Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

The cramped room was only slightly larger than the double bed covered with an embroidered counterpane. On the bedside table there was a flowered plastic tray with a filigreed bell-metal water jug, two colored glasses and a small CD player. The threadbare carpet on the floor was patterned, the cupboard doors were crudely carved, the wooden ceiling was honeycombed, the waste-paper bin was intricately patterned papier mâché. Tilo looked for a space that was not patterned, embroidered, carved or filigreed, to rest her eyes on. When she didn’t find one, a tide of anxiety welled up in her. She opened the wooden windows but they looked directly on to the closed wooden windows of the next houseboat a few feet away. Empty cigarette packets and cigarette stubs floated in the few feet of water that separated them. She put her bag down and went out to the porch, lit a cigarette and watched the glassy surface of the lake turn silver as the first stars appeared in the sky. The snow on the mountains glowed for a while, like phosphorus, even after darkness had fallen.

She waited on the boat the whole of the next day, watching Gulrez dust the undusty furniture and talk to purple brinjals and big-leaved haakh in his vegetable garden on the bank just behind the boat. After clearing away a simple lunch, he showed her his collection of things that he kept in a big yellow airport duty-free shopping bag that said See! Buy! Fly! He laid them out on the dining table one by one. It was his version of a Visitors’ Book: an empty bottle of Polo aftershave lotion, a range of old airline boarding passes, a pair of small binoculars, a pair of sunglasses from which one lens had fallen out, a well-thumbed Lonely Planet guidebook, a Qantas toilet bag, a small torch, a bottle of herbal mosquito repellent, a bottle of suntan lotion, a silver-foil card of expired diarrhea pills, and a pair of blue Marks & Spencer ladies’ knickers stuffed into an old cigarette tin. He giggled and made his eyes sly as he rolled the knickers into a soft cigar and put them back in the tin. Tilo searched her sling bag and added a small strawberry-shaped eraser and a vial that used to contain clutch-pencil leads to the collection. Gulrez unscrewed the little cap of the vial and screwed it back on, thrilled. After contemplating the matter for a while, he put the eraser in the plastic bag and pocketed the vial. He went out of the room and came back with a postcard-sized print of a photograph of himself holding the kittens in the palms of his hands that the last visitor on the boat had given him. He gave it to Tilo formally, holding it out with both hands as though it were a certificate of merit being awarded to her. Tilo accepted it with a bow. Their barter was complete.

In a conversation in which her hesitant Hindi encountered his halting Urdu, Tilo figured out that the “Muzz-kak” that Gulrez kept referring to was Musa. He brought out a clipping of an Urdu newspaper which had published photographs of all those who had been shot on the same day as Miss Jebeen and her mother. He kissed the cutting several times over, pointing to a little girl and a young woman. Gradually Tilo pieced together the semblance of a narrative: the woman was Musa’s wife and the child was their daughter. The photos were so badly printed it was impossible to decipher their features and tell what they looked like. To make sure Tilo understood his meaning, Gulrez laid his head down on a pillow made of his palms, closed his eyes like a child and then pointed to the sky.

They’ve gone to heaven.

Tilo didn’t know that Musa was married.

He hadn’t told her.

Should he have?

Why should he have?

And why should she mind?

It was she who had walked away from him.

But she did mind.

Not because he was married, but because he hadn’t told her.

For the rest of the day a Malayalam nonsense rhyme looped endlessly in her head. It had been the monsoon anthem of an army of tiny, knickered children — she, one among them — who stomped in mud puddles and streaked down the creepered, overgreened riverbank in the pouring rain, shrieking it.

She couldn’t understand. Could there be a more inappropriate response to what she had just learned? She hadn’t thought of this verse since she was five years old. Why now?

Perhaps it was raining inside her head. Perhaps it was the survival strategy of a mind that might shut down if it was foolish enough to attempt to make sense of the intricate fretwork that connected Musa’s nightmares to hers.

There was no tour guide on hand to tell her that in Kashmir nightmares were promiscuous. That they were unfaithful to their owners, they cartwheeled wantonly into other people’s dreams, they acknowledged no precincts, they were the greatest ambush artists of all. No fortification, no fence-building could keep them in check. In Kashmir the only thing to do with nightmares was to embrace them like old friends and manage them like old enemies. She would learn that of course. Soon.

She sat on the upholstered, built-in bench in the entrance porch of the houseboat and watched her second sunset. A gloomy nightfish (no relative of the nightmare) rose from the bottom of the lake and swallowed the reflection of the mountains in the water. Whole. Gulrez was laying the table for dinner (for two, clearly he knew something) when Musa arrived suddenly, quietly, entering from the back of the boat.

“Salaam.”

“Salaam.”

“You came.”

“Of course.”

“How are you? How was the journey?”

“OK. You?”

“OK.”

The rhyme in Tilo’s head swelled into a symphony.

“I’m sorry I’m so late.”

He didn’t give any further explanation. Other than looking a little gaunt, he hadn’t changed very much, and yet he was almost unrecognizable. He had grown a stubble that was almost a beard. His eyes seemed to have lightened and darkened at once, as though they’d been washed, and one color had faded and the other had not. His browngreen irises were circumscribed with a ring of black that Tilo did not remember. She saw that his outline — the shape he made in the world — had grown indistinct, smudged, somehow. He merged into his surroundings even more than he used to. It had nothing to do with the ubiquitous brown Kashmiri pheran that flapped around him. When he took off his wool cap Tilo saw that his hair had thick streaks of silver. He noticed that she noticed and ran self-conscious fingers through his hair. Strong, horse-drawing fingers, with a callus on the trigger finger. He was the same age as her. Thirty-one.

The silence between them swelled and subsided like the bellows of an accordion playing a tune that only they could hear. He knew that she knew that he knew that she knew. That’s how it was between them.

Gulrez brought in a tray of tea. With him too, there was no great exchange of greetings, although it was clear that there was familiarity, even love. Musa called him Gul-kak and sometimes “Mout” and had brought him eardrops. The eardrops broke the ice as only eardrops can.

“He has an ear infection, and he’s scared. Terrified,” Musa explained.

“Is he in pain? He seemed fine all day.”

“Not of the pain, there’s no pain. Of being shot. He says he can’t hear properly and he’s worried that he might not hear them at the checkposts when they say ‘Stop!’ Sometimes they first let you go through and then stop you. So if you don’t hear that…”