Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Gulrez, sensing the strain (and the love) in the room and alert to the fact that he could play a part in easing it, knelt on the floor theatrically, and rested his cheek on Musa’s lap with a big cauliflower ear turned upwards to receive eardrops. After ministering to both cauliflowers and stopping them up with wads of cotton wool, Musa gave him the bottle.

“Keep it carefully. When I’m not here ask her, she’ll do it,” he said. “She’s my friend.”

Gulrez, much as he coveted the tiny bottle with its plastic nozzle, much as he felt its rightful place was in his See! Buy! Fly! Visitors’ Book, entrusted it to Tilo and beamed at her. For a moment they became a spontaneously constituted family. Father bear, mother bear, baby bear.

Baby bear was by far the happiest. For dinner he produced five meat dishes: gushtaba, rista, martzwangan korma, shami kebab, chicken yakhni .

“So much food…” Tilo said.

“Cow, goat, chicken, lamb…only slaves eat like this,” Musa said, heaping an impolite amount on to his plate. “Our stomachs are graveyards.”

Tilo would not believe that baby bear had cooked the feast single-handedly.

“He was talking to brinjals and playing with the kittens all day. I didn’t see him doing any cooking.”

“He must have done it before you came. He’s a wonderful cook. His father is a professional, a waza , from Godzilla’s village.”

“Why is he here all alone?”

“He’s not alone. There are eyes and ears and hearts around him. But he can’t live in the village…it’s too dangerous for him. Gul-kak is what we call a ‘mout’ —he lives in his own world, with his own rules. A bit like you, in some ways.” Musa looked up at Tilo, serious, unsmiling.

“You mean a fool, a village fool?” Tilo looked back at him, not smiling either.

“I mean a special person. A blessed person.”

“Blessed by whom? Twisted fucking way to bless someone.”

“Blessed with a beautiful soul. Here we revere our maet .”

It had been a while since Musa had heard a laconic profanity of this nature, especially from a woman. It landed lightly, like a cricket on his constricted heart, and stirred the memory of why, and how and how much, he had loved Tilo. He tried to return that thought to the locked section of the archive it had come out of.

“We nearly lost him two years ago. There was a cordon-and-search operation in his village. The men were asked to come out and line up in the fields. Gul ran out to greet the soldiers, insisting they were the Pakistani army, come to liberate them. He was singing, shouting Jeevey! Jeevey! Pakistan! He wanted to kiss their hands. They shot him in his thigh, beat him with rifle butts and left him bleeding in the snow. After that incident he became hysterical, and would try to run away whenever he saw a soldier, which is of course the most dangerous thing to do. So I brought him to Srinagar to live with us. But now since there’s hardly anybody in our home — I don’t live there any more — he didn’t want to stay there either. I got him this job. This boat belongs to a friend; he’s safe here, he doesn’t need to go out. He just has to cook for the few visitors that come, hardly any do. Provisions are delivered to him. The only danger is that the boat is so old it might sink.”

“Seriously?”

Musa smiled.

“No. It’s quite safe.”

The house with “hardly anybody” in it took its place at the dinner table, a third guest, with the ravenous appetite of a slave.

“Almost all the maet in Kashmir have been killed. They were the first to be killed, because they don’t know how to obey orders. Maybe that’s why we need them. To teach us how to be free.”

“Or how to be killed?”

“Here it’s the same thing. Only the dead are free.”

Musa looked at Tilo’s hand resting on the table. He knew it better than he knew his own. She still wore the silver ring he had given her, years ago, when he was someone else. There was still ink on her middle finger.

Gulrez, keenly aware that he was being spoken about, hovered around the table, refilling glasses and plates, with a mewling kitten in each pocket of his pheran. During a break in the conversation, he introduced them as Agha and Khanum. The streaky gray one was Agha. The black-and-white harlequin was Khanum.

“And Sultan?” Musa asked him with a smile. “How is he?”

As if on cue, Gulrez’s face clouded over. His reply was a long profanity in a mixture of Kashmiri and Urdu. Tilo understood only the last sentence: Arre uss bewakoof ko agar yahan mintree ke saath rehna nahi aata tha, to phir woh saala is duniya mein aaya hi kyuun tha?

If that fool didn’t know how to live here with the military, why did he have to come into this world in the first place?

It was no doubt something Gulrez had heard a worried parent or neighbor say about him, and had filed away to use as a complaint against Sultan, whoever Sultan was.

Musa laughed out loud, grabbed Gulrez and kissed him on his head. Gul smiled. A happy imp.

“Who’s Sultan?” Tilo asked Musa.

“I’ll tell you later.”

After dinner they went out on to the porch to smoke and listen to the news on the transistor.

Three militants had been killed. Despite the curfew in Baramulla there had been major protests.

It was a no-moon night, pitch-dark, the water black as an oil slick.

The hotels on the boulevard that ran along the lakeshore had been turned into barracks, wrapped in razor wire, sandbagged and boarded up. The dining rooms were soldiers’ dormitories, the receptions daytime lock-ups, the guest rooms interrogation centers. Thick, painstakingly embroidered crewelwork drapes and exquisite carpets muffled the screams of young men having their genitals prodded with electrodes and petrol poured into their anuses.

“D’you know who’s here these days?” Musa said. “Garson Hobart. Have you been in touch with him at all?”

“Not for some years.”

“He’s Deputy Station Head, IB. It’s a pretty important post.”

“Good for him.”

There was no breeze. The lake was calm, the boat steady, the silence unsteady.

“Did you love her?”

“I did. I wanted to tell you that.”

“Why?”

Musa finished his cigarette and lit another.

“I don’t know. Something to do with honor. Yours, mine and hers.”

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was it an arranged marriage?”

“No.”

Sitting next to Tilo, breathing next to her, he felt like an empty house whose locked windows and doors were creaking open a little, to air the ghosts trapped inside it. When he spoke again he spoke into the night, addressing the mountains, entirely invisible now, except for the winking lights of army camps that were strung across the range, like meager decorations for some dreadful festival.

“I met her in the most horrible way…horrible yet beautiful…it could have only happened here. It was the spring of ’91, our year of chaos. We — everybody except Godzilla, I think — thought Azadi was around the corner, just a heartbeat away. Every day there were gun battles, explosions, encounter killings. Militants walked openly in the streets, flaunting their weapons…”

Musa trailed off, unsettled by the sound of his own voice. He wasn’t used to it. Tilo did nothing to help him out. A part of her shied away from the story that Musa had begun to tell her, and was grateful for the diversion into generalities.

“Anyway. That year — the year I met her — I had just got a job. It should have been a big deal, but it wasn’t, because in those days everything had shut down. Nothing worked…not courts, not colleges, not schools…there was a complete breakdown of normal life…how can I tell you how it was…how crazy…it was a free-for-all…there was looting, kidnapping, murder…mass cheating in school exams. That was the funniest thing. Suddenly, in the middle of war, everyone wanted to be a Matric Pass because it would help them to get cheap loans from the government…I actually know a family in which three generations, the grandfather, father and son, all sat for the school final exam together. Imagine that. Farmers, laborers, fruit-sellers, all of them Class Two and Three pass, barely literate, sat for the exam, copied from the guidebook and passed with flying colors. They even copied that ‘Please Turn Over’ sign at the bottom of the page — the pointing finger — remember? It used to be at the bottom of our school textbooks? Even today, when we want to insult someone who’s being stupid, we say, ‘Are you a namtuk pass ?’ ”