The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Read online

  Anjum watched the Trapped Rabbit—who barely had a chest at all—standing in his bulletproof enclosure with the Red Fort looming behind him, reeling off dense statistics about imports and exports to a restive crowd that had no idea what he was talking about. He spoke like a marionette. Only his lower jaw moved. Nothing else did. His bushy white eyebrows looked as though they were attached to his spectacles and not his face. His expression never changed. At the end of his speech he raised his hand in a limp salute and signed off with a high, reedy Jai Hind! (Victory to India!) A soldier, who was almost seven feet tall and had a bristling mustache as broad as the wingspan of a baby albatross, unsheathed his sword from its scabbard and shouted a salute at the little Prime Minister, who seemed to shudder in fright. When he walked away, only his legs moved, nothing else did. Anjum switched off the TV in disgust.

  “Let’s go up to the roof,” Saddam said hastily, sensing the approach of one of her moods, which usually spelled trouble for everybody within a half-kilometer range.

  He went on ahead and put out an old rug and a few hard pillows with flowered pillowcases that smelled of rancid hair oil. There was a hint of a breeze and the Independence Day kite-flyers were already out. There were some kite-flyers in the graveyard too, not doing too badly. Anjum arrived with a saucepan of fresh, hot tea and a transistor. Saddam and she lay down, staring up (Saddam in his sunglasses) at the dirty sky dotted with bright paper kites. Lolling next to them, as though he too had decided to take a day off after a hard, working week, was Biroo (sometimes called Roobi), a dog Saddam had found wandering down the pavement of a busy road, wild-eyed and disoriented, with a mess of transparent tubes dangling out of him. Biroo was a beagle who had either escaped from or outlived his purpose in a pharmaceuticals testing lab. He looked worn and rubbed out, like a drawing someone had tried to erase. The usually rich black, white and tan beagle colors were dimmed by a smoky, greyish patina that may of course have had nothing to do with the drugs that were tested on him. When Biroo first came to live in Jannat Guest House he was troubled by frequent epileptic fits and snorting, debilitating reverse sneezes. Each time he recovered from the exhaustion of a seizure, he emerged as a different character—sometimes friendly, sometimes horny, sometimes sleepy, sometimes snarly or lazy—as unreasonable and unpredictable as his adopted mistress. Over time his fits had grown less frequent and he had stabilized into what became his more or less permanent Lazy Dog avatar. The reverse sneezes lived on.

  Anjum poured a little tea into a saucer and blew into it to cool it down for him. He slurped it up noisily. He drank everything Anjum drank, ate everything that she ate—biryani, korma, samosas, halwa, falooda, phirni, zamzam, mangoes in summer, oranges in winter. It was terrible for his body, but excellent for his soul.

  In a while the breeze picked up and the kites soared, but then the mandatory Independence Day drizzle began. Anjum roared at it as though it was an uninvited guest—Ai Hai! Motherfucking whore rain! Saddam laughed but neither of them moved, waiting to see if it was a major or a minor. It was a minor, and soon stopped. Absent-mindedly, Anjum began to rub down Biroo’s coat, wiping off the delicate frost of raindrops on it. Getting wet in the rain reminded her of Zainab and she smiled to herself. Uncharacteristically, she began to tell Saddam about the Flyover Story (the edited version) and how much the Bandicoot had loved it when she was a little girl. She went on sunnily, describing Zainab’s pranks, her love of animals, and how quickly she had picked up English at school. All of a sudden, when her reminiscence was at its most cheerful, Anjum’s voice(s) broke and her eyes filled with tears.

  “I was born to be a mother,” she sobbed. “Just watch. One day Allah Mian will give me my own child. That much I know.”

  “How is that possible?” Saddam said, reasonably, entirely unaware that he was entering treacherous territory. “Haqeeqat bhi koi cheez hoti hai.” There is, after all, such a thing as Reality.

  “Why not? Why the hell not?” Anjum sat up and looked him in the eye.

  “I’m just saying…I meant realistically…”

  “If you can be Saddam Hussain, I can be a mother.” Anjum didn’t say it nastily, she said it smilingly, coquettishly, sucking on her white tusk and her dark red teeth. But there was something steely about the coquetry.

