The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

  —

  As for me, the least remarkable of us all—I loved her without pride. And without hope. Without hope, because I knew that even if by some remote chance she had reciprocated my feelings, my parents, my Brahmin parents, would never accept her—the girl without a past, without a caste—into the family. Had I persevered, it would have meant an upheaval of the sort that I simply did not have the stomach for. Even in the most uneventful of lives, we are called upon to choose our battles, and this one wasn’t mine.

  Now, these years later, my parents are both dead. And I’m what’s known as a “family man.” My wife and I tolerate each other and adore our children. Chitra—Chittaroopa—my wife (yes, my Brahmin wife), is in the Foreign Service and is posted to Prague. Our daughters, Rabia and Ania, are seventeen and fifteen. They stay with their mother and attend the French School. Rabia hopes to study English literature and young Ania is dead set on a career in human rights law. It’s an unorthodox choice, and her determination, her refusal to even consider other options, is a little odd, especially for one so young. I was troubled about it at first. I wondered whether it was her way of staging a subtle version of a teenage rebellion against her father. But that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. Over the last ten years or so the field of human rights has become a perfectly respectable and even lucrative profession. I have been nothing short of encouraging with her. In any case, a final decision is still a few years away. We’ll see what happens. Both the girls are good students. Chitra and I have been promised a joint posting soon—hopefully in the country where the girls will be at university.

  I never imagined I would ever do anything to upset or harm my family in any way. But when Tilo walked back into my life, those legal ties, those lofty, moral principles, atrophied and even seemed a little absurd. As it turned out my anxiety was irrelevant—she did not seem to even notice my dilemma or discomfort.

  By renting these rooms to her when she needed them, I told myself I was making up for my trespasses tactfully and unobtrusively. I say “trespasses” because I have always felt that I had failed her in a nebulous and yet fundamental way. She didn’t seem to see it like that at all—but then she wasn’t that sort of person.

  —

  I had only seen her on and off since she married Naga. Their wedding in Delhi remains burned into my memory, and not because of what might seem to be the obvious reasons—heartbreak or thwarted love. That, in fact, was the least of it. I was reasonably happy at the time. My own marriage was less than two years old; there was still some semblance of real affection between me and my wife, if not love. The sapping brittleness that marks my relationship with Chitra now had not set in yet.

  By the time Tilo and he got married, Naga had already made the many transitions from an irreverent, iconoclastic student to an unemployable intellectual on the radical Left, to being a passionate advocate of the Palestinian cause (his hero at the time was George Habash), and then on to mainstream journalism. Like many noisy extremists, he has moved through a whole spectrum of extreme political opinion. What has remained consistent is only the decibel level. Now Naga has a handler—though he may not see it quite that way—in the Intelligence Bureau. With a senior position at his paper, he is a valuable asset for us.

  His journey to the dark side, if that’s what you want to call it—I wouldn’t—began with the usual bit of quid pro quo. His beat was the Punjab. The insurgency had more or less been crushed by then. But Naga spent his time digging up old stories, providing ammunition for those farcical parodies called “People’s tribunals,” after which they brought out even more farcical “People’s charge-sheets” against the police and the paramilitary. An administration that was at war with a ruthless insurgency cannot be held to the same standards as one that is functioning in ordinary, peaceful conditions. But who was to explain that to a crusading journalist who wrote his copy with the sound of applause permanently ringing in his ears? On one of his vacations from this brand of performative radicalism, Naga went to Goa and, in typical Naga fashion, fell wildly in love and impulsively married a young Australian hippy. Lindy, I think she was called. (Or was it Charlotte? I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter. I’ll stay with Lindy.) Within a year of their marriage, Lindy was arrested in Goa for heroin trafficking. She faced the prospect of several years in prison. Naga was beside himself. His father was an influential man and could easily have helped, but Naga—a late arrival in his father’s life—had always had a troubled relationship with him and didn’t want him to know. So he called me and I pulled a few strings. The Director General of Police in Punjab spoke to his counterpart in Goa. We got Lindy out of custody and had the charges dropped. As soon as she was released, Lindy caught the first plane home to Perth. In a few months Naga and she were formally divorced. Naga continued his work in Punjab, needless to say, a considerably chastened man.

