Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“Your mother is a remarkable woman. You must understand that it isn’t she who is uttering those ugly words.”

“Oh. Who is it, then?”

“Someone else. Her illness. Her blood. Her suffering. Our conditioning, our prejudices, our history…”

“So to whom will I be apologizing? To prejudice? Or to history?”

But she was already following him down the corridor, back to the ICU.

By the time they arrived her mother had slipped into a coma. She was beyond hearing, beyond history, beyond prejudice, beyond apology. Tilo curled up on the bed and put her face on her mother’s feet until they went cold. The broken chair watched over them like a melancholy angel. Tilo wondered how her mother had known what the chair would do. How could she have known?

Forget about the broken chairs, they’re always hanging around.

Maryam Ipe died early the next morning.

The Syrian Christian church would not forgive her her trespasses and flat out refused to bury her. So the funeral, attended mostly by schoolteachers and a few of her pupils’ parents, took place in the government crematorium. Tilo brought her mother’s ashes back to Delhi. She told Naga that she needed to think very carefully about what to do with them. She didn’t tell him much else. The pot containing the ashes sat on her worktable for as long as he could remember. Lately Naga noticed that it had disappeared. He was not sure whether Tilo had found an appropriate place to immerse the ashes (or scatter them, or bury them), or whether they had simply moved with her to her new home.

THE PRINCESS CAME UPON NAGA sitting on the floor looking through a fat medical file. She stood behind him and read the notes aloud over his shoulders.

“ ‘The arterial port is Jesus Christ’s screw’…‘Did you hear the sound of the white flower?’ What’s this rubbish you’re reading, jaan? Since when did flowers start making sounds?”

Naga remained sitting and said nothing for a long time. He appeared to be deep in thought. Then he stood up and cupped her beautiful face in his hands.

“I’m so sorry…”

“For what, jaan?”

“It’s not going to work…”

“What?”

“Us.”

“But she’s gone! She’s left you!”

“She has. She has, yes…But she’ll come back. She has to. She will.”

The Princess looked at Naga pityingly and moved on. She was soon married to the Chief Editor of a TV news channel. They made a handsome, happy couple and went on to have many healthy, happy children.

THE ROOMS TILO RENTED were on the second floor of a townhouse overlooking a government primary school full of relatively poor children and a Neem tree full of reasonably well-off parakeets. Every morning at assembly the children shouted out the whole of “Hum Hongey Kaamyaab”—the Hindi version of “We Shall Overcome.” She sang with them. On weekends and holidays she missed the children and the school assembly, so she sang the song to herself at exactly 7 a.m. On the days that she didn’t, she felt the morning was just the previous day extended, that a new day hadn’t dawned. On most mornings, anyone who put an ear to her door would have heard her.

No one put an ear to her door.

Miss Jebeen’s birthday and baptism ceremony marked Tilo’s fourth year and last night in the second-floor apartment. She wondered what she should do with the rest of the birthday cake. Perhaps the ants would invite their relatives in the neighborhood to partake of the feast and either finish it or remove every last crumb into storage.

The heat stood up and paced around the room. Traffic growled in the distance. City thunder.

No rain.

The spotted owlet flitted away to duck and bob and practice his good manners on some other woman through some other window.

When she noticed that the owl had left, Tilo felt unutterably sad. She knew she would soon be leaving too, and might never see him again. The owl was someone . She wasn’t sure who. Musa maybe. That was always how it was with Musa. Each time he left, after his brief, mysterious visits, in his peculiar disguises, looking like Mr. Nobody from District Nowhere, she knew she might never see him again. Usually it was he who disappeared and she who waited. This time it was her turn to disappear. She had no means of letting him know where she was. He did not use a mobile phone, and the only calls he made to her were on her landline, which would now go unanswered. She was overcome by the desire to communicate the uncertain nature of their farewell to the spotted owlet that night. She scribbled a line on a piece of paper and stuck it on the window, facing outwards for the owl to read:

Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.

She returned to her mattress, pleased with herself and the borrowed clarity of her communication. But then, in no time at all, she felt ashamed. Osip Mandelstam had had more serious things on his mind when he wrote that line. He was negotiating Stalin’s Gulag. He wasn’t talking to owls. She retrieved her note and once again returned to bed.

A few miles away from where she lay awake, three men had been crushed to death the previous night by a truck that had careened off the road. Perhaps the driver had fallen asleep. On TV they said that that summer homeless people had taken to sleeping on the edges of roads with heavy traffic. They had discovered that diesel exhaust fumes from passing trucks and buses were an effective mosquito repellent and protected them from the outbreak of dengue fever that had killed several hundred people in the city already.

She imagined the men: new immigrants to the city, stone-workers, come home to their pre-booked, pre-paid-for spot whose rent was calculated by calibrating the optimum density of exhaust fumes and dividing it by the acceptable density of mosquitoes. Precise algebra; not easily found in textbooks.

The men were tired from their day’s work on the building site, their eyelashes and lungs pale with stone-dust from cutting stone and laying floors in the multi-story shopping centers and housing estates springing up around the city like a fast-growing forest. They spread their soft, frayed gamchha s on the poky grass of the sloping embankment dotted with dogshit and stainless-steel sculptures — public art — sponsored by the Pamnani Group that was promoting cutting-edge artists who used stainless steel as a medium, in the hope that the cutting-edge artists would promote the steel industry. The sculptures looked like clusters of steel spermatozoa, or perhaps they were meant to be balloons. It wasn’t clear. Either way, they looked cheerful. The men lit a last beedi. Smoke rings curled into the night. The neon street lights made the grass look metal blue and the men look gray. There was teasing and some laughter, because two of them could blow smoke rings and the third couldn’t. He was bad at things, always the last to learn.

Sleep came to them, quick and easy, like money to millionaires.

If they hadn’t died of truck, they would have died of:

(a) Dengue fever

(b) The heat

(c) Beedi smoke

or

(d) Stone-dust

Or maybe not. Maybe they would have risen to become:

(a) Millionaires

(b) Supermodels

or

(c) Bureau chiefs

Did it matter that they were mashed into the grass they slept on? To whom did it matter? Did those to whom it mattered matter?