Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Dear Doctor,

We have been crushed. Is there a cure?

Regards,

Biru, Jairam, Ram Kishore

Tilo smiled and closed her eyes.

Careless motherfuckers. Who asked them to get in the way of the truck?

She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know. How to un-know, for example, that when people died of stone-dust, their lungs refused to be cremated. Even after the rest of their bodies had turned to ash, two lung-shaped slabs of stone remained behind, unburned. Her friend Dr. Azad Bhartiya, who lived on the pavement of Jantar Mantar, had told her about his older brother, Jiten Y. Kumar, who had worked in a granite quarry and died at the age of thirty-five. He described how he had had to break up his brother’s lungs with a crowbar on the funeral pyre to release his soul. He did it, he said, even though he was a communist and didn’t believe in souls.

He did it to please his mother.

He said his brother’s lungs glittered, because they were speckled with silica.

Dear Doctor,

Nothing, really. I just wanted to say hello. Actually — there is something. Imagine having to smash your brother’s lungs to please your mother. Would you call that normal human activity?

She wondered what an unreleased soul, a soul-shaped stone on a funeral pyre, might look like. Like a starfish maybe. Or a millipede. Or a dappled moth with a living body and stone wings — poor moth — betrayed, held down by the very things that were meant to help it to fly.

Miss Jebeen the Second stirred in her sleep.

Concentrate , the kidnapper told herself as she stroked the baby’s damp, sweaty forehead. Otherwise things could get completely out of hand. She had no idea why she of all people, who never wanted children, had picked up the baby and run. But now it was done. Her part in the story had been written. But not by her. By whom, then? Someone.

Dear Doctor,

If you like you can change every inch of me. I’m just a story.

Miss Jebeen was a good-natured baby and seemed to like the saltless soup and mashed vegetables that Tilo made for her. For a woman who had very little experience with children, Tilo was surprisingly easy with her and confident in the way she handled her. On the few occasions that Miss Jebeen cried, she was able to comfort her in no time at all. The best course of action, Tilo found (a feed being the exception), was to lay her down on the floor with the litter of five gun-colored puppies that Comrade Laali, a red-haired mongrel, had birthed on the landing outside her door five weeks ago. Both parties (the puppies and Miss Jebeen) seemed to have plenty to say to each other. Both mothers were great friends. So the get-togethers were usually a success. When everybody was tired, Tilo would return the puppies to their burlap sack on the landing, and give Comrade Laali a little bowl of milk and bread.

Earlier in the day, Tilo had just lit the candle on the cake and was waltzing the newly named Miss Jebeen around the room humming “Happy Birthday,” when Ankita, the ground-floor tenant, phoned. She said that a constable had come by that morning inquiring about her (Tilo) and asking her (Ankita) whether she knew anything about a new baby in the building. He was in a hurry and had left a newspaper with her in which the police had published a routine notice. Ankita sent it up with her little Adivasi child-slave. It said: KIDNAPPING NOTICE DP/1146 NEW DELHI 110001

General Public is hereby informed that one unknown baby, s/o UNKNOWN, r/o UNKNOWN, without clothes was abandoned at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi. After Police was informed but before police-force arrived on the scene the said baby was kidnapped by an unknown person/persons. First Information Report has been registered under Sections 361, 362, 365, 366A, Sections 367 & 369. For all or any information please contact Station House Officer, Parliament Street Police Station, New Delhi. The description of the baby is as under:

Name: UNKNOWN, Father’s Name: UNKNOWN, Address: UNKNOWN, Age: UNKNOWN, Wearing: NO CLOTHES.

Ankita sounded superior and disapproving on the phone. But that was just her usual manner with Tilo. She tended to assume that somewhat smug, triumphant air of a woman-with-a-husband speaking to a woman-without-a-husband. It didn’t have anything to do with the baby. She did not know about Miss Jebeen. (Fortunately Garson Hobart had seen to it that the construction of his house was solid and the walls soundproof.) Nobody in the neighborhood did. Tilo had not taken her out. She hadn’t been out much herself, except for occasional, essential trips to the market when the baby was asleep. The shopkeepers might have wondered about the uncharacteristic purchases of baby food. But Tilo did not think the police would take the investigation that far.

When she first read the police notice in the newspaper, Tilo didn’t take it seriously. It looked like a routine, bureaucratic requirement that was being mindlessly fulfilled. On a second reading, however, she realized it could spell serious trouble. To give herself time to think, she copied the notice carefully into a notebook, word for word, in olde-worlde calligraphy, and decorated it with a margin of vines and fruit as though it were the Ten Commandments. She couldn’t imagine how the police had traced her and come knocking. She knew she needed a plan. But she didn’t have one. So she called the only person in the world that she trusted would understand the problem and give her sound counsel.

They had been friends for more than four years, she and Dr. Azad Bhartiya. They met for the first time while they were both waiting for their sandals to be mended by a street-side cobbler in Connaught Place who was famous for his skill and his smallness. In his hands, each shoe or slipper he was mending looked as though it belonged to a giant. While they stood around with one shoe on and one shoe off, Dr. Bhartiya surprised Tilo by asking her (in English) if she had a cigarette. She surprised him back by replying (in Hindi) that she had no cigarettes but could offer him a beedi. The little cobbler lectured them both at length about the consequences of smoking. He told them how his father, a chain-smoker, had died of cancer. He drew the outline of his father’s lung tumor with his finger in the dust. “It was this big.” Dr. Bhartiya assured him that he smoked only on the occasions when he was having his shoes mended. The conversation switched to politics. The cobbler cursed the current climate, bad-mouthed the gods of every creed and religion, and ended his diatribe by bending down and kissing his iron last. He said it was the only God he believed in. By the time their soles had been mended, the cobbler and his clients had become friends. Dr. Bhartiya invited both his new friends to his pavement home in Jantar Mantar. Tilo went. From then on there was no looking back.

She visited him twice a week or more, often arriving in the evening and leaving at dawn. Occasionally she brought him a deworming pill, which, for some reason, she deemed essential for everybody’s well-being, and he deemed ethical to consume even while on hunger strike. She considered him to be a man of the world, among the wisest, sanest people she knew. In time she became the translator/transcriber as well as printer/publisher of his single-page broadsheet: My News & Views , which he revised and updated every month. They managed to sell as many as eight or nine copies of each edition. All in all it was a thriving media partnership — politically acute, uncompromising, and wholly in the red.

The media partners had not met for more than eight days — since the coming of Miss Jebeen the Second. When Tilo called Dr. Bhartiya to tell him about the police notice, he dropped his voice to a whisper. He said they should speak as little as possible on the mobile phone, because they were under constant surveillance by International Agencies. But after that initial moment of caution, he chatted away sunnily. He told her how the police had beaten him and confiscated all his papers. He said it was quite likely that they had picked up the trail from there (because the publisher’s name and address were given at the bottom of the pamphlet). It was either that or her flamboyant signature on his plaster cast, which they had forcibly photographed from several angles. “No one else signed in green ink and put their address,” he told her. “So you must be the first person on their list. It must be just a routine check-up.” Still, he suggested that she immediately transfer Miss Jebeen and herself, at least temporarily, to a place called Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services in the old city. The person to contact there, he said, was Saddam Hussain, or the proprietor herself, Dr. Anjum, who, Dr. Bhartiya said, was an extremely good person and had met him several times after the incident (of the said night), inquiring about the baby. Due to the honorific he had arbitrarily bestowed on himself (even though his PhD was still “pending”), Dr. Bhartiya often called people he liked “Doctor” for no real reason other than that he liked and respected them.