The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

by Arundhati Roy

  Anjum couldn’t read English. Saddam could, if he paid careful attention. On this occasion he didn’t.

  Anjum finished her tea and then lay on her back with her forearms crossed over her eyes. She seemed to have dozed off, but she hadn’t. She was worried.

  “And in case you didn’t know,” she said after a while, as though she was continuing a conversation—actually she was, except that it was one she had been having with herself in her head. “Let me tell you that we Muslims are motherfuckers too, just like everyone else. But I suppose one additional murderer won’t harm the reputation of our badnaam qoam, our name is mud already. Anyway, take your time, don’t do anything in a hurry.”

  “I won’t. But Sehrawat must die.”

  Saddam took off his glasses and closed his eyes, screwing them up against the light. He played an old Hindi film song on his phone and began to sing along tunelessly but confidently. Biroo slurped up the cold tea remaining in the saucepan and trotted off with boiled tea leaves on his nose.

  When the sun grew hot, they returned indoors where they continued to float through their lives like a pair of astronauts, defying gravity, limited only by the outer walls of their fuchsia spaceship with its pale pistachio doors.

  It isn’t as though they didn’t have plans.

  Anjum waited to die.

  Saddam waited to kill.

  And miles away, in a troubled forest, a baby waited to be born…

  In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?

  —PABLO NERUDA

  3

  THE NATIVITY

  It was peacetime. Or so they said.

  All morning a hot wind had whipped through the city streets, driving sheets of grit, soda-bottle caps and beedi stubs before it, smacking them into car windscreens and cyclists’ eyes. When the wind died, the sun, already high in the sky, burned through the haze and once again the heat rose and shimmered on the streets like a belly dancer. People waited for the thundershower that always followed a dust storm, but it never came. Fire raged through a swathe of huts huddled together on the riverbank, gutting more than two thousand in an instant.

  Still the Amaltas bloomed, a brilliant, defiant yellow. Each blazing summer it reached up and whispered to the hot brown sky, Fuck You.

  She appeared quite suddenly, a little after midnight. No angels sang, no wise men brought gifts. But a million stars rose in the east to herald her arrival. One moment she wasn’t there, and the next—there she was on the concrete pavement, in a crib of litter: silver cigarette foil, a few plastic bags and empty packets of Uncle Chipps. She lay in a pool of light, under a column of swarming neon-lit mosquitoes, naked. Her skin was blue-black, sleek as a baby seal’s. She was wide awake, but perfectly quiet, unusual for someone so tiny. Perhaps, in those first short months of her life, she had already learned that tears, her tears at least, were futile.

  A thin white horse tethered to the railing, a small dog with mange, a concrete-colored garden lizard, two palm-striped squirrels who should have been asleep and, from her hidden perch, a she-spider with a swollen egg sac watched over her. Other than that, she seemed to be utterly alone.

  Around her the city sprawled for miles. Thousand-year-old sorceress, dozing, but not asleep, even at this hour. Gray flyovers snaked out of her Medusa skull, tangling and untangling under the yellow sodium haze. Sleeping bodies of homeless people lined their high, narrow pavements, head to toe, head to toe, head to toe, looping into the distance. Old secrets were folded into the furrows of her loose, parchment skin. Each wrinkle was a street, each street a carnival. Each arthritic joint a crumbling amphitheater where stories of love and madness, stupidity, delight and unspeakable cruelty had been played out for centuries. But this was to be the dawn of her resurrection. Her new masters wanted to hide her knobby, varicose veins under imported fishnet stockings, cram her withered tits into saucy padded bras and jam her aching feet into pointed high-heeled shoes. They wanted her to swing her stiff old hips and re-route the edges of her grimace upwards into a frozen, empty smile. It was the summer Grandma became a whore.

  She was to become supercapital of the world’s favorite new superpower. India! India! The chant had gone up—on TV shows, on music videos, in foreign newspapers and magazines, at business conferences and weapons fairs, at economic conclaves and environmental summits, at book festivals and beauty contests. India! India! India!

