The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Read online

  She tried to tell him that she had fought back bravely as they hauled her off his lifeless body.

  But she knew very well that she hadn’t.

  She tried to un-know what they had done to all the others—how they had folded the men and unfolded the women. And how eventually they had pulled them apart limb from limb and set them on fire.

  But she knew very well that she knew.

  They.

  They, who?

  Newton’s Army, deployed to deliver an Equal and Opposite Reaction. Thirty thousand saffron parakeets with steel talons and bloodied beaks, all squawking together:

  Mussalman ka ek hi sthan! Qabristan ya Pakistan!

  Only one place for the Mussalman! The Graveyard or Pakistan!

  Anjum, feigning death, had lain sprawled over Zakir Mian. Counterfeit corpse of a counterfeit woman. But the parakeets, even though they were—or pretended to be—pure vegetarian (this was the minimum qualification for conscription), tested the breeze with the fastidiousness and proficiency of bloodhounds. And of course they found her. Thirty thousand voices chimed together, mimicking Ustad Kulsoom Bi’s Birbal:

  Ai Hai! Saali Randi Hijra! Sister-fucking Whore Hijra. Sister-fucking Muslim Whore Hijra.

  Another voice rose, high and anxious, another bird:

  Nahi yaar, mat maro, Hijron ka maarna apshagun hota hai.

  Don’t kill her, brother, killing Hijras brings bad luck.

  Bad luck!

  Nothing scared those murderers more than the prospect of bad luck. After all, it was to ward off bad luck that the fingers that gripped the slashing swords and flashing daggers were studded with lucky stones embedded in thick gold rings. It was to ward off bad luck that the wrists wielding iron rods that bludgeoned people to death were festooned with red puja threads lovingly tied by adoring mothers. Having taken all these precautions, what would be the point of willfully courting bad luck?

  So they stood over her and made her chant their slogans.

  Bharat Mata Ki Jai! Vande Mataram!

  She did. Weeping, shaking, humiliated beyond her worst nightmare.

  Victory to Mother India! Salute the Mother!

  They left her alive. Unkilled. Unhurt. Neither folded nor unfolded. She alone. So that they might be blessed with good fortune.

  Butchers’ Luck.

  That’s all she was. And the longer she lived, the more good luck she brought them.

  She tried to un-know that little detail as she rattled through her private fort. But she failed. She knew very well that she knew very well that she knew very well.

  The Chief Minister with cold eyes and a vermilion forehead would go on to win the next elections. Even after the Poet–Prime Minister’s government fell at the Center, he won election after election in Gujarat. Some people believed he ought to be held responsible for mass murder, but his voters called him Gujarat ka Lalla. Gujarat’s Beloved.

  FOR MONTHS ANJUM LIVED in the graveyard, a ravaged, feral specter, out-haunting every resident djinn and spirit, ambushing bereaved families who came to bury their dead with a grief so wild, so untethered, that it clean outstripped theirs. She stopped grooming herself, stopped dyeing her hair. It grew dead white from the roots, and suddenly, halfway down her head, turned jet black, making her look, well…striped. Facial hair, which she had once dreaded more than almost anything else, appeared on her chin and cheeks like a glimmer of frost (mercifully a lifetime of cheap hormone injections stopped it from growing into an all-out beard). One of her front teeth, stained dark red from chewing paan, grew loose in her gums. When she spoke or smiled, which she did rarely, it moved up and down terrifyingly, like a harmonium key playing a tune of its own. The terrifyingness had its advantages though—it scared people and kept nasty, insult-hurling, stone-throwing little boys at bay.

  Mr. D. D. Gupta, an old client of Anjum’s, whose affection for her had transcended worldly desire long ago, tracked her down and visited her in the graveyard. He was a building contractor from Karol Bagh who bought and supplied construction material—steel, cement, stone, bricks. He diverted a small consignment of bricks and a few asbestos sheets from the building site of a wealthy client and helped Anjum construct a small, temporary shack—nothing elaborate, just a storeroom in which she could lock her things if she needed to. Mr. Gupta visited her from time to time to make sure she was provided for and did not harm herself. When he moved to Baghdad after the American invasion of Iraq (to capitalize on the escalating demand for concrete blast walls), he asked his wife to send their driver with a hot meal for Anjum at least three times a week. Mrs. Gupta, who thought of herself as a Gopi, a female adorer of Lord Krishna, was, according to her palmist, living through her seventh and last cycle of rebirth. This gave her license to behave as she wished without worrying that she would have to pay for her sins in her next life. She had her own amorous involvements, although she maintained that when she attained sexual climax, the ecstasy she felt was for a divine being and not for her human lover. She was extremely fond of her husband but was relieved to have his physical appetites taken off her plate, and therefore more than happy to do him this small favor.

