The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

  When she first read the police notice in the newspaper, Tilo didn’t take it seriously. It looked like a routine, bureaucratic requirement that was being mindlessly fulfilled. On a second reading, however, she realized it could spell serious trouble. To give herself time to think, she copied the notice carefully into a notebook, word for word, in olde-worlde calligraphy, and decorated it with a margin of vines and fruit as though it were the Ten Commandments. She couldn’t imagine how the police had traced her and come knocking. She knew she needed a plan. But she didn’t have one. So she called the only person in the world that she trusted would understand the problem and give her sound counsel.

  They had been friends for more than four years, she and Dr. Azad Bhartiya. They met for the first time while they were both waiting for their sandals to be mended by a street-side cobbler in Connaught Place who was famous for his skill and his smallness. In his hands, each shoe or slipper he was mending looked as though it belonged to a giant. While they stood around with one shoe on and one shoe off, Dr. Bhartiya surprised Tilo by asking her (in English) if she had a cigarette. She surprised him back by replying (in Hindi) that she had no cigarettes but could offer him a beedi. The little cobbler lectured them both at length about the consequences of smoking. He told them how his father, a chain-smoker, had died of cancer. He drew the outline of his father’s lung tumor with his finger in the dust. “It was this big.” Dr. Bhartiya assured him that he smoked only on the occasions when he was having his shoes mended. The conversation switched to politics. The cobbler cursed the current climate, bad-mouthed the gods of every creed and religion, and ended his diatribe by bending down and kissing his iron last. He said it was the only God he believed in. By the time their soles had been mended, the cobbler and his clients had become friends. Dr. Bhartiya invited both his new friends to his pavement home in Jantar Mantar. Tilo went. From then on there was no looking back.

  She visited him twice a week or more, often arriving in the evening and leaving at dawn. Occasionally she brought him a deworming pill, which, for some reason, she deemed essential for everybody’s well-being, and he deemed ethical to consume even while on hunger strike. She considered him to be a man of the world, among the wisest, sanest people she knew. In time she became the translator/transcriber as well as printer/publisher of his single-page broadsheet: My News & Views, which he revised and updated every month. They managed to sell as many as eight or nine copies of each edition. All in all it was a thriving media partnership—politically acute, uncompromising, and wholly in the red.

  The media partners had not met for more than eight days—since the coming of Miss Jebeen the Second. When Tilo called Dr. Bhartiya to tell him about the police notice, he dropped his voice to a whisper. He said they should speak as little as possible on the mobile phone, because they were under constant surveillance by International Agencies. But after that initial moment of caution, he chatted away sunnily. He told her how the police had beaten him and confiscated all his papers. He said it was quite likely that they had picked up the trail from there (because the publisher’s name and address were given at the bottom of the pamphlet). It was either that or her flamboyant signature on his plaster cast, which they had forcibly photographed from several angles. “No one else signed in green ink and put their address,” he told her. “So you must be the first person on their list. It must be just a routine check-up.” Still, he suggested that she immediately transfer Miss Jebeen and herself, at least temporarily, to a place called Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services in the old city. The person to contact there, he said, was Saddam Hussain, or the proprietor herself, Dr. Anjum, who, Dr. Bhartiya said, was an extremely good person and had met him several times after the incident (of the said night), inquiring about the baby. Due to the honorific he had arbitrarily bestowed on himself (even though his PhD was still “pending”), Dr. Bhartiya often called people he liked “Doctor” for no real reason other than that he liked and respected them.

  Tilo recognized the name of the guest house as well as the name Saddam Hussain from the visiting card that the man on the white horse who had followed her home from Jantar Mantar had dropped into her letter box (on the said night). When she phoned him, Saddam told her that Dr. Bhartiya had been in touch, and that he (Saddam) had been waiting for her call. He said he was of the same opinion as Dr. Bhartiya, and that he would come back to her with a plan of action. He advised her that she should on no account leave her house with the baby until she heard from him. The police could not enter her house without a search warrant, he said, but if they were watching the house, as they might well be, and they caught her with the baby on the street, they could do anything they liked. Tilo was reassured by his voice and his friendly, efficient manner on the phone. And Saddam, for his part, was reassured by hers.

