The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Read online

  Imran and Anjum walked up to Turkman Gate from where they took an autorickshaw to the graveyard.

  Anjum, Man of the House for the moment, held a knife over her beautiful ram and said a prayer. Imran slit his jugular, and held him down while he shuddered and the blood flowed out of him. Within twenty minutes the ram was skinned, cut up into manageable pieces, and Imran was gone. Anjum made little parcels of mutton to distribute the sacrifice in the way it is Written: a third for the family, a third for nears and dears, a third for the poor. She gave Roshan Lal, who had arrived that morning to greet her on Eid, a plastic packet containing the tongue and part of a thigh. She kept the best pieces for Zainab, who had just turned twelve, and for Ustad Hameed.

  The addicts ate well that night. Anjum, Nimmo Gorakhpuri and Imam Ziauddin sat out on the terrace and feasted on three kinds of mutton dishes and a mountain of biryani. Nimmo gifted Anjum a mobile phone with the rooster MMS already installed on it. Anjum hugged her and said she now felt she had a direct line to God. They watched the MMS a few more times. They described the video in detail to Imam Ziauddin, who listened with his eyes but was not as enthusiastic as they were about its evidentiary value. Then Anjum tucked her new phone safely into her bosom. This one she did not lose. In a few weeks, through the good offices of his driver, who still brought messages from his boss to Anjum, D. D. Gupta got her new number and was back in touch with her from Iraq where he seemed to have decided to live.

  —

  The morning after Bakr-Eid, Jannat Guest House received its second permanent guest—a young man who called himself Saddam Hussain. Anjum knew him a little and liked him a lot, so she offered him a room at a rock-bottom price—less than it would have cost him to rent one in the old city.

  When Anjum first met Saddam he worked in the mortuary. He was one of about ten young men whose job it was to handle the cadavers. The Hindu doctors who were required to conduct post-mortems thought of themselves as upper caste and would not touch dead bodies for fear of being polluted. The men who actually handled the cadavers and performed the post-mortems were employed as cleaners and belonged to a caste of sweepers and leatherworkers who used to be called Chamars. The doctors, like most Hindus, looked down on them and considered them to be Untouchable. The doctors would stand at a distance with handkerchiefs masking their noses and shout instructions to the staff about where incisions were to be made and what was to be done with the viscera and the organs. Saddam was the only Muslim among the cleaners who worked in the mortuary. Like them, he too had become something of an amateur surgeon.

  Saddam had a quick smile and eyelashes that looked as though they had worked out in a gym. He always greeted Anjum with affection and often ran little errands for her—buying her eggs and cigarettes (she trusted nobody with her vegetable shopping) or fetching a bucket of water from the pump on the days she had a backache. Occasionally, when the workload at the mortuary was less hectic (usually September to November, when people on the streets were not dying like flies of the heat, the cold, or dengue), Saddam would drop in, Anjum would make him tea and they’d share a cigarette. One day he disappeared without leaving word. When she asked, his colleagues told her he had had a run-in with one of the doctors and been fired. When he reappeared that morning after Eid, a whole year later, he looked a little gaunt, a little battered, and was accompanied by an equally gaunt and battered white mare whose name he said was Payal. He was dressed stylishly, in jeans and a red T-shirt that said Your Place or Mine? He wore his sunglasses even when he was indoors. He smiled when Anjum teased him but he said it didn’t have anything to do with style. He told her the strange story of how his eyes had been burned by a tree.

  After he was fired from the mortuary, Saddam said, he drifted from job to job—he worked as a helper in a shop, a bus conductor, selling newspapers at the New Delhi railway station and finally, in desperation, as a bricklayer on a construction site. One of the security guards at the site became a friend and took Saddam to meet his boss, Sangeeta Madam, in the hope that she might give him a job. Sangeeta Madam was a plump, cheerful widow who, notwithstanding her jolly-type personality, and her love for Bollywood songs, was a tough-hearted labor contractor whose security company, Safe n’ Sound Guard Service (SSGS), controlled a pool of five hundred security guards. Her office, in the basement of a bottle factory, was in the new industrial belt that had sprung up on the outskirts of Delhi. The men on her roster had a twelve-hour working day and a six-day week. Sangeeta Madam’s commission was 60 percent of their salary, which left them with barely enough for food and a roof over their heads. Still they flocked to her in their thousands—retired soldiers, laid-off workers, trainloads of desperate villagers freshly arrived in the city, educated men, illiterate men, well-fed men, starving men. “There were many security companies whose offices were all next to each other,” Saddam told Anjum. “What a sight we made on the first of every month when we went to collect our pay…thousands of us…You got the feeling that there were only three kinds of people in this city—security guards, people who need security guards, and thieves.”

