Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“He’s an ex-militant,” Khadija said, under her breath. “He was in jail for years. Poor man, he’s crying for the wrong person.”

“Maybe not,” Tilo said. “The whole world should weep for Gul-kak.”

They scattered rose petals on Gul-kak’s grave and lit a candle. Khadija found the graves of Arifa and Miss Jebeen the First, and did the same for them. She read the inscription on Miss Jebeen’s tombstone out to Tilo:

MISS JEBEEN

2 January 1992–22 December 1995

Beloved d/o Arifa and Musa Yeswi

And the almost-hidden one below it:

Akh daleela wann

Yeth manz ne kahn balai aasi

Na aes soh kunni junglas manz roazaan

Khadija translated it for Tilo, but neither of them understood what it really meant.

The last lines of the Mandelstam poem she had read with Musa (and wished she hadn’t) floated back unbidden into Tilo’s brain.

Death cleaner, misfortune saltier,

And the earth more truthful, more awful.

They returned to Ahdoos. Khadija would not leave until she saw Tilo back to her room. When Khadija had gone, Tilo called Naga to say she was back and that she was going to bed. For no reason she knew, she said a small prayer (to no god she knew) before opening the envelope Musa had given her.

It contained a doctor’s prescription for eardrops and a photograph of Gul-kak. He was in a khaki shirt, combat fatigues and Musa’s Asal boot , smiling into the camera. He had a handsome leather ammunition belt slung across both his shoulders, and a pistol holster at his hip. He was armed to the teeth. In each leather bullet loop there was a green chili. Sheathed in his pistol holster was a juicy, fresh-leaved, white radish.

On the back of the photograph Musa had written: Our darling Commander Gulrez.

In the middle of the night Tilo knocked on Naga’s door. He opened it and put his arm around her. They spent the night together on a purely secular basis.

TILO HAD BEEN CARELESS.

She returned from the Valley of death carrying a little life.

She and Naga had been married for two months when she discovered that she was pregnant. Their marriage had not been what was called “consummated” yet. So there was no doubt in her mind about who the father of the child was. She considered going through with it. Why not? Gulrez if it was a boy. Jebeen if it was a girl. She couldn’t see herself as a mother any more than she could see herself as a bride — although she had been a bride. She had done that and survived. So why not this?

The decision she eventually took had nothing to do with her feelings for Naga or her love for Musa. It came from a more primal place. She worried that the little human she produced would have to negotiate the same ocean full of strange and dangerous fish that she had had to in her relationship with her mother. She did not trust that she would be a better parent than Maryam Ipe. Her clear-eyed assessment of herself was that she’d be a far worse one. She did not wish to inflict herself on a child. And she did not wish to inflict a replication of herself on the world.

Money was a problem. She had a little, but not much. She had been fired from her job for poor attendance, and hadn’t got another one. She didn’t want to ask Naga for any. So she went to a government hospital.

The waiting room was full of distraught women who had been thrown out of their homes by their husbands for not being able to conceive. They were there to have fertility tests. When the women found out that Tilo was there for what was called MTP — Medical Termination of Pregnancy — they could not hide their hostility and disgust. The doctors too were disapproving. She listened to their lectures impassively. When she made it clear that she would not change her mind, they said they could not give her general anesthetic unless there was somebody with her to sign the consent form, preferably the father of the child. She told them to do it without anesthetic. She passed out with the pain and woke in the general ward. Someone else was with her in the bed. A child, with a kidney disorder, screaming in pain. There was more than one patient in every bed. There were patients on the floor, most of the visitors and family members who were crowded around them looked just as ill. Harried doctors and nurses picked their way through the chaos. It was like a wartime ward. Except that in Delhi there was no war other than the usual one — the war of the rich against the poor.

Tilo got up and stumbled out of the ward. She lost her way in the filthy hospital corridors that were packed with sick and dying people. On the ground floor she asked a small man with biceps that seemed to belong to someone else whether he could show her the way out. The exit he pointed to led her to the back of the hospital. To the mortuary, and beyond it, to a derelict Muslim graveyard that seemed to have fallen into disuse.

Flying foxes hung from the branches of huge, old trees, like limp black flags from an old protest. There was nobody around. Tilo sat on a broken grave, trying to orient herself.

A thin, bald man in a scarlet waiter’s coat clanked in on an old bicycle. He had a small bunch of marigolds clamped to the back seat of his cycle. He made his way to one of the graves with the flowers and a duster. After dusting it, he placed the flowers on it, stood in silence for a moment and then hurried away.

Tilo walked over to the grave. It was the only one, as far as she could tell, whose tombstone was inscribed in English. It was the grave of Begum Renata Mumtaz Madam, the belly dancer from Romania who had died of a broken heart.

The man was Roshan Lal on his day off from Rosebud Rest-O-Bar. Tilo would meet him seventeen years later, when she returned to the graveyard with Miss Jebeen the Second. Of course she wouldn’t recognize him. Nor would she recognize the graveyard, because by then, it was no longer a derelict place for the forgotten dead.

Once Roshan Lal left, Tilo lay down on Begum Renata Mumtaz Madam’s grave. She cried a little and then fell asleep. When she woke she felt better prepared to go home and face the rest of her life.

That included dinner downstairs, at least once a week, with Ambassador Shivashankar and his wife, whose views on almost everything, including Kashmir, made Tilo’s hands shake and the cutlery rattle on her plate.

The stupidification of the mainland was picking up speed at an unprecedented rate, and it didn’t even need a military occupation.

Word spread quickly in the poorer quarters that a clever woman had moved into the graveyard. Parents in the neighborhood flocked to enroll their children in the classes Tilo held at Jannat Guest House. Her pupils called her Tilo Madam and sometimes Ustaniji (Teacher, in Urdu). Although she missed the morning singing by the children from the school opposite her apartment, she didn’t teach her own pupils to sing “We Shall Overcome” in any language, because she wasn’t sure that Overcoming was anywhere on anyone’s horizon. But she taught them arithmetic, drawing, computer graphics (on three second-hand desktop computers she had bought with the minimal fees she charged), a bit of basic science, English and eccentricity. From them she learned Urdu and something of the art of happiness. She worked a long day and, for the first time in her life, slept a full night. (Miss Jebeen the Second slept with Anjum.) With each passing day Tilo’s mind felt less like one of Musa’s “recoveries.” Despite making plans every other day to do so, she had not visited her apartment since she left. Not even after receiving the message Garson Hobart had sent through Anjum and Saddam when they went (out of curiosity to see where and how the strange woman who had parachuted into their lives lived) to pick up some of her things. She continued to pay her rent into his account, which she thought was only fair until she moved her things out. When a few months had gone by with no news from Musa, she left a message with the fruit-seller who brought her his “recoveries.” But she still hadn’t heard from him. And yet, the burden of perpetual apprehension that she had carried around for years — of suddenly receiving news of Musa’s death — had lightened somewhat. Not because she loved him any less, but because the battered angels in the graveyard that kept watch over their battered charges held open the doors between worlds (illegally, just a crack), so that the souls of the present and the departed could mingle, like guests at the same party. It made life less determinate and death less conclusive. Somehow everything became a little easier to bear.