  He called her a few hours later to say that arrangements had been made. He would pick her up from her home at dawn, probably between 4 and 5 a.m., before “Truck Entry” closed in the area. If the house was being watched, it would be easy to tell at that hour, when the streets were empty. He would come with a friend who drove a pickup for the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. They had to pick up the carcass of a cow that had died—burst—from eating too many plastic bags at the main garbage dump in Hauz Khas. Her address would not be much of a detour. It was a foolproof plan, he said. “No policeman ever stops an MCD garbage truck,” he said, laughing. “If you keep your window open you’ll be able to smell us before you see us.”

  —

  So, once again she was moving.

  Tilo surveyed her home like a thief, wondering what to take. What should the criterion be? Things that she might need? Or things that ought not to be left lying around? Or both? Or neither? It vaguely occurred to her that if the police were to make a forced entry, kidnapping might turn out to be the least of her crimes.

  Most incriminating of all the things in her apartment was the stack of bright fruit cartons that had been delivered to her doorstep, one at a time, over a few days, by a Kashmiri fruit-seller. They contained what Musa called his “recoveries” from the flood that had inundated Srinagar a year ago.

  When the Jhelum rose and breached its banks, the city disappeared. Whole housing colonies went underwater. Army camps, torture centers, hospitals, courthouses, police stations—all went down. Houseboats floated over what had once been marketplaces. Thousands of people huddled precariously on sharply sloping rooftops and in makeshift shelters set up on higher ground, waiting for rescues that never happened. A drowned city was a spectacle. A drowned civil war was a phenomenon. The army performed stunning helicopter rescues for TV crews. In live round-the-clock bulletins news anchors marveled at how much brave Indian soldiers were doing for ungrateful, surly Kashmiris who did not really deserve to be rescued. When the flood receded, it left behind an uninhabitable city, encased in mud. Shops full of mud, houses full of mud, banks full of mud, refrigerators, cupboards and bookshelves full of mud. And an ungrateful, surly people who had survived without being rescued.

  During the weeks the flood lasted, Tilo had no news of Musa. She did not even know whether he was in Kashmir or not. She did not know whether he had survived or drowned, his body washed up on some distant shore. On those nights, while she waited for news of him, she put herself to sleep with heavy doses of sleeping pills, but during the day while she was wide awake she dreamed of the flood. Of rain and rushing water, dense with coils of razor wire masquerading as weeds. The fish were machine guns with fins and barrels that ruddered through the swift current like mermaids’ tails, so you could not tell who they were really pointed at, and who would die when they were fired. Soldiers and militants grappled with each other underwater, in slow motion, like in the old James Bond films, their breath bubbling up through the murky water, like bright silver bullets. Pressure cookers (separated from their whistles), gas heaters, sofas, bookshelves, tables and kitchen utensils spun through the water, giving it the feel of a lawless, busy highway. Cattle, dogs, yaks and chickens sw
am around in circles. Affidavits, interrogation transcripts and army press releases folded themselves into paper boats and rowed themselves to safety. Politicians and TV anchors, both men and women, from the Valley as well as the mainland went prancing past in sequined bathing suits, like a chorus line of seahorses, executing beautifully choreographed aqua-ballet routines, diving, surfacing, twirling, pointing their toes, happy in the debris-filled water, smiling broadly, their teeth glimmering like barbed wire in the sun. One politician in particular, whose views were not dissimilar to those of the Schutzstaffel of Nazi Germany, cartwheeled in the water, looking triumphant, in a starched white dhoti that gave the impression of being waterproof.

  It recurred, day after day, this day-mare, each time with new embellishments.

  A month went by before Musa finally called. Tilo was furious with him for sounding cheerful. He said there was no safe house left in Srinagar where he could store his “recoveries” from the flood, and asked whether he could keep them in her flat until the city got back on its feet.