  Sangeeta Madam was among the better paymasters. So she had her pick of the men. She recruited the ones who looked relatively less malnourished and gave them half a day’s training—basically, she taught them how to stand straight, how to salute, how to say “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” “Good morning, sir” and “Goodnight, sir.” She equipped them with a cap, a pre-knotted tie that came on an elastic loop, and two sets of uniforms with SSGS embroidered on the epaulettes. (They had to pay a deposit worth more than the price of the uniforms in case they ran off without returning them.) She spread her little private army across the city. They guarded homes, schools, farmhouses, banks, ATMs, stores, malls, cinema halls, gated housing communities, hotels, restaurants and the embassies and high commissions of poorer countries. Saddam told Sangeeta Madam that his name was Dayachand (because every idiot knew that in the prevailing climate a security guard with a Muslim name would have been considered a contradiction in terms). Being a literate, pleasant-looking man in good health, he got the job easily. “I’ll be watching you,” Sangeeta Madam told him on his very first day, looking him up and down appreciatively. “If you can prove you are a good worker, I’ll make you a supervisor in three months.” She sent him out as one of a team of twelve men to the National Gallery of Modern Art where one of India’s most famous contemporary artists, a man from a small town who had risen to international stardom, was holding a solo show. The security for the show had been subcontracted to Safe n’ Sound.

  The exhibits, everyday artifacts made of stainless steel—steel cisterns, steel motorcycles, steel weighing scales with steel fruit on one side and steel weights on the other, steel cupboards full of steel clothes, a steel dining table with steel plates and steel food, a steel taxi with steel luggage on its steel luggage rack—extraordinary for their verisimilitude, were beautifully lit and displayed in the many rooms of the gallery, each room guarded by two Safe n’ Sound guards. Even the cheapest exhibit, Saddam said, was the price of a two-bedroom LIG (Lower Income Group) flat. So, all put together, according to his calculations, they cost as much as a whole housing colony. Art First, a cutting-edge contemporary art magazine owned by a leading steel magnate, was the main sponsor of the show.

  Saddam (Dayachand) was given sole charge of the signature exhibit in the show—an exquisitely made half-scale, but absolutely life-like, stainless-steel Banyan tree, with stainless-steel aerial roots that hung all the way down to the ground, forming a stainless-steel grove. The tree came in a gigantic wooden crate, shipped in from a gallery in New York. He watched it being un-crated and placed on the lawns of the National Gallery, secured with underground bolts. It had stainless-steel buckets, stainless-steel tiffin carriers and stainless-steel pots and pans hanging from its branches. (Almost as though stainless-steel laborers had hung up their stainless-steel lunches while they plowed stainless-steel fields and sowed stainless-steel seeds.)

  “That part I
just didn’t understand,” Saddam told Anjum.

  “And the rest you did?” Anjum asked, laughing.

  The artist, who lived in Berlin, had sent strict instructions that he did not want any kind of protective fence or cordon to be built around the tree. He was keen for viewers to commune with his work directly, without any barriers. They were to be allowed to touch it and to wander through the grove of roots if they wanted to. Most of them did, Saddam said, except when the sun was high and the steel was burning hot to the touch. Saddam’s job was to make sure nobody scratched their names into the steel tree or damaged it in any way. It was also his responsibility to keep the tree clean and to make sure the imprints from the hundreds of hands that touched it were wiped away. For this task he was given a specially designed ladder, a supply of Johnson’s Baby Oil and fragments of old, soft saris. It seemed an improbable method, but it actually worked. Cleaning the tree was not a problem, he said. The problem was keeping an eye on it when the sun reflected off it. It was like being asked to keep an eye on the sun. After the first two days Saddam asked Sangeeta Madam for permission to wear sunglasses. She turned down his request, saying it would look inappropriate and the museum management was bound to take offense. So Saddam developed a technique of looking at the tree for a couple of minutes and then looking away. Still, by the time seven weeks had passed and the tree was re-crated and shipped to Amsterdam for the artist’s next show, Saddam’s eyes were singed. They smarted and watered continuously. He found it impossible to keep them open in daylight unless he used sunglasses. He was dismissed from Safe n’ Sound Guard Service because nobody had any use for an ordinary security guard who dressed as though he was a film star’s bodyguard. Sangeeta Madam told him he was a great disappointment to her and had completely belied her expectations. His response was to call her some terrible names. He was physically ejected from her office.

