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Chapter 1
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Corruption, Political Violence, and Capitalism
Resilience and Hope
Gender Identity, Social Division, and Coexistence
Social Hierarchy vs. Social Inclusivity
Religion and Power
Summary
Analysis
Anjum is born the fourth of five children. The first three are girls. At birth, the midwife presents Anjum to her mother as a boy, and her mother, Jahanara Begum, is absolutely thrilled. She has been wanting a boy for years, and has already picked out a name—Aftab. But when the sun rises the day after Aftab’s birth, Jahanara picks up her newborn child only to discover, underneath his tiny penis, “a small, unformed, but undoubtedly girl-part.” When she sees that her child is intersex, Jahanara is devastated. She even contemplates killing herself and the baby.
Jahanara’s eagerness to have a baby boy demonstrates the extent to which the male gender is privileged over the female in Jahanara’s society. Her impulse to kill herself and the baby when she realizes Aftab is intersex reveals the glaring intolerance that abounds in her community: she finds the idea of having a child who doesn’t fit into strict gender categories to be so unbearable that she thinks it might be better for the child not to live at all.
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Jahanara’s confusion and disappointment leads her to feel terrified of her own child. She thinks to herself that in Urdu, the only language she knows, everything has a gender—except her own child. Of course, she remembers, even in Urdu there are words for people like Aftab: Hijra and Kinnar. Still, she thinks to herself “two words do not make a language. Was it possible to live outside languages?” She isn’t able to answer her question, and worries for her child.
Throughout the novel, Roy examines language’s ability to describe reality. In this passage, Jahanara unknowingly engages with an age-old philosophical question: is language created in response to reality, or is reality created in response to language? She thinks that because there are no words for people like Aftab, they can’t exist. This line of thinking, though, shows how people sometimes allow language’s limitations to limit their tolerance for difference.
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Ultimately, Jahanara resolves to keep her baby’s gender a secret. But she does decide to take little Aftab to a sacred place to bless him, the shrine of Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed. She doesn’t usually go to this particular shrine, but feels called to it on this particular occasion, “perhaps […] drawn to the strange people she had seen camped there […] the kind of people who in her earlier life she would not have deigned to even glance at unless they’d crossed her path. Suddenly they seem[] to be the most important people in the world.”
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Shaheed was an Armenian Jewish merchant who travelled to Delhi to be with his beloved, a young Hindu boy. Later in life, Shaheed converted to Islam, which he also ultimately renounced. At the end of his life, he wandered the streets, naked, living as an ascetic and accepting alms. He was ultimately arrested, and the king tried to force him to admit there was no God but the Muslim God. Because this was contrary to his belief, Shaheed refused, and was beheaded. At his shrine, his “insubordinate spirit […] celebrate[s] (but never preach[es]) the virtue of spirituality over sacrament, simplicity over opulence and stubborn, ecstatic love even when faced with the prospect of annihilation.” Jahanara asks the spirit of Shaheed to bless her Aftab, and he does.
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Aftab passes as a normal boy until he is five years old. Jahanara waits for his “girl part to heal,” and meanwhile Aftab starts going to school, where he particularly enjoys singing lessons. His voice is high and sweet, and Jahanara sends him to Ustad Hameed Khan, a renowned young musician. Aftab excels at singing, and his high voice allows him to sing even female parts. For this, adults celebrate him, but other children tease him. Eventually, the teasing becomes so bad that Aftab wants to give up music classes. But Ustad Hameed won’t hear of it, and gives Aftab lessons on his own.
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The time comes for Aftab to have his circumcision, and although Jahanara attempts to put off this rite of passage, there comes a time when she can no longer avoid it. Desperate, she finally confides in her husband, Mulaqat Ali, and tells him their son is intersex. Once a successful tradesman, the business Mulaqat worked at selling beverages weakened with the violence of partition, and the arrival of Coca-Cola in India. He works as an herbalist to supplement his income, and can trace his family lineage back to the Mongol Emperor Changez Khan. Fond of Urdu poetry, Mulaqat often has a verse of a poem suitable for any situation—but when his wife tells him about their son, no comforting poem comes to mind.
