The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

by Arundhati Roy

To, The Unconsoled

At magic hour, when the sun has gone but the light has not, armies of flying foxes unhinge themselves from the Banyan trees in the old graveyard and drift across the city like smoke. When the bats leave, the crows come home. Not all the din of their homecoming fills the silence left by the sparrows that have gone missing, and the old white-backed vultures, custodians of the dead for more than a hundred million years, that have been wiped out.

Famous last birds

as the city ate more ice cream, butterscotch-crunch, nutty-buddy and chocolate-chip, as it drank more mango milkshake, vultures’ necks began to droop as though they were tired and simply couldn’t stay awake. Silver beards of saliva dripped from their beaks, and one by one they tumbled off their branches, dead.

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

Famous last birds

“You mean I’ve made a khichdi of their story?” she asked. “What will they do when they find that Laila may actually be Majnu and Romi was really Juli?” The next time he saw her, the Man Who Knew English said he’d made a mistake. Her name spelled backwards would be Mujna, which wasn’t a name and meant nothing at all. To this she said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m all of them, I’m Romi and Juli, I’m Laila and Majnu. And Mujna, why not? Who says my name is Anjum? I’m not Anjum, I’m Anjuman. I’m a mehfil, I’m a gathering. Of everybody and nobody, of everything and nothing. Is there anyone else you would like to invite? Everyone’s invited.”

Plurals

there was a word for those like him—Hijra. Two words actually, Hijra and Kinnar.

loved her and how she had been the cruel one. “Others have horrible stories, the kind you people like to write about,” she would say. “Why not talk to them?” But of course newspapers didn’t work that way.

The word Hijra, she said, meant a Body in which a Holy Soul lives.

Dr. Mukhtar’s pills did undeepen her voice. But it restricted its resonance, coarsened its timbre and gave it a peculiar, rasping quality, which sometimes sounded like two voices quarreling with each other instead of one.

The saffron men sheathed their swords, laid down their tridents and returned meekly to their working lives, answering bells, obeying orders, beating their wives and biding their time until their next bloody outing.

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

“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.”

Anjum used the word Chamar and not Dalit, the more modern and accepted term for those that Hindus considered to be “untouchable,” in the same spirit in which she refused to refer to herself as anything other than Hijra. She didn’t see the problem with either Hijras or Chamars.

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.

an American army general’s famous words: Be professional, be polite and have a plan to kill everybody you meet.

A dozen hefty men in civil clothes but with uncivil haircuts (short back and sides) and uncivil socks and shoes (khaki socks, brown boots) had distributed themselves among the crowd, blatantly eavesdropping on conversations. Some of them pretended to be journalists and filmed conversations with small Handycams. They paid special attention to the young foreigners (many of whom would soon find their visas revoked).

You’ve always got to keep an eye out for those proud boys who pull the veil

the night smelled of charred insect.

“Another World Is Possible” in whatever language they spoke. For example, if their mother tongue was Hindi or Urdu, they could say, “Doosri duniya mumkin hai…”

Because of,course Hindi and Urdu are basically the same language

uncomprehending, stared into the camera. “Hum doosri Duniya se aaye hain,” she explained helpfully, which meant: We’ve come from there…from the other world.

The Trapped Rabbit had refused to meet the Bhopalis. The TV crews were not interested in them; their struggle was too old to make the news.

Someone said she was a beggar. Someone else said she was a rapevictim (which was a word in every language).

For all their religiosity, Kashmiris are great businessmen. And all businessmen eventually, one way or another, have a stake in the status quo—or what we call the “Peace Process,” which, by the way, is an entirely different kind of business opportunity from peace itself.

It was like a wartime ward. Except that in Delhi there was no war other than the usual one—the war of the rich against the poor.