The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

  Aijaz held Naga’s gaze for a moment. The mortification of being described as a renegade clean outstripped the physical pain he was in. He knew who Naga was. He didn’t recognize his face, obviously, but Naga’s name was well known in militant circles as a fearless journalist—not a fellow traveler by any means, but someone who could be useful—a member of the “human right-wing,” as some militants jokingly called Indian journalists who wrote even-handedly and equally conscientiously about the excesses committed by the security forces as well as the militants. (Naga’s political shift had still not manifested itself as a discernible pattern, not even to himself.) Aijaz knew he had only moments within which to decide what to do. Like a goalkeeper in a penalty shoot-out, he had to commit himself one way or another. He was young—he chose the riskier option. He began to speak, quietly and clearly, in Kashmiri-accented Urdu. The incongruity between his appearance and his words was almost as shocking as the words themselves.

  “I know who you are, sir. Struggling people, people fighting for their freedom and dignity, know Nagaraj Hariharan as an honest, upright journalist. If you write about me you must write the truth. It’s not true what he—Ashfaq Sahib—said. They tortured me, they gave me electric shocks and made me sign a blank sheet. This is what they do here with everybody. I don’t know what they wrote on it later. I don’t know what they have made me say in it. The truth is that I have not denounced anybody. The truth is that I honor those who trained me in jihad more than I honor my own parents. They didn’t force me to join them. It was I who went looking for them.”

  Tilo turned around.

  “I was in Class Twelve in a government school in Tangmarg. It took me one whole year to get recruited. They—Lashkar—were very suspicious of me because I didn’t have any family member who had been killed, tortured or made to disappear. I did it for Azadi and for Islam. They took one year to believe me, to check me out, to see if I was an army agent, or if my family would be left without a breadwinner if I became a militant. They are very careful about—”

  Four policemen burst into the room with trays of omelettes, bread, kebabs, onion rings, chopped carrots and more tea. Ashfaq Mir appeared behind them like a charioteer driving his horses. He personally served the food on to the plates, taking his time to arrange the carrots on the outer rim, the onions inside, like an impenetrable military formation. The room fell silent. There were only two plates. Aijaz returned his gaze to the floor. Tilo turned back to the window. The trucks came and went. The woman with the baby was still standing in the middle of the road. The sky was a flaming rose. The mountains in the distance were ethereally beautiful, but it had been another terrible year for tourism.

  “Please go ahead. Help yourself. Will you like kebab? Now or later? Please, keep talking. No problem. OK, I’m going.” And for the fourth time in ten minutes Ashfaq Mir left his office and stood outside the door.

  Naga was pleased by what Aijaz had said about him and delighted that it had been said in front of Tilo. He could not resist a small performance.

  “You crossed over? You were trained in Pakistan?” Naga asked Aijaz once he was sure Ashfaq Mir was out of earshot.

  “No. I was trained here. In Kashmir. We have everything here now. Training, weapons…We buy our ammunition from the army. It’s twenty rupees for a bullet, nine hundred for—”

  “From the army?”

  “Yes. They don’t want the militancy to end. They don’t want to leave Kashmir. They are very happy with the situation as it is. Everybody on all sides is making money on the bodies of young Kashmiris. So many of the grenade blasts and massacres are done by them.”

  “You’re a Kashmiri. Why did you choose the Lashkar instead of Hizb or JKLF?”

  “Because even the Hizb has respect for certain political leaders in Kashmir. In Lashkar we have no respect for these leaders. I have no respect for any leader. They have cheated and betrayed us. They have made their political careers on the bodies of Kashmiris. They have no plan. I joined Lashkar because I wanted to die. I am supposed to be dead. I did not ever think I would be caught alive.”

  “But first—before you died—you wanted to kill…?”

  Aijaz looked Naga in the eye.

  “Yes. I wanted to kill the murderers of my people. Is that wrong? You can write that.”

  —

  Ashfaq Mir burst in, smiling broadly, but his unsmiling eyes darted from person to person, trying to assess what had passed between them.

  “Enough? Happy? Did he cooperate? Before publication you can please reconfirm with me any facts he gave you. He’s a terrorist, after all. My terrorist brother.”