  When we needed a journalist’s help on a small matter, a case that human rights activists were making a noise about, though as usual many of their facts needed correcting, I called Naga. He helped. And so it went. A collaboration was born.

  Gradually Naga began to enjoy the head start he had over his colleagues because of the briefings he received from us. It was a great irony—another kind of drug racket. This time around we were the drug dealers. He was our addict. In a few years he rose to become a star reporter and a sought-after security analyst in the media firmament. When his relationship with the Bureau promised to become more than a temporary association—a marriage and not just a one-night stand—I thought it prudent to step out of the way. A colleague of mine, R. C. Sharma—Ram Chandra Sharma—took over. R.C. and he got on very well. They shared the same cruel sense of humor and a love for rock ’n’ roll and the blues. The one thing I will say for Naga is that not a rupee ever changed hands. About that he was—and continues to be—honest to a fault. Since his idea of professional integrity requires him to live by his principles, in order to remain a person of integrity, he has changed his principles, and now believes in us almost more than we believe in ourselves. What an irony for the schoolboy whose favorite taunt was to call me the “Running Dog of Imperialism” at an age when most of us were still reading Archie comics.

  I’m not sure where and from whom Naga learned the fiery language of the Left. Perhaps from a relative who was communist. Whoever it was, he—or she—was a good teacher and Naga deployed what he learned spectacularly. It took him from conquest to conquest. I was once pitted against him in a school debate. We must have been thirteen or fourteen years old. The topic was “Does God Exist?” I was to speak for, and Naga against, the motion. I spoke first. Then Naga delivered his flaming speech, his skinny body taut as a whipcord, his voice quavering with indignation. Our mesmerized classmates took diligent notes of his blatant blasphemy: “The falsehood of our 330 million mute idols, the selfish deities we call Ram and Krishna are not going to save us from hunger, disease and poverty. Our foolish faith in monkeys and elephant-headed apparitions is not going to feed our starving masses…” I didn’t stand a chance. Naga’s speech made mine sound as though it had been written by a pious, elderly aunt. Oddly, though I have a clear, raw memory of my feeling of utter inadequacy, I have no memory of what I actually said. For months after that, I would secretly declaim Naga’s sacrilege to myself in the mirror: “Our foolish faith in monkeys and elephant-headed apparitions is not going to feed our starving masses…” my atomized spit landing on my own reflection like rain.

  Another of Naga’s milestone performances came a few years later, at a college annual cultural event. Fresh from a summer trip to Bastar with two of his friends, where they had camped in the forest and walked through villages peopled by primitive tribes, Naga ambled on to the stage, long-haired, barefoot, bare-bodied, wearing only a loincloth, with a bow and a quiver of arrows slung over his shoulders. He made a great show of crunching what he claimed was termites on toast, eliciting breathless expressions of coy disgust from the girls in the audience, most of whom wanted to marry him.
After swallowing the last morsel of toast, he went up to the microphone and performed the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” vocalizing the background score, simulating the chords on an imaginary guitar. He was a good, maybe even excellent, singer, but I found the whole thing distasteful, and thought it showed a deep disrespect for indigenous people as well as for Mick Jagger, who, at that point in my life, I believed was God. (I wish I had thought of that for my pro-God speech in school.) I actually took it upon myself to say so to him. Naga laughed and insisted that his performance was a tribute to both.