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Mulaqat comes to the conclusion that he and his wife need to take Aftab to Dr. Ghulam Nabi, a “sexologist.” Dr. Nabi declares that Aftab is not technically a Hijra, what he defines as a male trapped in a female body. Indeed, male traits seem to be more dominant, but the doctor warns Aftab’s parents that “Hijra tendencies”—behavioral as well as physical—are not likely to go away. He prescribes Aftab some pills and recommends a surgeon who could seal Aftab’s “girl-part.”
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Mulaqat decides Aftab will get the gender-change surgery, and while he saves up money, he resolves to tell his son stories about his Mongol ancestors. The men were fierce warriors, but Aftab is captured by the story of a warrior queen, and finds himself wanting to be her. While his siblings all go to school, Aftab stays at home, observing the neighborhood. One day he sees a tall, thin woman “wearing bright lipstick, gold high heels and a shiny, green satin salwar kameez” and, again, wants to be her.
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Aftab follows the fascinating woman all the way down the street until she enters a house with a blue doorway. He is intrigued by her in part because he knows that if she were really a woman, she wouldn’t have been allowed to dress that way—she would have had to wear a burqa or at the very least a head covering. Aftab longs to be her, to have her graceful walk and stylish clothing—for “it [is] not Aftab’s girl-part that [is] just an appendage.”
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Every day, Aftab stands outside the house, which he learns is called the Khwabgah, or “house of dreams.” At first, the residents of the house all shoo him away, not wanting to upset his father. But Aftab sticks around, runs errands for them, and occasionally massages their feet. Eventually, they let him in. Aftab is fascinated by the house and its residents, mostly Hijras. Kulsoom Bi is the head of the house, and Aftab befriends Nimmo, a Hijra who “would have been beautiful but for her fast-growing facial hair” who is “obsessed with Western women’s fashion.”
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One day, Nimmo asks Aftab why God made Hijras. She answers her own question, saying that it was an experiment, that God wanted to create something that was totally incapable of happiness. Aftab protests, saying he loves the Khwabgah and that everyone seems happy there. Nimmo disagrees, going on to say that everything that makes “normal people” unhappy is outside of them—cost of living, abusive husbands, disappointing children, Hindu-Muslim conflicts. But, she says, for Hijras, “The war is inside us. Indo-Pak is inside us.”
When Nimmo says this, Aftab wants to say she’s wrong, because he loves the Khwabgah. But a couple years later, when his body begins to change, he understands the suffering she speaks of. He becomes tall and muscular, and, worst of all, develops a deep, masculine voice. He resolves never to sing again, except in jest. This, for him, is the last straw—without music, there is nothing tying him to the Duniya, or the real world. He steals some of his parents’ money, packs up his things, and moves into the Khwabgah.
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At first, Jahanara begs Aftab to leave the Khwabgah, but he refuses. She resolves to meet with him every so often at the shrine of Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed. Mulaqat, ashamed, resolves to cut all ties with his former son. Meanwhile, Aftab becomes Anjum, eventually to become Delhi’s most famous Hijra. She is coveted by NGO’s and journalists, who assume her traditional Muslim family has abused her. She responds that she was the one who had been cruel.
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Finally, at the Khwabgah, Anjum is able to dress the way she’s always dreamed of. She gets her nose pierced and wears elaborate feminine clothes, pulling her short hair back and weaving it into a braid of extensions. On Anjum’s 18th birthday, Kulsoom Bi throws her a party, and, that night, she dreams that she is “a new bride on her wedding night.” To her dismay, she wakes up to find that she had an orgasm during the night, and came onto her new red sari. Dismayed, Anjum speaks with Kulsoom Bi, who comforts her saying that Hijras are bodies “in which a Holy Soul lives.” Kulsoom Bi also encourages Anjum to undergo gender transition surgery, saying that it is not against Islam.
