The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

  Opposite the toilet, back on the TV-crew side of the road (but some serious ideological distance away), was what people on the pavement called the Border: Manipuri Nationalists asking for the revocation of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which made it legal for the Indian Army to kill on “suspicion”; Tibetan refugees calling for a free Tibet; and, most unusually (and most dangerously, for them), the Association of Mothers of the Disappeared, whose sons had gone missing, in their thousands, in the war for freedom in Kashmir. (Spooky, then, to have a soundtrack that went “Hi Mom! Hi Mom! Hi Mom!” However, the Mothers of the Disappeared did not register this eeriness because they thought of themselves as Moj—“Mother” in Kashmiri—and not “Mom.”)

  It was the Association’s first visit to the Super Capital. They weren’t all mothers; the wives, sisters and a few young children of the Disappeared had come too. Each of them carried a picture of their missing son, brother or husband. Their banner said:

  The Story of Kashmir

  DEAD = 68,000

  DISAPPEARED = 10,000

  Is this Democracy or Demon Crazy?

  No TV camera pointed at that banner, not even by mistake. Most of those engaged in India’s Second Freedom Struggle felt nothing less than outrage at the idea of freedom for Kashmir and the Kashmiri women’s audacity.

  Some of the Mothers, like some of the Bhopal gas leak victims, had become a little jaded. They had told their stories at endless meetings and tribunals in the international supermarkets of grief, along with other victims of other wars in other countries. They had wept publicly and often, and nothing had come of it. The horror they were going through had grown a hard, bitter shell.

  The trip to Delhi had turned out to be an unhappy experience for the Association. The women were heckled and threatened at their roadside press conference in the afternoon and eventually the police had had to intervene and throw a cordon around the Mothers. “Muslim Terrorists do not deserve Human Rights!” shouted Gujarat ka Lalla’s undercover janissaries. “We have seen your genocide! We have faced your ethnic cleansing! Our people have been living in refugee camps for twenty years now!” Some young men spat at photographs of the dead and missing Kashmiri men. The “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” they referred to was the mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir Valley when the freedom struggle had turned militant in the 1990s and some Muslim militants had turned on the tiny Hindu population. Several hundred Hindus had been massacred in macabre ways and when the government announced that it could not ensure their safety, almost the entire population of Kashmiri Hindus, almost two hundred thousand people, had fled the Valley and moved into refugee camps in the plains of Jammu where many of them still lived. A few of Lalla’s janissaries on the pavement that day were Kashmiri Hindus who had lost their homes and families and all they had ever known.

  Perhaps even more hurtful to the Mothers than the Spitters were the three beautifully groomed, pencil-thin college girls who walked past that morning on their way to shop at Connaught Place. “Oh wow! Kashmir! What funnn! Apparently it’s completely normal now, ya, safe for tourists. Let’s go? It’s supposed to be stunning.”

  The Association of Mothers had decided to get through the night somehow and never come back to Delhi. Sleeping out on the street was a new experience for them. Back home they all had pretty houses and kitchen gardens. That night they had a meager meal (that was a new experience too), rolled up their banner and tried to sleep, waiting for day to break, longing to begin their journey back to their beautiful, war-torn valley.

  —

  It was there, right next to the Mothers of the Disappeared, that our quiet baby appeared. It took the Mothers a while to notice her, because she was the color of night. A sharply outlined absence in the shadows under the street light. More than twenty years of living with crackdowns, cordon-and-search operations and the midnight knock (Operation Tiger, Operation Serpent Destruction, Operation Catch and Kill) had taught the Mothers to read the darkness. But when it came to babies, the only ones they were used to looked like almond blossoms with apple cheeks. The Mothers of the Disappeared did not know what to do with a baby that had Appeared.