  Across the city, huge billboards jointly sponsored by an English newspaper and the newest brand of skin-whitening cream (selling by the ton) said: Our Time Is Now. Kmart was coming. Walmart and Starbucks were coming, and in the British Airways advertisement on TV, the People of the World (white, brown, black, yellow) all chanted the Gayatri Mantra:

  Om bhur bhuvah svaha

  Tat savitur varenyam

  Bhargo devasya dhimahi

  Dhiyo yo nah pracodayat

  O God, thou art the giver of life,

  Remover of pain and sorrow,

  Bestower of happiness,

  O Creator of the Universe,

  May we receive thy supreme sin-destroying light,

  May thou guide our intellect in the right direction.

  (And may everyone fly BA.)

  When they finished chanting, the People of the World bowed low and joined their palms in greeting. Namaste, they said in exotic accents, and smiled like the turbaned doormen with maharaja mustaches who greeted foreign guests in five-star hotels. And with that, in the advertisement at least, history was turned upside down. (Who was bowing now? And who was smiling? Who was the petitioner? And who the petitioned?) In their sleep India’s favorite citizens smiled back. India! India! they chanted in their dreams, like the crowds at cricket matches. The drum major beat out a rhythm…India! India! The world rose to its feet, roaring its appreciation. Skyscrapers and steel factories sprang up where forests used to be, rivers were bottled and sold in supermarkets, fish were tinned, mountains mined and turned into shining missiles. Massive dams lit up the cities like Christmas trees. Everyone was happy.

  Away from the lights and advertisements, villages were being emptied. Cities too. Millions of people were being moved, but nobody knew where to.

  “People who can’t afford to live in cities shouldn’t come here,” a Supreme Court judge said, and ordered the immediate eviction of the city’s poor. “Paris was a slimy area before 1870, when all the slums were removed,” the Lieutenant Governor of the city said, rearranging his last-remaining swatch of hair across his scalp, right to left. (In the evenings when he went for a swim it swam beside him in the chlorine in the Chelmsford Club pool.) “And look at Paris now.”

  So surplus people were banned.

  In addition to the regular police, several battalions of the Rapid Action Force in strange, sky-blue camouflage uniforms (to flummox the birds perhaps) were deployed in the poorer quarters.

  In slums and squatter settlements, in resettlement colonies and “unauthorized” colonies, people fought back. They dug up the roads leading to their homes and blocked them with rocks and broken things. Young men, old men, children, mothers and grandmothers armed with sticks and rocks patrolled the entrances to their settlements. Across one road, where the police and bulldozers had lined up for the final assault, a slogan scrawled in chalk said, Sarkar ki Maa ki Choot. The Government’s Mother’s Cunt.

  “Where shall we go?” the surplus people asked. “You can kill us, but we won’t move,” they said.

  There were too many of them to be killed outright.

  Instead, their homes, their doors and windows, their makeshift roofs, their pots and pans, their plates, their spoons, their school-leaving certificates, their ration cards, their marriage certificates, their children’s schools, their lifetime’s work, the expression in their eyes, were flattened by yellow bulldozers imported from Australia. (Ditch Witch, they were called, the ’dozers.) They were State-of-the-Art machines. They could flatten history and stack it up like building material.

  In this way, in the su
mmer of her renewal, Grandma broke.

  Fiercely competitive TV channels covered the story of the breaking city as “Breaking News.” Nobody pointed out the irony. They unleashed their untrained, but excellent-looking, young reporters, who spread across the city like a rash, asking urgent, empty questions; they asked the poor what it was like to be poor, the hungry what it was like to be hungry, the homeless what it was like to be homeless. “Bhai Sahib, yeh bataaiye, aap ko kaisa lag raha hai…?” Tell me, brother, how does it feel to be…? The TV channels never ran out of sponsorship for their live telecasts of despair. They never ran out of despair.

  Experts aired their expert opinions for a fee: Somebody has to pay the price for Progress, they said expertly.

  Begging was banned. Thousands of beggars were rounded up and held in stockades before being shipped out of the city in batches. Their contractors had to pay good money to ship them back in.