  Anjum cackled her appreciation when Saddam told her what those names were. She gave him the room she had built around her sister Bibi Ayesha’s grave.

  Saddam built a temporary stable abutting the bathhouse for Payal. She stood there all night, snuffling and harrumphing, a pale night mare in the graveyard. In the daytime she was Saddam’s business partner. Saddam and she did the rounds of the city’s larger hospitals. He stationed himself outside the hospital gates and busied himself with one of her hooves, tapping it worriedly with a small hammer, pretending he was re-shoeing it. Payal went along with the charade. When the anxious relatives of seriously ill patients approached him Saddam would reluctantly agree to part with the old horseshoe to bring them good luck. For a price. He also had a supply of medicines—some commonly prescribed antibiotics, Crocin, cough syrup and a range of herbal remedies—that he sold to the people who flocked to the big government hospitals from the villages around Delhi. Most of them camped in the hospital grounds or on the streets because they were too poor to rent any kind of accommodation in the city. At night Saddam rode Payal home through the empty streets like a prince. In his room he had a sack of horseshoes. He gave Anjum one that she hung on her wall next to her old catapult. Saddam had other business interests too. He sold pigeon-feed at certain spots in the city where motorists stopped to seek quick benediction by feeding God’s creatures. On his non-hospital days Saddam would be there with small packets of grain and ready change. After the motorist sped away, he would, quite often, much to the chagrin of the pigeons, sweep up the grain and put it back into a packet, ready for his next customer. All of it—short-changing pigeons and exploiting sick people’s relatives—was tiring work, especially in summer, and the income was uncertain. But none of it involved having a boss and that was the main thing.

  Soon after Saddam moved in, Anjum and he, partnered by Imam Ziauddin, began another initiative. It started by accident and then evolved on its own. One afternoon Anwar Bhai, who ran a brothel nearby on GB Road, arrived in the graveyard with the body of Rubina, one of his girls, who had died suddenly of a burst appendix. He came with eight young women in burqas, trailed by a three-year-old boy, Anwar Bhai’s son by one of them. They were all distressed and agitated, not just by Rubina’s passing, but also because the hospital returned her body with the eyes missing. The hospital said that rats had got to them in the mortuary. But Anwar Bhai and Rubina’s colleagues believed that Rubina’s eyes had been stolen by someone who knew that a bunch of whores and their pimp were unlikely to complain to the police. If that wasn’t bad enough, because of the address given on the death certificate (GB Road), Anwar Bhai could not find a bathhouse to bathe Rubina’s body, a graveyard to bury her in, or an imam to say the prayers.

  Saddam told them they had come to the right place. He asked them to sit down and got them something cold to drink while he created an enclosure behind the guest house with some of Anjum’s old dupattas wrapped around four bamboo poles. Inside the enclosure he put out a piece of plywood raised off the ground on a few bricks, covered it with a plastic sheet and asked the women to lay Rubina’s corpse on it. He and Anwar Bhai collected water from the handpump in buckets and a couple of old paint cans and ferried them to the improvised bathhouse. The corpse was already stiff, so Rubina’s clothes had to be cut open. (Saddam produced a razor blade.) Lovingly, flapping over her body like a drove of ravens, the women bathed her, soaping her neck, her ears, her toes. Equally lovingly they kept a sharp eye out for anyone among them who might be tempted to slip off and pocket a bangle, a toe-ring or her pretty pendant. (All jewelry—fake as well as real—was to be handed over to Anwar Bhai.) Mehrunissa worried that the water might be too cold. Sulekha insisted Rubina had opened her eyes and closed them again (and that shafts of divine light shone out from where her eyes had been). Zeenat went off to buy a shroud. While Rubina was being prepared for her final journey, Anwar Bhai’s little son, dressed in denim dungarees and a prayer cap, paraded up and down, goose-stepping like a Kremlin guard, in order to show off his new (fake) mauve Crocs with flowers on them. He made a great production of noisily crunching Kurkure from the packet Anjum had given him. Occasionally he tried to peep into the shed to see what his mother and his aunties (whom he had never seen in burqas in all his short life) were up to.