  And once again he guffawed happily and rang his bell. The burly policeman returned, gathered Aijaz in his arms and carried him away.

  Once the snack had been cleared away on its burly tray, Naga and Tilo were given cheerful (but unspoken) permission to leave. The food on the plates remained untouched, the military formation unbreached.

  —

  On their way to Ahdoos, sitting in the claustrophobic back seat of an armored Gypsy, Naga held Tilo’s hand. Tilo held his hand back. He was acutely aware of the circumstances in which that tentative exchange of tenderness was taking place. He could feel the tremor, the motor under her skin. Still, of all the women in the world, to have this woman’s hand in his made him indescribably happy.

  The smell inside the jeep was overpowering—a rank cocktail of sour metal, gunpowder, hair oil, fear and treachery. Its customary passengers were masked informers, known as “Cats.” During cordon-and-search operations, the adult men of the cordoned neighborhood would be rounded up and paraded past the armored Gypsy, that ubiquitous symbol of dread in the Kashmir Valley. From the depths of his metal cage, the concealed Cat would nod, or blink, and a man would be taken out of the line to be tortured, “disappeared,” or to die. Naga knew all this of course, but it did nothing to lessen the intensity of his contentment.

  The sullen city was wide awake but feigning sleep. Empty streets, closed markets, shuttered shops and locked houses slid past the jeep’s slit windows—“death windows,” local people called them, because what peered out of them were either soldiers’ guns or informers’ eyes. Packs of street dogs slouched about like small bears, their burred coats thickening in anticipation of the approaching winter. Other than tense soldiers on hair-trigger alert, there was not a human in sight. By mid-morning the curfew would be lifted and the security withdrawn to allow people to reclaim their city for a few hours. They would swarm out of their homes in their hundreds of thousands and march to the graveyard, unaware that even the outpouring of their grief and fury had become part of a strategic, military, management plan.

  Naga waited for Tilo to say something. She didn’t. When he tried to initiate a conversation she said, “Please. Can we…is it…possible…to not talk?”

  “Garson said they had killed a man, a Commander Gulrez…they think, or I don’t know who thinks…Garson thinks…or maybe they told him it was Musa. Was it? Just that. Tell me just that?”

  She said nothing for a moment. Then she turned and looked straight at him. Her eyes were broken glass.

  “It was impossible to tell.”

  When he covered the conflict in Punjab, Naga had seen, often enough, the condition of bodies when they came out of interrogation centers. So he took what Tilo said as confirmation of his suspicions. He understood that it would take Tilo a while to get over what she had been through. He was prepared to wait. He thought he knew enough—or at least all that he really needed to know—about what had happened. He forgave himself for the fact that Tilo’s anguish was, for him, the source of exquisite contentment.

  Tilo’s answer to Naga’s question wasn’t an outright lie. But it certainly wasn’t the truth. The truth was that given the condition of the body she saw, had she not known who it was, it would have been impossible to tell. But she did know who it was. She knew very well that it wasn’t Musa.

  With that untruth or half-truth or one-tenth tr
uth (or whatever other fraction of the truth it was), the barriers came down and the borders of the country without consulates were sealed. The episode at the Shiraz was filed away as a closed subject.

  When they returned to Delhi, since Tilo was in no condition to be left alone in what Naga called her “storeroom” in the Nizamuddin basti, he invited her to stay for a while in his little flat on the roof of his parents’ house. When he finally saw her “haircut” he told her that it really suited her and that whoever had done it should become a hairdresser. That made her smile.

  A few weeks later he asked her if she would marry him. She delighted him by saying that she would. Very soon, to his parents’ utter dismay, the ceremony was, as they say, solemnized. They were married on Christmas Day, 1996.

  If cover was what Tilo needed, she couldn’t have done better than becoming the daughter-in-law of Ambassador Shivashankar Hariharan with a home address in Diplomatic Enclave.

  —

  She held that life together for fourteen years and then suddenly, she couldn’t any more. There were a number of explanations for why this was so, but chief among them was exhaustion. She grew tired of living a life that wasn’t really hers at an address she oughtn’t to be at. Ironically, when the drift began, she was fonder of Naga than she had ever been. It was herself she was exhausted by. She had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete—a skill that many consider to be the cornerstone of sanity. The traffic inside her head seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights. The result was incessant noise, a few bad crashes and eventually gridlock.