  Especially not a black one

  Kruhun kaal

  Especially not a black girl

  Kruhun kaal hish

  Especially not one that was swaddled in litter

  Shikas ladh

  —

  The whisper was passed around the pavement like a parcel. The question grew into an announcement: “Bhai baccha kiska hai?” Whose baby is this?

  —

  Silence.

  —

  Then someone said they had seen the mother vomiting in the park in the afternoon. Someone else said, “Oh no, that wasn’t her.”

  Someone said she was a beggar. Someone else said she was a rapevictim (which was a word in every language).

  Someone said she had come with the group that had been there earlier in the day organizing a signature campaign for the release of political prisoners. It was rumored to be a Front organization for the banned Maoist Party that was fighting a guerrilla war in the forests of Central India. Someone else said, “Oh no, that wasn’t her. She was alone. She’s been here for some days.”

  Someone said she was the former lover of a politician who had thrown her out after she got pregnant.

  Everybody agreed that politicians were all bastards. That didn’t help address the problem:

  What to do with the baby?

  —

  Perhaps aware that she had become the center of attention, or perhaps because she was frightened, the quiet baby finally wailed. A woman picked her up. (Later, about her it was said that she was tall, she was short, she was black, she was white, she was beautiful, she was not, she was old, she was young, she was a stranger, she was often seen at Jantar Mantar.) A piece of paper folded many times into a small square pellet, taped down along one edge, was threaded on to the thick black string tied around the baby’s waist. The woman (who was beautiful, who was not, who was tall, who was short) untaped it and handed it to someone to read. The message was written in English and was unambiguous: I cannot look after this child. So I am leaving her here.

  —

  Eventually, after a lot of murmured consultation, hesitantly, sadly, rather reluctantly, the people decided that the baby was a matter for the police.

  —

  Before Saddam could stop her, Anjum stood up and began to walk fast towards what seemed to have become a spontaneously constituted Baby Welfare Committee. She was a head taller than most people, so it wasn’t hard to follow her. As she walked through the crowd, the bells on her anklets, not visible below her loose salwar, went chhann-chhann-chhann. To Saddam, suddenly terrified, each chhann-chhann sounded like a gunshot. The blue street light lit up the faint shadow of white stubble on Anjum’s dark, pitted skin, shiny now with sweat. Her nose-pin flashed on her magnificent nose that curved downwards like the beak of a bird of prey. There was something unleashed about her, something uncalibrated and yet absolutely certain—a sense of destiny perhaps.

  “Police? We’re going to give her to the police?” Anjum said in both her voices, separate, yet joined, one rasping, one deep, distinct. Her white tusk shone out from between her betel-nut-red stumps.

  The solidarity of her “We” was an embrace. Predictably, it was met with an immediate insult.

  A wit from the crowd said, “Why? What will you do with her? You can’t turn her into one of you, can you? Modern technology has made great advances, but it hasn’t got that far yet…” He was referring to the widely held belief that Hijras kidnapped male babies and castrated them. His waggishness earned him an eddy of spineless laughter.

  Anjum didn’t balk at the vulgarity of the comment. She spoke with an intensity that was as clear and as urgent as hunger.

  “She’s a gift from God. Give her to me. I can give her the love she needs. The police will just throw her in a government orphanage. She’ll die there.”
br />   Sometimes a single person’s clarity can unnerve a muddled crowd. On this occasion, Anjum’s did. Those who could understand what she was saying were a little intimidated by the refinement of her Urdu. It was at odds with the class they assumed she came from.

  “Her mother must have left her here thinking as I did, that this place is today’s Karbala, where the battle for justice, the battle of good against evil, is being fought. She must have thought, ‘These people are fighters, the best in the world, one of them will look after the child that I cannot’—and you want to call the police?” Though she was angry and though she was six feet tall and had broad, powerful shoulders, her manner was inflected with the exaggerated coquetry and the fluttering hand gestures of a 1930s Lucknow courtesan.

  Saddam Hussain braced himself for a brawl. Ishrat and Ustad Hameed arrived to do what they could.

