The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

by Arundhati Roy

Not many noticed the passing of the friendly old birds. There was so much else to look forward to.

“You tell me,” she said. “You’re the Imam Sahib, not me. Where do old birds go to die? Do they fall on us like stones from the sky? Do we stumble on their bodies in the streets? Do you not think that the All-Seeing, Almighty One who put us on this Earth has made proper arrangements to take us away?”

And she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.

In Urdu, the only language she knew, all things, not just living things but all things—carpets, clothes, books, pens, musical instruments—had a gender. Everything was either masculine or feminine, man or woman. Everything except her baby. Yes of course she knew there was a word for those like him—Hijra. Two words actually, Hijra and Kinnar. But two words do not make a language.

Was it possible to live outside language? Naturally this question did not address itself to her in words, or as a single lucid sentence. It addressed itself to her as a soundless, embryonic howl.

“D’you know why God made Hijras?” she asked Aftab one afternoon while she flipped through a dog-eared 1967 issue of Vogue, lingering over the blonde ladies with bare legs who so enthralled her. “No, why?” “It was an experiment. He decided to create something, a living creature that is incapable of happiness. So he made us.”

Arre yaar, think about it, what are the things you normal people get unhappy about? I don’t mean you, but grown-ups like you—what makes them unhappy? Price-rise, children’s school-admissions, husbands’ beatings, wives’ cheatings, Hindu-Muslim riots, Indo-Pak war—outside things that settle down eventually. But for us the price-rise and school-admissions and beating-husbands and cheating-wives are all inside us. The riot is inside us. The war is inside us. Indo-Pak is inside us. It will never settle down. It can’t.”

He never sang again, except to mockingly caricature Hindi film songs at ribald Hijra gatherings or when (in their professional capacity) they descended on ordinary people’s celebrations—weddings, births, house-warming ceremonies—dancing, singing in their wild, grating voices, offering their blessings and threatening to embarrass the hosts (by exposing their mutilated privates) and ruin the occasion with curses and a display of unthinkable obscenity unless they were paid a fee. (This is what Razia meant when she said badtameezi, and what Nimmo Gorakhpuri referred to when she said, “We’re jackals who feed off other people’s happiness, we’re Happiness Hunters.” Khushi-khor was the phrase she used.)

Aftab became Anjum, disciple of Ustad Kulsoom Bi of the Delhi Gharana, one of the seven regional Hijra Gharanas in the country, each headed by a Nayak, a Chief, all of them headed by a Supreme Chief.

She wasn’t beautiful in the way Bombay Silk was, but she was sexier, more intriguing, handsome in the way some women can be. Those looks combined with her steadfast commitment to an exaggerated, outrageous kind of femininity made the real, biological women in the neighborhood—even those who did not wear full burqas—look cloudy and dispersed.

In the next hour Anjum learned that the Holy Souls were a diverse lot and that the world of the Khwabgah was just as complicated, if not more so, than the Duniya. The Hindus, Bulbul and Gudiya, had both been through the formal (extremely painful) religious castration ceremony in Bombay before they came to the Khwabgah.

Dr. Mukhtar was more reassuring than Dr. Nabi had been. He said he could remove her male parts and try to enhance her existing vagina. He also suggested pills that would undeepen her voice and help her develop breasts. At a discount, Kulsoom Bi insisted. At a discount, Dr. Mukhtar agreed. Kulsoom Bi paid for the surgery and the hormones; Anjum paid her back over the years, several times over.

Anjum lived in the Khwabgah with her patched-together body and her partially realized dreams for more than thirty years. She was forty-six years old when she announced that she wanted to leave.

In a few weeks she began to call Anjum “Mummy” (because that’s what Anjum had begun to call herself). The other residents (under Anjum’s tutelage) were all called “Apa” (Auntie, in Urdu), and Mary, because she was Christian, was Mary Auntie. Ustad Kulsoom Bi and Bismillah became “Badi Nani” and “Chhoti Nani.” Senior and Junior Granny.

When Zainab was old enough to understand, Anjum began to tell her bedtime stories. At first the stories were entirely inappropriate for a young child. They were Anjum’s somewhat maladroit attempt to make up for lost time, to transfuse herself into Zainab’s memory and consciousness, to reveal herself without artifice, so that they could belong to each other completely. As a result she used Zainab as a sort of dock where she unloaded her cargo—her joys and tragedies, her life’s cathartic turning points.

