The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

by Arundhati Roy

  Showkat Yeswi seemed to have been expecting the soldiers. He did not appear alarmed. “Amrik Singh called. He wants to talk to you. It’s nothing, don’t worry. He will release you before daylight.”

  Musa did not reply. He did not even glance at Godzilla, his disgust apparent in the way he held his shoulders and in the erectness of his back. He walked out of the front door escorted by two armed men on either side of him and got into the vehicle. He was not handcuffed or headbagged. The Gypsy slid through the slick, frozen streets. It had begun to snow again.

  —

  The Shiraz Cinema was the centerpiece of an enclave of barracks and officers’ quarters, cordoned off by the elaborate trappings of paranoia—two concentric rings of barbed wire sandwiching a shallow, sandy moat; the fourth and innermost ring was a high boundary wall topped with jagged shards of broken glass. The corrugated-metal gates had watchtowers on either side, manned by soldiers with machine guns. The Gypsy carrying Musa made it through the checkposts quickly. Clearly it was expected. It drove straight through the compound to the main entrance.

  The cinema lobby was brightly lit. A mosaic of tiny mirrors that sequined the fluted white plaster-of-Paris false ceiling, whipped up like icing on a gigantic, inverted wedding cake, dispersed and magnified the light from cheap, flashy chandeliers. The red carpet was frayed and worn, the cement floor showing through in patches. The stale, recirculated air smelled of guns and diesel and old clothes. What had once been the cinema snack bar now functioned as a reception-cum-registration counter for torturers and torturees. It continued to advertise things it no longer stocked—Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut chocolate and several flavors of Kwality ice cream, Choco Bar, Orange Bar, Mango Bar. Faded posters of old films (Chandni, Maine Pyar Kiya, Parinda and Lion of the Desert)—from the time before films were banned and the cinema hall shut down by the Allah Tigers—were still up on the wall, some of them spattered with red betel juice. Rows of young men, bound and handcuffed, squatted on the floor like chickens, some so badly beaten that they had keeled over, barely alive, still in squatting position, their wrists secured to their ankles. Soldiers milled around, bringing prisoners in, taking others away for interrogation. The faint sounds that came through the grand wooden doors leading to the auditorium could have been the muted soundtrack of a violent film. Cement kangaroos with mirthless smiles and garbage-bin pouches that said Use Me supervised the kangaroo court.

  Musa and his escort were not detained by the formalities of reception or registration. Followed by the gaze of the chained, beaten men, they swept like royalty straight up the grand, curving staircase that led to the balcony seats—the Queen’s Circle—and then further up a narrower staircase to the projection room that had been expanded into an office. Musa was aware that even the staging of this piece of theater was deliberate, not innocent.

  Major Amrik Singh stood up from behind a desk that was cluttered with his collection of exotic paperweights—spiky, speckled seashells, brass figurines, sailing ships and ballerinas imprisoned in glass orbs—to greet Musa. He was a swarthy, exceptionally tall man—six foot two, easily—in his mid-thirties. His chosen avatar that night was Sikh. The skin on his cheeks above his beardline was large-pored, like the surface of a soufflé. His dark green turban, wound tight around his ears and forehead, pulled the corners of his eyes and his eyebrows upward, giving him a sleepy air. Those who were even casually acquainted with him knew that to be taken in by that sleepy air would be a perilous misreading of the man. He came around the desk and greeted Musa solicitously, with concern and affection. The soldiers who had brought Musa in were asked to leave.

  “As salaam aleikum huzoor…Please sit down. What will you have? Tea? Or coffee?”

  His tone was somewhere between a query and an order.

  “Nothing. Shukriya.”

  Musa sat down. Amrik Singh picked up the receiver of his red intercom and ordered tea and “officers’ biscuits.” His size and bulk made his desk look small and out of proportion.