  Father John-for-the-Weak sent out a letter saying that, according to police records, almost three thousand unidentified dead bodies (human) had been found on the city’s streets last year. Nobody replied.

  But the food shops were bursting with food. The bookshops were bursting with books. The shoe shops were bursting with shoes. And people (who counted as people) said to one another, “You don’t have to go abroad for shopping any more. Imported things are available here now. See, like Bombay is our New York, Delhi is our Washington and Kashmir is our Switzerland. It’s like really like saala fantastic yaar.”

  All day long the roads were choked with traffic. The newly dispossessed, who lived in the cracks and fissures of the city, emerged and swarmed around the sleek, climate-controlled cars, selling cloth dusters, mobile phone chargers, model jumbo jets, business magazines, pirated management books (How to Make Your First Million, What Young India Really Wants), gourmet guides, interior design magazines with color photographs of country houses in Provence, and quick-fix spiritual manuals (You Are Responsible for Your Own Happiness…or How to Be Your Own Best Friend…). On Independence Day they sold toy machine guns and tiny national flags mounted on stands that said Mera Bharat Mahan, My India Is Great. The passengers looked out of their car windows and saw only the new apartment they planned to buy, the Jacuzzi they had just installed and the ink that was still wet on the sweetheart deal they had just closed. They were calm from their meditation classes and glowing from yoga practice.

  On the city’s industrial outskirts, in the miles of bright swamp tightly compacted with refuse and colorful plastic bags, where the evicted had been “re-settled,” the air was chemical and the water poisonous. Clouds of mosquitoes rose from thick green ponds. Surplus mothers perched like sparrows on the debris of what used to be their homes and sang their surplus children to sleep.

  Sooti rahu baua, bhakol abaiya

  Naani gaam se angaa, siyait abaiya

  Maama sange maami, nachait abaiya

  Kara sange chara, labait abaiya

  Sleep, my darling, sleep, before the demon comes

  Your newly tailored shirt from mother’s village comes

  Your uncle and auntie, a-dancing they will comes

  Your anklets and bracelets, a-bringing they will comes

  The surplus children slept, dreaming of yellow ’dozers.

  Above the smog and the mechanical hum of the city, the night was vast and beautiful. The sky was a forest of stars. Jet aircraft darted about like slow, whining comets. Some hovered, stacked ten deep over the smog-obscured Indira Gandhi International Airport, waiting to land.

  DOWN BELOW, on the pavement, on the edge of Jantar Mantar, the old observatory where our baby made her appearance, it was fairly busy even at that time of the morning. Communists, seditionists, secessionists, revolutionaries, dreamers, idlers, crackheads, crackpots, all manner of freelancers, and wise men who couldn’t afford gifts for newborns, milled around. Over the last ten days they had all been sidelined and driven off what had once been their territory—the only place in the city where they were allowed to gather—by the newest show in town. More than twenty TV crews, their cameras mounted on yellow cranes, kept a round-the-clock vigil over their bright new star: a tubby old Gandhian, former-soldier-turned-village-social-worker, who had announced a fast to the death to realize his dream of a corruption-free India. He lay fatly on his back with the air of an ailing saint, against a backdrop of a portrait of Mother India—a many-armed goddess with a map-of-India-shaped body. (Undivided British India, of course, which included Pakistan and Bangladesh.) Each sigh, each whispered instruction to the people around him, was being broadcast live through the night.

  The old man was on to something. The summer of the city’s resurrection had also been the summer of scams—coal scams, iron-ore scams, housing scams, insurance scams, stamp-paper scams, phone-license scams, land scams, dam scams, irrigation scams, arms and ammunition scams, petrol-pump scams, polio-vaccine scams, electricity-bill scams, school-book scams, God Men scams, drought-relief scams, car-number-plate scams, voter-list scams, identity-card scams—in which politicians, businessmen, businessmen-politicians and politician-businessmen had made off with unimaginable quantities of public money.