  —

  Looking back now, Naga realized that for years he had lived with the subconscious dread that Tilo was just passing through his life, like a camel crossing a desert. That she would surely leave him one day.

  Still, when it actually happened, it took him a while to believe it.

  His old friend R.C., who had always maintained that working in the Intelligence Bureau and reading interrogation transcripts gave a man an unparalleled understanding of human nature, more profound than any preacher, poet or psychiatrist could ever hope to attain, took him in hand.

  “What she needs, I’m sorry to say, is two tight slaps. This modern approach of yours doesn’t always work. At the end of the day we’re all animals. We need to be shown our pee ell a see ee. A little clarity will go a long way towards helping all the concerned parties. You will be doing her a favor for which she will, one day, be grateful. Believe me, I speak from experience.” R.C. often dropped his voice mid-sentence and spelled out random words, as though he was hoodwinking an imaginary eavesdropper who didn’t know how to spell. He always referred to people as “parties.” “At the end of the day” was his favorite launching pad for all his advice and insights, just as when he wanted to belittle someone he always began by saying, “With all due respect.”

  R.C. chastised Naga for allowing Tilo to refuse to have children. Children, he said, would have bound her to their marriage like nothing else could. He was a small, soft, effeminate man with a salt-and-pepper mustache. He had a small, soft wife and a small, soft teenaged daughter who was studying molecular biology. They looked like a model family of small, soft toys. So coming from him, this masculine advice was startling even to Naga, who had known him for years. Naga fell to wondering about the nature and frequency of tight slaps that had kept Mrs. R.C. in place. Outwardly she looked placid and perfectly content with her lot—with her houseful of mementoes and her collection of somewhat tasteless jewelry and expensive Kashmiri shawls. He couldn’t imagine that she was really a volcano of hidden furies that needed to be disciplined and slapped from time to time.

  R.C., who loved the blues, played a song for Naga. Billie Holiday’s “No Good Man.”

  I’m the one who gets

  The run-around,

  I oughta hate him

  And yet

  I love him so

  For I require

  Love that’s made of fire

  R.C. heard “I oughta hate him” as “All the hittin’.”

  “Women,” he said. “All women. No exceptions. Get it?”

  —

  Tilo had always reminded Naga of Billie Holiday. Not the woman so much as her voice. If it was possible for a human being to evoke a voice, a sound, then for Naga, Tilo evoked Billie Holiday’s voice—she had that same quality of limbering, heart-stopping, fucked-up unexpectedness to her. R.C. had no idea what he had set off when he used Billie Holiday to illustrate the point he was making.

  One morning, Naga, who, whatever his other faults, was physically the gentlest of men, hit his wife. Not very convincingly, they both realized. But he did hit her. Then he held her and wept. “Don’t go. Please don’t go.”

  That day Tilo stood at the gate and watched him being driven away in his office car, by his office driver. She couldn’t see that he cried in the back seat all the way to work. Naga was not a crying man. (When he appeared as a guest on a prime-time TV debate about national security later that night, he showed no signs of personal distress. He was sharp with his repartee and made quick work of the Human Rights woman who said that New India was sliding towards fascism. Naga’s laconic response raised a titter from the carefully picked studio audience of nattily dressed students and ambitious young professionals. Another guest, a retired, geriatric army general, all mustache and medals, who was trundled out regularly by TV studios to supply venom and stupidity to all discussions on national security, laughed and applauded.)

  Tilo took a bus to the edge of the city. She walked through miles of city waste, a bright landfill of compacted plastic bags with an army of ragged children picking through it. The sky was a dark swirl of ravens and kites competing with the children, pigs and packs of dogs for the spoils. In the distance, garbage trucks wound their way slowly up the garbage mountain. Partly collapsed cliffs of refuse revealed the depth of what had accumulated.

  She took another bus to the riverfront. She stopped on a bridge and watched a man row a circular raft built with old mineral-water bottles and plastic jerry cans across the thick, slow, filthy river. Buffaloes sank blissfully into the black water. On the pavement vendors sold lush melons and sleek green cucumbers grown in pure factory effluent.