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Anjum decides to have the surgery with Dr. Mukhtar, who works with many of the residents of the Khwabgah. After removing her penis, Anjum feels much better physically. Dr. Mukhtar also gives Anjum pills that “undeepen her voice” but also give it “a peculiar, rasping quality, which sometimes sound[s] like two voices quarreling with each other instead of one.” In this state, with her “patched up body parts,” Anjum lives in the Khwabgah for 30 years—until, suddenly, she announces that she wants to leave.
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When Anjum announces that she wants to leave the Khwabgah, no one takes her seriously at first. Even she herself isn’t sure why she does, but she fantasizes about living in her own home, being a mother to Zainab, and living “like an ordinary person.” She wonders, though, if a life like that is “reasonable […] on the part of someone like herself.”
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Zainab is the person Anjum loves most in this world, whom she finds one day, an abandoned baby, on the steps in front of a mosque. Anjum offers the baby a finger to grasp, and Zainab responds. This shocks Anjum, as “being ignored instead of dreaded by the tiny creature subdue[s] what Nimmo […] call[s] Indo-Pak.” Adoring the feeling of acceptance, Anjum brings the baby home to the Khwabgah. She makes public announcements that a baby has been found, but, to her relief, no one responds. Zainab comes to call Anjum “Mummy,” and grows into a stubborn “bandicoot-like” little girl.
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Unfamiliar with the rites of motherhood, Anjum spoils Zainab at first. Discovering Zainab’s love for animals, Anjum gifts her a baby goat. When Zainab grows older, Anjum begins to tell her bedtime stories based on her own life, that are “entirely inappropriate for a young child.” Soon, though, Anjum learns to modify the stories to be child-appropriate. For instance, she euphemizes the “Flyover Story”—a time when the police attacked a party where Anjum and other Hijras were gathering and threatened to arrest them all for prostitution if they didn’t run home, and Anjum had to pee on a flyover—into a story where Anjum simply gets caught in the rain and goes pee outside. In this way, “Anjum beg[ins] to rewrite a simpler, happier life for herself.”
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When Zainab turns five, Anjum takes her to have singing lessons with Ustad Hameed, her old music teacher. Sadly, the little girl has no talent for music, but does have a real passion for animals. Anjum gifts her with a rooster in addition to the goat, and, when it comes time, registers her for school. (Anjum’s brother, Saqib, and his wife are the official parents.) Sadly, Zainab falls too ill to go to school. She gets malaria, and then two bouts of viral fever. Worried, Anjum wonders if someone has put a hex on Zainab. She suspects Saeeda, a younger Hijra who is more modern than Anjum, who uses words like “transperson” and is Zainab’s second-favorite in the Khwabgah.
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In addition to possibly hexing Zainab, Saeeda has also stolen Anjum’s spot as the most famous Hijra in Delhi. Her modern image and ability to switch between Western and traditional clothes better suits “the image of the New India—a nuclear power and an emerging destination for international finance.” An aging Ustad Kulsoom Bi sees the benefits of including members like this in the Khwabgah, and Saeeda is neck-to-neck with Anjum for replacing Kulsoom Bi as head of the house.
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One day, Anjum hears commotion in the Khwabgah and, fearing the worst, runs downstairs with Zainab. What she discovers is that the two commercial airlines have crashed into tall buildings in a city called New York. Anjum suspects that the hex Saeeda has put on Zainab has made the whole world sick, but she is the only one blaming a local Hijra for the attacks. Instead, Muslim communities across the world are persecuted. In India, political parties espousing the belief that India ought to be a Hindu republic rise to power. The “Poet-Prime Minister” makes a speech in which he says “The Mussalman, he doesn’t like the Other […] His Faith he wants to spread through Terror.”