  It was not their first meeting. Musa had met Amrik Singh several times before, at, of all places, his (Musa’s) own home, when Amrik Singh would drop in to visit Godzilla, upon whom he had decided to bestow the gift of friendship—an offer that Godzilla was not exactly free to turn down. After Amrik Singh’s first few visits, Musa became aware of a drastic change in the home atmosphere. It became quieter. The bitter political arguments between himself and his father ebbed away. But Musa sensed that Godzilla’s suddenly suspicious eyes were constantly on him, as though trying to assess him, gauge him, fathom him. One afternoon, coming down from his room, Musa slipped on the staircase, righted himself mid-slide, and landed on his feet. Godzilla, who had been watching this performance, accosted Musa. He did not raise his voice, but he was furious and Musa could see a pulse throbbing near his temple.

  “How did you learn to fall like that? Who taught you to fall like this?”

  He examined his son with the finely honed instincts of a worried Kashmiri parent. He looked for unusual things—for a callus on a trigger finger, for horny, tough-skinned knees and elbows and any other signs of “training” that might have been received in militant camps. He found none. He decided to confront Musa with the troubling information Amrik Singh had given him—about boxes of “metal” being moved through his family’s orchards in Ganderbal. About Musa’s journeys into the mountains, about his meetings with certain “friends.”

  “What do you have to say about all this?”

  “Ask your friend the Major Sahib. He’ll tell you that non-actionable intelligence is as good as garbage,” Musa said.

  “Tse chhui marnui assi sarnei ti marnavakh,” Godzilla said.

  You’re going to die and take us all with you.

  The next time Amrik Singh dropped in, Godzilla insisted that Musa be present. On that occasion they sat cross-legged on the floor around a flowered, plastic dastarkhan as Musa’s mother served the tea. (Musa had asked Arifa to make sure that she and Miss Jebeen did not come downstairs until the visitor had left.) Amrik Singh exuded warmth and camaraderie. He made himself at home, sprawling back against the bolsters. He told a few bawdy Stupid Sikh jokes about Santa Singh and Banta Singh, and laughed at them louder than anybody else. And then, on the pretext that it was preventing him from eating as much as he would like to, he unbuckled his belt with his pistol still in its holster. If the gesture was meant to signal that he trusted his hosts and felt at ease with them, it had the opposite effect. The murder of Jalib Qadri was still to come, but everyone knew about the string of other murders and kidnappings. The pistol lay balefully among the plates of cakes and snacks and Thermos flasks of salted noon chai. When Amrik Singh finally stood up to leave, burping his appreciation, he forgot it, or appeared to have forgotten it. Godzilla picked it up and handed it to him.

  Amrik Singh looked straight at Musa and laughed as he buckled it back on.

  “A good thing your father remembered. Imagine if it had been found here during a cordon-and-search. Forget me, even God wouldn’t have been able to help you. Imagine.”

  Everybody laughed obediently. Musa saw that there was no laughter in Amrik Singh’s eyes. They seemed to absorb light but not reflect it. They were opaque, depthless black discs with not a hint of a glimmer or a glint.

  —

  Those same opaque eyes now looked at Musa across a desk full of paperweights in the projection room of the Shiraz. It was an extraordinary sight—Amrik Singh sitting at a desk. It was clear that he had absolutely no idea what to do with it other than use it as a coffee table for mementoes. It was placed in such a way that he had only to lean back in his chair and peer through the tiny rectangular opening in the wall—once the projectionist’s viewing portal, now a spyhole—to keep an eye on whatever was happening in the main hall. The interrogation cells led off from there, through the doorways over which red, neon-lit signs said (and sometimes meant): EXIT. The screen still had an old-fashioned red velvet tasseled curtain—the kind that used to go up in the
old days to piped music: “Popcorn” or “Baby Elephant Walk.” The cheaper seats in the stalls had been removed and piled up in a heap in a corner, to make space for an indoor badminton court where stressed-out soldiers could let off steam. Even at this hour, the faint thwack thwack of a shuttlecock meeting a racquet made its way into Amrik Singh’s office.

  “I brought you here to offer my apologies and my deepest personal condolences for what has happened.”