  “Who gave these Hijras permission to sit here? Which of these Struggles do they belong to?”

  Mr. Aggarwal, a slim, middle-aged man with a clipped mustache, wearing a safari shirt, terry cotton trousers and a printed Gandhi cap that said I am against Corruption are You? had the curt, authoritative air of a bureaucrat, which was indeed what he had been until recently. He had spent most of his working life in the Revenue Department, until one day, on a whim, sickened by his ringside view of the rot in the system, he had resigned his government job to “serve the nation.” He had been tinkering on the periphery of good works and social service for a few years, but now, as the tubby Gandhian’s chief lieutenant, he had shot to prominence and his picture was in the papers every day. Many believed (correctly) that the real power lay with him, and that the old man was just a charismatic mascot, a hireling who fitted the job-profile and had now begun to exceed his brief. The conspiracy theorists, who huddled on the edges of all political movements, whispered that the old man was deliberately being encouraged to promote himself, to paint himself into a corner, so that his own hubris would not allow a retreat. If the old man died of hunger publicly, on live TV, the rumor went, the Movement would have a martyr and that would kick-start the political career of Mr. Aggarwal in a way nothing else could. The rumor was unkind and untrue. Mr. Aggarwal was the man behind the Movement, but even he had been taken aback at the frenzy the old Gandhian evoked, and he was riding the tide, not plotting a stage-managed suicide. In a few months he would jettison his mascot and go on to become a mainstream politician—a veritable treasure house of many of the qualities he had once denounced—and a formidable opponent of Gujarat ka Lalla.

  —

  Mr. Aggarwal’s singular advantage as an emerging politician was his unsingular looks. He looked like many people. Everything about him, the way he dressed, the way he spoke, the way he thought, was neat and tidy, clipped and groomed. He had a high voice and an understated, matter-of-fact manner, except when he stood before a microphone. Then he was transformed into a raging, almost uncontrollable, tornado of terrifying righteousness. By intervening in the matter of the baby, he hoped to deflect another public spat (like the one between the Kashmiri Mothers and the Spitting Brigade) that could distract media attention away from what he thought of as the Real Issues. “This is our Second Freedom Struggle. Our country is on the brink of a Revolution,” he said portentously to the quickly growing audience. “Thousands have gathered here because corrupt politicians have made our lives unbearable. If we solve the problem of corruption we can take our country to new heights, right to the top of the world. This is a space for serious politics, not a circus ring.” He addressed Anjum without looking at her: “Do you have police permission to be here? Everybody must have permission to be here.” She towered over him. His refusal to meet her eye meant he was squarely addressing her breasts.

  Mr. Aggarwal had misread the temperature, misjudged the situation completely. The people who had gathered were not wholly sympathetic to him. Many resented the way his “Freedom Struggle” had grabbed all the media attention and undermined everybody else. Anjum, for her part, was oblivious to the crowd. It didn’t matter to her in which direction its sympathies lay. Something had lit up inside her and filled her with resolute courage.

  “Police permission?” Never could two words have been pronounced with more contempt. “This is a child, not some illegal encroachment on your father’s property. You apply to the police, Sahib. The rest of us will take the shorter route and apply straight to the Almighty.” Saddam had just enough time to whisper a small prayer of gratitude that the word she used for the Almighty was the generic Khuda and not specifically Allah mian before the battle lines were drawn.

  The adversaries squared off.

  Anjum and the Accountant.

  What a confrontation it was.

  Ironically both of them were on the pavement that night to escape their past and all that had circumscribed their lives so far. And yet, in order to arm themselves for battle, they retreated right back into what they sought to escape, into what they were used to, into what they really were.