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Anjum sees on the news that “all the prisons [are] full of young Muslim men” and “thank[s] the Almighty that Zainab [is] a girl. It [is] so much safer.” Meanwhile, Zainab’s health does not improve, and Anjum ultimately seeks the advice of a Muslim religious leader, who advises her to visit the shrine of Hazrat Gharib Nawaz in Ajmer. So, once Zainab has gotten a little better, Anjum resolves to make the trip with Zakir Mian, an old friend of her father’s, “too old to be embarrassed about being seen travelling with a Hijra.” He suggests that they visit the shrine of Wali Dakhani, an Urdu poet whom Mulaqat loved.
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The two set off for Ajmer, and, for the first three days, Anjum calls the Khwabgah every day to check on Zainab. After the third day, the residents don’t hear from her, but they do see on television terrible news from Gujarat: 60 Hindu pilgrims have been burned alive in a train. Politicians declare it “the work of Pakistani terrorists,” and an “unofficial spokesperson announce[s] unofficially that every action [will] be met with an equal and opposite reaction.” This triggers an unprecedented chain reaction of Hindu extremist groups wearing saffron headbands murdering Muslims, attacking them in their homes and shops and on pilgrimages and even in the hospital.
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Worried, Saeeda suggests that they keep the news on at the Khwabgah to see if they can find out what has happened to Anjum and Zakir Mian, whom they haven’t heard from. They look closely at footage of Muslim refugee camps in Gujarat to see if they can glimpse either. On TV, they learn that the shrine of Wali Dakhani has been razed to make room for a tarred road. Even so, pilgrims continue to leave flowers in the middle of the road where the shrine used to be.
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The Khwabgah goes two months without hearing anything from Anjum. By that time, “the murdering [has] grown sporadic,” and Mansoor, Zakir Mian’s son, goes to Ahmedabad to see if he can find his father. On the way, he wears red puja threads to try and pass for Hindu. He never finds Zakir Mian, and instead learns that he has been murdered. He finds Anjum in the men’s section of a refugee camp—dressed in men’s clothing and with a short haircut—and brings her back home. After hugging a delighted Zainab, the first thing Anjum does upon returning to the Khwabgah is change into her preferred feminine clothes and put on makeup. She is subdued, and doesn’t seem happy to see the women of the Khwabgah. She is particularly unhappy that Zainab has begun to call Saeeda “Mummy” as well.
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Anjum’s strange mood lasts for many weeks. She teaches Zainab a strange chant that nobody knows—the Gayatri Mantra, that she learned in the refugee camp at Gujarat. She says it is good to know for mob situations, so that Zainab can pass for Hindu if she needs to. One day, Anjum even gives Zainab a haircut and dresses her in boy’s clothes, explaining to the perplexed members of the Khwabgah that “it’s safer like this.”
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Ustad Kulsoom Bi does not like what Anjum has done with Zainab, and calls an emergency meeting. She speaks proudly of the history of the Khwabgah, reminding her fellow Hijras of their ancestors’ important role with Mughal royals in the historical Red Court. She reminds them of a sound and light show at the modern-day Red Court, in which at one point listeners can distinctly hear “the deep, distinct, rasping, coquettish giggle of a court eunuch.” Ustad Kulsoom Bi adores this part of the installation, for “to be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, [is] a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether.” Anjum remembers the time she herself went to see the installation, and a tourist asked to take her picture—it was the first time she was photographed.
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Anjum’s attention returns to the meeting, where Ustad Kulsoom Bi continues to speak proudly of the legacy of Hijras in India. She reminds the other girls that the Khwabgah is a place where “Holy Souls trapped in the wrong bodies [are] liberated.” But, she emphasizes, the key principle of the Khwabgah is manzoori, or “consent.” She reminds everyone that in the Duniya, people spread rumors that Hijras capture and castrate young boys. In keeping with the principle of consent, she says, Anjum cannot oblige Zainab to present as a boy, even if she thinks it makes her safer.