  The corrosion in Kashmir ran so deep that Amrik Singh was genuinely unaware of the irony of picking up a man whose wife and child had just been shot and bringing him forcibly, under armed guard, to an interrogation center at four in the morning, only in order to offer his commiseration.

  Musa knew that Amrik Singh was a chameleon and that underneath his turban he was a “Mona”—he didn’t have the long hair of a Sikh. He had committed that ultimate sacrilege against the Sikh canon by cutting his hair many years ago. Musa had heard him boast to Godzilla about how when he was out on a counter-insurgency operation he could pass himself off as a Hindu, a Sikh or a Punjabi-speaking Pakistani Muslim, depending on what the operation demanded. He guffawed as he described how, in order to identify and flush out “sympathizers,” he and his men dressed in salwar kameez—“Khan Suits”—and knocked on villagers’ doors in the dead of night, pretending to be militants from Pakistan asking for shelter. If they were welcomed, the next day the villagers would be arrested as OGWs (overground workers).

  “How are unarmed villagers supposed to turn away a group of men with guns who knock on their doors in the middle of the night? Regardless of whether they are militants or military?” Musa could not help asking.

  “Oh, we have ways of assessing the warmth of the welcome,” Amrik Singh said. “We have our own thermometers.”

  Maybe. But you have no understanding of the depths of Kashmiri duplicity, Musa thought but did not say. You have no idea how a people like us, who have survived a history and a geography such as ours, have learned to drive our pride underground. Duplicity is the only weapon we have. You don’t know how radiantly we smile when our hearts are broken. How ferociously we can turn on those we love while we graciously embrace those whom we despise. You have no idea how warmly we can welcome you when all we really want is for you to go away. Your thermometer is quite useless here.

  That was one way of looking at it. On the other hand, it may have been Musa who was, at that point in time, the naive one. Because Amrik Singh certainly had the full measure of the dystopia he operated in—one whose populace had no borders, no loyalties and no limits to the depths to which it would fall. As for the Kashmiri psyche, if there was indeed such a thing, Amrik Singh was seeking neither understanding nor insight. For him it was a game, a hunt, in which his quarry’s wits were pitted against his own. He saw himself more as a sportsman than a soldier. Which made for a sunny soul. Major Amrik Singh was a gambler, a daredevil officer, a deadly interrogator and a cheery, cold-blooded killer. He greatly enjoyed his work and was constantly on the lookout for ways to up the entertainment. He was in touch with certain militants who would occasionally tune into his wireless frequency, or he into theirs, and they would taunt each other like schoolboys. “Arre yaar, what am I but a humble travel agent?” he liked to say to them. “For you jihadis Kashmir is just a transit point, isn’t it? Your real destination is jannat where your houris are waiting for you. I’m only here to facilitate your journey.” He referred to himself as Jannat Express. And if he was speaking English (which usually meant he was drunk), he translated that as Paradise Express.

  One of his legendary lines was: Dekho mian, mein Bharat Sarkar ka lund hoon, aur mera kaam hai chodna.

  Look, brother, I am the Government of India’s dick and it’s my job to fuck people.

  In his relentless quest for amusement, he was known to have released a militant whom he had tracked down and captured with the greatest difficulty, only because he wanted to relive the exhilaration of recapturing him. It was in keeping with that spirit, with the perverse rubric of his personal hunting manual, that he had summoned Musa to the Shiraz to apologize to him. Over the last few months Amrik Singh had, correctly perhaps, identified Musa as a potentially worthy antagonist, someone who was his polar opposite and yet had the nerve and the intelligence to raise the stakes and perhaps change the nature of the hunt to a point where it would be hard to tell who was the hunter and who the hunted. For this reason Amrik Singh was extremely upset when he learned of the death of Musa’s wife and daughter. He wanted Musa to know that he had nothing to do with it. That it was an unexpected and, as far as he was concerned, below-the-belt blow, never part of his plan. In order for the hunt to go on, he needed to clarify this to his quarry.

