Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

After an hour’s window-shopping and absolutely no buying, they ate lunch in an outlet called Nando’s. Mainly, huge helpings of deep-fried chicken. Zainab was assigned to supervise Nimmo Gorakhpuri, and Saddam took care of Anjum, because neither of them had been to a restaurant before. Anjum stared in frank amazement at the family of four at the next table — an older couple and a younger one. The women, clearly mother and daughter, were both dressed alike in sleeveless printed tops and trousers, their faces caked with make-up. The young man, presumably the girl’s fiancé, had his elbows on the table and frequently gazed down admiringly at his own (huge) biceps that bulged out of his blue, short-sleeved T-shirt. Only the older man did not appear to be enjoying himself. He peered furtively out from around the imaginary pillar he was hiding behind. Every few minutes the family suspended all conversation, immobilized their smiles and took selfies — with the menu, with the waiter, with the food and with each other. After each selfie they passed their phones around for the others to see. They did not pay any attention to anyone else in the restaurant.

Anjum was far more interested in them than in the food on her plate, which she had not been in the least impressed by. After he paid the bill, Saddam looked around the table with a sense of ceremony:

“You all must be wondering why I brought you all the way here.”

“To show us the Duniya?” Anjum said, as though it were a quiz question on a TV show.

“No. To introduce all of you to my father. This is where he died. Right here. Where this building now stands. Before it came up there were villages here, surrounded by wheat fields. There was a police station…a road…”

Saddam then told them the story of what happened to his father. He told them about his vow to kill Sehrawat, the Station House Officer of the Dulina police station, and why he had given up the idea. They all took turns to pass his mobile phone around the table and watch the video of the dead cows being flung into the District Collector’s bungalow.

“My father’s spirit must be wandering here, trapped inside this place.”

Everybody tried to imagine him — a village skinner, lost in the bright lights, trying to find his way out of the mall.

“This is his mazar,” Anjum said.

“Hindus aren’t buried. They don’t have mazars, badi Mummy,” Zainab said.

Maybe it’s the whole world’s mazar , Tilo thought, but didn’t say. Maybe the mannequin-shoppers are ghosts trying to buy what no longer exists.

“It isn’t right,” Anjum said. “The matter can’t be left like this. Your father should have a proper funeral.”

“He did have a proper funeral,” Saddam said. “He was cremated in our village. I lit his funeral pyre.”

Anjum was not convinced. She wanted to do something more for Saddam’s father, to lay his spirit to rest. After a great deal of discussion, they decided they would buy a shirt in his name from one of the shops (like people bought chadars in dargahs) and bury it in the old graveyard so that Saddam and Zainab’s children would feel the presence of their grandfather around them as they grew up.

“I know a Hindu prayer!” Zainab said suddenly. “Shall I recite it here in memory of Abbajaan?”

Everybody leaned in to listen. And then, sitting at a table in a fast-food restaurant, as a missive of love to her late as well as future father-in-law, Zainab recited the Gayatri Mantra that Anjum had taught her when she was a little girl (because she believed it would help her in a mob-situation).

ON THE MORNING of Saddam Hussain’s father’s second funeral, Tilo put something else on the table. Literally. She brought out the little pot that contained her mother’s ashes and said she would like her mother to be buried in the old graveyard too. It was decided that there would be a double funeral that day. If the cremation in the electric crematorium in Cochin counted, it would be Maryam Ipe’s second funeral too. Saddam Hussain dug the graves. A stylish, Madras-checked shirt was interred in one. A pot of ashes in the other. Imam Ziauddin demurred a little at the unorthodoxy of the proceedings, but eventually agreed to say the prayers. Anjum asked Tilo if she wanted to say a Christian prayer for her mother. Tilo explained that the church had refused to bury her mother, so any prayers would do. As she stood beside her mother’s grave, a line that Maryam Ipe had repeated more than once during her hallucinations in the ICU came back to her.

I feel I am surrounded by eunuchs. Am I?

At the time it had seemed like nothing more than a part of her regular barrage of ICU insults. But now it gave Tilo a shiver. How did she know? Once the pot of ashes had been buried and the grave filled with earth, Tilo closed her eyes and recited her mother’s favorite passage from Shakespeare to herself. And at that moment the world, already a strange place, became an even stranger one:

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remember’d—

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition;

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

She had never understood why her mother had so particularly loved this manly, soldierly, warlike passage. But she had. When Tilo opened her eyes, she was shocked to realize that she was weeping.

Zainab and Saddam were married a month later. There was an eclectic gathering of guests — Hijras from all over Delhi (including the new friends they had made at the traffic lights), Zainab’s friends, most of them students of fashion design, some of Ustaniji’s students and their parents, Zakir Mian’s family, and several of Saddam Hussain’s old comrades from his varied career — sweepers, mortuary workers, municipal truck drivers, security guards. Dr. Azad Bhartiya, D. D. Gupta and Roshan Lal were there of course. Anwar Bhai and his women and his son who had outgrown his mauve Crocs came from GB Road, and Ishrat-the-Beautiful — who had played a stellar role in the rescue of Miss Jebeen the Second — came from Indore. Tilo’s and Dr. Azad Bhartiya’s little cobbler friend, who had outlined his father’s lung tumor in the dirt, dropped in briefly. Old Dr. Bhagat came too — still dressed in white, still wearing his watch on a sweatband. Dr. Mukhtar the quack was not invited. Miss Jebeen the Second was dressed as a little queen. She wore a tiara and a frothy dress and shoes that squeaked. Of all the presents the young couple were showered with, their favorite was the goat that Nimmo Gorakhpuri gave them. She had had it specially imported from Iran.

Ustad Hameed and his students sang.

Everybody danced.

Afterwards Anjum took Saddam and Zainab to Hazrat Sarmad. Tilo, Saeeda and Miss Jebeen the Second went too. They made their way past the sellers of ittars and amulets, the custodians of pilgrims’ shoes, the cripples, the beggars, and the goats being fattened for Eid.