Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Tilo understood he was deliberately digressing, circling around a story that was as hard — harder — for him to tell as it was for her to hear.

“Are you the batch of ’91?” Musa’s soft laugh was full of affection for the foibles of his people.

She had always loved that about him, the way he belonged so completely to a people whom he loved and laughed at, complained about and swore at, but never separated himself from. Maybe she loved it because she herself didn’t — couldn’t — think of anybody as “her people.” Except perhaps the two dogs that arrived at 6 a.m. sharp in the little park outside her house where she fed them, and the hobos she drank tea with at the tea stall near the Nizamuddin dargah. But not even them, not really.

Long ago she had thought of Musa as “her people.” They had been a strange country together for a while, an island republic that had seceded from the rest of the world. Since the day they decided to go their own ways, she had had no “people.”

“We were fighting and dying in our thousands for Azadi, and at the same time we were trying to secure cheap loans from the very government we were fighting. We’re a valley of idiots and schizophrenics, and we are fighting for the freedom to be idiotic and—”

Musa stopped mid-chuckle, cocking his head. A patrol boat chugged past some distance away, the soldiers in it sweeping the surface of the water with beams of light from powerful torches. Once they had gone, he stood up. “Let’s go in, Babajaana. It’s getting cold.”

It slipped out so naturally, that old term of endearment. Babajaana . My love. She noticed. He didn’t. It wasn’t cold. But still, they went in.

Gulrez was asleep on the carpet in the dining room. Agha and Khanum were wide awake, playing on him as though his body were an amusement park constructed entirely for their pleasure. Agha hid in the crook of his knee, Khanum staged an ambush from the strategic heights of his hip.

Musa stood at the door of the carved, embroidered, patterned, filigreed bedroom and said, “May I come in?” and that hurt her.

“Slaves don’t necessarily have to be stupid, do they?” She sat on the edge of the bed and flipped backwards, her palms under her head, her feet remaining on the floor. Musa sat next to her and put his hand on her stomach. The tension slipped out of the room like an unwanted stranger. It was dark except for the light from the corridor.

“Can I play you a Kashmiri song?”

“No, thanks, man. I’m not a Kashmiri Nationalist.”

“You soon will be. In three or maybe four days’ time.”

“Why’s that?”

“You will be, because I know you. When you see what you see and hear what you hear, you won’t have a choice. Because you are you.”

“Is there going to be a convocation? I’ll get a degree?”

“Yes. And you’ll pass with flying colors. I know you.”

“You don’t really know me. I’m a patriot. I get goosebumps when I see the national flag. I get so emotional I can’t think straight. I love flags and soldiers and all that marching around stuff. What’s the song?”

“You’ll like it. I carried it through the curfew for you. It was written for us, for you and me. By a fellow called Las Kone, from my village. You’ll love it.”

“I’m pretty sure I won’t.”

“Come on. Give me a chance.”

Musa took out a CD from the pocket of his pheran and put it into the player. Within seconds of the opening chords of the guitar, Tilo’s eyes snapped open.

Trav’ling lady, stay awhile

until the night is over.

I’m just a station on your way,

I know I’m not your lover.

“Leonard Cohen.”

“Yes. Even he doesn’t know that he’s really a Kashmiri. Or that his real name is Las Kone…”

Well I lived with a child of snow

when I was a soldier,

and I fought every man for her

until the nights grew colder.

She used to wear her hair like you

except when she was sleeping,

and then she’d weave it on a loom

of smoke and gold and breathing.

And why are you so quiet now

standing there in the doorway?

You chose your journey long before

you came upon this highway.

“How did he know?”

“Las Kone knows everything.”

“Did she wear her hair like mine?”

“She was a civilized person, Babajaana. Not a mout .”

Tilo kissed Musa, and while she held him to her and would not let him go she said, “Get away from me, you filthy mountain man.”

“Overwashed river woman.”

“How long since you bathed?”

“Nine months.”

“No, seriously.”

“A week maybe? I don’t know.”

“Filthy bastard.”

Musa’s shower lasted an inordinately long time. She could hear him humming along with Las Kone. He came out bare-bodied, with a towel around his hips, smelling of her soap and shampoo. It made her chortle.

“You’re smelling like a summer rose.”

“I’m feeling really guilty,” Musa said, smiling.

“Right. You really look it.”

“After weeks of generous hospitality to lices and leeches I’ve turned them out of the house.”

“Lices” made her love him a little more.

They had always fitted together like pieces of an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) puzzle — the smoke of her into the solidness of him, the solitariness of her into the gathering of him, the strangeness of her into the straightforwardness of him, the insouciance of her into the restraint of him. The quietness of her into the quietness of him.

And then of course there were the other parts — the ones that wouldn’t fit.

What happened that night on the HB Shaheen was less lovemaking than lament. Their wounds were too old and too new, too different, and perhaps too deep, for healing. But for a fleeting moment, they were able to pool them like accumulated gambling debts and share the pain equally, without naming the injuries or asking which was whose. For a fleeting moment they were able to repudiate the world they lived in and call forth another one, just as real. A world in which maet gave the orders and soldiers needed eardrops so they could hear them clearly and carry them out correctly.

Tilo knew there was a gun underneath the bed. She made no comment about it. Not even afterwards, when Musa’s calluses had been counted. And kissed. She lay stretched out on top of him, as though he were a mattress, her chin resting on her intertwined fingers, her distinctly un-Kashmiri bottom vulnerable to the Srinagar night. In a way Musa’s journey to where he was now did not entirely surprise her. She clearly remembered a day years ago, in 1984 (who could forget 1984), when the newspapers reported that a Kashmiri called Maqbool Butt, jailed for murder and treason, had been hanged in Tihar Jail in Delhi, his remains interred in the prison yard, for fear his grave would become a monument, a rallying point in Kashmir, where trouble had already begun to simmer. The news had not mattered to even one other person in their college, neither student nor professor. But that night Musa had said to her, quietly, matter-of-factly, “Some day you’ll understand why, for me, history began today.” Though she had not fully comprehended the import of his words at the time, the intensity with which they had been uttered had remained with her.

“How’s the Queen Mother in Kerala keeping?” Musa inquired into the bird’s nest that passed off as his lover’s hair.

“Don’t know. Haven’t visited.”