Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

I’m not sure where and from whom Naga learned the fiery language of the Left. Perhaps from a relative who was communist. Whoever it was, he — or she — was a good teacher and Naga deployed what he learned spectacularly. It took him from conquest to conquest. I was once pitted against him in a school debate. We must have been thirteen or fourteen years old. The topic was “Does God Exist?” I was to speak for, and Naga against, the motion. I spoke first. Then Naga delivered his flaming speech, his skinny body taut as a whipcord, his voice quavering with indignation. Our mesmerized classmates took diligent notes of his blatant blasphemy: “The falsehood of our 330 million mute idols, the selfish deities we call Ram and Krishna are not going to save us from hunger, disease and poverty. Our foolish faith in monkeys and elephant-headed apparitions is not going to feed our starving masses…” I didn’t stand a chance. Naga’s speech made mine sound as though it had been written by a pious, elderly aunt. Oddly, though I have a clear, raw memory of my feeling of utter inadequacy, I have no memory of what I actually said. For months after that, I would secretly declaim Naga’s sacrilege to myself in the mirror: “Our foolish faith in monkeys and elephant-headed apparitions is not going to feed our starving masses…” my atomized spit landing on my own reflection like rain.

Another of Naga’s milestone performances came a few years later, at a college annual cultural event. Fresh from a summer trip to Bastar with two of his friends, where they had camped in the forest and walked through villages peopled by primitive tribes, Naga ambled on to the stage, long-haired, barefoot, bare-bodied, wearing only a loincloth, with a bow and a quiver of arrows slung over his shoulders. He made a great show of crunching what he claimed was termites on toast, eliciting breathless expressions of coy disgust from the girls in the audience, most of whom wanted to marry him. After swallowing the last morsel of toast, he went up to the microphone and performed the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” vocalizing the background score, simulating the chords on an imaginary guitar. He was a good, maybe even excellent, singer, but I found the whole thing distasteful, and thought it showed a deep disrespect for indigenous people as well as for Mick Jagger, who, at that point in my life, I believed was God. (I wish I had thought of that for my pro-God speech in school.) I actually took it upon myself to say so to him. Naga laughed and insisted that his performance was a tribute to both.

Today, as the saffron tide of Hindu Nationalism rises in our country like the swastika once did in another, Naga’s “foolish faith” schoolboy speech would probably get him expelled, if not by the school authorities, then certainly by some sort of parents’ campaign. In fact, in today’s climate, to get away with just expulsion would be lucky. People are being lynched for far less. Even my colleagues in the Bureau don’t seem to be able to see the difference between religious faith and patriotism. They seem to want a sort of Hindu Pakistan. Most of them are conservative, closet Brahmins who wear their sacred threads inside their safari suits, and their sacred ponytails dangling down the inside of their vegetarian skulls. They tolerate me only because I am a fellow Twice-born (actually, the caste I belong to is Baidya, but we count ourselves as Brahmin). Still, I keep my opinions to myself. Naga on the other hand has slid into the new dispensation in one smooth slither. His old irreverence has vanished without a trace. In his current avatar he wears a tweed blazer and smokes cigars. I haven’t met him in years, but I see him playing the National Security expert on those excitable TV shows — he doesn’t seem to even realize that he’s not much more than a ventriloquist’s bright puppet. It saddens me sometimes, to see him so housebroken. Naga is perpetually experimenting with his facial hair. Sometimes he sports a French goatee, sometimes a twirled, waxed, Daliesque mustache, sometimes he affects designer stubble, and sometimes he’s clean-shaven. He can’t seem to settle on a “look.” It’s the Achilles heel in his rig-out of opinionated self-importance. It gives him away. Or at least that’s the way I see it.

Unfortunately of late he has begun to overplay his hand, and his intemperance is becoming a liability. Twice in two years the Bureau has had to intervene (discreetly of course) with the proprietors of his newspaper, to settle squabbles he has had with his editor that ended in impulsive resignations. The last time around we pulled off a coup. We had him reinstated with a raise.

If being together in kindergarten, school and university, and playing homosexual lovers in a play wasn’t enough, during the years that I was posted to Srinagar, as Deputy Station Head for the Bureau, Naga was the Kashmir correspondent for his newspaper. He wasn’t stationed in Kashmir, but lived there most days of the month. He had a permanent room at Ahdoos Hotel, where most reporters stayed. His relationship with the Bureau had been cemented by then, but was not as evident as it is now. It suited us much better that way. To his readers — and possibly even to himself — he was still the intrepid journalist who could be trusted to expose the so-called crimes of the Indian State.

It must have been well past midnight when the call came through on the Governor’s hotline at the Forest Guest House in Dachigam National Park, about twenty kilometers out of Srinagar. I was there as part of His Excellency’s entourage. (We were well into the Troubles by then. The civilian government had been dismissed; it was 1996, the sixth straight year of Governor’s Rule in the State.)

His Excellency, a former Chief of the Indian Army, liked to get away from the bloodletting in the city as often as he could. He spent his weekends in Dachigam, strolling along a rushing mountain stream with his family and friends, while the children in the party, each shadowed by a tense, heavily armed security guard, mowed down imaginary militants (who shouted Allah-hu-Akbar! as they died) and chased long-tailed marmots into their holes. They usually had a picnic lunch, but dinner was always back at the guest house — rice and curried trout from the fish farm close by. The ponds in the hatchery were so thick with fish that you could put your hand in — if you could stand the close-to-freezing temperature — and pick out your own thrashing rainbow trout.

It was autumn. The forest was heart-stoppingly beautiful in the way only a Himalayan forest can be. The Chinar trees had begun to turn color. The meadows were a coppery gold. If you were lucky you might spot a black bear or a leopard or Dachigam’s famous deer, the hangul. (Naga used to call one of Kashmir’s famously randy ex — Chief Ministers the “well-hung ghoul.” It was a clever pun, I have to admit, though of course most people didn’t get it.) I had become something of a bird man — a passion that has remained with me — and could tell a Himalayan griffon from a bearded vulture and could identify the streaked laughing thrush, the orange bullfinch, Tytler’s leaf warbler and the Kashmir flycatcher, which was threatened then, and must surely by now be extinct. The trouble with being in Dachigam was that it had the effect of unsettling one’s resolve. It underlined the futility of it all. It made one feel that Kashmir really belonged to those creatures. That none of us who were fighting over it — Kashmiris, Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese (they have a piece of it too — Aksai Chin, which used to be part of the old Kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir), or for that matter Pahadis, Gujjars, Dogras, Pashtuns, Shins, Ladakhis, Baltis, Gilgitis, Purikis, Wakhis, Yashkuns, Tibetans, Mongols, Tatars, Mon, Khowars — none of us, neither saint nor soldier, had the right to claim the truly heavenly beauty of that place for ourselves. I was once moved to say so, quite casually, to Imran, a young Kashmiri police officer who had done some exemplary undercover work for us. His response was, “It’s a very great thought, sir. I have the same love for animals as yourself. Even in my travels in India I feel the exact same feeling — that India belongs not to Punjabis, Biharis, Gujaratis, Madrasis, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians, but to those beautiful creatures — peacocks, elephants, tigers, bears…”