  Before he left, Mr. Gupta bought Anjum a cheap mobile phone and taught her how to answer it (incoming calls were free) and how to give him what he described as a “missed call” if she needed to speak to him. Anjum lost it within a week, and when Mr. Gupta called from Baghdad the phone was answered by a drunk who wept and demanded to speak to his mother.

  In addition to this kind-heartedness, Anjum also received other visitors. Saeeda brought the apparently heartless, but in truth traumatized, Zainab a few times. (When it became apparent to Saeeda that the visits caused both Anjum and Zainab too much pain, she stopped bringing her.) Anjum’s brother, Saqib, came once a week. Ustad Kulsoom Bi herself, accompanied by her friend Haji Mian and sometimes Bismillah, would come by in a rickshaw. She saw to it that Anjum received a small pension from the Khwabgah, delivered to her in cash in an envelope on the first of every month.

  The most regular visitor of all was Ustad Hameed. He would arrive every day except on Wednesdays and Sundays, either at dawn or at twilight, settle down on someone’s grave with Anjum’s harmonium and begin his haunting riaz, Raag Lalit in the morning, Raag Shuddh Kalyan in the evenings—Tum bin kaun khabar mori lait…Who other than you will ask for news of me? He studiously ignored the insulting audience-requests for the latest Bollywood hit or popular qawwali (nine out of ten times it was Dum-a-Dum Mast Qalandar) shouted out by the vagabonds and drifters who gathered outside the invisible boundary of what had, by consensus, been marked off as Anjum’s territory. Sometimes the tragic shadows on the edge of the graveyard rose to their feet in a dreamy, booze- or smack-induced haze and danced in slow motion to a beat of their own. While the light died (or was born) and Ustad Hameed’s gentle voice ranged over the ruined landscape and its ruined inhabitants, Anjum would sit cross-legged with her back to Ustad Hameed on Begum Renata Mumtaz Madam’s grave. She would not speak to him or look at him. He didn’t mind. He could tell from the stillness of her shoulders that she was listening. He had seen her through so much; he believed that if not he, then certainly music, would see her through this too.

  But neither kindness nor cruelty could coax Anjum to return to her old life at the Khwabgah. It took years for the tide of grief and fear to subside. Imam Ziauddin’s daily visits, their petty (and sometimes profound) quarrels, and his request that Anjum read the papers to him every morning, helped draw her back into the Duniya. Gradually the Fort of Desolation scaled down into a dwelling of manageable proportions. It became home; a place of predictable, reassuring sorrow—awful, but reliable. The saffron men sheathed their swords, laid down their tridents and returned meekly to their working lives, answering bells, obeying orders, beating their wives and biding their time until their next bloody outing. The saffron parakeets retracted their talons and returned to green, and camouflaged themselves in the branches of the Banyan trees from which the white-backed vu
ltures and sparrows had disappeared. The folded men and unfolded women visited less frequently. Only Zakir Mian, neatly folded, would not go away. But in time, instead of following her around, he moved in with her and became a constant but undemanding companion.

  Anjum began to groom herself again. She hennaed her hair, turning it a flaming orange. She had her facial hair removed, her loose tooth extracted and replaced with an implant. A perfect white tooth now shone like a tusk between the dark red stumps that passed for teeth. On the whole it was only slightly less alarming than the previous arrangement. She stayed with the Pathan suits but she had new ones tailored in softer colors, pale blue and powder pink, which she matched with her old sequined and printed dupattas. She gained a little weight and filled out her new clothes in an attractive, comfortable way.

  But Anjum never forgot that she was only Butchers’ Luck. For the rest of her life, even when it appeared otherwise, her relationship with the Rest-of-Her-Life remained precarious and reckless.