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Anjum protests, insisting that Zainab is her child and she will do as she pleases with her, threatening to leave the Khwabgah with Zainab. Ustad Kulsoom Bi responds that the Anjum can go wherever she wants, but the child will stay in the Khwabgah. At first, Anjum’s threat to leave is mostly rhetorical, but as time passes, she begins to truly consider leaving her home of the past 30 years.
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Thinking Anjum is crazy for wanting to leave, the women of the Khwabgah go and visit Dr. Bhagat, a doctor who prescribes many of them with mental health medication. Fearing (erroneously) that the Hindu doctor will not understand that Anjum may be traumatized from what she experienced at the refugee camp, Saeeda doesn’t mention that Anjum was present in Gujarat, but does tell the doctor about Anjum’s anxiety and crazy desire to leave the Khwabgah. The doctor prescribes Anjum a medication, which she refuses to take.
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Growing increasingly restless and unhappy, Anjum burns Dr. Bhagat’s prescription, along with a collection of photographs and articles of her that she has collected over the years, scaring Zainab so much that she moves all her things to Saeeda’s room. Heartbroken, Anjum packs a few of her things—her cupboard, two suits, and a pair of men’s shoes—and leaves the Khwabgah, headed for the graveyard behind the government hospital, where many of her family members are buried.
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Anjum sets up her belongings next to her father’s grave, among the “smack addicts” and stray dogs that populate the graveyard. Normally, she would be in danger in such a situation, but “her desolation protect[s] her.” Alone with her mind, she tries to shut out memories of what happened to her and Zakir Mian, but is unable to. She remembers how the Hindu extremists, “saffron parakeets with steel talons and bloodied beaks,” murdered everyone around her, tore them limb from limb and set them on fire. She remembers how she had feigned death but was discovered, only to be spared because “killing Hijras brings bad luck.” Indeed, the murderers seemed to be preoccupied with not acquiring bad luck—their “wrists wielding iron rods that bludgeoned people to death were festooned with red puja threads lovingly tied by adoring mothers.”
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Instead of killing her, the mob simply made her “chant their slogans,” and Anjum remembers repeating “Victory to Mother India!” While she suffers with her traumas in the graveyard, Anjum receives no visitors at first, but D.D. Gupta, a client of hers at the Khwabgah who works in construction in Iraq, comes to visit her before moving to Baghdad. When he visits, he brings her a cell phone, which she doesn’t use. Eventually, Saeeda brings Zainab a few times, Ustad Kulsoom Bi visits and gives Anjum an allowance from the Khwabgah, and even Saqib comes once a week. Ustad Hameed comes and sings for Anjum, which he knows to be possibly one of her only sources of joy in those difficult moments. Still, Anjum won’t be convinced to return to the Khwabgah.
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Over the years, Anjum’s grief subsides—her memories of the saffron parakeets of Gujarat dim and of Zakir Mian “will not go away” but become “a constant but undemanding companion.” As she heals, Anjum begins to present as a woman again, dying her hair with henna and replacing a dead tooth with a shiny, new implant. Meanwhile, she transforms her tiny shack in the graveyard into a real house, painting the walls fuchsia and even building a little kitchen. Saeeda and Zainab begin to visit again, and although Anjum is devastated at the permanent wound in their relationships, she is glad the child feels comfortable around her again. When authorities challenge Anjum’s right to live in the graveyard, she protests, saying she isn’t living there—she is dying there. The officers, who fear being cursed by a Hijra, leave her alone, allowing her to stay there for a small fee.
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With time, Anjum’s home grows and grows. Imam Ziauddin eventually moves in permanently, and Anjum builds rooms over the graves of several of her relatives nearby. What’s more, her house starts functioning as a guesthouse—obviously, not too many people are interested in spending the night in the graveyard, and Anjum won’t let in just anyone, so business isn’t exactly booming. But still, her house and the community she forms around it slowly grows. She names the guest house Jannat, meaning “paradise.” Because she steals electricity from the mortuary, “where the corpses required round-the-clock refrigeration,” Anjum suffers no power cuts and keeps the TV on day and night, learning much about modern politics.
