The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Read online

  In a few weeks she began to call Anjum “Mummy” (because that’s what Anjum had begun to call herself). The other residents (under Anjum’s tutelage) were all called “Apa” (Auntie, in Urdu), and Mary, because she was Christian, was Mary Auntie. Ustad Kulsoom Bi and Bismillah became “Badi Nani” and “Chhoti Nani.” Senior and Junior Granny. The Mouse absorbed love like sand absorbs the sea. Very quickly she metamorphosed into a cheeky young lady with rowdy, distinctly bandicoot-like tendencies (that could only barely be managed).

  Mummy, in the meanwhile, grew more addle-headed by the day. She was caught unawares by the fact that it was possible for one human being to love another so much and so completely. At first, being new to the discipline, she was only able to express her feelings in a busy, bustling way, like a child with its first pet. She bought Zainab an unnecessary amount of toys and clothes (frothy, puff-sleeved frocks and Made-in-China squeaking shoes with flashing heel-lights), she bathed, dressed and undressed her an unnecessary number of times, oiled, braided and unbraided her hair, tied and untied it with matching and unmatching ribbons that she kept rolled up in an old tin. She overfed her, took her for walks in the neighborhood and, when she saw that Zainab was naturally drawn to animals, got her a rabbit—who was killed by a cat on his very first night at the Khwabgah—and a he-goat with a Maulana-style beard who lived in the courtyard and every now and then, with an impassive expression on his face, sent his shiny goat pills skittering in all directions.

  The Khwabgah was in better condition than it had been for years. The broken room had been renovated and a new room built on top of it on the first floor, which Anjum and Mary now shared. Anjum slept with Zainab on a mattress on the floor, her long body curled protectively around the little girl like a city wall. At night she sang her to sleep softly, in a way that was more whisper than song. When Zainab was old enough to understand, Anjum began to tell her bedtime stories. At first the stories were entirely inappropriate for a young child. They were Anjum’s somewhat maladroit attempt to make up for lost time, to transfuse herself into Zainab’s memory and consciousness, to reveal herself without artifice, so that they could belong to each other completely. As a result she used Zainab as a sort of dock where she unloaded her cargo—her joys and tragedies, her life’s cathartic turning points. Far from putting Zainab to sleep, many of the stories either gave her nightmares or made her stay awake for hours, fearful and cranky. Sometimes Anjum herself wept as she told them. Zainab began to dread her bedtime and would shut her eyes tightly, simulating sleep in order not to have to listen to another tale. Over time, however, Anjum (with inputs from some of the junior Apas) worked out an editorial line. The stories were successfully childproofed, and eventually Zainab even began to look forward to the night-time ritual.

  Her top favorite was the Flyover Story—Anjum’s account of how she and her friends walked home late one night from Defense Colony in South Delhi all the way back to Turkman Gate. There were five or six of them, dressed up, looking stunning after a night of revelry at a wealthy Seth’s house in D-Block. After the party they decided to walk for a while and take in some fresh air. In those days there was such a thing as fresh air in the city, Anjum told Zainab. When they were halfway across the Defense Colony flyover—the city’s only flyover at the time—it began to rain. And what can anyone possibly do when it rains on a flyover?

  “They have to keep walking,” Zainab would say, in a reasonable, adult tone.

  “Exactly right. So we kept walking,” Anjum would say. “And then what happened?”

  “Then you wanted to soo!”

  “Then I wanted to soo!”

  “But you couldn’t stop!”

  “I couldn’t stop.”

  “You had to keep walking!”

  “I had to keep walking.”

  “So we soo-ed in our ghagra!” Zainab would shout, because she was at the age when anything to do with shitting, pissing and farting was the high point, or perhaps the whole point, of all stories.

  “That’s right, and it was the best feeling in the world,” Anjum would say, “being drenched in the rain on that big, empty flyover, walking under a huge advertisement of a wet woman drying herself with a Bombay Dyeing towel.”

  “And the towel was as big as a carpet!”

  “As big as a carpet, yes.”

  “And then you asked that woman if you could borrow her towel to dry yourself.”

  “And what did the woman say?”

  “She said, Nahin! Nahin! Nahin!”

  “She said, Nahin! Nahin! Nahin! So we got drenched, and we kept walking…”

  “With garam-garam (warm) soo running down your thanda-thanda (cold) legs!”