  As the Fort of Desolation scaled down, Anjum’s tin shack scaled up. It grew first into a hut that could accommodate a bed, and then into a small house with a little kitchen. So as not to attract undue attention, she left the exterior walls rough and unfinished. The inside she plastered and painted an unusual shade of fuchsia. She put in a sandstone roof supported on iron girders, which gave her a terrace on which, in the winter, she would put out a plastic chair and dry her hair and sun her chapped, scaly shins while she surveyed the dominion of the dead. For her doors and windows she chose a pale pistachio green. The Bandicoot, now well on her way to becoming a young lady, began to visit her again. She always came with Saeeda, and she never spent the night. Anjum never asked or insisted, or even made her feelings manifest. But the pain from this one wound never deadened, never diminished. On this count her heart simply would not agree to mend.

  Every few months the municipal authorities stuck a notice on Anjum’s front door that said squatters were strictly prohibited from living in the graveyard and that any unauthorized construction would be demolished within a week. She told them that she wasn’t living in the graveyard, she was dying in it—and for this she didn’t need permission from the municipality because she had authorization from the Almighty Himself.

  None of the municipal officers who visited her was man enough to take the matter further and run the risk of being embarrassed by her legendary abilities. Also, like everyone else, they feared being cursed by a Hijra. So they chose the path of appeasement and petty extortion. They settled on a not-inconsiderable sum of money to be paid to them, along with a non-vegetarian meal, on Diwali as well as Eid. And they agreed that if the house expanded the sum would expand proportionately.

  Over time Anjum began to enclose the graves of her relatives and build rooms around them. Each room had a grave (or two) and a bed. Or two. She built a separate bathhouse and a toilet with its own septic tank. For water she used the public handpump. Imam Ziauddin, who was being unkindly treated by his son and daughter-in-law, soon became a permanent guest. He rarely went home any more. Anjum began to rent a couple of rooms to down-and-out travelers (the publicity was strictly by word of mouth). There weren’t all that many takers because obviously the setting and landscape, to say nothing of the innkeeper herself, were not to everybody’s taste. Also, it must be said, not all the takers were to the innkeeper’s taste. Anjum was whimsical and irrational about whom she admitted and whom she turned away—often with unwarranted and entirely unreasonable rudeness that bordered on abuse (Who sent you here? Go fuck yourself in the arse), and sometimes with an unearthly, savage roar.

  The advantage of the guest house in the graveyard was that unlike every other neighborhood in the city, including the most exclusive ones, it suffered no power cuts. Not even in the summer. This was because Anjum stole her electricity from the mortuary, where the corpses required round-the-clock refrigeration. (The city’s paupers who lay there in air-conditioned splendor had never experienced anything of the kind while they were alive.) Anjum called her guest house Jannat. Paradise. She kept her TV on night and day. She said she needed the noise to steady her mind. She watched the news diligently and became an astute political analyst. She also watched Hindi soap operas and English film channels. She particularly enjoyed B-grade Hollywood vampire movies and watched the same ones over and over again. She couldn’t understand the dialogue of course, but she understood the vampires reasonably well.

  Gradually Jannat Guest House became a hub for Hijras who, for one reason or another, had fallen out of, or been expelled from, the tightly administered grid of Hijra Gharanas. As word spread about the new guest house in the graveyard, friends from the past reappeared, most incredibly, Nimmo Gorakhpuri. When they first met, Anjum and she held each other and wept like star-crossed sweethearts reunited after a long separation. Nimmo became a regular visitor, often spending two or three days at a stretch with Anjum. She had grown into a resplendent figure, large, jeweled, perfumed and immaculately groomed. She came in her own little white Maruti 800 from Mewat, a two-hour drive from Delhi, where she owned two flats and a small farm. She had become a goat-magnate who traded in exotic goats that she sold for serious money to wealthy Muslims in Delhi and Bombay for slaughter on Bakr-Eid. She chuckled as she told her old friend the tricks of the trade and described the spurious techniques of overnight goat-fattening and the politics of goat-pricing in the pre-Eid goat-market. She said that from next year her business would go online. Anjum and she agreed that for old times’ sake they would celebrate the next Bakr-Eid together in the graveyard with the best specimen in Nimmo’s stock. She showed Anjum goat portraits on her swanky new mobile phone. She was as obsessed with goats as she had once been with Western women’s fashion. She showed Anjum how to tell a Jamnapari from a Barbari, an Etawa from a Sojat. Then she showed her an MMS of a rooster who seemed to say “Ya Allah!” each time he flapped his wings. Anjum was floored. Even a simple rooster knew! From that day onwards her faith deepened.

