The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Read online

  ALSO BY ARUNDHATI ROY

  FICTION

  The God of Small Things

  NONFICTION

  The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and the Annihilation of Caste (The Debate Between B. R. Ambedkar and M. K. Gandhi)

  Things That Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations (with John Cusack)

  Capitalism: A Ghost Story

  Broken Republic

  Walking with the Comrades

  Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers

  The Algebra of Infinite Justice

  The End of Imagination

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2017 by Arundhati Roy

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd., a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, and in India by Penguin Books Pvt Ltd, a division of Penguin Random House India, New Delhi.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Due to limitations of space, permissions to reprint previously published material can be found following the acknowledgments.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Roy, Arundhati, author.

  Title: The ministry of utmost happiness : a novel / Arundhati Roy.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017002124 | ISBN 9781524733155 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781524733162 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524711276 (open market)

  Subjects: LCSH: Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Self-realization—Fiction. | India—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Cultural Heritage. | GSAFD: Love stories.

  Classification: LCC PR9499.3.R59 M56 2017 | DDC 823/.914—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017002124

  Ebook ISBN 9781524733162

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photographs by Mayank Austen Soofi

  Cover design by Two Associates

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Arundhati Roy

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

   1. Where Do Old Birds Go to Die?

   2. Khwabgah

   3. The Nativity

   4. Dr. Azad Bhartiya

   5. The Slow-Goose Chase

   6. Some Questions for Later

   7. The Landlord

   8. The Tenant

   9. The Untimely Death of Miss Jebeen the First

  10. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

  11. The Landlord

  12. Guih Kyom

  Acknowledgments

  Permission Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  To,

  The Unconsoled

  I mean, it’s all a matter of your heart…

  —NZIM HIKMET

  At magic hour, when the sun has gone but the light has not, armies of flying foxes unhinge themselves from the Banyan trees in the old graveyard and drift across the city like smoke. When the bats leave, the crows come home. Not all the din of their homecoming fills the silence left by the sparrows that have gone missing, and the old white-backed vultures, custodians of the dead for more than a hundred million years, that have been wiped out. The vultures died of diclofenac poisoning. Diclofenac, cow aspirin, given to cattle as a muscle relaxant, to ease pain and increase the production of milk, works—worked—like nerve gas on white-backed vultures. Each chemically relaxed, milk-producing cow or buffalo that died became poisoned vulture bait. As cattle turned into better dairy machines, as the city ate more ice cream, butterscotch-crunch, nutty-buddy and chocolate-chip, as it drank more mango milkshake, vultures’ necks began to droop as though they were tired and simply couldn’t stay awake. Silver beards of saliva dripped from their beaks, and one by one they tumbled off their branches, dead.

  Not many noticed the passing of the friendly old birds. There was so much else to look forward to.

  1

  WHERE DO OLD BIRDS GO TO DIE?

  She lived in the graveyard like a tree. At dawn she saw the crows off and welcomed the bats home. At dusk she did the opposite. Between shifts she conferred with the ghosts of vultures that loomed in her high branches. She felt the gentle grip of their talons like an ache in an amputated limb. She gathered they weren’t altogether unhappy at having excused themselves and exited from the story.

  When she first moved in, she endured months of casual cruelty like a tree would—without flinching. She didn’t turn to see which small boy had thrown a stone at her, didn’t crane her neck to read the insults scratched into her bark. When people called her names—clown without a circus, queen without a palace—she let the hurt blow through her branches like a breeze and used the music of her rustling leaves as balm to ease the pain.

  It was only after Ziauddin, the blind imam who had once led the prayers in the Fatehpuri Masjid, befriended her and began to visit her that the neighborhood decided it was time to leave her in peace.

  Long ago a man who knew English told her that her name written backwards (in English) spelled Majnu. In the English version of the story of Laila and Majnu, he said, Majnu was called Romeo and Laila was Juliet. She found that hilarious. “You mean I’ve made a khichdi of their story?” she asked. “What will they do when they find that Laila may actually be Majnu and Romi was really Juli?” The next time he saw her, the Man Who Knew English said he’d made a mistake. Her name spelled backwards would be Mujna, which wasn’t a name and meant nothing at all. To this she said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m all of them, I’m Romi and Juli, I’m Laila and Majnu. And Mujna, why not? Who says my name is Anjum? I’m not Anjum, I’m Anjuman. I’m a mehfil, I’m a gathering. Of everybody and nobody, of everything and nothing. Is there anyone else you would like to invite? Everyone’s invited.”

  The Man Who Knew English said it was clever of her to come up with that one. He said he’d never have thought of it himself. She said, “How could you have, with your standard of Urdu? What d’you think? English makes you clever automatically?”

  He laughed. She laughed at his laugh. They shared a filter cigarette. He complained that Wills Navy Cut cigarettes were short and stumpy and simply not worth the price. She said she preferred them any day to Four Square or the very manly Red & White.