  Inevitably at this point Zainab would fall asleep, smiling. Every hint of adversity and unhappiness was required to be excised from Anjum’s stories. She loved it when Anjum transformed herself into a young sex-siren who had led a shimmering life of music and dance, dressed in gorgeous clothes with varnished nails and a throng of admirers.

  And so, in these ways, in order to please Zainab, Anjum began to rewrite a simpler, happier life for herself. The rewriting in turn began to make Anjum a simpler, happier person.

  Edited out of the Flyover Story, for example, was the fact that the incident had happened in 1976, at the height of the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi that lasted twenty-one months. Her spoiled younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, was the head of the Youth Congress (the youth wing of the ruling party), and was more or less running the country, treating it as though it was his personal plaything. Civil Rights had been suspended, newspapers were censored and, in the name of population control, thousands of men (mostly Muslim) were herded into camps and forcibly sterilized. A new law—the Maintenance of Internal Security Act—allowed the government to arrest anybody on a whim. The prisons were full, and a small coterie of Sanjay Gandhi’s acolytes had been unleashed on the general population to carry out his fiat.

  On the night of the Flyover Story, the gathering—a wedding party—that Anjum and her colleagues had descended on was broken up by the police. The host and three of his guests were arrested and driven away in police vans. Nobody knew why. Arif, the driver of the van that brought Anjum & Co. to the venue, tried to bundle his passengers into his van and make a getaway. For this impertinence he had the knuckles of his left hand and his right kneecap smashed. His passengers were dragged out of the Matador, kicked on their backsides as though they were circus clowns and instructed to scram, to run all the way home if they did not want to be arrested for prostitution and obscenity. They ran in blind terror, like ghouls, through the darkness and the driving rain, their make-up running a lot faster than their legs could, their drenched diaphanous clothes limiting their strides and impeding their speed. True, it was only a routine bit of humiliation for Hijras, nothing out of the ordinary, and nothing at all compared to the tribulations others endured during those horrible months.

  It was nothing, but still, it was something.

  Notwithstanding Anjum’s editing, the Flyover Story retained some elements of truth. For instance, it really did rain that night. And Anjum really did piss while she ran. There really was an advertisement for Bombay Dyeing towels on the Defense Colony flyover. And the woman in the advertisement really did flat out refuse to share her towel.

  A YEAR BEFORE ZAINAB was old enough to go to school, Mummy began to prepare for the event. She visited her old home and, with her brother Saqib’s permission, brought Mulaqat Ali’s collection of books to the Khwabgah. She was often seen sitting cross-legged in front of an open book (not the Holy Quran), moving her mouth as her finger traced a line across the page, or rocking back and forth with her eyes closed, thinking about what she had just read, or perhaps dredging the swamp of her memory to retrieve something that she once knew.

  When Zainab turned five, Anjum took her to Ustad Hameed to begin singing lessons. It was clear from the start that music was not her calling. She fidgeted unhappily through her classes, hitting false notes so uner
ringly that it was almost a skill in itself. Patient, kind-hearted Ustad Hameed would shake his head as though a fly was bothering him and fill his cheeks with lukewarm tea while he held down the keys of the harmonium, which meant that he wanted his pupil to try once more. On that rare occasion when Zainab managed to arrive somewhere in the vicinity of the note, he would nod happily and say, “That’s my boy!”—a phrase he had picked up from The Tom and Jerry Show on Cartoon Network, which he loved and watched with his grandchildren (who were studying in an English Medium school). It was his highest form of praise, regardless of the gender of his student. He bestowed it on Zainab not because she deserved it, but out of regard for Anjum and his memory of how beautifully she (or he—when she was Aftab) used to sing. Anjum sat through all the classes. Her high, hole-in-the-head insect hum reappeared, this time as a discreet usher endeavoring to discipline Zainab’s wayward voice and keep it true. It was useless. The Bandicoot couldn’t sing.

