Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Compared to Kabul, or anywhere else in Afghanistan or Pakistan, or for that matter any other country in our neighborhood (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Burma, Iran, Iraq, Syria — Good God!) this foggy little back lane, with its everyday humdrumness, its vulgarity, its unfortunate but tolerable inequities, its donkeys and its minor cruelties, is like a small corner of Paradise. The shops in the market sell food and flowers and clothes and mobile phones, not grenades and machine guns. Children play at ringing doorbells, not at being suicide bombers. We have our troubles, our terrible moments, yes, but these are only aberrations.

I feel a rush of anger at those grumbling intellectuals and professional dissenters who constantly carp about this great country. Frankly, they can only do it because they are allowed to. And they are allowed to because, for all our imperfections, we are a genuine democracy. I would not be crass enough to say this too often in public, but the truth is that it gives me great pride to be a servant of the Government of India.

The back gate was open, as I expected it to be. (The ground-floor tenants have painted it lavender.) I went straight up the stairs to the second floor. The door was locked. The extent of my disappointment unsettled me. The landing looked deserted. There was mail and old newspapers piled up against the door. I noticed a dog’s paw-prints in the dust.

On my way down, the plump, pretty wife of my ground-floor tenant, who runs some sort of video production company, came out of her kitchen and accosted me on the stairs. She invited me in for a cup of tea (to what used to be my home when my wife and I were both posted in Delhi).

“I’m Ankita,” she said over her shoulder as she led me in. Her long, chemically straightened hair streaked with blonde highlights was damp and I could smell her tangy shampoo. She wore solitaires in her ears and a fuzzy white wool sweater. The back pockets of her tight blue jeans—“jeggings,” my daughters say they’re called — stretched over her generous behind were embroidered with colorful forked-tongued Chinese dragons. My mother would have approved, if not of the clothes, then certainly of the plumpness. Dekhte besh Rolypoly , she’d have said. My poor mother, who spent all of her married life in Delhi, dreaming of her childhood in Calcutta.

The word set up an annoying buzz in my head. Rolypolyrolypolyrolypoly.

Three of the four walls in the room were painted watermelon pink. All the furniture including the dining table was a sort of flecked— distressed, I believe is the right word — rind green. The door and window frames were black (the seeds, I suppose). I began to regret having given them a free hand with the interior. Ankita and I sat facing each other, separated by the length of the sofa (my old sofa, re-upholstered now). At one point we had to clasp our knees and lift our feet off the floor while her maid passed below us, shuffling on her haunches like a small duck, swabbing the floor with something that smelled sharp, like citronella. Would it have been so difficult for Rolypoly to have had that section of her floor swabbed a little later? When will our people learn some basic etiquette?

The maid was obviously a Gond or a Santhal from Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh, or perhaps one of the aboriginal tribes in Orissa. She looked like a child of maybe fourteen or fifteen. From where I sat I could see down her kurta to where a tiny silver crucifix nestled between her tiny breasts. My father, who had a reflexive hostility towards Christian missionaries and their flock, would have called her Hallelujah. For all his sophistication he possessed more than just a streak of impropriety.

Enthroned in her giant watermelon, looking radiantly out at me from under her halo of tinted hair, Rolypoly gave me a whispered, incoherent account of what had happened upstairs. “I think so she is not a normal person,” she said, more than once. To be fair, perhaps she was coherent and I was hostile to the idea of hearing her out. She said something about a baby and the police (“I was dump-struck when police knocked on the door”) and bringing disrepute to the house and the entire neighborhood. It all sounded a bit vicious and far-fetched. I thanked her and left with the gift she pressed into my hands — a DVD of her husband’s latest documentary on the Dal Lake in Kashmir made for the Department of Tourism.

An hour or two later, here I am. I’ve had to bring in a locksmith from the market to fashion a key for me. In other words, I’ve had to break in. My second-floor tenant seems to have left. “Left,” if Rolypoly is to be believed, may be something of a euphemism. But then “tenant” is a euphemism too. No, we were not lovers. At no point did she ever offer me a hint that she might be open to a relationship of that sort. Had she, I don’t know myself well enough to say how things might have turned out. Because all my life, ever since I first met her all those years ago when we were still in college, I have constructed myself around her. Not around her perhaps, but around the memory of my love for her. She doesn’t know that. Nobody does, except perhaps Naga, Musa and me, the men who loved her.

I use the word love loosely, and only because my vocabulary is unequal to the task of describing the precise nature of that maze, that forest of feelings that connected the three of us to her and eventually to each other.

The first time I saw her was almost exactly thirty years ago, in 1984 (who in Delhi can forget 1984?), at the rehearsals of a college play in which I was acting, called Norman, Is That You? Sadly, after rehearsing it for two months we never performed it. A week before it was meant to open, Mrs. G — Indira Gandhi — was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards.

For a few days after the assassination, mobs led by her supporters and acolytes killed thousands of Sikhs in Delhi. Homes, shops, taxi stands with Sikh drivers, whole localities where Sikhs lived were burned to the ground. Plumes of black smoke climbed into the sky from the fires all over the city. From my window seat in a bus on a bright, beautiful day, I saw a mob lynch an old Sikh gentleman. They pulled off his turban, tore out his beard and necklaced him South Africa — style with a burning tire while people stood around baying their encouragement. I hurried home and waited for the shock of what I had witnessed to hit me. Oddly, it never did. The only shock I felt was shock at my own equanimity. I was disgusted by the stupidity, the futility of it all, but somehow, I was not shocked. It could be that my familiarity with the gory history of the city I had grown up in had something to do with it. It was as though the Apparition whose presence we in India are all constantly and acutely aware of had suddenly surfaced, snarling, from the deep, and had behaved exactly as we expected it to. Once its appetite was sated it sank back into its subterranean lair and normality closed over it. Maddened killers retracted their fangs and returned to their daily chores — as clerks, tailors, plumbers, carpenters, shopkeepers — life went on as before. Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labors and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we are continue to coexist — continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the center holds, as long as the yolk doesn’t run, we’ll be fine. In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view.

We decided to postpone the opening of the play by a month in the hope that by then things would have settled down. But in early December tragedy struck again, this time even harder. The Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal sprang a deadly gas leak that killed thousands of people. The newspapers were full of accounts of people trying to flee the poisonous cloud that pursued them, their eyes and lungs on fire. There was something almost biblical about the nature and the scale of the horror. News magazines published photographs of the dead, the ill, the dying, the mangled and the permanently blinded, their sightless eyes eerily turned towards the cameras. Eventually we decided that the gods weren’t with us and that performing Norman would be inappropriate for the times, so the whole thing was shelved. If you’ll pardon me for making this somewhat prosaic observation — maybe that’s what life is, or ends up being most of the time: a rehearsal for a performance that never eventually materializes. In the case of Norman , though, we didn’t need a final performance to change the course of our lives. The rehearsals turned out to be more than enough.