  Alert, but not worried, Saddam looked back at her, wondering what she knew.

  “Once you have fallen off the edge like all of us have, including our Biroo,” Anjum said, “you will never stop falling. And as you fall you will hold on to other falling people. The sooner you understand that the better. This place where we live, where we have made our home, is the place of falling people. Here there is no haqeeqat. Arre, even we aren’t real. We don’t really exist.”

  Saddam said nothing. He had grown to love Anjum more than he loved anyone else in the world. He loved the way she spoke, the words she chose, the way she moved her mouth, the way her red, paan-stained lips moved over her rotten teeth. He loved her ridiculous front tooth and the way she could recite whole verses of Urdu poetry, most—or all—of which he didn’t understand. Saddam knew no poetry and very little Urdu. But then, he knew other things. He knew the quickest way to skin a cow or buffalo without damaging the hide. He knew how to wet-salt the skin and marinate it with lime and tannin until it began to stretch and stiffen into leather. He knew how to calibrate the sourness of the marinade by tasting it, how to scud the leather and strip it of hair and fat, how to soap it, bleach it, buff, grease and wax it till it shone. He also knew that the average human body contains between four and five liters of blood. He had watched it spill and spread slowly across the road outside the Dulina police post, just off the Delhi-Gurgaon highway. Strangely, the thing he remembered most clearly about all that was the long line-up of expensive cars and the insects that flitted in the beams of their headlights. And the fact that nobody got out to help.

  He knew it was neither plan nor coincidence that had brought him to the Place of Falling People. It was the tide.

  “Who are you trying to fool?” Anjum asked him.

  “Only God.” Saddam smiled. “Not you.”

  “Recite the Kalima…” Anjum said imperiously, as though she were Emperor Aurangzeb himself.

  “La ilaha…” Saddam said. And then, like Hazrat Sarmad, he stopped. “I don’t know the rest. I’m still learning it.”

  “You’re a Chamar like all those other boys you worked with in the mortuary. You weren’t lying to that Sangeeta Madam Haramzaadi Bitch about your name, you were lying to me and I don’t know why, because I don’t care what you are…Muslim, Hindu, man, woman, this caste, that caste, or a camel’s arsehole. But why call yourself Saddam Hussain? He was a bastard, you know.”

  Anjum used the word Chamar and not Dalit, the more modern and accepted term for those that Hindus considered to be “untouchable,” in the same spirit in which she refused to refer to herself as anything other than Hijra. She didn’t see the problem with either Hijras or Chamars.

  For a while they lay side by side, in silence. And then Saddam decided to trust Anjum with the story he had not told anybody before—a story about saffron parakeets and a dead cow. His too was a story about luck, not butchers’ luck perhaps, but some similar strain.

  She was right, he told Anjum. He had lied to her and told the truth to Sangeeta Madam Haramzaadi Bitch. Saddam Hussain was his chosen name, not his real name. His real name was Dayachand. He was born into a family of Chamars—skinners—in a village called Badshahpur in the state of Haryana, only a couple of hours away by bus from Delhi.

  One day, in answer to a phone call, he and his father, along with three other men, hired a Tempo to drive out to a nearby village to collect the carcass of a cow that had died on someone’s farm.

  “This was what our people did,” Saddam said. “When cows died, upper-caste farmers would call us to collect the carcasses—because they couldn’t pollute themselves by touching them.”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” Anjum said, in a tone that sounded s
uspiciously like admiration. “Some of them are very neat and clean. They don’t eat onions, garlic, meat…”

  Saddam ignored that intervention.

  “So we would go and collect the carcasses, skin them, and turn the hides into leather…I’m talking about the year 2002. I was still in school. You know better than me what was going on then…what it was like…Yours happened in February, mine in November. It was the day of Dussehra. On our way to pick up the cow we passed a Ramlila maidan where they had built huge effigies of the demons…Ravan, Meghnad and Kumbhakaran, as high as three-storeyed buildings—all ready to be blown up in the evening.”

