Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Who was the drive-by artist that the wife mentioned in her testimony? And who were the others?

Does it matter any more?

Not to me.

Not to the Government of India.

Surely not to the California Police, who must have other things on their minds.

Shame about the wife and kids though.

Why does my tenant Madam S. Tilottama have this file?

And where the hell is she?

My phone beeps. Strange. No one has this number. As far as the world is concerned I’m in rehab. Or on study leave, which is the other way of putting it. Who’s texting me? Oh. THYROCARE, whatever that is:

Dear Client please attend our health camp. VitD+B12, Sugar, Lipid, LFT, KFT, Thyroid, Iron, CBC, Urine test for Rs 1800/-

Dear Thyrocare. I think I’d rather die.

I’ve already drunk a quarter of the bottle. It’s time for a forbidden afternoon snooze. Working men shouldn’t snooze. I shouldn’t take the Cardhu into the bedroom. But I must. It insists.

There’s no bed. Just a mattress on the floor. There are books, notebooks, dictionaries arranged in neat towers.

I switch on the tall standard lamp. I can see a piece of colored paper Scotch-taped to the wide-brimmed lampshade of the standard lamp. A reminder? A note to herself? It says:

As for their death, need I tell you about it? It will be, for all of them, the death of him who, when he learned of his from the jury, merely mumbled in a Rhenish accent, “I’m already way beyond that.”

Jean Genet

P.S. This lampshade is made of some kind of animal skin. If you look carefully you will find some hairs growing out of it.

Thankyou.

These rooms seem to have witnessed some sort of unraveling. The unraveling of any human being is probably horrifying to witness. But this human being? It has an edge of danger, like the faint, acrid smell of gunpowder hanging in the air at the scene of a crime.

I have not read Genet, should I have? Have you?

It’s good whisky, Cardhu. And bloody expensive. I’ll have to drink it respectfully. I’m already a bit woozy—“oozy,” as my old friend Golak would have put it. In Orissa they tend to drop their W’s.

IT’S PITCH-DARK.

I dreamed of a tower of stacked saucepan lids and open manholes stuffed with strange things — files mostly, and Musa’s drawings of horses. And long bolts of very dry snow that look like bones.

Who finished the whisky?

Who brought the vodka and the crate of beer from my car up to the apartment?

Who turned the day into night?

How many days have been turned into how many nights?

And who is at the door? I can hear the key turning.

Is it her?

No it’s not.

It’s two people with three voices. Strange. They come in and switch on the lights as though they own the place. And now we’re face-to-face. A young man in dark glasses and an older man. Older woman. Man. Woman-man. Whatever. Some sort of freak dressed in a Pathan suit and a cheap plastic anorak. Very tall. With a red mouth and a bright, shining tooth. Or maybe it’s just me still dreaming. My senses are weirdly heightened and blunted at the same time. There are bottles everywhere, crashing around our feet, rolling under the furniture and into the open manholes.

Since we don’t seem to have much to say to each other and I’m unsteady on my feet — I can feel myself swaying like corn in a cornfield — I go back into the bedroom and lie down. What else is there for me to do?

They follow me in. That strikes me as unusual behavior, even in a dream sequence, if that’s what’s going on here. The woman-man speaks to me in a voice that sounds like two voices. She speaks the most beautiful Urdu. She says her name is Anjum, that she’s a friend of Tilottama, who is living with her for the moment, and that she and her friend Saddam Hussain had come because Tilo needed some things from her cupboard. I said I was a friend of Tilo’s too and they should go right ahead and take what they needed. The young man produces a key and opens the cupboard.

A cloud of balloons floats out.

The young man produces a sack and begins to fill it. In goes — at least from what I can tell — a rubber duck, an inflatable baby’s bathtub, a large, stuffed zebra, some blankets, books and warm clothes. When they are done they thank me for my patience. They ask if I want to send a message to Tilo. I say I do.

I tear a page out of one of her notebooks and write GARSON HOBART. The letters come out much larger than I intend them to be. Like some sort of declaration. I hand the note to them.

And then they are gone.

I move to the window to watch them exit the building. One of them — the older one — gets into an autorickshaw, the other, I swear on my children, leaves on a horse . A pair of freaks with a swag bag full of stuffed toys trotting off into the mist on a frigging white horse.

My mind is in a shambles. My hallucinations are so pitiful. It was all so real. I could smell it. I can’t remember when I last ate. Where’s my phone? What’s the time? What day is it, or what night?

I look back at the room. The balloons are floating around like a screensaver. The cupboard doors have swung open. The inside of one is marked up. From where I’m standing it looks like a chart of some kind…a parents’ record of the height of their growing child — we used to do that with Ania and Rabia when they were growing up. What child could she have been measuring, I wonder. From up close I realize it’s not that at all. How could I have imagined, however briefly, that it would be something so domestic and endearing?

It’s some kind of dictionary, a work in progress — the entries are in uneven handwriting and in different colors: Kashmiri-English Alphabet

A:Azadi/​army/Allah/​America/Attack/AK-47/Ammunition/​Ambush/​Aatankwadi/Armed Forces Special Powers Act/​Area Domination/​Al Badr/Al Mansoorian/​Al Jehad/Afghan/Amarnath Yatra

B:BSF/​body/​blast/​bullet/​battalion/​barbed wire/​brust (burst)/​border cross/​booby trap/​bunker/​byte/​begaar (forced labor)

C:Cross-border/​Crossfire/camp/​civilian/​curfew/​Crackdown/Cordon-and-Search/CRPF/Checkpost/​Counter-insurgency/​Ceasefire/​Counter-Intelligence/​Catch and Kill/​Custodial Killing/​Compensation/​Cylinder (surrender)/​Concertina wire/​Collaborator

D:Disappeared/​Defense Spokesman/​Double Cross/​Double Agent/​Disturbed Areas Act/​Dead body

E:Encounter/​EJK (extrajudicial killing)/​Ex Gratia/​Embedded journalists/​Elections/​enforced disappearance

F:Funerals/​Fidayeen/​Foreign Militant/FIR (First Information Report)/​Fake Encounter

G:Grenade Blast/​Gunbattle/​G Branch (General branch — BSF intelligence)/​Graveyard/​Gun culture

H:HM (Hizb-ul-Mujahideen)/​HRV (human rights violations)/HRA (human rights activist)/​Hartal/​Harkat-ul-Mujahideen/​Honeymoon/​Half-widows/​Half-orphans/​Human shields/​Healing Touch/​Hideout

I:Interrogation/​India/​Intelligence/​Insurgent/​Informer/I-card/​ISI/​intercepts/​Ikhwan/​Information Warfare/​IB/​Indefinite Curfew

J:Jail/​Jamaat/JKP/​JIC (Joint Interrogation Center)/​JKLF (Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front)/​jihad/jannat/​jahannum/​Jamiat ul Mujahideen/Jaish-e-Mohammed