Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

The so-called martyrs’ funerals were always a game of nerves. The police and security forces had orders to remain alert, but out of sight. This was not just because on those occasions tempers naturally ran high and a confrontation would inevitably lead to another massacre — this we had learned from bitter experience. The thinking was that permitting the population to vent its feelings and shout its slogans from time to time would prevent that anger from accumulating and building into an unmanageable cliff of rage. So far, in this more than quarter-century-long conflict in Kashmir, it has paid off. Kashmiris mourned, wept, shouted their slogans, but in the end they always went back home. Gradually, over the years, as it grew into a habit, a predictable, acceptable cycle, they began to distrust and disrespect themselves, their sudden fervors and their easy capitulations. That was an unplanned benefit that accrued to us.

Nevertheless, to allow half a million, sometimes even a million, people to take to the streets in any situation, let alone during an insurgency, is a serious gamble.

The following morning, once the streets had been secured, we returned to the city. I drove straight to Ahdoos to find that Tilo and Naga had checked out. Naga didn’t return to Srinagar for a while. I was told he was on leave.

A few weeks later, I received an invitation for their wedding. I went of course, how could I not? I felt responsible for the travesty. For driving Tilo into the arms of a man I felt sure had been less than honest with her. I didn’t think she would have been made privy to the relationship between her soon-to-be husband and the Intelligence Bureau. She would have thought she was marrying a campaigning journalist, seeker of justice, scourge of the establishment that had killed the man she loved. The deception made me angry, but of course I couldn’t be the one to disabuse her of that notion.

The reception was on the moonlit lawns of Naga’s parents’ big white Art Deco house in Diplomatic Enclave. It was a small, exquisite affair, very unlike the overblown extravaganzas that have become so popular these days. There were white flowers everywhere, lilies, roses, cascading strings of jasmine, arranged in the most artful ways by Naga’s mother and older sister, neither of whom looked, or even pretended to look, happy. The driveway and the flower beds were lined with clay lamps. Japanese lanterns hung from trees. Fairy lights were threaded through the branches. Old-world bearers in liveried costumes with brass buttons, red-and-gold cummerbunds and starched white turbans rushed about with trays of food and drink. A posse of mop-haired dogs smelling of perfume and cigarette smoke ran amok among the guests, like a small army of yapping, motorized floor swabs.

On a raised platform covered with white sheets, a band of musicians from Barmer, in white dhotis and kurtas and bright, printed turbans, transported us to the Rajasthan desert. Muslim folk musicians were an odd choice for a wedding of this kind. But my friend Naga was eclectic and had discovered them on a trip he’d made to the desert. They were outstanding performers. Their raw, haunting music opened up the city sky and shook the dust off the stars. The greatest of them all, Bhungar Khan, sang of the coming of the monsoon. In his wild, high, almost-female voice he transformed a song about the parched desert’s ache for rain into a song about a woman yearning for the return of her lover. My memory of Tilo’s wedding has always been imbued with that song.

It had been more than ten years since I had seen Tilo and shared that joint with her on her terrace. She was thinner than I remembered. Her collarbones winged out from the base of her neck. Her gossamer sari was the color of sunset. Her head was covered, but through the sheer fabric I could see the smooth shape of her skull. She was bald, or almost. Her hair just a velvet stubble. My first thought was that she had been unwell, and was recovering from chemotherapy or some other dreadful affliction that caused hair loss. But her dense, almost-bushy eyebrows and thick eyelashes put that particular theory to rest. She certainly didn’t look ill or unwell. She was barefaced and wore no make-up, no kajal, no bindi, no henna on her hands and feet. She looked like an understudy for the bride, temporarily standing in while the real one got dressed. Desolate I think is the word I’d use to describe her. She gave the impression of being utterly, unreachably alone, even at her own wedding. The insouciance was gone.

When I walked up to her, she looked straight at me, but I felt as though someone else was looking out through her eyes. I was expecting anger, but what I encountered was emptiness. It could have been my imagination, but as she held my gaze a tremor went through her. For the nine-thousandth time I noticed what a beautiful mouth she had. I was transfixed by the way it moved. I could almost see the effort it took for it to form words and a voice to attach to them:

“It’s just a haircut.”

The haircut — the shave — must have been ACP Pinky Sodhi’s idea. A policewoman’s therapy for what she saw as treason — sleeping with the enemy, her brother’s killers. Pinky Sodhi liked to keep things simple.

I had never seen Naga look so disconcerted, so anxious. He held Tilo’s hand right through the evening. Musa’s ghost was wedged between them. I could almost see him — short, compact, with that chipped-tooth smile and that quiet air of his. It was as though the three of them were getting married.

That’s probably how it turned out in the end.

Naga’s mother was at the center of a clot of elegant ladies whose perfume I could smell from across the lawn. Auntie Meera was from a royal family, one of the minor principalities in Madhya Pradesh. She was a teenage widow, whose royal husband had developed an aggressive lung tumor and died three months after she married him. Unsure of what to do with her, her parents sent her to a finishing school in England, where she met Naga’s father at a party in London. There could not have been a better position for a queen without a queendom than being the wife of a suave Foreign Service officer. She modeled herself into a perfect hostess — a modern Indian Maharani with a plummy British accent, acquired from a childhood governess and perfected at finishing school. She wore chiffon saris and pearls and always kept her head covered with her pallu, as Rajput royalty should. She was trying to put a brave face on the trauma that her new daughter-in-law’s shocking complexion had visited upon her. She herself was the color of alabaster. Her husband, though Tamilian, was Brahmin and only a shade darker than her. As I walked past I heard her little granddaughter, her daughter’s daughter, ask:

“Nani, is she a nigger?”

“Of course not, darling, don’t be silly. And, darling, we don’t use words like nigger any more. It’s a bad word. We say negro .”

“Negro.”

“Good girl.”

Auntie Meera, mortified, turned to her friends with a brave smile and said of the new member of her family, “But she has a beautiful neck, don’t you think?” The friends all agreed enthusiastically.

“But, Nani, she looks like a servants.”

The little girl was admonished and sent off on a pretend errand.

The other guests, Naga’s old college friends — acolytes more than friends — none of whom had ever met Tilo, were bunched together on the lawn, already gossiping, trained by now in Naga’s distinctive brand of cruel humor. One of them raised a toast.

“To Garibaldi.” (That was Abhishek, who worked for his father’s company, which sourced and sold sewage pipes.)