Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“What are they shouting? It’s in Gujarati?” she asked Saddam.

“Your Mother! You look after her!” Saddam whispered.

“ Ai hai! What will they do to these boys now?”

“What can they do, the poor fuckers? They can’t clean their own shit. They can’t bury their own mothers. I don’t know what they’ll do. But it’s their problem, not ours.”

“So now?” Anjum said. “You’ve deleted the video…that means that you’ve given up the idea of killing that bastard cop?” She sounded disappointed. Disapproving, almost.

“Now I don’t need to kill him. You saw the video — my people have risen up! They are fighting! What is one Sehrawat for us now? Nothing!”

“Do you make all your life’s big decisions based on mobile phone videos?”

“That’s how it is these days, yaar . The world is only videos now. But see what they’ve done! It’s real. It’s not a movie. They’re not actors. Do you want to see it again?”

“ Arre , it’s not that easy, babu. They’ll beat up these boys, buy them off…that’s how they do it these days…and if they leave this work of theirs, how will they earn? What will they eat? Chalo , we’ll think about that later. Do you have a nice photograph of your father? We can hang it up in the TV room.”

Anjum was suggesting that a portrait of Saddam’s father be hung next to the portrait of Zakir Mian garlanded with crisp cash-birds that graced the TV room. It was her way of accepting Saddam as her son-in-law.

Saeeda was delighted, Zainab ecstatic. Preparations for the wedding began. Everybody, including Tilo Madam, was measured up for new clothes that Zainab would design. A month before the wedding Saddam announced that he was taking the family out for a special treat. A surprise. Imam Ziauddin was too frail to go and it was Ustad Hameed’s grandson’s birthday. Dr. Azad Bhartiya said the treat-destination Saddam had chosen was against his principles and in any case he couldn’t eat. So the party consisted of Anjum, Saeeda, Nimmo Gorakhpuri, Zainab, Tilo, Miss Jebeen the Second and Saddam himself. None of them could in their wildest dreams have predicted what he had in store for them.

Naresh Kumar, a friend of Saddam’s, was one of five chauffeurs employed by a billionaire industrialist who maintained a palatial home and a fleet of expensive cars even though he spent only three or four days a month in Delhi. Naresh Kumar arrived at the graveyard to pick up the pre-wedding party in his master’s leather-seated silver Mercedes-Benz. Zainab sat in front on Saddam’s lap and everybody else squashed in behind. Tilo could never have imagined enjoying a ride through the streets of Delhi in a Mercedes. But that, she discovered very quickly, was only due to her severely limited imagination. The passengers shrieked as the car picked up speed. Saddam would not tell them where he was taking them. As they drove through the vicinity of the old city, they looked out of the windows eagerly, hoping to be seen by friends and acquaintances. As they moved into South Delhi, the mismatch between the passengers and the vehicle they were in drew plenty of curious and sometimes angry looks. A little intimidated, they rolled the window-glasses up. They stopped at a traffic intersection at the end of a long, tree-lined avenue where a group of Hijras dressed up to the nines were begging — they were technically begging, but actually hammering on car windows demanding money. All the cars that had stopped at the lights had their windows rolled up. The people in them were doing all they could to avoid eye contact with the Hijras. When they caught sight of the silver Mercedes, all four Hijras converged on it, smelling wealth and, they hoped, a naive foreigner. They were surprised when the windows rolled down before they had even launched their strike, and Anjum, Saeeda and Nimmo Gorakhpuri smiled back at them, returning their wide-fingered Hijra clap. The encounter quickly turned into an exchange of gossip. Which Gharana did the four belong to? Who was their Ustad? And their Ustad’s Ustad? The four leaned through the Merc’s windows, their elbows resting on the ledges, their bottoms protruding provocatively into the traffic. When the light changed, the cars behind them hooted impatiently. They responded with a string of inventive obscenities. Saddam gave them one hundred rupees and his visiting card. He invited them to the wedding.

“You must come!”

They smiled and waved goodbye, sashaying their leisurely way through the annoyed traffic. As their car sped away, Saeeda said that because sexual-reassignment surgery was becoming cheaper, better, and more accessible to people, Hijras would soon disappear. “Nobody will need to go through what we’ve been through any more.”

“You mean no more Indo-Pak?” Nimmo Gorakhpuri said.

“It wasn’t all bad,” Anjum said. “I think it would be a shame if we became extinct.”

“It was all bad,” Nimmo Gorakhpuri said. “You’ve forgotten that quack Dr. Mukhtar? How much money did he make off you?”

The car floated like a steel bubble through streets wide and narrow, smooth and potholed, for more than two hours. They glided through dense forests of apartment buildings, past gigantic concrete amusement parks, bizarrely designed wedding halls and towering cement statues as high as skyscrapers, of Shiva in a cement leopard-skin loincloth with a cement cobra around his neck and a colossal Hanuman looming over a metro track. They drove over an impossible-to-pee-on flyover as wide as a wheat field, with twenty lanes of cars whizzing over it and towers of steel and glass growing on either side of it. But when they took an exit road off it, they saw that the world underneath the flyover was an entirely different one — an unpaved, unlaned, unlit, unregulated, wild and dangerous one, in which buses, trucks, bullocks, rickshaws, cycles, handcarts and pedestrians jostled for survival. One kind of world flew over another kind of world without troubling to stop and ask the time of day.

The steel bubble floated on, past shanty towns and industrial swamps where the air was a pale mauve haze, past railway tracks packed thick with trash and lined with slums. Finally they arrived at their destination. The Edge. Where the countryside was trying, quickly, clumsily and tragically, to turn itself into the city.

A mall.

The passengers in the Merc fell dead silent as it turned into the underground parking lot, lifted its bonnet and its boot like a girl lifting her skirts, for a quick bomb-check and then drifted down into a basement full of cars.

When they entered the bright shopping arcade, Saddam and Zainab looked happy and excited, completely at ease in the new surroundings. The others, including Ustaniji, looked as though they had stepped through a portal into another cosmos. The visit began with a hitch — a little trouble on the escalator. Anjum refused to get on. It took a good fifteen minutes of coaxing and encouragement. Finally, while Tilo carried Miss Jebeen the Second, Saddam stood next to Anjum on the step with his arm around her shoulders, and Zainab stood on the step above her, facing her, holding both her hands. Thus reinforced, Anjum went up wobbling and roaring Ai Hai! as though she was risking her life in a dangerous adventure sport. As they wandered around awestruck, trying to tell the difference between the shoppers and the mannequins in shop windows, Nimmo Gorakhpuri was the first to regain her composure. She looked approvingly at the young women in shorts and miniskirts, with huge shopping bags and sunglasses pushed up into their lush, blow-dried hair.

“See, this is what I wanted to look like when I was young. I had a real fashion sense. But nobody understood. I was too far ahead of our times.”