  By the time the body had been bathed, dried, perfumed and wrapped in a shroud, Saddam, with the help of two of the addicts, had dug a respectably deep grave. Imam Ziauddin said the prayers and Rubina’s body was interred. Anwar Bhai, relieved and grateful, pressed five hundred rupees on Anjum. She refused to take it. Saddam refused too. But he was not one to pass up a business opportunity.

  Within a week Jannat Guest House began to function as a funeral parlor. It had a proper bathhouse with an asbestos roof and a cement platform for bodies to be laid out on. There was a steady supply of gravestones, shrouds, perfumed Multani clay (which most people preferred to soap) and bucket-water. There was a resident imam on call night and day. The rules for the dead (same as for the living in the guest house) were esoteric—warm, welcoming smiles or irrational roars of rejection, depending on nobody-really-knew-what. The one clear criterion was that Jannat Funeral Services would only bury those whom the graveyards and imams of the Duniya had rejected. Sometimes days went by with no funerals and sometimes there was a glut. Their record was five in one day. Sometimes the police themselves—whose rules were as irrational as Anjum’s—brought bodies to them.

  When Ustad Kulsoom Bi passed away in her sleep she was buried in grand fashion in the Hijron Ka Khanqah in Mehrauli. But Bombay Silk was buried in Anjum’s graveyard. And so were many other Hijras from all over Delhi.

  (In this way, Imam Ziauddin finally received the answer to his long-ago question: “Tell me, you people, when you die, where do they bury you? Who bathes the bodies? Who says the prayers?”)

  Gradually Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services became so much a part of the landscape that nobody questioned its provenance or its right to exist. It existed. And that was that. When Jahanara Begum died at the age of eighty-seven, Imam Ziauddin said the prayers. She was buried next t
o Mulaqat Ali. Bismillah, when she died, was buried in Anjum’s graveyard too. And so was Zainab’s goat, who could have made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for accomplishing an unheard-of feat (for a goat): dying of natural causes (colic) after surviving a record sixteen Bakr-Eids in Shahjahanabad. The credit for that of course belonged not to him, but to his fierce little mistress. Of course the Guinness Book had no such category.

  —

  Though Anjum and Saddam shared the same home (and graveyard), they rarely spent time together. Anjum enjoyed lazing around, but Saddam, stretched between his many enterprises (he had sold his pigeon-feed business, it being the least remunerative), had no time to spare and hated TV. On one unusual morning of enforced leisure Anjum and he sat on an old red taxi seat that they used as a sofa, drinking tea and watching TV. It was the 15th of August, Independence Day. The timid little Prime Minister who had replaced the lisping Poet–Prime Minister (the party he belonged to did not officially believe India was a Hindu Nation) was addressing the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort. It was one of those days when the insularity of the walled city had been invaded by the rest of Delhi. Massive crowds organized by the Ruling Party filled the Ramlila grounds. Five thousand schoolchildren dressed in the colors of the national flag did a flower drill. Petty influence-peddlers and smallwigs who wanted to be seen on TV seated themselves in the front rows so they could convert their visible proximity to power into business deals. A few years ago, when the lisping Poet–Prime Minister and his party of bigots were voted out of office, Anjum had rejoiced and lavished something close to adoration on the timid, blue-turbaned Sikh economist who replaced him. The fact that he had all the political charisma of a trapped rabbit only enhanced her adulation. But of late she had decided that it was true what people said—that he really was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings. His ineffectualness was strengthening the forces of darkness that had begun to mass on the horizon and slouch through the streets once again. Gujarat ka Lalla was still the Chief Minister of Gujarat. He had developed a swagger and begun to talk a lot about avenging centuries of Muslim Rule. In every public speech, he always found a way to bring in the measurement of his chest (fifty-six inches). For some odd reason it did seem to impress people. There were rumors that he was getting ready for his “March to Delhi.” On the subject of Gujarat ka Lalla, Saddam and Anjum were in perfect sync.