Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

It was possible for Tilo and Musa to have this strange conversation about a third loved one, because they were concurrently sweethearts and ex-sweethearts, lovers and ex-lovers, siblings and ex-siblings, classmates and ex-classmates. Because they trusted each other so peculiarly that they knew, even if they were hurt by it, that whoever it was that the other person loved had to be worth loving. In matters of the heart, they had a virtual forest of safety nets.

Musa showed Tilo a photograph of Miss Jebeen and Arifa that he carried in his wallet. Arifa wore a pearl-gray pheran with silver embroidery and a white hijab. Miss Jebeen was holding her mother’s hand. She was dressed in a denim jumpsuit with an embroidered heart on its pinafore. A white hijab was pinned around her smiling, apple-cheeked face. Tilo looked at the photograph for a long time before she gave it back. She saw Musa suddenly look drawn and haggard. But he recovered his poise in a while. He told her about how Arifa and Miss Jebeen had died. About Amrik Singh and the murder of Jalib Qadri, and the string of murders that followed. About his ominous apology at the Shiraz.

“I’ll never take what happened to my family personally. But I’ll never not take it personally. Because that is important too.”

They talked into the night. Hours later, Tilo circled back to the photograph.

“Did she like wearing a headscarf?”

“Arifa?”

“No, your daughter.”

Musa shrugged. “It’s the custom. Our custom.”

“I didn’t know you were such a customs man. So if I had agreed to marry you, you’d have wanted me to wear one?”

“No, Babajaana. If you had agreed to marry me, I’d have ended up wearing a hijab and you would have been running around the underground with a gun.”

Tilo laughed out loud.

“And who would have been in my army?”

“I don’t know. No humans for sure.”

“A moth squadron and a mongoose brigade…”

Tilo told Musa about her boring job and her exciting life in her storeroom near the Nizamuddin dargah. About the rooster she had drawn on her wall—“So weird. Maybe Sultan visited me telepathically — is that a word?” (It was the pre-mobile-phone era, so she didn’t have a photograph to show him.) She described her neighbor, the fake sex-hakim with waxed mustaches who had endless queues of patients outside his door, and her friends, the tramps and mendicants she drank tea with on the street every morning, who all believed she worked for a drug lord.

“I laugh, but I don’t deny it. I leave it ambiguous.”

“Why’s that? That’s dangerous.”

“No. Opposite. It’s free security for me. They think I have gangster protection. No one bothers me. Let’s read a poem before we sleep.” It was an old habit, from their college days. One of them would open the book at a random page. The other would read the poem. It often turned out to have uncanny significance for them and the particular moment they were living through. Poetry roulette. She scrambled out of bed and returned with a slim, worn volume of Osip Mandelstam. Musa opened the book. Tilo read:

I was washing at night in the courtyard,

Harsh stars shone in the sky.

Starlight, like salt on an ax-head—

The rain-butt was brim-full and frozen.

“What’s a rain-butt? Don’t know…must check.”

The gates are locked,

And the earth in all conscience is bleak.

There’s scarcely anything more basic and pure

Than truth’s clean canvas.

A star melts, like salt, in the barrel

And the freezing water is blacker,

Death cleaner, misfortune saltier,

And the earth more truthful, more awful.

“Another Kashmiri poet.”

“Russian Kashmiri,” Tilo said. “He died in a prison camp, during Stalin’s Gulag. His ode to Stalin wasn’t considered sincere enough.”

She regretted reading the poem.

They slept fitfully. Before dawn, still half asleep, Tilo heard Musa splashing in the bathroom again, washing, brushing his teeth (with her toothbrush of course). He came out with his hair slicked down and put on his cap and pheran. She watched him say his prayers. She had never seen him do that before. She sat up in bed. It did not distract him. When he was done he came to her and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Does it worry you?”

“Should it?”

“It’s a big change…”

“Yes. No. Just makes me…think.”

“We can’t win this with just our bodies. We have to recruit our souls too.”

She lit two more cigarettes.

“You know what the hardest thing for us is? The hardest thing to fight? Pity. It’s so easy for us to pity ourselves…such terrible things have happened to our people…in every single household something terrible has happened…but self-pity is so…so debilitating. So humiliating. More than Azadi, now it’s a fight for dignity. And the only way we can hold on to our dignity is to fight back. Even if we lose. Even if we die. But for that we as a people — as an ordinary people — have to become a fighting force…an army. To do that we have to simplify ourselves, standardize ourselves, reduce ourselves…everyone has to think the same way, want the same thing…we have to do away with our complexities, our differences, our absurdities, our nuances…we have to make ourselves as single-minded…as monolithic…as stupid…as the army we face. But they’re professionals, and we are just people. This is the worst part of the Occupation…what it makes us do to ourselves. This reduction, this standardization, this stupidification …Is that a word?”

“It just became one.”

“This stupidification…this idiotification…if and when we achieve it…will be our salvation. It will make us impossible to defeat. First it will be our salvation and then…after we win…it will be our nemesis. First Azadi. Then annihilation. That’s the pattern.”

Tilo said nothing.

“Are you listening?”

“Of course.”

“I’m being so profound and you’re not saying anything.”

She looked up at him and pressed her thumb into the tiny inverted “v” between his chipped front teeth. He held her hand and kissed her silver ring.

“It makes me happy that you still wear it.”

“It’s stuck. I can’t take it off even if I want to.”

Musa smiled. They smoked in silence and when they were done she took the ashtray to the window, dropped the stubs into the water to join the other floating stubs and looked up at the sky before she returned to bed.

“That was a filthy thing I just did. Sorry.”

Musa kissed her forehead and stood up.

“You’re leaving?”

“Yes. A boat’s coming for me. With a cargo of spinach and melons and carrots and lotus stems. I’ll be a Haenz…selling my produce in the floating market. I’ll undercut the competition, bargain ruthlessly with housewives. And through the chaos I’ll make my exit.”

“When will I see you?”

“Someone will come for you — a woman called Khadija. Trust her. Go with her. You’ll be traveling. I want you to see everything, know everything. You’ll be safe.”

“When will I see you?”

“Sooner than you think. I’ll find you. Khuda Hafiz, Babajaana.”

And he was gone.

In the morning Gulrez gave her a Kashmiri breakfast. Chewy lavasa rotis with butter and honey. Kahwa with no sugar, but with shredded almonds that she had to scoop up from the bottom of her cup. Agha and Khanum displayed deplorable manners, skittering up and down the dining table, knocking around the cutlery, spilling the salt. At ten sharp, Khadija arrived with her two young sons. They crossed the lake in a shikara and drove downtown in a red Maruti 800.