  She didn’t remember his name now. Perhaps she never knew it. He was long gone, the Man Who Knew English, to wherever he had to go. And she was living in the graveyard behind the government hospital. For company she had her steel Godrej almirah in which she kept her music—scratched records and tapes—an old harmonium, her clothes, jewelry, her father’s poetry books, her photo albums and a few press clippings that had survived the fire at the Khwabgah. She hung the key around her neck on a black thread along with her bent silver toothpick. She slept on a threadbare Persian carpet that she locked up in the day and unrolled between two graves at night (as a private joke, never the same two on consecutive nights). She still smoked. Still Navy Cut.

  One morning, while she read the newspaper aloud to him, the old imam, who clearly hadn’t been listening, asked—affecting a casual air—“Is it true that even
the Hindus among you are buried, not cremated?”

  Sensing trouble, she prevaricated. “True? Is what true? What is Truth?”

  Unwilling to be deflected from his line of inquiry, the imam muttered a mechanical response. “Sach Khuda hai. Khuda hi Sach hai.” Truth is God. God is Truth. The sort of wisdom that was available on the backs of the painted trucks that roared down the highways. Then he narrowed his blindgreen eyes and asked in a slygreen whisper: “Tell me, you people, when you die, where do they bury you? Who bathes the bodies? Who says the prayers?”

  Anjum said nothing for a long time. Then she leaned across and whispered back, untree-like, “Imam Sahib, when people speak of color—red, blue, orange, when they describe the sky at sunset, or moonrise during Ramzaan—what goes through your mind?”

  Having wounded each other thus, deeply, almost mortally, the two sat quietly side by side on someone’s sunny grave, hemorrhaging. Eventually it was Anjum who broke the silence.

  “You tell me,” she said. “You’re the Imam Sahib, not me. Where do old birds go to die? Do they fall on us like stones from the sky? Do we stumble on their bodies in the streets? Do you not think that the All-Seeing, Almighty One who put us on this Earth has made proper arrangements to take us away?”

  That day the imam’s visit ended earlier than usual. Anjum watched him leave, tap-tap-tapping his way through the graves, his seeing-eye cane making music as it encountered the empty booze bottles and discarded syringes that littered his path. She didn’t stop him. She knew he’d be back. No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she saw it. She sensed that in some strange tangential way, he needed her shade as much as she needed his. And she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.

  Even though Anjum’s departure from the Khwabgah had been far from cordial, she knew that its dreams and its secrets were not hers alone to betray.

  2

  KHWABGAH

  She was the fourth of five children, born on a cold January night, by lamplight (power cut), in Shahjahanabad, the walled city of Delhi. Ahlam Baji, the midwife who delivered her and put her in her mother’s arms wrapped in two shawls, said, “It’s a boy.” Given the circumstances, her error was understandable.

  A month into her first pregnancy Jahanara Begum and her husband decided that if their baby was a boy they would name him Aftab. Their first three children were girls. They had been waiting for their Aftab for six years. The night he was born was the happiest of Jahanara Begum’s life.

  The next morning, when the sun was up and the room nice and warm, she unswaddled little Aftab. She explored his tiny body—eyes nose head neck armpits fingers toes—with sated, unhurried delight. That was when she discovered, nestling underneath his boy-parts, a small, unformed, but undoubtedly girl-part.

  Is it possible for a mother to be terrified of her own baby? Jahanara Begum was. Her first reaction was to feel her heart constrict and her bones turn to ash. Her second reaction was to take another look to make sure she was not mistaken. Her third reaction was to recoil from what she had created while her bowels convulsed and a thin stream of shit ran down her legs. Her fourth reaction was to contemplate killing herself and her child. Her fifth reaction was to pick her baby up and hold him close while she fell through a crack between the world she knew and worlds she did not know existed. There, in the abyss, spinning through the darkness, everything she had been sure of until then, every single thing, from the smallest to the biggest, ceased to make sense to her. In Urdu, the only language she knew, all things, not just living things but all things—carpets, clothes, books, pens, musical instruments—had a gender. Everything was either masculine or feminine, man or woman. Everything except her baby. Yes of course she knew there was a word for those like him—Hijra. Two words actually, Hijra and Kinnar. But two words do not make a language.

  Was it possible to live outside language? Naturally this question did not address itself to her in words, or as a single lucid sentence. It addressed itself to her as a soundless, embryonic howl.

  —

  Her sixth reaction was to clean herself up and resolve to tell nobody for the moment. Not even her husband. Her seventh reaction was to lie down next to Aftab and rest. Like the God of the Christians did, after he had made Heaven and Earth. Except that in his case he rested after making sense of the world he had created, whereas Jahanara Begum rested after what she created had scrambled her sense of the world.