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Many of Anjum’s guests are other Hijras who have “fallen out of, or been expelled from, the tightly administered grid of Hijra Gharanas.” Among these is Nimmo, who over the years has become a large, beautiful woman and the owner of a successful business that sells goats for slaughter on particularly on Eid (a Muslim religious feast commemorating the end of Ramadan, a month of fasting.) Nimmo gifts Anjum with a beautiful ram to rear and slaughter for Eid one year. She raises him with great care, as she believes “love, after all, is the ingredient that separates a sacrifice from ordinary, everyday butchery.”
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That Eid, Anjum hires a popular butcher to perform the sacrifice. Anjum dresses as a man to take on the role of “Man of the House” and is the one to say the traditional prayer before the ram’s throat is slit. She distributes “little parcels of mutton […] in the way it is Written: a third for the family, a third for nears and dears, a third for the poor.” For Eid, Anjum, Nimmo, Imam Ziauddin, and all of the addicts in the graveyard eat very well. Nimmo gifts Anjum a mobile phone, which, unlike the phone D.D. Gupta gifted her, she keeps.
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The next morning, a second permanent guest arrives at Jannat Guest House: a young man who has dubbed himself Saddam Hussain. Anjum takes a liking to him, and offers him extremely cheap rent. Saddam works at the mortuary handling cadavers, as the upper-caste Hindu doctors whose legal job it is to perform post-mortems feel that they are above the task. Saddam and the others who perform his job are part of a caste called Chamars, whom the doctors think of as Untouchable. When he arrives to stay for good at Jannat Guest House, he has just been fired from his job after a fight with a doctor. He comes along with a white mare named Payal, and wears sunglasses, even indoors.
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Saddam tells Anjum the story of how he burned his eyes looking at a tree. Previously, he was employed as a security guard at Safe n’ Sound Guard Service—where he used the name Dayachand, as no one would trust a Muslim security guard—when he was assigned to guard an art exhibition in which everything was made of steel. He was tasked with staring at a steel tree all day, making sure visitors did not touch it. However, the sunlight reflecting off of the metal burned his eyes, and when he asked for permission to wear sunglasses, he was denied because it looked unprofessional. After several weeks, Saddam’s eyes were permanently damaged, and he couldn’t open them in daylight without sunglasses, which he was fired for wearing. Upon leaving, he cursed at his boss, and Anjum laughs when he tells her what names he called his employer.
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Now unemployed, Saddam supports himself with a few odd jobs. For instance, he takes his horse Payal and stations outside of hospitals, pretending to be re-shoeing her. Superstitious Hindu relatives of the ill want to take the old horseshoe for good luck, and Saddam happily sells them. He also sells medication to poor people from villages who are tended to in Delhi’s government hospitals.
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Saddam soon partners with Anjum and Imam Ziauddin to begin another odd job when Anwar Bhai, the owner of a nearby brothel, arrives at Jannat with the dead body of one of his girls, Rubina. Anwar is unhappy for many reasons—Rubina’s eyes are missing, and, because of her profession, none of the graveyards in Delhi are willing to bury her. Sensing a business opportunity, Saddam tells Anwar that he’s come to the right place. The other sex workers that worked with Rubina begin preparing her body for the funeral, bathing, drying, and perfuming her. Two addicts help Saddam to dig a grave, and Imam Ziauddin says the prayers. Although initially both Anjum and Saddam refuse the 500 rupees Anwar offers them for the service, Saddam is “not one to pass up a business opportunity,” and the very next week Jannat Guest House begins to double as a funeral parlor.
