats and show traces of pedigreed lineage. Trickledown. Ha! Ha!

Two men — one white, one Indian — go past, holding hands. Their plump black Labrador is dressed in a red-and-blue jersey that says No. 7 Manchester United . Like a genial holy man distributing his blessings, he bestows a little squirt of piss on to the tires of the cars he waddles past.

The sheet-metal gate of the Municipal Primary School that abuts the deer park is new. It’s painted over with a dreadful rendition of a happy baby in its happy mother’s arms being given a polio vaccination by a happy nurse in a white dress and white stockings. The syringe is roughly the size of a cricket bat. I can hear children’s voices in their classrooms, shouting Baa baa black sheep , rising to a shriek on Wool! and Full!