  No Old Delhi Muslim needed a lesson about the Hindu festival of Dussehra. It was celebrated every year in the Ramlila grounds, just outside Turkman Gate. Every year the effigies of Ravan, the ten-headed “demon” King of Lanka, his brother Kumbhakaran and his son Meghnad grew taller and were packed with more and more explosives. Every year the Ramlila, the story of how Lord Ram, King of Ayodhya, vanquished Ravan in the battle of Lanka, which Hindus believed was the story of the triumph of Good over Evil, was enacted with greater aggression and ever-more generous sponsorship. A few audacious scholars had begun to suggest that the Ramlila was really history turned into mythology, and that the evil demons were really dark-skinned Dravidians—indigenous rulers—and the Hindu gods who vanquished them (and turned them into Untouchables and other oppressed castes who would spend their lives in service of the new rulers) were the Aryan invaders. They pointed to village rituals in which people worshipped deities, including Ravan, that in Hinduism were considered to be demons. In the new dispensation however, ordinary people did not need to be scholars to know, even if they could not openly say so, that in the rise and rise of the Parakeet Reich, regardless of what may or may not have been meant in the scriptures, in saffron parakeetspeak, the evil demons had come to mean not just indigenous people, but everybody who was not Hindu. Which included of course the citizenry of Shahjahanabad.

  When the giant effigies were blown up, the sound of the explosions would boom through the narrow lanes of the old city. And few were in doubt about what that was meant to mean.

  Every year, the morning after Good had vanquished Evil, Ahlam Baji, the midwife-turned-wandering-queen with filthy hair, would go to the Ramlila grounds, sift through the debris, and return with bows and arrows, sometimes a whole handlebar mustache, or a staring eye, an arm, or a sword that stuck out of her fertilizer bag.

  So when Saddam spoke of Dussehra, Anjum understood it in all its vast and varied meanings.

  “We found the dead cow easily,” Saddam said. “It’s always easy, you just have to know the art of walking straight into the stink. We loaded the carcass on to the Tempo and started driving home. On the way we stopped at the Dulina police station to pay the Station House Officer—his name was Sehrawat—his cut. It was a previously-agreed-upon sum, a per-cow rate. But that day he asked for more. Not just for more, for triple the amount. Which meant we would have actually been losing money to skin that cow. We knew him well, that Sehrawat. I don’t know what came over him that day—maybe he wanted the money to buy alcohol that night, to celebrate Dussehra, or maybe he had a debt to pay off, I don’t know. Maybe he was just trying to take advantage of the political climate of the time. My father and his friends tried to plead with him, but he wouldn’t listen. He got angry when they said they didn’t even have that much money on them. He arrested them on the charge of ‘cow-slaughter’ and put them in the police lock-up. I was left outside. My father didn’t seem worried when he went in, so I wasn’t either. I waited, assuming they were just doing some hard bargaining and would soon come to an agreement. Two hours went by. Crowds of people passed by on their way to the evening fireworks. Some were dressed as gods, Ram, Laxman and Hanuman—little kids with bows and arrows, some with monkey’s tails and their faces painted red, some were demons with black faces, all going to take part in the Ramlila. When they walked past our truck, they all held their noses because of the stink. At sunset, I heard the explosions of the effigies being blown up and the cheers of the people watching. I was upset that I had missed all the fun. In a while people began to return home. There was still no sign of my father and his friends. And then, I don’t know how it happened—maybe the police spread the rumor, or made a few phone calls—but a crowd started to collect outside the police station demanding the ‘cow-killers’ be turned over to them. The dead cow in the Tempo, stinking up the whole area, was proof enough for them. People began to block traffic. I didn’t know what to do, where to hide, so I mingled with the crowd. Some people started shouting Jai Shri Ram! and Vande Mataram! More and more joined in and it turned into a frenzy. A few men went into the police station and brought my father and his three friends out. They began to beat them, at first just with their fists, and with shoes. But then someone brought a crowbar, someone else a carjack. I couldn’t see much, but when the first blows fell I heard their cries…”

  Saddam turned to Anjum.

