The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

 

Tilo was a third-year student at the Architecture School and was working on the sets and lighting design. She introduced herself to us as Tilottama. The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.

 

 

 

 

 

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

 

 

 

Arundhati Roy. Penguin Books 2017

 

 

 

‘The unmissable literary read of the summer. With its insights into human nature, its memorable characters and its luscious prose, it is well worth the wait’ [Time]

 

 

 

*luscious/adj/extremely pleasing to the sense of taste/having strong sexual appeal,

 

 

 

2019 最高의 讀書였다. 作家의 美貌는 讀者를 背反.

 

Jammu and Kashimir 讚歌 (Homage to Catalonia를 記憶한다면)라고 부를 만.

 

 

 

Aftab의 이야기

 

 

 

父 Mulaqat Ari

 

母 Jahanara Begum

 

子 兩性具有Aftab

 

弟 Saqib

 

 

 

LGBTAIQ

 

Lesbian/Gay/Bi_Sexual/Transgender/A_Sexual/

 

Intersex(one having both male and female sexual characteristics and organs ; at birth an unambiguous assignment of male or female cannot be made. 兩性具有, 阴阳人 ) /

 

Questioner

 

 

 

P7

 

That was when she discovered, nestling underneath his boy-parts, a small, unformed, but undoubtedly girl-part.

 

 

 

 

 

P8

 

Hijra

 

 

 

P9

 

Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed

 

 

 

P12

 

His real gift was music

 

 

 

P17

 

How to raise enough money for the surgery?

 

 

 

P19

 

The woman Aftab followed could dress as she was dressed and walk the way she did only because she wasn’t a woman.

 

 

 

P23

 

Do you know why God made Hijras?

 

…

 

It was an experiment. He decided to create something, a living creature that is incapable of happiness. So he made us.

 

 

 

P25

 

And so, at the age of fifteen, only a few hundred yards from where his family had lived for centuries, Aftab stepped through an ordinary doorway into another universe.

 

 

 

…

 

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 Nayakm a Chief, all of them headed by a Supreme Chief.

 

 

 

P28

 

Dr.Mukhtar

 

 

 

The surgery was difficult, the recovery even more so, but in the end it came as a relief.

 

 

 

P30

 

Zainab was Anjum’s only love. Anjum had found here three years ago on one of those windy afternoons., She was alone and bawling on the steps of the Jama Masjid…She wore a dull green salwar kameeze and a dirty white hijab.

 

 

 

P57

 

She left without saying where she was going.

 

 

 

P58

 

It was an unprepossessing graveyard, run-down, not very big and used only occasionally.

 

 

 

P72

 

The morning after Bakr-Eid, Jannat Guest House received its second-permanent guest- a young man who called himself Saddam Husaain.

 

 

 

P79

 

Within a week, Jannat Guest House began to function as a funeral parlor.

 

 

 

P90

 

Jammu & Kashimir Tourism Department

 

 

 

P143

 

The Landlord

 

 

 

I’m upstairs in this barsati, this small, second –floor apartment on-the-roof.

 

 

 

P149

 

I first met her all these years ago when we were still in college, I have constructed myself around her. Not around her perhaps, but around the memory of my love for her. She doesn’t know that. Nobody does, except perhaps Naga, Musa and me, the men who loved her.

 

 

 

I use the word love loosely, and only because my vocabulary is unequal to the task of describing the precise nature of that maze, the forest of feelings that connected the three of us to her and eventually to each other.

 

 

 

P152

 

Tilo was a third-year student at the Architecture School and was working on the sets and lighting design. She introduced herself to us as Tilottama. The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.

 

 

 

P153

 

She wasn’t tall, but she was rangy, and she had a way of standing, with her weight on the balls of her feet, her shoulders squared, that was almost masculine, and yet wasn’t.

 

 

 

P156

 

He was striking-looking, in the way many young Kashimiri men can be.

 

 

 

P157

 

The contrast between the two of them was remarkable. If Musa was (or at least gave the impression of being) solid, defendable, a rock- Naga was breezy and mercurial.

 

 

 

P165

 

Today, as the saffron tide of Hindu nationalism rises in our country like the swastika once did in another.

 

 

 

P177

 

A ‘ladies’ had been captured along with Commander Gulrez, he said. She wasn’t Kashimiri.

 

 

 

P183

 

It had been more than ten years since I had seen Tilo and shared that joint with her on her terrace. She was thinner than I remembered. Her collarbones winged out from the base of her neck. Her gossamer sari was the color of sunset. Her head was covered, but through the sheer fabric I could see the smooth shape of her skull.

 

 

 

P187

 

Four years ago, out of the blue sky, she rang to ask whether I was the Biplab Dasgupta (there are plenty of us, the absurdly named, in this world) who had advertised in the papers for a tenant for a second-floor apartment.

 

 

 

Much older of course, but in some essential way unchanged as peculiar as ever. She wore a purple sari and a black-and-white-checkered blouse, a shirt actually, with a collar and long sleeves rolled halfway up her forearms. Her hair was dead white and cropped close to here head, short enough for it to look spiky. She looked either much younger or much older than her years. I couldn’t decide which.

 

 

 

P188

 

Her smile made the lights come on in the room.

 

..

 

I had no idea what she meant. Then she was gone. Then too, her absence filled the apartment, like it does now.

 

..

 

Her arrival in my life, here presence upstairs, unlocked something inside me.

 

It worries me that I use the past tense.

 

 

 

P206

 

It’s two people with three voices. Strange.

 

 

 

The woman-man speaks to me in a voice that sounds like two voices. She speaks the most beautiful Urdu. She says her name is Anjum, that she’s a friend of Tilottama, who is living with her for the moment, and that she and her friend Saddam Hussain had come because Tilo needed some things from her cupboard.

 

 

 

P215

 

The baby was the beginning of something. The bay was Miss Jebeen returned,

 

 

 

 

 

P240

 

She was a jet-black baby, like a little piece of coal, She was so small she almost fitted in the palm of my hand so I called her Tilottama, which means “sesame seed” in Sanskrit.

 

P253

 

Maryam Ipe died early the next morning.

 

 

 

P258

 

She wondered what an un-released soul, a soul shaped stone on a funeral pyre, might look like.

 

 

 

P309

 

Ever since she was old enough to insist, she had insisted on being called Miss Jebeen. It was the only name she would answer to.

 

 

 

P343

 

Dawn was breaking. A hint of rose in a pigeon-grey sky. Musa walked home through the dead streets.

 

 

 

P362

 

The had always fitted together like pieces of an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) puzzle- the smoke of her into the solidness of him, the solitariness of her into the gathering of him, the strangeness of her into the straightforwardness of him. The quietness of her into the quietness of him.

 

 

 

P397

 

Word spread quickly in the poorer quarters that a clever woman had moved into the graveyard.

 

 

 

P428

 

Instead of drinking, I’ve been binge reading.

 

 

 

P430

 

Of course I know about Musa now-in the sense that I know he didn’t die when we thought he did.

 

 

 

P435

 

It was Musa’s third night in Jannat Guest House. He had arrived a few days ago like a delivery man, with a Tempo full of cardboard cartons.

 

 

 

Nov 6, 2019

 

At Sweet Home

 

鎭