  He, a revolutionary trapped in an accountant’s mind. She, a woman trapped in a man’s body. He, raging at a world in which the balance sheets did not tally. She, raging at her glands, her organs, her skin, the texture of her hair, the width of her shoulders, the timbre of her voice. He, fighting for a way to impose fiscal integrity on a decaying system. She, wanting to pluck the very stars from the sky and grind them into a potion that would give her proper breasts and hips and a long, thick plait of hair that would swing from side to side as she walked, and yes, the thing she longed for most of all, that most well stocked of Delhi’s vast stock of invectives, that insult of all insults, a Maa ki Choot, a mother’s cunt. He, who had spent his days tracking tax dodges, pay-offs and sweetheart deals. She, who had lived for years like a tree in an old graveyard, where, on lazy mornings and late at night, the spirits of the old poets whom she loved, Ghalib, Mir and Zauq, came to recite their verse, drink, argue and gamble. He, who filled in forms and ticked boxes. She, who never knew which box to tick, which queue to stand in, which public toilet to enter (Kings or Queens? Lords or Ladies? Sirs or Hers?). He, who believed he was always right. She, who knew she was all wrong, always wrong. He, reduced by his certainties. She, augmented by her ambiguity. He, who wanted a law. She, who wanted a baby.

  A circle formed around them: furious, curious, assessing the adversaries, picking sides. It didn’t matter. Which tight-arsed Gandhian accountant stood a chance in hell in a one-to-one public face-off against an old, Old Delhi Hijra?

  Anjum bent low and brought her face within kissing distance of Mr. Aggarwal’s.

  “Ai Hai! Why so angry, jaan? Won’t you look at me?”

  Saddam Hussain clenched his fists. Ishrat restrained him. She took a deep breath and waded into the battlefield, intervening in the practiced way that only Hijras knew how to when it came to protecting each other—by making a declaration of war and peace at the same time. Her attire, which had looked absurd only a few hours ago, could not have been more appropriate for what she needed to do now. She started the spread-fingered Hijra clap and began to dance, moving her hips obscenely, swirling her chunni, her outrageous, aggressive sexuality aimed at humiliating Mr. Aggarwal, who had never in all his life fought a fair street fight. Damp patches appeared in the armpits of his white shirt.

  Ishrat began with a song she knew the crowd would know—from a film called Umrao Jaan, immortalized by the beautiful actress Rekha.

  Dil cheez kya hai, aap meri jaan lijiye

  Why just my heart, take my whole life too

  Someone tried to hustle her off the pavement. She moved to the middle of the wide, empty road, enjoying herself now as she pirouetted on the zebra crossing under the street lights. From the opposite side of the road someone began beating out a rhythm on a dafli. People joined the singing. She was right. Everybody knew the song:

  Bas ek baar mera kaha maan lijiye

  But just this once, my love, grant me my wish

  That courtesan’s song, or at least that o
ne line, could have been the anthem for almost everybody in Jantar Mantar that day. All those who were there were there because they believed that somebody cared, that somebody was listening. That somebody would grant them a hearing.

  —

  A fight broke out. Perhaps someone said something lewd. Perhaps Saddam Hussain hit him. It’s not clear exactly what happened.

  The policemen on duty at the pavement snapped out of their sleep and swung their lathis at anybody who was within their reach. Police patrol jeeps (With You, For You, Always) arrived with flashing lights and the Delhi Police special—maader chod behen chod maa ki choot behen ka lauda.*

  —

  The TV cameras crowded in. The activist on her nineteenth fast saw her chance. She waded into the crowd and turned to the cameras with her trademark, clenched-fist call and, with unerring political acumen, she appropriated the lathi charge for her people.

  Lathi goli khaayenge!

  Batons and bullets we will bear!

  And her people answered:

  Andolan chalaayenge!

  With our struggle we’ll persevere!

  It didn’t take the police long to restore order. Among those arrested and driven away in police vans were Mr. Aggarwal, Anjum, a quaking Ustad Hameed and the live art installation in his scatological suit. (The Lime Man had made himself scarce.) They were released the following morning with no charges.