Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

She missed her hair. She would never grow it long again. In memory of Gul-kak.

At about ten o’clock that morning there was a quiet, barely audible knock on her door. She thought it would be Naga, but it was Khadija. They hardly knew each other, but there was nobody in the world (other than Musa) that Tilo would have been happier to see. Khadija explained quickly how she had found Tilo: “We have our people too.” In this case they included the pilot of one of the boats on the cordon-and-search team and people on neighboring houseboats and all along the way, who had relayed information, almost in real time. In the Shiraz Cinema, there was Mohammed Subhan Hajam the barber. And in Ahdoos there was a bellboy.

Khadija had news. The army had announced the capture and killing of the dreaded militant Commander Gulrez. Musa was still in Srinagar. He would be at the funeral. Militants from several groups would attend to give Commander Gulrez a farewell gun salute. It was safe for them to move around because there would be tens of thousands of people out on the streets. The army would have to pull back to avoid an all-out massacre. Tilo was to go with her to a safe house in Khanqah-e-Moula where Musa would meet her after the funeral. He said it was important. Khadija had brought Tilo a set of fresh clothes — a salwar kameez, a pheran and a lime-green hijab. Her matter-of-factness jolted Tilo out of the little swamp of self-pity she had allowed herself to sink into. It reminded her that she was among a people for whom her ordeal of the previous night was known as normal life.

The hot water came. Tilo bathed and put on her new clothes. Khadija showed her how to pin the hijab around her face. It made her look regal, like an Ethiopian queen. She liked it, although she much preferred the look of her own hair. Ex-hair. Tilo slipped a note under Naga’s door saying she would be back by evening. The two women stepped out of the hotel and into the streets of the city that came alive only when it had to bury its dead.

The City of Funerals was suddenly awake, animated, kinetic. All around was motion. The streets were tributaries; small rivers of people, all flowing towards the estuary — the Mazar-e-Shohadda. Little contingents, large contingents, people from the old city, the new city, from villages and from other cities were converging quickly. Even in the narrowest by-lanes, groups of women and men and even the smallest children chanted Azadi! Azadi! Along the way young men had set up water points and community kitchens to feed those who had come from far away. As they distributed water, as they filled the plates, as people ate and drank, as they breathed and walked, to a drumbeat that only they could hear, they shouted: Azadi! Azadi!

Khadija seemed to have a detailed map of the back streets of her city in her head. This impressed Tilo enormously (because she herself had no such skills). They took a long, circuitous route. The chants of Azadi! became a reverberating boom that sounded like the coming of a storm. (Garson Hobart, holed up in Dachigam with the Governor’s entourage, unable to return to the city until the streets had been secured, heard it on the phone held out to the street by his secretary.) Nine months after Miss Jebeen’s funeral, here was another one. This time there were nineteen coffins. One of them empty, for the boy whose body the Ikhwanis had stolen. Another one full of the shredded remains of a little man with emerald eyes who was on his way to join Sultan, his beloved bewakoof , in heaven.

“I would like to attend the funeral,” Tilo said to Khadija.

“We could. But it will be a risk. We may get late. And we won’t get anywhere close. Women are not allowed near the grave. We can visit it afterwards, once everyone has left.”

Women are not allowed. Women are not allowed. Women are not allowed.

Was it to protect the grave from the women or the women from the grave?

Tilo didn’t ask.

After forty-five minutes of driving around, Khadija parked her car and they walked quickly through a maze of narrow, winding streets in a part of town that seemed to be interconnected in several ways — underground and overground, vertically and diagonally, via streets and rooftops and secret passages — like a single organism. A giant coral, or an anthill.

“This part of town is still ours,” Khadija said. “The army can’t come in here.”

They stepped through a small wooden doorway into a bare, green-carpeted room. An unsmiling young man greeted them and ushered them in. He walked them quickly through two rooms and as they entered the third, he opened what looked like a large cupboard. There was a trapdoor through which steep, narrow steps led into a secret basement. Tilo followed Khadija down the steps. The room had no furniture, but there were a couple of mattresses on the floor and some cushions. There was a calendar on the wall, but it was two years old. Her backpack was propped up in a corner. Someone had risked salvaging it from the HB Shaheen . A young girl came down the steps and rolled out a plastic lace dastarkhan . An older woman followed with a tray of tea and teacups, a plate of rusks and a plate of sliced sponge cake. She took Tilo’s face in her hands and kissed her forehead. Not much was said, but both mother and daughter stayed in the room.

When Tilo finished her tea, Khadija patted the mattress they were sitting on.

“Sleep. He will take at least two or three hours to get here.”

Tilo lay down and Khadija covered her with a quilt. She reached out and held Khadija’s hand under the quilt. In the years that followed, they would become fast friends. Tilo’s eyes closed. The murmur of women’s voices saying things she couldn’t understand was like balm on raw skin.

She was still asleep when Musa came. He sat cross-legged next to her, looking down at her sleeping face for a long time, wishing he could wake her up to another, better world. He knew it would be a long time before he saw her again. And then only if they were lucky.

There wasn’t much time. He had to leave while the tide was high and the streets still belonged to the people. He woke her as gently as he could.

“Babajaana. Wake up.”

She opened her eyes and pulled him down next to her. For a long time there was nothing to say. Absolutely nothing.

“I’ve just come from my own funeral. I gave myself a twenty-one-gun salute,” Musa said.

And then in a voice that would not rise above a whisper because each time it did it broke under the weight of what it was trying to say, Tilo told him what had happened. She forgot nothing. Not a single thing. Not a sound. Not a feeling. Not a word that had or had not been said.

Musa kissed her head.

“They don’t know what they’ve done. They really have no idea.”

And then it was time for him to leave.

“Babajaana, listen carefully. When you go back to Delhi you must not on any account stay alone. It’s too dangerous. Stay with friends…maybe Naga. You’ll hate me for saying this — but either get married or go to your mother. You need cover. For a while at least. Until we deal with Otter. We’ll win this war, and then we’ll be together, you and I. I’ll wear a hijab — although you look lovely in this one — and you can take up arms. OK?”

“OK.”

Of course it didn’t work out that way.

Before Musa left he gave Tilo a sealed envelope.

“Don’t open it now. Khuda Hafiz.”

It would be two years before she saw him again.

The sun had not yet set when Khadija and Tilo went to the Mazar-e-Shohadda. Commander Gulrez’s grave stood out from the others. A small bamboo framework had been erected over it. It was decorated with strings of silver and gold tinsel and a green flag. A temporary shrine to a beloved freedom fighter who had given his todays for his people’s tomorrows. A man with tears streaming down his face looked at it from a distance.