Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Anjum lived in the Khwabgah with her patched-together body and her partially realized dreams for more than thirty years.

She was forty-six years old when she announced that she wanted to leave. Mulaqat Ali was dead. Jahanara Begum was more or less bedridden and lived with Saqib and his family in one section of the old house at Chitli Qabar (the other half was rented to a strange, diffident young man who lived amidst towers of second-hand English books piled on the floor, on his bed and on every available horizontal surface). Anjum was welcome to visit occasionally, but not to stay. The Khwabgah was home to a new generation of residents; of the old ones only Ustad Kulsoom Bi, Bombay Silk, Razia, Bismillah and Mary remained.

Anjum had nowhere to go.

PERHAPS FOR THIS REASON, nobody took her seriously.

Theatrical announcements of departure and impending suicide were fairly routine responses to the wild jealousies, endless intrigue and continuously shifting loyalties that were a part of daily life in the Khwabgah. Once again, everybody suggested doctors and pills. Dr. Bhagat’s pills cure everything, they said. Everyone’s on them. “I’m not Everyone,” Anjum said, and that set off another round of whispers (For and Against) about the pitfalls of pride and what did she think of herself?

What did she think of herself? Not much, or quite a lot, depending on how you looked at it. She had ambitions, yes. And they had come full circle. Now she wanted to return to the Duniya and live like an ordinary person. She wanted to be a mother, to wake up in her own home, dress Zainab in a school uniform and send her off to school with her books and tiffin box. The question was, were ambitions such as these, on the part of someone like herself, reasonable or unreasonable?

Zainab was Anjum’s only love. Anjum had found her three years ago on one of those windy afternoons when the prayer caps of the Faithful blew off their heads and the balloon-sellers’ balloons all slanted to one side. She was alone and bawling on the steps of the Jama Masjid, a painfully thin mouse of a thing, with big, frightened eyes. Anjum guessed that she was about three years old. She wore a dull green salwar kameez and a dirty white hijab. When Anjum loomed over her and offered her a finger to hold, she glanced up briefly, grasped it and continued to cry loudly without pause. The Mouse-in-a-hijab had no idea what a storm that casual gesture of trust set off inside the owner of the finger that she held on to. Being ignored instead of dreaded by the tiny creature subdued (for a moment at least) what Nimmo Gorakhpuri had so astutely and so long ago called Indo-Pak. The warring factions inside Anjum fell silent. Her body felt like a generous host instead of a battlefield. Was it like dying, or being born? Anjum couldn’t decide. In her imagination it had the fullness, the sense of entirety, of one of the two. She bent down and picked the Mouse up and cradled her in her arms, murmuring all the while to her in both her quarreling voices. Even that did not scare or distract the child from her bawling project. For a while Anjum just stood there, smiling joyfully, while the creature in her arms cried. Then she set her down on the steps, bought her some bright pink cotton candy and tried to distract her by chatting nonchalantly about adult matters, hoping to pass the time until whoever owned the child came to get her. It turned out to be a one-way conversation, the Mouse did not seem to know much about herself, not even her name, and did not seem to want to talk. By the time she had finished with the cotton candy (or it had finished with her) she had a bright pink beard and sticky fingers. The bawling subsided into sobs and eventually into silence. Anjum stayed with her on the steps for hours, waiting for someone to come for her, asking passersby if they knew of anybody who was missing a child. As evening fell and the great wooden doors of the Jama Masjid were pulled shut, Anjum hoisted the Mouse on to her shoulders and carried her to the Khwabgah. There she was scolded and told that the right thing to do under the circumstances was to inform the Masjid Management that a lost child had been found. She did that the next morning. (Reluctantly, it has to be said, dragging her feet, hoping against hope, because by now Anjum was hopelessly in love.)

Over the next week announcements were made from several mosques several times a day. No one came forward to claim the Mouse. Weeks went by, still no one came looking. And so, by default, Zainab — the name Anjum chose for her — stayed on in the Khwabgah where she was lavished with more love by more mothers (and, in a manner of speaking, fathers) than any child could hope for. She did not take very long to settle into her new life, which suggested that she had not been unduly attached to her old one. Anjum came to believe that she had been abandoned and not lost.

In a few weeks she began to call Anjum “Mummy” (because that’s what Anjum had begun to call herself). The other residents (under Anjum’s tutelage) were all called “Apa” (Auntie, in Urdu), and Mary, because she was Christian, was Mary Auntie. Ustad Kulsoom Bi and Bismillah became “Badi Nani” and “Chhoti Nani.” Senior and Junior Granny. The Mouse absorbed love like sand absorbs the sea. Very quickly she metamorphosed into a cheeky young lady with rowdy, distinctly bandicoot-like tendencies (that could only barely be managed).

Mummy, in the meanwhile, grew more addle-headed by the day. She was caught unawares by the fact that it was possible for one human being to love another so much and so completely. At first, being new to the discipline, she was only able to express her feelings in a busy, bustling way, like a child with its first pet. She bought Zainab an unnecessary amount of toys and clothes (frothy, puff-sleeved frocks and Made-in-China squeaking shoes with flashing heel-lights), she bathed, dressed and undressed her an unnecessary number of times, oiled, braided and unbraided her hair, tied and untied it with matching and unmatching ribbons that she kept rolled up in an old tin. She overfed her, took her for walks in the neighborhood and, when she saw that Zainab was naturally drawn to animals, got her a rabbit — who was killed by a cat on his very first night at the Khwabgah — and a he-goat with a Maulana-style beard who lived in the courtyard and every now and then, with an impassive expression on his face, sent his shiny goat pills skittering in all directions.

The Khwabgah was in better condition than it had been for years. The broken room had been renovated and a new room built on top of it on the first floor, which Anjum and Mary now shared. Anjum slept with Zainab on a mattress on the floor, her long body curled protectively around the little girl like a city wall. At night she sang her to sleep softly, in a way that was more whisper than song. When Zainab was old enough to understand, Anjum began to tell her bedtime stories. At first the stories were entirely inappropriate for a young child. They were Anjum’s somewhat maladroit attempt to make up for lost time, to transfuse herself into Zainab’s memory and consciousness, to reveal herself without artifice, so that they could belong to each other completely. As a result she used Zainab as a sort of dock where she unloaded her cargo — her joys and tragedies, her life’s cathartic turning points. Far from putting Zainab to sleep, many of the stories either gave her nightmares or made her stay awake for hours, fearful and cranky. Sometimes Anjum herself wept as she told them. Zainab began to dread her bedtime and would shut her eyes tightly, simulating sleep in order not to have to listen to another tale. Over time, however, Anjum (with inputs from some of the junior Apas) worked out an editorial line. The stories were successfully childproofed, and eventually Zainab even began to look forward to the night-time ritual.