  He could. Of course he could.

  They were excellent quality, the Kashmiri apples that were delivered in custom-made cartons, red ones, less-red ones, green, and almost-black ones—Delicious, Golden Delicious, Ambri, Kaala Mastana—all individually packed in shredded paper. Each carton had Musa’s calling card—a small sketch of a horse’s head—tucked into a corner. And each carton had a false bottom. And each false bottom contained his “recoveries.”

  Tilo reopened the cartons to remind herself what was in them and work out what to do with them—take them or leave them behind? Musa had the only other key to the apartment. Garson Hobart was safely parked in Afghanistan. In any case he did not have a key. So leaving them where they were was no great risk. Unless, unless, unless—was there an off-chance that the police would break in?

  The “recoveries” were few and had obviously been hurriedly dispatched. When they first arrived some of them were caked with mud—thick, dark river silt. Some were in fine shape and had obviously escaped the flood waters. There was a ruined album of water-stained family photographs, most of them barely recognizable, of Musa’s daughter, Miss Jebeen the First, and her mother, Arifa. There was a stack of passports in a plastic Ziploc—seven altogether, two Indian and five other nationalities—Iyad Khareef (Musa the Lebanese pigeon), Hadi Hassan Mohseni (Musa the Iranian wise man and guide), Faris Ali Halabi (Musa the Syrian horseman), Mohammed Nabil al-Salem (Musa the Qatari nobleman), Ahmed Yasir al-Qassimi (Musa the rich man from Bahrain). Musa clean-shaven, Musa with a salt-and-pepper beard, Musa with long hair and no beard, Musa with close-cropped hair and a clipped beard. Tilo recognized the first name, Iyad Khareef, as a name that Musa had always loved, and which they had both laughed about during their college days, because it meant “the pigeon who was born in the autumn.” Tilo had a variation on the theme for people she was annoyed with—Gandoo Khareef. The asshole who was born in autumn. (She had been exceptionally foul-mouthed as a young woman, and when she first started learning Hindi, took pleasure in using newly learned expletives as the foundation on which she built a working vocabulary.)

  In another plastic packet there were mud-crusted credit cards with names that matched the passports, boarding passes and a few airline tickets—relics from the days when airline tickets existed. There were old telephone diaries, with names, addresses and numbers crammed into them. Diagonally, across the back of one of them, Musa had scrawled a fragment of a song:

  Dark to light and light to dark

  Three black carriages, three white carts,

  What brings us together is what pulls us apart,

  Gone our brother, gone our heart.

  Who was he mourning? She didn’t know. A whole generation maybe.

  There was a half-written letter, on a blue inland letter-form. It wasn’t addressed to anybody. Perhaps he was writing it to himself…or to her, because it began with an Urdu poem that he had tried to translate, something he often did for her:

  Duniya ki mehfilon se ukta gaya hoon ya Rab

  Kya lutf anjuman ka, jab dil hi bujh gaya ho

  Shorish se bhagta hoon, dil dhoondta hai mera

  Aisa sukoot jis pe taqreer bhi fida ho

  I am weary of worldly gatherings, O Lord

  What pleasure in them, when the light in my heart is gone?

  From the clamor of crowds I flee, my heart seeks

  The kind of silence that would mesmerize speech itself

  Underneath he had written:

  I don’t know where to stop, or how to go on. I stop when I shouldn’t. I go on when I should stop. There is weariness. But there is also defiance. Together they define me these days. Together they steal my sleep, and together they restore my soul. There are plenty of problems with no solutions in sight. Friends turn into foes. If not vocal ones, then silent, reticent ones. But I’ve yet to see a foe turning into a friend. There seems to be no hope. But pretending to be hopeful is the only grace we have…

  She didn’t know which friends he meant.

