Arundhati Roy: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

We circled around the subject of Kashmir, but only in abstract ways.

“You may be right after all,” I said to him in the kitchen. “You may be right, but you’ll never win.”

“I think the opposite,” he smiled, stirring the pot from which a wonderful aroma of rogan josh arose. “We may turn out to be wrong, but we have already won.”

I left it at that. I don’t think he was aware of the extent to which the Government of India would go to hold on to that little patch of land. It could turn into a bloodbath that would make the 1990s look like a school play. On the other hand, maybe I had no idea how suicidal Kashmiris were prepared to be — to become. Either way, the stakes were higher than they had ever been. Or maybe we had different notions about what “winning” means.

The meal was delectable. Musa was a relaxed, accomplished cook. He asked about Naga. “I haven’t seen him on TV of late. Is he OK?”

Oddly, the only person I have been seeing occasionally in my new life as a recluse is Naga. He has resigned from his paper and seems happier than I remember him ever being. Maybe, ironically, we’re both liberated by Tilo’s conclusive and categorical disappearance from our lives and the world we know. I told Musa that Naga and I were planning — it was still nothing more than a plan — to start a sort of yesteryear music channel, on the radio or maybe a podcast. Naga would do the Western music, rock ’n’ roll, blues, jazz, and I’d do world music. I have an interesting, and I believe excellent, collection of Afghan, Iranian and Syrian folk music. After I said it, I felt shallow and superficial. But Musa seemed genuinely interested and we had a nice little chat about music.

The next morning he organized a small Tempo from the market and two men loaded it up with the cartons and the rest of Tilo’s things. He seemed to know where she was, but didn’t say, so I didn’t ask. There was one question, though, that I did need to ask him before he left, something I desperately needed to know before another thirty years went by. It would have troubled me for the rest of my life if I didn’t. I had to ask. There was no subtle way of doing it. It wasn’t easy, but finally I came out with it.

“Did you kill Amrik Singh?”

“No.” He looked at me with his green-tea-colored eyes. “I didn’t.”

He said nothing for a moment, but I could tell from his gaze that he was assessing me, wondering if he should say more or not. I told him I’d seen the asylum applications and the boarding passes of flights to the US with a name that matched one of his fake passports. I had come across a receipt from a car-hire company in Clovis. The dates matched too, so I knew that he had something to do with that whole episode, but I didn’t know what.

“I’m just curious,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if you did. He deserved to die.”

“I didn’t kill him. He killed himself. But we made him kill himself.”

I had no idea what the hell that was supposed to mean.

“I didn’t go to the US looking for him. I was already there on some other work when I saw the news in the papers that he had been arrested for assaulting his wife. His residential address became public. I had been looking for him for years. I had some unfinished business with him. Many of us did. So I went to Clovis, made some inquiries and finally found him at a truck-washing garage and workshop where he would go to have his truck serviced. He was a completely different person from the murderer we knew, the killer of Jalib Qadri and many others. He did not have that infrastructure of impunity within which he operated in Kashmir. He was scared and broke. I almost felt sorry for him. I assured him that I was not going to harm him, and that I was only there to tell him that we would not allow him to forget the things that he had done.”

Musa and I were having this conversation out on the street. I had come down to see him off.

“Other Kashmiris had also read the news. So they began to arrive in Clovis to see how the Butcher of Kashmir lived now. Some were journalists, some were writers, photographers, lawyers…some were just ordinary people. They turned up at his workplace, at his home, at the supermarket, across the street, at his children’s school. Every day. He was forced to look at us. Forced to remember. It must have driven him crazy. Eventually it made him self-destruct. So…to answer your question…no, I did not kill him.”

What Musa said next, standing against the backdrop of the school gates with the painting of the ogre nurse giving a baby a polio vaccine, was like…like an ice-injection. More so because it was said in that casual, genial way he had, with a friendly, almost-happy smile, as though he was only joking.

“One day Kashmir will make India self-destruct in the same way. You may have blinded all of us, every one of us, with your pellet guns by then. But you will still have eyes to see what you have done to us. You’re not destroying us. You are constructing us. It’s yourselves that you are destroying. Khuda Hafiz, Garson bhai.”

With that he left. I never saw him again.

What if he’s right? We’ve seen great countries fall into ruin virtually overnight. What if we’re next in line? That thought fills me with a kind of epochal sadness.

If this little back street is anything to go by, perhaps the unraveling has already begun. Everything has suddenly fallen quiet. All the construction has stopped. The laborers have disappeared. Where are the whores and the homosexuals and the dogs with fancy coats? I miss them. How could it all disappear so quickly?

I mustn’t keep standing here, like some nostalgic old fool.

Things will get better. They must.

On my way back in I managed to avoid my voluptuous and voluble tenant Ankita on the stairs as I returned to my empty apartment that will forever be haunted by the ghosts of the cardboard cartons that have gone, and all the stories they contained.

And the absence of the woman who, in my own weak, wavering way, I will never stop loving.

What will become of me? I’m a little like Amrik Singh myself — old, bloated, scared, and deprived of what Musa so eloquently called “the infrastructure of impunity” that I have operated within all my life. What if I self-destruct too?

I could — unless music rescues me.

I should get in touch with Naga. I should work on that podcast idea.

But first I need a drink.

It was Musa’s third night in Jannat Guest House. He had arrived a few days ago like a deliveryman, with a Tempo full of cardboard cartons. Everybody was delighted to see the animation on Ustaniji’s face when she set eyes on him. The cartons were stacked against the wall in Tilo’s room, crowding up the space she shared with Ahlam Baji. Tilo had told Musa as much as she knew about everyone in Jannat Guest House. On that last night she lay next to him on her bed, showing off her prowess in Urdu. She had written out a poem she’d learned from Dr. Azad Bhartiya in one of her notebooks:

“That sounds like the anthem of a suicide bomber,” Musa said.

Tilo told him about Dr. Azad Bhartiya and how the poem had been his response to police questioning in Jantar Mantar (on the morning after the said night, the concerned night, the aforementioned night, the night hereinafter referred to as “the night”).