  Zainab’s real passion, it turned out, was animals. She was a terror on the streets of the old city. She wanted to free all the half-bald, half-dead white chickens that were pressed into filthy cages and stacked on top of each other outside the butcher shops, to converse with every cat that flashed across her path and to take home every litter of stray puppies she found wallowing in the blood and offal flowing through the open drains. She would not listen when she was told that dogs were unclean—najis—for Muslims and should not be touched. She did not shrink from the large, bristly rats that hurried along the street she had to walk down every day; she could not seem to get used to the sight of the bundles of yellow chicken claws, sawed-off goats’ trotters, the pyramids of goats’ heads with their staring, blind, blue eyes and the pearly white goats’ brains that shivered like jelly in big steel bowls.

  In addition to her pet goat, who, thanks to Zainab, had survived a record three Bakr-Eids unslaughtered, Anjum got her a handsome rooster who responded to his new mistress’s welcoming embrace with a vicious peck. Zainab wept loudly, more from heartbreak than pain. The peck chastened her, but her affection for the bird remained undiminished. Whenever Rooster Love came upon her she would wrap her arms around Anjum’s legs and deliver a few smacking kisses to Mummy’s knees, turning her head to look longingly and lovingly at the rooster between kisses so that the object of her affection and the party receiving the kisses were not in any doubt about what was going on and who the kisses were really meant for. In some ways, Anjum’s addle-headedness towards Zainab was proportionately reflected in Zainab’s addle-headedness towards animals. None of her tenderness towards living creatures, however, got in the way of her voracious meat eating. At least twice a year Anjum took her to the zoo inside Purana Qila, the Old Fort, to visit the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and her favorite character, the baby gibbon from Borneo.

  A few months after she was admitted into KGB (Kindergarten—Section B) in Tender Buds Nursery School in Daryaganj—Saqib and his wife were registered as her official parents—the usually robust Bandicoot went through a patch of ill health. It wasn’t serious, but it was persistent, and it wore her out, each illness making her more vulnerable to the next. Malaria followed flu followed two separate bouts of viral fever, one mild, the second worrying. Anjum fretted over her in unhelpful ways and, disregarding grumbles about her dereliction of Khwabgah duties (which were mostly administrative and managerial now), nursed the Bandicoot night and day with furtive, mounting paranoia. She became convinced that someone who envied her (Anjum’s) good fortune had put a hex on Zainab. The needle of her suspicion pointed steadfastly in the direction of Saeeda, a relatively new member of the Khwabgah. Saeeda was much younger than Anjum and was second in line for Zainab’s affections. She was a graduate and knew English. More importantly, she could speak the new language of the times—she could use the terms cis-Man and FtoM and MtoF and in interviews she referred to herself as a “transperson.” Anjum, on the other hand, mocked what she called the “trans-france” business, and stubbornly insisted on referring to herself as a Hijra.

  Like many of the younger generation, Saeeda switched easily between traditional salwar kameez and Western clothes—jeans, skirts, halter-necks that showed off her long, beautifully muscled back. What she lacked in local flavor and old-world charm she more than made up for with her modern understanding, her knowledge of the law and her involvement with Gender Rights Groups (she had even spoken at two conferences). All this placed her in a different league from Anjum. Also, Saeeda had edged Anjum out of the Number One spot in the media. The foreign newspapers had dumped the old exotics in favor of the younger generation. The exotics didn’t suit the image of the New India—a nuclear power and an emerging destination for international finance. Ustad Kulsoom Bi, wily old she-wolf, was alert to these winds of change, and saw benefit accrue to the Khwabgah. So Saeeda, though she lacked seniority, was in close competition with Anjum to take over as Ustad of the Khwabgah when Ustad Kulsoom Bi decided to relinquish charge, which, like the Queen of England, she seemed in no hurry to do.

  Ustad Kulsoom Bi was still the major decision-maker in the Khwabgah, but she was not actively involved in its day-to-day affairs. On the mornings her arthritis troubled her she was laid out on her charpai in the courtyard, to be sunned along with the jars of lime and mango pickle, and wheat flour spread out on newspaper to rid it of weevils. When the sun got too hot she would be returned indoors to have her feet pressed and her wrinkles mustard-oiled. She dressed like a man now, in a long yellow kurta—yellow because she was a disciple of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya—and a checked sarong. She wound her thin white hair that barely covered her scalp into a tiny bun pinned to the back of her head. On some days her old friend Haji Mian, who sold cigarettes and paan down the street, would arrive with the audio cassette of their all-time favorite film, Mughal-e-Azam. They both knew every song and every line of dialogue by heart. So they sang and spoke along with the tape. They believed nobody would ever write Urdu like that again and that no actor would ever be able to match the diction and delivery of Dilip Kumar. Sometimes Ustad Kulsoom Bi would play Emperor Akbar as well as his son Prince Salim, the hero of the film, and Haji Mian would be Anarkali (Madhubala), the slave-girl Prince Salim had loved. Sometimes they would exchange roles. Their joint performance was really, more than anything else, a wake for lost glory and a dying language.