  Today, as the saffron tide of Hindu Nationalism rises in our country like the swastika once did in another, Naga’s “foolish faith” schoolboy speech would probably get him expelled, if not by the school authorities, then certainly by some sort of parents’ campaign. In fact, in today’s climate, to get away with just expulsion would be lucky. People are being lynched for far less. Even my colleagues in the Bureau don’t seem to be able to see the difference between religious faith and patriotism. They seem to want a sort of Hindu Pakistan. Most of them are conservative, closet Brahmins who wear their sacred threads inside their safari suits, and their sacred ponytails dangling down the inside of their vegetarian skulls. They tolerate me only because I am a fellow Twice-born (actually, the caste I belong to is Baidya, but we count ourselves as Brahmin). Still, I keep my opinions to myself. Naga on the other hand has slid into the new dispensation in one smooth slither. His old irreverence has vanished without a trace. In his current avatar he wears a tweed blazer and smokes cigars. I haven’t met him in years, but I see him playing the National Security expert on those excitable TV shows—he doesn’t seem to even realize that he’s not much more than a ventriloquist’s bright puppet. It saddens me sometimes, to see him so housebroken. Naga is perpetually experimenting with his facial hair. Sometimes he sports a French goatee, sometimes a twirled, waxed, Daliesque mustache, sometimes he affects designer stubble, and sometimes he’s clean-shaven. He can’t seem to settle on a “look.” It’s the Achilles heel in his rig-out of opinionated self-importance. It gives him away. Or at least that’s the way I see it.

  Unfortunately of late he has begun to overplay his hand, and his intemperance is becoming a liability. Twice in two years the Bureau has had to intervene (discreetly of course) with the proprietors of his newspaper, to settle squabbles he has had with his editor that ended in impulsive resignations. The last time around we pulled off a coup. We had him reinstated with a raise.

  —

  If being together in kindergarten, school and university, and playing homosexual lovers in a play wasn’t enough, during the years that I was posted to Srinagar, as Deputy Station Head for the Bureau, Naga was the Kashmir correspondent for his newspaper. He wasn’t stationed in Kashmir, but lived there most days of the month. He had a permanent room at Ahdoos Hotel, where most reporters stayed. His relationship with the Bureau had been cemented by then, but was not as evident as it is now. It suited us much better that way. To his readers—and possibly even to himself—he was still the intrepid journalist who could be trusted to expose the so-called crimes of the Indian State.

  It must have been well past midnight when the call came through on the Governor’s hotline at the Forest Guest House in Dachigam National Park, about twenty kilometers out of Srinagar. I was there as part of His Excellency’s entourage. (We were well into the Troubles by then. The civilian government had been dismissed; it was 1996, the sixth straight year of Governor’s Rule in the State.)

  His Excellency, a former Chief of the Indian Army, liked to get away from the bloodletting in the city as often as he could. He spent his weekends in Dachigam, strolling along a rushing mountain stream with his family and friends, while the children in the party, each shadowed by a tense, heavily armed security guard, mowed down imaginary militants (who shouted Allah-hu-Akbar! as they died) and chased long-tailed marmots into their holes. They usually had a picnic lunch, but dinner was always back at the guest house—rice and curried trout from the fish farm close by. The ponds in the hatchery were so thick with fish that you could put your hand in—if you could stand the close-to-freezing temperature—and pick out your own thrashing rainbow trout.

  It was autumn. The forest was heart-stoppingly beautiful in the way only a Himalayan forest can be. The Chinar trees had begun to turn color. The meadows were a coppery gold. If you were lucky you might spot a black bear or a leopard or Dachigam’s famous deer, the hangul. (Naga used to call one of Kashmir’s famously randy ex–Chief Ministers the “well-hung ghoul.” It was a clever pun, I have to admit, though of course most people didn’t get it.) I had become something of a bird man—a passion that has remained with me—and could tell a Himalayan griffon from a bearded vulture and could identify the streaked laughing thrush, the orange bullfinch, Tytler’s leaf warbler and the Kashmir flycatcher, which was threatened then, and must surely by now be extinct. The trouble with being in Dachigam was that it had the effect of unsettling one’s resolve. It underlined the futility of it all. It made one feel that Kashmir really belonged to those creatures. That none of us who were fighting over it—Kashmiris, Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese (they have a piece of it too—Aksai Chin, which used to be part of the old Kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir), or for that matter Pahadis, Gujjars, Dogras, Pashtuns, Shins, Ladakhis, Baltis, Gilgitis, Purikis, Wakhis, Yashkuns, Tibetans, Mongols, Tatars, Mon, Khowars—none of us, neither saint nor soldier, had the right to claim the truly heavenly beauty of that place for ourselves. I was once moved to say so, quite casually, to Imran, a young Kashmiri police officer who had done some exemplary undercover work for us. His response was, “It’s a very great thought, sir. I have the same love for animals as yourself. Even in my travels in India I feel the exact same feeling—that India belongs not to Punjabis, Biharis, Gujaratis, Madrasis, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians, but to those beautiful creatures—peacocks, elephants, tigers, bears…”

  He was polite to the point of being obsequious, but I knew what he was getting at. It was extraordinary; you couldn’t—and still cannot—trust even the ones you assumed were on your side. Not even the damn police.

