Ministry of Utmost Happiness

by Arundhati Roy

Sarmad’s spirit permitted those who came to him to take his story and turn it into whatever they needed it to be.

God’s carotid burst open on the new border between India and Pakistan and a million people died of hatred.

But eventually, the Elixir of the Soul that had survived wars and the bloody birth of three new countries, was, like most things in the world, trumped by Coca-Cola.

Mulaqat Ali’s passion for poetry was not just a hobby separate from his work as a hakim. He believed that poetry could cure, or at least go a long way towards curing, almost every ailment. He would prescribe poems to his patients the way other hakims prescribed medicine. He could produce a couplet from his formidable repertoire that was eerily apt for every illness, every occasion, every mood and every delicate alteration in the political climate. This habit of his made life around him seem more profound and at the same time less distinctive than it really was. It infused everything with a subtle sense of stagnancy, a sense that everything that happened had happened before. That it had already been written, sung, commented upon and entered into history’s inventory. That nothing new was possible. This could be why young people around him often fled, giggling, when they sensed that a couplet was on its way.

Mulaqat Ali, prepared to grasp at straws, was elated. ‘Tendencies?’ he said. ‘Tendencies are no problem. Everybody has some tendency or the other . . . tendencies can always be managed.’

He was now able to convert his anguish into a practical problem and to turn his attention and his energies to something he understood well: How to raise enough money for the surgery?