Edited out of the Flyover Story, for example, was the fact that the incident had happened in 1976, at the height of the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi that lasted twenty-one months. Her spoiled younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, was the head of the Youth Congress (the youth wing of the ruling party), and was more or less running the country, treating it as though it was his personal plaything. Civil Rights had been suspended, newspapers were censored and, in the name of population control, thousands of men (mostly Muslim) were herded into camps and forcibly sterilized. A new law—the Maintenance of Internal Security Act—allowed the government to arrest anybody on a whim.

In some ways, Anjum’s addle-headedness towards Zainab was proportionately reflected in Zainab’s addle-headedness towards animals.

She was a graduate and knew English. More importantly, she could speak the new language of the times—she could use the terms cis-Man and FtoM and MtoF and in interviews she referred to herself as a “transperson.” Anjum, on the other hand, mocked what she called the “trans-france” business, and stubbornly insisted on referring to herself as a Hijra.

Mughal-e-Azam.

A commercial airliner had crashed into a tall building. Half of it still protruded out, hanging in mid-air like a precarious, broken toy. In moments a second plane crashed into a second building and turned into a ball of fire.

By December Old Delhi was flooded with Afghan families fleeing warplanes that sang in their skies like unseasonal mosquitoes, and bombs that fell like steel rain.

Who but Anjum knew that the Master Planner of this holocaust was neither Osama bin Laden, Terrorist, nor George W. Bush, President of the United States of America, but a far more powerful, far stealthier, force: Saeeda (née Gul Mohammed), r/o Khwabgah, Gali Dakotan, Delhi—110006, India.

A weaselly “unofficial spokesperson” announced unofficially that every action would be met with an equal and opposite reaction. He didn’t acknowledge Newton of course, because, in the prevailing climate, the officially sanctioned position was that ancient Hindus had invented all science.

Om bhur bhuvah svaha Tat savitur varenyam Bhargo devasya dhimahi Dhiyo yo nah pracodayat

One morning Anjum left the house, taking Zainab with her. She returned with a completely transformed Bandicoot. Her hair was cropped short and she was dressed in boy’s clothes; a baby Pathan suit, an embroidered jacket, jootis with toes curled upward like gondolas. “It’s safer like this,” Anjum said by way of explanation. “Gujarat could come to Delhi any day. We’ll call him Mahdi.”

Always remember—we are not just any Hijras from any place. We are the Hijras of Shahjahanabad. Our Rulers trusted us enough to put their wives and mothers in our care. Once we roamed freely in their private quarters, the zenana, of the Red Fort. They’re all gone now, those mighty emperors and their queens. But we are still here. Think about that and ask yourselves why that should be.”

They would go in a group, dressed in their best clothes, with flowers in their hair, holding hands, risking life and limb as they plunged through the Chandni Chowk traffic—a confusion of cars, buses, rickshaws and tangas driven by people who somehow managed to be reckless even at an excruciatingly slow speed.

history of the Red Fort and the emperors who had ruled from it for more than two hundred years—from Shah Jahan, who built it, to Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal, who was sent into exile by the British after the failed uprising of 1857.

The moment passed in a heartbeat. But it did not matter. What mattered was that it existed. To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether. A chuckle, after all, could become a foothold in the sheer wall of the future.

Ordinary people in the Duniya—what did they know about what it takes to live the life of a Hijra? What did they know about the rules, the discipline and the sacrifices? Who today knew that there had been times when all of them, including she, Ustad Kulsoom Bi herself, had been driven to begging for alms at traffic lights? That they had built themselves up, bit by bit, humiliation by humiliation, from there? The Khwabgah was called Khwabgah, Ustad Kulsoom Bi said, because it was where special people, blessed people, came with their dreams that could not be realized in the Duniya. In the Khwabgah, Holy Souls trapped in the wrong bodies were liberated. (The question of what would happen if the Holy Soul were a man trapped in a woman’s body was not addressed.)

the central edict of the Khwabgah was manzoori. Consent. People in the Duniya spread wicked rumors about Hijras kidnapping little boys and castrating them. She did not know and could not say whether these things happened elsewhere, but in the Khwabgah, as the Almighty was witness, nothing happened without manzoori.

