Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Her top favorite was the Flyover Story — Anjum’s account of how she and her friends walked home late one night from Defense Colony in South Delhi all the way back to Turkman Gate. There were five or six of them, dressed up, looking stunning after a night of revelry at a wealthy Seth’s house in D-Block. After the party they decided to walk for a while and take in some fresh air. In those days there was such a thing as fresh air in the city, Anjum told Zainab. When they were halfway across the Defense Colony flyover — the city’s only flyover at the time — it began to rain. And what can anyone possibly do when it rains on a flyover?

“They have to keep walking,” Zainab would say, in a reasonable, adult tone.

“Exactly right. So we kept walking,” Anjum would say. “And then what happened?”

“Then you wanted to soo!”

“Then I wanted to soo!”

“But you couldn’t stop!”

“I couldn’t stop.”

“You had to keep walking!”

“I had to keep walking.”

“So we soo-ed in our ghagra!” Zainab would shout, because she was at the age when anything to do with shitting, pissing and farting was the high point, or perhaps the whole point, of all stories.

“That’s right, and it was the best feeling in the world,” Anjum would say, “being drenched in the rain on that big, empty flyover, walking under a huge advertisement of a wet woman drying herself with a Bombay Dyeing towel.”

“And the towel was as big as a carpet!”

“As big as a carpet, yes.”

“And then you asked that woman if you could borrow her towel to dry yourself.”

“And what did the woman say?”

“She said, Nahin! Nahin! Nahin! ”

“She said, Nahin! Nahin! Nahin! So we got drenched, and we kept walking…”

“With garam-garam (warm) soo running down your thanda-thanda (cold) legs!”

Inevitably at this point Zainab would fall asleep, smiling. Every hint of adversity and unhappiness was required to be excised from Anjum’s stories. She loved it when Anjum transformed herself into a young sex-siren who had led a shimmering life of music and dance, dressed in gorgeous clothes with varnished nails and a throng of admirers.

And so, in these ways, in order to please Zainab, Anjum began to rewrite a simpler, happier life for herself. The rewriting in turn began to make Anjum a simpler, happier person.

Edited out of the Flyover Story, for example, was the fact that the incident had happened in 1976, at the height of the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi that lasted twenty-one months. Her spoiled younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, was the head of the Youth Congress (the youth wing of the ruling party), and was more or less running the country, treating it as though it was his personal plaything. Civil Rights had been suspended, newspapers were censored and, in the name of population control, thousands of men (mostly Muslim) were herded into camps and forcibly sterilized. A new law — the Maintenance of Internal Security Act — allowed the government to arrest anybody on a whim. The prisons were full, and a small coterie of Sanjay Gandhi’s acolytes had been unleashed on the general population to carry out his fiat.

On the night of the Flyover Story, the gathering — a wedding party — that Anjum and her colleagues had descended on was broken up by the police. The host and three of his guests were arrested and driven away in police vans. Nobody knew why. Arif, the driver of the van that brought Anjum & Co. to the venue, tried to bundle his passengers into his van and make a getaway. For this impertinence he had the knuckles of his left hand and his right kneecap smashed. His passengers were dragged out of the Matador, kicked on their backsides as though they were circus clowns and instructed to scram, to run all the way home if they did not want to be arrested for prostitution and obscenity. They ran in blind terror, like ghouls, through the darkness and the driving rain, their make-up running a lot faster than their legs could, their drenched diaphanous clothes limiting their strides and impeding their speed. True, it was only a routine bit of humiliation for Hijras, nothing out of the ordinary, and nothing at all compared to the tribulations others endured during those horrible months.

It was nothing, but still, it was something.

Notwithstanding Anjum’s editing, the Flyover Story retained some elements of truth. For instance, it really did rain that night. And Anjum really did piss while she ran. There really was an advertisement for Bombay Dyeing towels on the Defense Colony flyover. And the woman in the advertisement really did flat out refuse to share her towel.

A YEAR BEFORE ZAINAB was old enough to go to school, Mummy began to prepare for the event. She visited her old home and, with her brother Saqib’s permission, brought Mulaqat Ali’s collection of books to the Khwabgah. She was often seen sitting cross-legged in front of an open book (not the Holy Quran), moving her mouth as her finger traced a line across the page, or rocking back and forth with her eyes closed, thinking about what she had just read, or perhaps dredging the swamp of her memory to retrieve something that she once knew.

When Zainab turned five, Anjum took her to Ustad Hameed to begin singing lessons. It was clear from the start that music was not her calling. She fidgeted unhappily through her classes, hitting false notes so unerringly that it was almost a skill in itself. Patient, kind-hearted Ustad Hameed would shake his head as though a fly was bothering him and fill his cheeks with lukewarm tea while he held down the keys of the harmonium, which meant that he wanted his pupil to try once more. On that rare occasion when Zainab managed to arrive somewhere in the vicinity of the note, he would nod happily and say, “That’s my boy!”—a phrase he had picked up from The Tom and Jerry Show on Cartoon Network, which he loved and watched with his grandchildren (who were studying in an English Medium school). It was his highest form of praise, regardless of the gender of his student. He bestowed it on Zainab not because she deserved it, but out of regard for Anjum and his memory of how beautifully she (or he — when she was Aftab) used to sing. Anjum sat through all the classes. Her high, hole-in-the-head insect hum reappeared, this time as a discreet usher endeavoring to discipline Zainab’s wayward voice and keep it true. It was useless. The Bandicoot couldn’t sing.

Zainab’s real passion, it turned out, was animals. She was a terror on the streets of the old city. She wanted to free all the half-bald, half-dead white chickens that were pressed into filthy cages and stacked on top of each other outside the butcher shops, to converse with every cat that flashed across her path and to take home every litter of stray puppies she found wallowing in the blood and offal flowing through the open drains. She would not listen when she was told that dogs were unclean— najis— for Muslims and should not be touched. She did not shrink from the large, bristly rats that hurried along the street she had to walk down every day; she could not seem to get used to the sight of the bundles of yellow chicken claws, sawed-off goats’ trotters, the pyramids of goats’ heads with their staring, blind, blue eyes and the pearly white goats’ brains that shivered like jelly in big steel bowls.

In addition to her pet goat, who, thanks to Zainab, had survived a record three Bakr-Eids unslaughtered, Anjum got her a handsome rooster who responded to his new mistress’s welcoming embrace with a vicious peck. Zainab wept loudly, more from heartbreak than pain. The peck chastened her, but her affection for the bird remained undiminished. Whenever Rooster Love came upon her she would wrap her arms around Anjum’s legs and deliver a few smacking kisses to Mummy’s knees, turning her head to look longingly and lovingly at the rooster between kisses so that the object of her affection and the party receiving the kisses were not in any doubt about what was going on and who the kisses were really meant for. In some ways, Anjum’s addle-headedness towards Zainab was proportionately reflected in Zainab’s addle-headedness towards animals. None of her tenderness towards living creatures, however, got in the way of her voracious meat eating. At least twice a year Anjum took her to the zoo inside Purana Qila, the Old Fort, to visit the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and her favorite character, the baby gibbon from Borneo.