  She spent an hour on a third bus and got off at the zoo. For a long time she watched the little gibbon from Borneo in his vast, empty enclosure, a furry dot hugging a tall tree as though his life depended on it. The ground underneath the tree was littered with things visitors had thrown at him to attract his attention. There was a gibbon-shaped cement trashcan outside the gibbon’s cage and a hippo-shaped trashcan outside the hippo’s cage. The cement hippo’s mouth was open and crammed with trash. The real hippo was wallowing in a scummy pond, her slick, wide, ballooning bottom the color of a wet tire, her tiny eyes set inside their pink, puffy eyelids, watchful, above the water. Plastic bottles and empty cigarette packets floated around her. A man bent down to his little daughter dressed in a bright frock, her eyes smudged with kohl. He pointed to the hippo and said, “Crocodile.” “Cockodie,” his little girl said, cranking up the cuteness. A knot of noisy young men flicked razor blades across the barred enclosure and down the cement banks of the hippo pond. When they ran out of blades they asked Tilo if she would take a photograph of them. One of them, with rings on every finger and faded red threads around his wrists, composed the picture for her, handed her his phone and ran back into the frame. He put his arms around his companions’ shoulders and made the victory sign. When Tilo returned the phone she congratulated them for the courage it must require to feed a caged hippo razor blades. It took a while for the insult to register. When it did, they followed her around the zoo with that leering Delhi yodel “Oye! Hapshie madam!” Hey! Nigger madam! They taunted her not because the color of her skin was unusual in India, but because they saw in her bearing and demeanor a “hapshie”—Hindi for Abyssinian—who had risen above her station. A “hapshie” who was clearly not a maidservant or a laborer.

  —


  There was an Indian rock python in every cage in the snake house. Snake scam. There were cows in the sambar stag’s enclosure. Deer scam. And there were women construction workers carrying bags of cement in the Siberian tiger enclosure. Siberian tiger scam. Most of the birds in the aviary were ones you could see on the trees anyway. Bird scam. At the cage of the sulphur-crested cockatoo one of the young men insinuated himself next to Tilo and sang to the cockatoo, setting his own lyrics to the tune of a popular Bollywood song:

  Duniya khatam ho jayegi

  Chudai khatam nahi hogi

  The world will end,

  But fucking never will.

  It was intended to be doubly insulting because Tilo was at least double his age.

  —

  Outside the enclosure of the rosy pelicans she received a text message on her phone:

  Organic Homes on NH24 Ghaziabad

  1 BHK 15L*

  2 BHK 18L*

  3 BHK 31L*

  Booking starting at Rs 35000

  For Discount call 91-103-957-9-8

  The dusty old Nicaraguan jaguar had his chin on the dusty ledge of his cage. He stayed like that, supremely indifferent, for hours. Maybe years.

  Tilo felt like him. Dusty, old and supremely indifferent.

  Maybe she was him.

  Maybe some day she would have an expensive city car named after her.

  WHEN SHE MOVED OUT, she didn’t take much with her. At first it wasn’t clear to Naga or, for that matter, even to her that she had moved out. She told him she had rented an office space, she didn’t say where. (Garson Hobart didn’t tell him either.) For a few months she came and went. Over time she went more than she came, and then gradually she stopped returning home.

  Naga began his life as a newly unmarried man by plunging into work and into a string of gloomy affairs. Being on TV as often as he was had made him what magazines and newspapers called a “celebrity,” which people seemed to think was a profession in and of itself. At restaurants and airports strangers often approached him for an autograph. Many of them weren’t even sure who he was, or what exactly he did or why he looked familiar. Naga was too bored to even bother to refuse. Unlike most men of his age, he was still slim, and had a full head of hair. Being seen as “successful” gave him the pick of a range of women, some single and far younger than him, and some his age or older, married and looking for variety, or divorced and looking for a second chance. The front runner among them was a slender, stylish widow in her mid-thirties with milk-white skin and glossy hair—minor royalty from a small principality—in whom Naga’s mother saw her younger self, and coveted more than her son did. She invited the lady and Prince Charles, her Chihuahua, to stay with her downstairs as a house guest, from where they could jointly plan the capture of the summit.