  It wasn’t a real vagina after all, she told herself. Its passages were not open (she checked). It was just an appendage, a baby-thing. Perhaps it would close, or heal, or go away somehow. She would pray at every shrine she knew and ask the Almighty to show her mercy. He would. She knew He would. And maybe He did, in ways she did not fully comprehend.

  The first day she felt able to leave the house, Jahanara Begum took baby Aftab with her to the dargah of Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed, an easy, ten-minute walk from her home. She didn’t know the story of Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed then, and had no idea what turned her footsteps so surely in the direction of his shrine. Perhaps he had called her to him. Or perhaps she was drawn to the strange people she had seen camped there when she used to walk past on her way to Meena Bazaar, the kind of people who in her earlier life she would not have deigned to even glance at unless they’d crossed her path. Suddenly they seemed to be the most important people in the world.

  Not all the visitors to Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed’s dargah knew his story. Some knew parts of it, some none of it and some made up their own versions. Most knew he was a Jewish Armenian merchant who had traveled to Delhi from Persia in pursuit of the love of his life. Few knew the love of his life was Abhay Chand, a young Hindu boy he had met in Sindh. Most knew he had renounced Judaism and embraced Islam. Few knew his spiritual search eventually led him to renounce orthodox Islam too. Most knew he had lived on the streets of Shahjahanabad as a naked fakir before being publicly executed. Few knew the reason for his execution was not the offense caused by his public nakedness but the offense caused by his apostasy. Aurangzeb, emperor at the time, summoned Sarmad to his court and asked him to prove he was a true Muslim by reciting the Kalima: la ilaha illallah, Mohammed-ur rasul Allah—There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His Messenger. Sarmad stood naked in the royal court in the Red Fort before a jury of Qazis and Maulanas. Clouds stopped drifting in the sky, birds froze in mid-flight and the air in the fort grew thick and impenetrable as he began to recite the Kalima. But no sooner had he started than he stopped. All he said was the first phrase: la ilaha. There is no God. He could not go any further, he insisted, until he had completed his spiritual search and could embrace Allah with all his heart. Until then, he said, reciting the Kalima would only be a mockery of prayer. Aurangzeb, backed by his Qazis, ordered Sarmad’s execution.

  To suppose from this that those who went to pay their respects to Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed without knowing his story did so in ignorance, with little regard for facts and history, would be a mistake. Because inside the dargah, Sarmad’s insubordinate spirit, intense, palpable and truer than any accumulation of historical facts could be, appeared to those who sought his blessings. It celebrated (but never preached) the virtue of spirituality over sacrament, simplicity over opulence and stubborn, ecstatic love even when faced with the prospect of annihilation. Sarmad’s spirit permitted those who came to him to take his story and turn it into whatever they needed it to be.

  When Jahanara Begum became a familiar figure at the dargah she heard (and then retailed) the story of how Sarmad was beheaded on the steps of the Jama Masjid before a veritable ocean of people who loved him and had gathered to bid him farewell. Of how his head continued to recite his poems of love even after it had been severed from his body, and how he picked up his speaking head, as casually as a modern-day motorcyclist might pick up his helmet, and walked up the steps into the Jama Masjid, and then, equally casually, went straight to heaven. That is why, Jahanara Begum said
(to anyone who was willing to listen), in Hazrat Sarmad’s tiny dargah (clamped like a limpet to the base of the eastern steps of the Jama Masjid, the very spot where his blood spilled down and collected in a pool), the floor is red, the walls are red and the ceiling is red. More than three hundred years have gone by, she said, but Hazrat Sarmad’s blood cannot be washed away. Whatever color they paint his dargah, she insisted, in time it turns red on its own.

  The first time she made her way past the crowd—the sellers of ittars and amulets, the custodians of pilgrims’ shoes, the cripples, the beggars, the homeless, the goats being fattened for slaughter on Eid and the knot of quiet, elderly eunuchs who had taken up residence under a tarpaulin outside the shrine—and entered the tiny red chamber, Jahanara Begum became calm. The street sounds grew faint and seemed to come from far away. She sat in a corner with her baby asleep on her lap, watching people, Muslim as well as Hindu, come in ones and twos, and tie red threads, red bangles and chits of paper to the grille around the tomb, beseeching Sarmad to bless them. It was only after she noticed a translucent old man with dry, papery skin and a wispy beard of spun light sitting in a corner, rocking back and forth, weeping silently as though his heart was broken, that Jahanara Begum allowed her own tears to fall. This is my son, Aftab, she whispered to Hazrat Sarmad. I’ve brought him here to you. Look after him. And teach me how to love him.

  Hazrat Sarmad did.

  FOR THE FIRST FEW YEARS of Aftab’s life, Jahanara Begum’s secret remained safe. While she waited for his girl-part to heal, she kept him close and was fiercely protective of him. Even after her younger son, Saqib, was born she would not allow Aftab to stray very far from her on his own. It was not seen as unusual behavior for a woman who had waited so long and so anxiously for a son.