  Hunting was not Amrik Singh’s only passion. He had expensive tastes and a lifestyle that he couldn’t support on his salary. So he exploited other avenues of entrepreneurial potential that being on the winning side of a military occupation offered. In addition to his kidnapping and extortion concerns, he owned (in his wife’s name) a sawmill in the mountains and a furniture business in the Valley. He was as impetuously generous as he was violent, and distributed extravagant gifts of carved coffee tables and walnut-wood chairs to people he liked or needed. (Godzilla had a pair of bedside tables pressed on him.) Amrik Singh’s wife, Loveleen Kaur, was the fourth of five sisters—Tavleen, Harpreet, Gurpreet, Loveleen and Dimple—famous for their beauty—and two younger brothers. They belonged to the small community of Sikhs who had settled in the Valley centuries ago. Their father was a small farmer with little or no means to feed his large family. It was said that the family was so poor that when one of the girls tripped on her way to school and dropped the tiffin carrier that contained their packed lunch, the hungry sisters ate the spilled food straight off the pavement. As the girls grew up, all manner of men began to circle around them like hornets, with all manner of proposals, none of them for marriage. So their parents were more than delighted to be able to give away one of their daughters (for no dowry) to a Sikh from the mainland—an army officer, no less. After they were married Loveleen did not move into Amrik Singh’s officer’s quarters in the various camps he was posted to in and around Srinagar. Because, it was said (rumored), at work he had another woman, another “wife,” a colleague from the Central Reserve Police, an ACP Pinky who usually partnered him in field operations as well as in interrogation sessions at the camps. On weekends, when Amrik Singh visited his wife and their infant son in their first-floor flat in Jawahar Nagar, the little Sikh enclave in Srinagar, neighbors whispered about domestic violence and her muffled screams for help. Nobody dared to intervene.

  Though Amrik Singh hunted down and eliminated militants ruthlessly, he actually regarded them—the best of them at least—with a sort of grudging admiration. He had been known to pay his respects at the graves of some, including a few whom he himself had killed. (One even got an unofficial gun salute.) The people he didn’t just disrespect but truly despised were human rights activists—mostly lawyers, journalists and newspaper editors. To him, they were vermin who spoiled and distorted the rules of engagement of the great game with their constant complaints and whining. Whenever Amrik Singh was given permission to pick one of them up or “neutralize” them (these “permissions” never came in the form of orders to kill, but usually as an absence of orders not to kill) he was never less than enthusiastic in carrying out his duties. The case of Jalib Qadri was different. His orders had been merely to intimidate and detain the man. Things had gone wrong. Jalib Qadri had made the mistake of being unafraid. Of talking back. Amrik Singh regretted having lost control of himself and regretted even more that he had had to eliminate his friend and fellow traveler, the Ikhwan Salim Gojri, as a consequence of that. They had shared good times and many grand escapades, he and Salim Gojri. He knew that had things been the other way around, Salim would surely have done the same thing. And he, Amrik Singh, would surely have understood. Or so he told himself. Of all the things he had done, killing Salim
Gojri was the one thing that had given him pause. Salim Gojri was the only person in the world, his wife Loveleen included, for whom Amrik Singh had felt something that vaguely resembled love. In acknowledgment of this, when the moment came, he pulled the trigger on his friend himself.

  He was not a brooder though, and got over things quickly. Sitting across the table from Musa, the Major was his usual self, cocky and sure of himself. He had been pulled out of the field and given a desk job, yes, but things had not begun to unravel for him yet. He did still go out on field trips occasionally, on operations in which he was familiar with the particular case history of a militant or OGW. He was reasonably sure he had contained the damage, and was out of the woods.

  The “officers’ biscuits” and tea arrived. Musa heard the faint rattle of teacups on a metal tray before the bearer of the biscuits appeared from behind him. Musa and the bearer recognized each other at once, but their expressions remained passive and opaque. Amrik Singh watched them closely. The room ran out of air. Breathing became impossible. It had to be simulated.