  She knew that it was nothing short of a miracle that Musa was still alive. In the eighteen years that had gone by since 1996, he had lived a life in which every night was potentially the night of the long knives. “How can they kill me again?” he would say if he sensed worry on Tilo’s part. “You’ve already been to my funeral. You’ve already laid flowers on my grave. What more can they do to me? I’m a shadow at high noon. I don’t exist.” The last time she met him he said something to her, casually, jokingly, but with heartbreak in his eyes. It made her blood freeze.

  “These days in Kashmir, you can be killed for surviving.”

  In battle, Musa told Tilo, enemies can’t break your spirit, only friends can.

  —

  In another carton there was a hunting knife and nine mobile phones—a lot, for a man who did not use mobiles—old ones the size of small bricks, tiny Nokia ones, a Samsung smartphone and two iPhones. When they were delivered, covered in mud, they looked like slabs of fossilized chocolate. Now, minus the mud, they just looked old and unusable. There was a sheaf of stiff, yellowed newspaper clippings, the first of which contained a statement made by the then Chief Minister of Kashmir. Someone had underlined it:

  We can’t just go on digging all the graveyards up. We need at least general directions from the relatives of the Missing, if not pointedly specific information. Where could be the greater possibility of their disappeared kin being buried?

  A third carton contained a pistol, a few loose bullets, a vial of pills (she didn’t know what pills, but was in a position to make an educated guess—something beginning with C) and a notebook that seemed not to have suffered the depredations of the flood. Tilo recognized the book and the writing in it as hers, but she read through its contents curiously, as though it had been written by someone else. These days her brain felt like a “recovery”—encased in mud. It wasn’t just her brain, she herself, all of her, felt like a recovery—an accumulation of muddy recoveries, randomly assembled.

  Long before she became stenographer to her mother and to Dr. Azad Bhartiya, Tilo had been a weird, part-time stenographer to a full-time military occupation. After the episode at the Shiraz, after she came back to Delhi and married Naga, she had traveled back to Kashmir obsessively, month after month, year after year, as though she was searching for something she had left behind. She and Musa seldom met on those trips (when they met, they met in Delhi, mostly). But while she was in Kashmir, he watched over her from his hidden perch. She knew that the friendly souls that appeared as if from nowhere, to hang about with her, to travel with her, to invite her to their homes, were Musa’s people. They welcomed her and told her things they would hardly tell themselves, only because they loved Musa—or at least their idea of him, the man whom they knew as a shadow among shadows. Musa didn’t know what she was searching for, neither did she. Yet she spent almost all the money she earned from her design and typography assignments on these trips. Sometimes she took odd picture
s. She wrote strange things down. She collected scraps of stories and inexplicable memorabilia that appeared to have no purpose. There seemed to be no pattern or theme to her interest. She had no set task, no project. She was not writing for a newspaper or magazine, she was not writing a book or making a film. She paid no attention to things that most people would have considered important. Over the years, her peculiar, ragged archive grew peculiarly dangerous. It was an archive of recoveries, not from a flood, but from another kind of disaster. Instinctively she kept it hidden from Naga, and ordered it according to some elaborate logic of her own that she intuited but did not understand. None of it amounted to anything in the cut and thrust of real argument in the real world. But that didn’t matter.

  The truth is that she traveled back to Kashmir to still her troubled heart, and to atone for a crime she hadn’t committed.

  And to put fresh flowers on Commander Gulrez’s grave.

  The notebook that Musa sent back with his “recoveries” was hers. She must have left it behind on one of her trips. The first few pages were filled with her writing, the rest were blank. She grinned when she saw the opening page:

  The Reader’s Digest Book of English Grammar and Comprehension for Very Young Children

  By

  S. Tilottama

  She got herself an ashtray, settled down cross-legged on the floor, and chain-smoked her way to the end of her book. It contained stories, press clippings and some diary entries:

  THE OLD MAN & HIS SON

  When Manzoor Ahmed Ganai became a militant, soldiers went to his home and picked up his father, the handsome, always dapper Aziz Ganai. He was kept in the Haider Baig Interrogation Center. Manzoor Ahmed Ganai worked as a militant for one and a half years. His father remained imprisoned for one and a half years.