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As expected, Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services isn’t the typical funeral parlor. Indeed, like guests, Anjum either warmly welcomes or roaringly rejects petitions from those who want to be buried on her land. Her only “clear criterion” is that Anjum is only willing to bury “those whom the graveyards and imams of the Duniya [have] rejected.” Even the police, “whose rules [are] as irrational as Anjum’s” sometimes bring bodies to Jannat. Ustad Kulsoom Bi eventually is buried in Anjum’s graveyard, along with many other Delhi Hijras. (This is how Imam Ziauddin finally receives the answer to the question he asks at the beginning of the story about where Hijras go to die.)
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Anjum and Saddam live together, but don’t spend much time in one another’s company. Anjum likes to spend her days watching television, and on the news she learns that, in spite of the moderate but puppet-like Sikh president, Hindu conservative extremist groups are gaining power again. Gujarat ka Lalla is the Chief Minister of Gujarat and “talk[s] a lot about avenging centuries of Muslim Rule.” One Independence Day, Anjum is watching the news and listens to a speech given by the Sikh president, according to Anjum, “speak[s] like a marionette.”
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Saddened by the rise of the political right in her country, Anjum goes outside with Saddam and Biroo, their dog, to enjoy some tea. She begins to tell Saddam the “Flyover Story” that Zainab had loved when she was a little girl, and, suddenly, has the realization that she was “born to be a mother,” which she shares with Saddam. But Saddam is doubtful, and asks her how that would be possible; he reminds her that “there is, after all, such a thing as Reality.” Angrily, Anjum challenges him, saying, “Once you have fallen off the edge like all of us have […] you will never stop falling. And as you fall you will hold on to other falling people […] The place where we live, where we have made our home, is the place of falling people […] We don’t really exist.”
Out of affection for Anjum, Saddam doesn’t push the conversation further. Indeed, in that moment, he realizes she’s the person he loves most in the world. After some silence, Anjum asks him why he calls himself Saddam Hussain. He reveals that the story has to do with “saffron parakeets and a dead cow.” His real name is Dayachand, and he comes from a family of Chamars, or members of the Untouchable caste. One day, he went with his father to collect a cow that had died on an upper-caste man’s property—members of the upper-caste wouldn’t dirty themselves by touching dead cows. Collecting these bodies was Saddam’s father’s profession.
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On that day, the community was celebrating Dussehra, a festival that celebrates Hindu gods vanquishing evil demons. (“Audacious scholars” believe this festival might have been based on Aryan invaders vanquishing the indigenous rulers of the land.) As Saddam and his father were driving back with the cow carcass, they came across an official, whom they usually bribed, who asked them that day for more money. Saddam’s father couldn’t pay, so the official had his father arrested for cow-slaughter. After the festivities, a mob gathered in front of the police station, demanding that the “cow-killers” be handed over to them. Fearing for his life, Saddam mingled with the crowd. The police acquiesced, and the crowd beat Saddam’s father to death. He remembers how the crowd “splashed through puddles of his father’s blood as if it were rainwater,” and says to Anjum, “I was part of the mob that killed my father.”
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Hearing Saddam’s words, Anjum remembers her traumatic experience with a Hindu extremist mob. Saddam goes on to say how shortly after his father was killed, his mother also died, and how he stole money from an uncle to come to Delhi. This was where he saw the video of Saddam Hussain’s hanging. Saddam was so impressed by the other Saddam’s stoicism when he was killed that he resolved to become a Muslim and take his name. Saddam says he wants to be like his chosen namesake: willing to pay the price for doing what he feels he has to do. Anjum tells Saddam that she has a friend who lives in Iraq, and shares with Saddam photos that D. D. Gupta has sent her. One of these is graffiti of the words of an American army general: “Be professional, be polite, and have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”
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Once they have finished talking, Anjum and Saddam go back inside, where they “continue[] to float through their lives like a pair of astronauts,” although not without plans. Anjum wants to die, while Saddam wants to kill the official that condemned his father to death. Meanwhile, miles away, “in a troubled forest, a baby wait[s] to be born…”
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