Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Musa and his escort were not detained by the formalities of reception or registration. Followed by the gaze of the chained, beaten men, they swept like royalty straight up the grand, curving staircase that led to the balcony seats — the Queen’s Circle — and then further up a narrower staircase to the projection room that had been expanded into an office. Musa was aware that even the staging of this piece of theater was deliberate, not innocent.

Major Amrik Singh stood up from behind a desk that was cluttered with his collection of exotic paperweights — spiky, speckled seashells, brass figurines, sailing ships and ballerinas imprisoned in glass orbs — to greet Musa. He was a swarthy, exceptionally tall man — six foot two, easily — in his mid-thirties. His chosen avatar that night was Sikh. The skin on his cheeks above his beardline was large-pored, like the surface of a soufflé. His dark green turban, wound tight around his ears and forehead, pulled the corners of his eyes and his eyebrows upward, giving him a sleepy air. Those who were even casually acquainted with him knew that to be taken in by that sleepy air would be a perilous misreading of the man. He came around the desk and greeted Musa solicitously, with concern and affection. The soldiers who had brought Musa in were asked to leave.

“As salaam aleikum huzoor… Please sit down. What will you have? Tea? Or coffee?”

His tone was somewhere between a query and an order.

“Nothing. Shukriya .”

Musa sat down. Amrik Singh picked up the receiver of his red intercom and ordered tea and “officers’ biscuits.” His size and bulk made his desk look small and out of proportion.

It was not their first meeting. Musa had met Amrik Singh several times before, at, of all places, his (Musa’s) own home, when Amrik Singh would drop in to visit Godzilla, upon whom he had decided to bestow the gift of friendship — an offer that Godzilla was not exactly free to turn down. After Amrik Singh’s first few visits, Musa became aware of a drastic change in the home atmosphere. It became quieter. The bitter political arguments between himself and his father ebbed away. But Musa sensed that Godzilla’s suddenly suspicious eyes were constantly on him, as though trying to assess him, gauge him, fathom him. One afternoon, coming down from his room, Musa slipped on the staircase, righted himself mid-slide, and landed on his feet. Godzilla, who had been watching this performance, accosted Musa. He did not raise his voice, but he was furious and Musa could see a pulse throbbing near his temple.

“How did you learn to fall like that? Who taught you to fall like this?”

He examined his son with the finely honed instincts of a worried Kashmiri parent. He looked for unusual things — for a callus on a trigger finger, for horny, tough-skinned knees and elbows and any other signs of “training” that might have been received in militant camps. He found none. He decided to confront Musa with the troubling information Amrik Singh had given him — about boxes of “metal” being moved through his family’s orchards in Ganderbal. About Musa’s journeys into the mountains, about his meetings with certain “friends.”

“What do you have to say about all this?”

“Ask your friend the Major Sahib. He’ll tell you that non-actionable intelligence is as good as garbage,” Musa said.

“Tse chhui marnui assi sarnei ti marnavakh,” Godzilla said.

You’re going to die and take us all with you.

The next time Amrik Singh dropped in, Godzilla insisted that Musa be present. On that occasion they sat cross-legged on the floor around a flowered, plastic dastarkhan as Musa’s mother served the tea. (Musa had asked Arifa to make sure that she and Miss Jebeen did not come downstairs until the visitor had left.) Amrik Singh exuded warmth and camaraderie. He made himself at home, sprawling back against the bolsters. He told a few bawdy Stupid Sikh jokes about Santa Singh and Banta Singh, and laughed at them louder than anybody else. And then, on the pretext that it was preventing him from eating as much as he would like to, he unbuckled his belt with his pistol still in its holster. If the gesture was meant to signal that he trusted his hosts and felt at ease with them, it had the opposite effect. The murder of Jalib Qadri was still to come, but everyone knew about the string of other murders and kidnappings. The pistol lay balefully among the plates of cakes and snacks and Thermos flasks of salted noon chai . When Amrik Singh finally stood up to leave, burping his appreciation, he forgot it, or appeared to have forgotten it. Godzilla picked it up and handed it to him.

Amrik Singh looked straight at Musa and laughed as he buckled it back on.

“A good thing your father remembered. Imagine if it had been found here during a cordon-and-search. Forget me, even God wouldn’t have been able to help you. Imagine.”

Everybody laughed obediently. Musa saw that there was no laughter in Amrik Singh’s eyes. They seemed to absorb light but not reflect it. They were opaque, depthless black discs with not a hint of a glimmer or a glint.

Those same opaque eyes now looked at Musa across a desk full of paperweights in the projection room of the Shiraz. It was an extraordinary sight — Amrik Singh sitting at a desk. It was clear that he had absolutely no idea what to do with it other than use it as a coffee table for mementoes. It was placed in such a way that he had only to lean back in his chair and peer through the tiny rectangular opening in the wall — once the projectionist’s viewing portal, now a spyhole — to keep an eye on whatever was happening in the main hall. The interrogation cells led off from there, through the doorways over which red, neon-lit signs said (and sometimes meant): EXIT . The screen still had an old-fashioned red velvet tasseled curtain — the kind that used to go up in the old days to piped music: “Popcorn” or “Baby Elephant Walk.” The cheaper seats in the stalls had been removed and piled up in a heap in a corner, to make space for an indoor badminton court where stressed-out soldiers could let off steam. Even at this hour, the faint thwack thwack of a shuttlecock meeting a racquet made its way into Amrik Singh’s office.

“I brought you here to offer my apologies and my deepest personal condolences for what has happened.”

The corrosion in Kashmir ran so deep that Amrik Singh was genuinely unaware of the irony of picking up a man whose wife and child had just been shot and bringing him forcibly, under armed guard, to an interrogation center at four in the morning, only in order to offer his commiseration.

Musa knew that Amrik Singh was a chameleon and that underneath his turban he was a “Mona”—he didn’t have the long hair of a Sikh. He had committed that ultimate sacrilege against the Sikh canon by cutting his hair many years ago. Musa had heard him boast to Godzilla about how when he was out on a counter-insurgency operation he could pass himself off as a Hindu, a Sikh or a Punjabi-speaking Pakistani Muslim, depending on what the operation demanded. He guffawed as he described how, in order to identify and flush out “sympathizers,” he and his men dressed in salwar kameez—“Khan Suits”—and knocked on villagers’ doors in the dead of night, pretending to be militants from Pakistan asking for shelter. If they were welcomed, the next day the villagers would be arrested as OGWs (overground workers).

“How are unarmed villagers supposed to turn away a group of men with guns who knock on their doors in the middle of the night? Regardless of whether they are militants or military?” Musa could not help asking.

“Oh, we have ways of assessing the warmth of the welcome,” Amrik Singh said. “We have our own thermometers.”