Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Naga’s mother, who lived alone on the ground floor of the big house (his father, Ambassador Shivashankar Hariharan, had died), advised him to let Tilo go. “She won’t be able to manage on her own, she’ll beg you to take her back.” Naga knew otherwise. Tilo would manage. And even if she didn’t, there would be no begging. He sensed she was drifting on a tide that neither he nor she could do much about. He couldn’t tell whether her restlessness, her compulsive and increasingly unsafe wandering through the city, marked the onset of an unsoundness of mind or an acute, perilous kind of sanity. Or were they both the same thing?

The only thing he could attribute her newfound restiveness to was her mother’s bizarre passing, which he thought odd, given that it was a relationship that had barely existed. True, Tilo had been at her bedside during the last two weeks in hospital. But other than that, she had seen her mother only a few times in the past several years.

Naga was right in one sense but wrong in another. Her mother’s death (she died in the winter of 2009) had released Tilo from an internment that nobody, including she herself, had been aware of because it had passed itself off as something quite the opposite — a peculiar, insular independence. For all of her adult life Tilo had defined and shaped herself by marking off and maintaining a distance between herself and her mother — her real foster-mother. When that was no longer necessary, something frozen began to thaw and something unfamiliar began to take its place.

Naga’s pursuit of Tilo had not turned out as planned. She was meant to be just another easy conquest, yet another woman who succumbed to his irreverent brilliance and edgy charm and had her heart broken. But Tilo had crept up on him, and become a kind of compulsion, an addiction almost. Addiction has its own mnemonics — skin, smell, the length of the loved one’s fingers. In Tilo’s case it was the slant of her eyes, the shape of her mouth, the almost-invisible scar that slightly altered the symmetry of her lips and made her look defiant even when she did not mean to, the way her nostrils flared, announcing her displeasure even before her eyes did. The way she held her shoulders. The way she sat on the pot stark naked and smoked cigarettes. So many years of marriage, the fact that she was not young any more — and did nothing to pretend otherwise — didn’t change the way he felt. Because it had to do with more than all that. It was the haughtiness (despite the question mark over her “stock,” as his mother had not hesitated to put it). It had to do with the way she lived, in the country of her own skin. A country that issued no visas and seemed to have no consulates.

True, it had never been a particularly friendly country even at the best of times. But its borders were sealed and the regime of more or less complete isolationism began only after the train-wreck at the Shiraz Cinema. Naga married Tilo because he was never really able to reach her. And because he couldn’t reach her he couldn’t let her go. (Of course that raises another question: Why did Tilo marry Naga? A generous person would say it was because she needed shelter. A less generous view would be that it was because she needed cover.)

Although his was only a small part in the story, in Naga’s mind, “Before” and “After” Shiraz sometimes took on the overtones of BC and AD.

AFTER THE MIDNIGHT CALL from Biplab Das-Goose- da in Dachigam, it took Naga a few hours and several discreet phone calls to make the necessary arrangements to get from Ahdoos to the Shiraz. Curfew had been declared. Srinagar was locked down. Security was being put in place for the funeral procession for the people who had been killed over the weekend, which would rage through the streets the next morning. There were shoot-on-sight orders. Moving around the city that night was next to impossible. By the time Naga managed to organize a vehicle, a curfew pass, checkpoint waivers and an entry-permit to the Shiraz, it was almost dawn.

An orderly was waiting for him outside the cinema lobby, near what had once been the ticket booth and was now a sentry post. He said the Major Sahib (Amrik Singh) had left, but that his deputy would meet him in his office. The orderly escorted Naga to the back of the building, up the fire escape to a dim, makeshift office on the first floor. He asked Naga to take a seat, saying that “Sahib” would be there in a minute. When he entered the room Naga had no means of knowing that the figure in a pheran and balaclava sitting on a chair with her back to the door was Tilo. He hadn’t seen her in a while. When she turned around, what alarmed him more than the look in her eyes was the effort she made to smile and say hello. That, to him, was a sign of breakage. It wasn’t her. She wasn’t a woman who smiled and said hello. Her close friends had learned over time that with Tilo the absence of a greeting was actually a brusque declaration of intimacy. Thanks to the balaclava, what they later came to call “the haircut” wasn’t immediately evident. Naga assumed the balaclava was just a South Indian’s exaggerated response to the cold. (He had a cache of jokes about South Indians and monkey caps that he used to tell with accents and aplomb, without fear of causing offense, because he was half South Indian himself.) As soon as Tilo saw him she stood up and moved quickly to the door.

“It’s you! I thought Garson—”

“He called me. He’s in Dachigam with the Governor. I happened to be in town. Are you OK? And Musa…? Was it…?”

He put an arm around her shoulder. She wasn’t shivering so much as vibrating, as though there was a motor just underneath her skin. A pulse jumped on the side of her mouth.

“Can we go now? Shall we leave…?”

Before Naga could reply, Ashfaq Mir, Deputy Commandant of the Shiraz Cinema JIC, walked in, heralded by the overpowering scent of his cologne. Naga dropped his arm from Tilo’s shoulder, feeling guilty for an imagined misdemeanor. (In Kashmir in those days, the difference between what constituted guilt and innocence lay in the realm of the occult.)

Ashfaq Mir was startlingly short, startlingly strong-looking and startlingly white even for a Kashmiri. His ears and nostrils were shell pink. He exuded an almost metallic radiance. He was smartly turned out, khaki trousers creased, brown boots polished, buckles gleaming, hair gelled and raked back off his smooth, shining forehead. He could have been Albanian, or a young army officer from the Balkans, but when he spoke, it was with the manner of an old-world houseboat owner, steeped in generations of legendary Kashmiri hospitality, greeting an old customer.

“Welcome, sir! Welcome! Welcome! I must tell you, I am your biggest fan, sir! We need people like you to keep people like me on the right track!” The smile that spread across his fresh, boyish face was a pennant. His amazed, baby-blue eyes lit up with what looked like real pleasure. He sandwiched Naga’s hand between both his hands and pumped it warmly for a good length of time before taking his place behind his desk and gesturing to Naga to sit down opposite him. “I’m sorry I am a little late. I was out all night. There’s trouble in the city — you must have heard — protests, firings, killings, funerals…Our usual Srinagar Special. I just got back. My CO Sir asked me to come and hand over Ma’am personally.”

Though he called her “Ma’am,” he behaved as though Tilo wasn’t there. (Which allowed Tilo to behave as though she wasn’t there either.) Even when he referred to her he didn’t look at her. Whether that was a gesture of respect, disrespect or just local tradition was not clear.