Far from being perturbed by this declaration, everybody was actually relieved to see a sign that the old drama queen in Anjum was alive and well. They had no reason to worry because she had absolutely nowhere to go.

“Arre, Doctor Sahib, which Poor would want to be helped by us?” Meher said, and they all giggled at the idea of intimidating poor people with offers of help.

A little distance away was the grave of Ahlam Baji, the midwife who’d delivered Anjum. In the years before her death, Ahlam Baji had grown disoriented and obese.

To make ends meet she began to perform cabarets in the Rosebud Rest-O-Bar located in the rose garden—known to locals as No-Rose Garden—in the ruins of Feroz Shah Kotla, the fifth of the seven ancient cities of Delhi.

Another grave bore only the name “Islahi.” Some said he was a general in Emperor Shah Alam II’s army, others insisted he was a local pimp who had been knifed to death in the 1960s by a prostitute whom he had cheated. As always, everybody believed what they wanted to believe.

In that setting, Anjum would ordinarily have been in some danger. But her desolation protected her. Unleashed at last from social protocol, it rose up around her in all its majesty—a fort, with ramparts, turrets, hidden dungeons and walls that hummed like an approaching mob.

She tried to un-know what they had done to all the others—how they had folded the men and unfolded the women. And how eventually they had pulled them apart limb from limb and set them on fire. But she knew very well that she knew.

Mrs. Gupta, who thought of herself as a Gopi, a female adorer of Lord Krishna, was, according to her palmist, living through her seventh and last cycle of rebirth. This gave her license to behave as she wished without worrying that she would have to pay for her sins in her next life.

Over time Anjum began to enclose the graves of her relatives and build rooms around them. Each room had a grave (or two) and a bed. Or two. She built a separate bathhouse and a toilet with its own septic tank.

This was because Anjum stole her electricity from the mortuary, where the corpses required round-the-clock refrigeration. (The city’s paupers who lay there in air-conditioned splendor had never experienced anything of the kind while they were alive.)

Love, after all, is the ingredient that separates a sacrifice from ordinary, everyday butchery.

When Anjum first met Saddam he worked in the mortuary. He was one of about ten young men whose job it was to handle the cadavers. The Hindu doctors who were required to conduct post-mortems thought of themselves as upper caste and would not touch dead bodies for fear of being polluted.

“What a sight we made on the first of every month when we went to collect our pay…thousands of us…You got the feeling that there were only three kinds of people in this city—security guards, people who need security guards, and thieves.”

Within a week Jannat Guest House began to function as a funeral parlor. It had a proper bathhouse with an asbestos roof and a cement platform for bodies to be laid out on.

When Ustad Kulsoom Bi passed away in her sleep she was buried in grand fashion in the Hijron Ka Khanqah in Mehrauli. But Bombay Silk was buried in Anjum’s graveyard. And so were many other Hijras from all over Delhi.

seven, Imam Ziauddin said the prayers. She was buried next to Mulaqat Ali. Bismillah, when she died, was buried in Anjum’s graveyard too.

“Once you have fallen off the edge like all of us have, including our Biroo,” Anjum said, “you will never stop falling. And as you fall you will hold on to other falling people. The sooner you understand that the better. This place where we live, where we have made our home, is the place of falling people. Here there is no haqeeqat. Arre, even we aren’t real. We don’t really exist.”

No Old Delhi Muslim needed a lesson about the Hindu festival of Dussehra. It was celebrated every year in the Ramlila grounds, just outside Turkman Gate. Every year the effigies of Ravan, the ten-headed “demon” King of Lanka, his brother Kumbhakaran and his son Meghnad grew taller and were packed with more and more explosives. Every year the Ramlila, the story of how Lord Ram, King of Ayodhya, vanquished Ravan in the battle of Lanka, which Hindus believed was the story of the triumph of Good over Evil, was enacted with greater aggression and ever-more generous sponsorship. A few audacious scholars had begun to suggest that the Ramlila was really history turned into mythology, and that the evil demons were really dark-skinned Dravidians—indigenous rulers—and the Hindu gods who vanquished them (and turned them into Untouchables and other oppressed castes who would spend their lives in service of the new rulers) were the Aryan invaders.

That’s when I first saw the video of the hanging of Saddam Hussein. I didn’t know anything about him, but I was so impressed by the courage and dignity of that man in the face of death.