  One evening Anjum was upstairs in her room putting a cold compress on the Bandicoot’s hot forehead when she heard a commotion in the courtyard—raised voices, running feet, people shouting. Her first instinct was to assume that a fire had broken out. This happened often—the huge, tangled mess of exposed electric cables that hung over the streets had a habit of spontaneously bursting into flames. She picked Zainab up and ran down the stairs. Everybody was gathered in front of the TV in Ustad Kulsoom Bi’s room, their faces lit by flickering TV light. A commercial airliner had crashed into a tall building. Half of it still protruded out, hanging in mid-air like a precarious, broken toy. In moments a second plane crashed into a second building and turned into a ball of fire. The usually garrulous residents of the Khwabgah watched in dead silence as the tall buildings buckled like pillars of sand. There was smoke and white dust everywhere. Even the dust looked different—clean and foreign. Tiny people jumped out of the tall buildings and floated down like flecks of ash.

  It wasn’t a film, the Television People said. It was really happening. In America. In a city called New York.

  The longest silence in the history of the Khwabgah was finally broken by a profound inquiry.

  “Do they speak Urdu there?” Bismillah wanted to know.

  Nobody replied.

  The shock in the room seeped into Zainab and she stirred out of her fever dream only to tumble straight into another. She wasn’t familiar with television replays, so she counted ten planes crashing into ten buildings.

  “Altogether ten,” she announced soberly, in her new, Tender Buds English, and then refitted her fat, fevered cheek back into its parking slot in Anju
m’s neck.

  The hex that had been put on Zainab had made the whole world sick. This was powerful sifli jaadu. Anjum stole a sly, sidelong glance at Saeeda to see whether she was brazenly celebrating her success or affecting innocence. The crafty bitch was pretending to be as shocked as everybody else.

  —

  By December Old Delhi was flooded with Afghan families fleeing warplanes that sang in their skies like unseasonal mosquitoes, and bombs that fell like steel rain. Of course the great politicos (which, in the old city, included every shopkeeper and Maulana) had their theories. For the rest, nobody really understood exactly what those poor people had to do with the tall buildings in America. But how could they? Who but Anjum knew that the Master Planner of this holocaust was neither Osama bin Laden, Terrorist, nor George W. Bush, President of the United States of America, but a far more powerful, far stealthier, force: Saeeda (née Gul Mohammed), r/o Khwabgah, Gali Dakotan, Delhi—110006, India.

  In order to better understand the politics of the Duniya that the Bandicoot was growing up in, as well as to neutralize or at least pre-empt the educated Saeeda’s sifli jaadu, Mummy began to read the papers carefully and to follow the news on TV (whenever the others would let her switch away from the soaps).

  —

  The planes that flew into the tall buildings in America came as a boon to many in India too. The Poet–Prime Minister of the country and several of his senior ministers were members of an old organization that believed India was essentially a Hindu nation and that, just as Pakistan had declared itself an Islamic Republic, India should declare itself a Hindu one. Some of its supporters and ideologues openly admired Hitler and compared the Muslims of India to the Jews of Germany. Now, suddenly, as hostility towards Muslims grew, it began to seem to the Organization that the whole world was on its side. The Poet–Prime Minister made a lisping speech, eloquent, except for long, exasperating pauses when he lost the thread of his argument, which was quite often. He was an old man, but had a young man’s way of tossing his head when he spoke, like the Bombay film stars of the 1960s. “The Mussalman, he doesn’t like the Other,” he said poetically in Hindi, and paused for a long time, even by his own standards. “His Faith he wants to spread through Terror.” He had made this couplet up on the spot, and was exceedingly pleased with himself. Each time he said Muslim or Mussalman his lisp sounded as endearing as a young child’s. In the new dispensation he was considered to be a moderate. He warned that what had happened in America could easily happen in India and that it was time for the government to pass a new anti-terrorism law as a safety precaution.