  It had already snowed in the high mountains, but the border passes were still negotiable and small legations of fighters—gullible young Kashmiris and murderous Pakistanis, Afghans, even some Sudanese—who belonged to the thirty or so remaining terrorist groups (down from almost one hundred) were still making the treacherous journey across the Line of Control, dying in droves on the way. Dying. Maybe that’s an inadequate description. What was that great line in Apocalypse Now? “Terminate with Extreme Prejudice.” Our soldiers’ instructions at the Line of Control were roughly similar.

  What else should they have been? “Call their mothers”?

  The militants who managed to make it through rarely survived in the Valley for more than two or at most three years. If they weren’t captured or killed by the security forces, they slaughtered each other. We guided them along that path, although they didn’t need much assistance—they still don’t. The Believers come with their guns, their prayer beads and their own Destroy-Yourselves Manual.

  Yesterday a Pakistani friend forwarded me this—it’s making the mobile phone rounds, so you may have seen it already:

  I saw a man on a bridge about to jump.

  I said, “Don’t do it!”

  He said, “Nobody loves me.”

  I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”

  He said, “Yes.”

  I said, “Are you a Muslim or a non-Muslim?”

  He said, “A Muslim.”

  I said, “Shia or Sunni?”

  He said, “Sunni.”

  I said, “Me too! Deobandi or Barelvi?”

  He said, “Barelvi.”

  I said, “Me too! Tanzeehi or Tafkeeri?”

  He said, “Tanzeehi.”

  I said, “Me too! Tanzeehi Azmati or Tanzeehi Farhati?”

  He said, “Tanzeehi Farhati.”

  I said, “Me
too! Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Uloom Ajmer, or Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Noor Mewat?”

  He said, “Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Noor Mewat.”

  I said, “Die, kafir!” and I pushed him over.

  Thankfully some of them still have a sense of humor.

  —

  The inbuilt idiocy, this idea of jihad, has seeped into Kashmir from Pakistan and Afghanistan. Now, twenty-five years down the line, I think, to our advantage, we have eight or nine versions of the “True” Islam battling it out in Kashmir. Each has its own stable of Mullahs and Maulanas. Some of the most radical among them—those who preach against the idea of nationalism and in favor of the great Islamic Ummah—are actually on our payroll. One of them was recently blown up outside his mosque by a bicycle bomb. He won’t be hard to replace. The only thing that keeps Kashmir from self-destructing like Pakistan and Afghanistan is good old petit bourgeois capitalism. For all their religiosity, Kashmiris are great businessmen. And all businessmen eventually, one way or another, have a stake in the status quo—or what we call the “Peace Process,” which, by the way, is an entirely different kind of business opportunity from peace itself.

  —

  The men who came were young, in their teens or early twenties. A whole generation virtually committed suicide. By ’96 the border-crossings had slowed to a trickle. But we hadn’t managed to completely stem the flow. We were investigating some disturbing intelligence we had received about our soldiers at some border security posts selling windows of “safe passage” during which they would look away discreetly while Gujjar shepherds, who knew those mountains like the backs of their hands, guided the contingents through. Safe Passage was only one of the things on the market. There was also diesel, alcohol, bullets, grenades, army rations, razor wire and timber. Whole forests were disappearing. Sawmills had been set up inside army camps. Kashmiri labor and Kashmiri carpenters had been press-ganged into service. The trucks in the army convoy that brought supplies up to Kashmir from Jammu every day returned loaded with carved walnut-wood furniture. If not the best-equipped, we certainly had the best-furnished—if I may coin a phrase—army in the world. But who’s to interfere with a victorious army?