  Like a good prospector, the old man had tapped into a rich seam, a reservoir of public anger, and much to his own surprise had become a cult figure overnight. His dream of a society free of corruption was like a happy meadow in which everybody, including the most corrupt, could graze for a while. People who would normally have nothing to do with each other (the left-wing, the right-wing, the wingless) all flocked to him. His sudden appearance, as if from nowhere, inspired and gave purpose to an impatient new generation of youngsters that had been innocent of history and politics so far. They came in jeans and T-shirts, with guitars and songs against corruption that they had composed themselves. They brought their own banners and placards with slogans like Enough Is Enough! and End Corruption Now! written on them. A team of young professionals—lawyers, accountants and computer programmers—formed a committee to manage the event. They raised money, organized the massive canopy, the props (the portrait of Mother India, a supply of national flags, Gandhi caps, banners) and a digital-age media campaign. The old man’s rustic rhetoric and earthy aphorisms trended on Twitter and swamped Facebook. TV cameras couldn’t get enough of him. Retired bureaucrats, policemen and army officers joined in. The crowd grew.

  Instant stardom thrilled the old man. It made him expansive and a little aggressive. He began to feel that sticking to the subject of corruption alone cramped his style and limited his appeal. He thought the least he could do was to share with his followers something of his essence, his true self and his innate, bucolic wisdom. And so the circus began. He announced that he was leading India’s Second Freedom Struggle. He made stirring speeches in his old-man-baby-voice, which, although it sounded like a pair of balloons being rubbed together, seemed to touch the very soul of the nation. Like a magician at a children’s birthday party, he performed tricks and conjured gifts out of thin air. He had something for everyone. He electrified Hindu chauvinists (who were already excited by the Mother India map) with their controversial old war cry, Vande Mataram! Salute the Mother! When some Muslims got upset, the committee arranged a visit from a Muslim film star from Bombay who sat on the dais next to the old man for more than an hour wearing a Muslim prayer cap (something he never usually did) to underline the message of Unity in Diversity. For traditionalists the old man quoted Gandhi. He said that the caste system was India’s salvation. “Each caste must do the work it has been born to do, but all work must be respected.” When Dalits erupted in fury, a municipal sweeper’s little daughter was dressed up in a new frock and seated by his side with a bottle of water from which he sipped from time to time. For militant moralists the old man’s slogan was Thieves must have their hands cut off! Terrorists must be hanged! For Nationalists of all stripes he roared, “Doodh maangogey to kheer dengey! Kashmir maangogey to chiir dengey!” Ask for milk, we’ll give you cream! Ask for Kashmir, we’ll ri
p you open seam to seam!

  In his interviews he smiled his gummy Farex-baby smile and described the joys of his simple, celibate life in his room that was attached to the village temple, and explained how the Gandhian practice of rati sadhana—semen retention—had helped him to keep up his strength during his fast. To demonstrate this, on the third day of his fast, he got off his bed, jogged around the stage in his white kurta and dhoti and flexed his flappy biceps. People laughed and cried and brought their children to him to be blessed.

  Television viewership skyrocketed. Advertising rolled in. Nobody had seen frenzy like this, at least not since twenty years ago, when, on the Day of the Concurrent Miracle, idols of Lord Ganesh in temples all over the world were reported to have simultaneously started drinking milk.

  But now it was the ninth day of the old man’s fast and, despite his stockpile of unspilled semen, he was noticeably weaker. Rumors about the rise in his creatinine levels and the deterioration of his kidneys had flown around the city that afternoon. Luminaries lined up by his bedside and had themselves photographed with him while they held his hand and (although nobody seriously believed it would come to that) urged him not to die. Industrialists who had been exposed in the scams donated money to his Movement and applauded the old man’s unwavering commitment to non-violence. (His prescriptions for hand-chopping, hanging and disemboweling were accepted as reasonable caveats.)

  The relatively well off among the old man’s fans, who had been blessed with life’s material needs, but had never experienced the adrenaline rush, the taste of the righteous anger that came with participating in a mass protest, arrived in cars and on motorcycles, waving national flags and singing patriotic songs. The Trapped Rabbit’s government, once the messiah of India’s economic miracle, was paralyzed.