  True to her word, Nimmo Gorakhpuri presented Anjum with a young black ram with biblical, curled horns—the same model, Nimmo said, as the one Hazrat Ibrahim had sacrificed on the mountain in place of his only begotten son, Ishaq, except that theirs was white. Anjum put the ram in a room of his own (with a grave of his own) and reared him lovingly. She tried to love him just as much as Ibrahim had loved Ishaq. Love, after all, is the ingredient that separates a sacrifice from ordinary, everyday butchery. She wove him a tinsel collar and put bells on his ankles. He loved her too, and followed her wherever she went. (She took care to take the bells off his ankles and conceal him from Zainab when she visited, because she knew what that would lead to.) By the time Eid came around that year, the old city was teeming with retired camels with faded tattoos, buffaloes and goats as big as small horses, waiting to be slaughtered. Anjum’s ram was full-grown, almost four feet tall, all lean meat and muscle and slanting yellow eyes. People came to the graveyard just to have a look at him.

  Anjum booked Imran Qureishi, the rising star among the new crop of young butchers in Shahjahanabad, to perform the sacrifice. He had several prior bookings and said he would not be able to come until late afternoon. When the day of Bakr-Eid dawned, Anjum knew that unless she went to the old city and brought him herself, interlopers would snatch him away out of turn. Dressed as a man, in a clean, ironed Pathan suit, she spent the whole morning trailing Imran from house to house, street corner to street corner while he went about his business. His last appointment was with a politician, a former member of the Legislative Assembly, who had lost the previous election by an embarrassing margin of votes. To minimize his defeat and show his constituency that he was already preparing for the next election, he had decided to put on an opulent display of piety. A sleek, fat water buffalo, her skin oiled and shining, was dragged through the narrow streets that were only as wide as she was, to a crossing where there was some room for maneuver. Positioned diagonally, tethered to a lamp post with her front legs hobbled, she just ab
out fitted into what passed off as a street crossing. Excited people, dressed in new clothes, crowded doorways, windows, little balconies and terraces to watch Imran perform the sacrifice. He arrived, making his way through the crowd, slim, quiet, unassuming. As the murmur of the crowd grew louder the buffalo’s skin twitched and her eyes began to roll. Her huge head with its horns that swept backwards in an oblong arc began to sway back and forth, as though she was in a trance at a classical music concert. With a deft judo move Imran and his helper rolled her over on to her side. In a moment he had cut open her jugular and ducked out of the way of the fountain of blood that pumped up into the air, its rhythm matching the beating of her failing heart. Blood sprayed across the downed shutters of shops, on to the faces of smiling politicians on the tattered old posters pasted on the walls. It flowed down the street past parked motorcycles, scooters, rickshaws and cycles. Little girls in jeweled slippers squealed and stepped out of its way. Little boys pretended not to mind and the more naughty ones stamped their feet softly in the red puddles and admired their bloody shoe-prints. It took a while for the buffalo to bleed to death. When she did, Imran opened her up and laid her organs out on the street—heart, spleen, stomach, liver, entrails. Since the street sloped downwards, they began to slip away like odd-shaped boats on a river of blood. Imran’s helper rescued them and put them on more even ground. The skinning and cutting-up would be done by the supporting cast. The superstar wiped his cleaver on a piece of cloth, scanned the crowd, caught Anjum’s eye and nodded imperceptibly. He slipped through the crowd and walked away. Anjum caught up with him at the next chowk. The streets were busy. Goatskins, goat horns, goat skulls, goat brains and goat offal were being collected, separated and stacked. Shit was being extruded from intestines that would then be properly cleaned and boiled down into soap and glue. Cats were making off with delectable booty. Nothing went to waste.