  “I have never heard a sound like that…it was a strange, high sound, it wasn’t human. But then the howling of the crowd drowned them. I don’t need to tell you. You know…” Saddam’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Everybody watched. Nobody stopped them.”

  He described how once the mob had finished its business the cars switched their headlights on, all together, like an army convoy. How they splashed through puddles of his father’s blood as if it were rainwater, how the road looked like a street in the old city on the day of Bakr-Eid.

  “I was part of the mob that killed my father,” Saddam said.

  Anjum’s desolate fort with its humming walls and secret dungeons threatened to rise around her again. Saddam and she could almost hear each other’s heartbeats. She couldn’t bring herself to say anything, not even to utter a word of sympathy. But Saddam knew she was listening. It was a while before he spoke again.

  “A few months after all this my mother, who was already unwell, died. I was left in the care of my uncle and my grandmother. I dropped out of school, stole some money from my uncle and came to Delhi. I arrived in Delhi with just a little money and the clothes I was wearing. I had only one ambition—I wanted to kill that bastard Sehrawat. Someday I will. I slept on the streets, worked as a truck cleaner, for a few months even as a sewage worker. And then my friend Neeraj, who is from my village, now he works in the Municipal Corporation, you’ve met him—”

  “Yes,” Anjum said, “that tall, beautiful-looking boy—”

  “Yes, him. He tried to get into modeling but couldn’t…even for that you have to pay pimps. Now he drives a truck for the Municipal Corporation…Anyway, Neeraj helped me to get a job here, in the mortuary, where we first met…A few years after I came to Delhi I was passing a TV showroom, and one of the TVs in the window was playing the evening news. That’s when I first saw the video of the hanging of Saddam Hussein. I didn’t know anything about him, but I was so impressed by the courage and dignity of that man in the face of death. When I got my first mobile phone, I asked the shopkeeper to find that video and download it for me. I watched it again and again. I wanted to be like him. I decided to become a Muslim and take his name. I felt it would give me the courage to do what I had to do and face the consequences, like him.”

  “Saddam Hussein was a bastard,” Anjum said. “He killed so many people.”

  “Maybe. But he was brave…See…Look at this.”

  Saddam took out his fancy new smartphone with its fancy big screen and pulled up a video. He shaded the screen with a cupped palm to cut the glare. It was a TV clip that began with an advertisement for Vaseline Intensive Care moisturizing cream in which a pretty girl oiled her elbows and shins and seemed extremely pleased with the results. Next up was an advertisement by the Jammu & Kashmir Tourism Department—snowy landscapes and happy people in warm clothes sitting in snow sledges. The voice-over said, “Jammu & Kashmir. So White. So Fair. So Exciting.” Then the TV announcer said something in English and Saddam Hussein, fo
rmer President of Iraq, appeared, elegant, with a salt-and-pepper beard, in a black overcoat and white shirt. He towered over the group of murmuring men wearing peaked, black executioner’s hoods who surrounded him and looked at him through eye-slits. His hands were tied behind his back. He stood still while one of the men tied a black scarf around his neck, making gestures that seemed to suggest that the scarf would help to prevent the skin on his neck getting chafed by the hangman’s rope. Once it was knotted, the scarf made Saddam Hussein look even more elegant. Surrounded by the jabbering, hooded men, he walked to the gallows. The noose was looped over his head and tightened around his neck. He said his prayers. The last expression on his face before he fell through the trapdoor was one of absolute disdain for his executioners.

  “I want to be this kind of a bastard,” Saddam said. “I want to do what I have to do and then, if I have to pay a price, I want to pay it like that.”

  “I have a friend who lives in Iraq,” Anjum said, seemingly more impressed by Saddam’s phone than with the execution video. “Guptaji. He sends me his photos from Iraq.” She pulled out her phone and showed Saddam the pictures that D. D. Gupta sent her regularly—Guptaji in his flat in Baghdad, Guptaji and his Iraqi mistress on a picnic, and a series of portraits of the blast walls that Guptaji had constructed all over Iraq for the US Army. Some were new and some were already pockmarked with bullet holes and covered with graffiti. Across one of them, someone had scrawled an American army general’s famous words: Be professional, be polite and have a plan to kill everybody you meet.