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Chapter 6
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
Another day in Delhi, and the city is shaken by simultaneous explosions that have gone off in bus stop, a café, and a shopping mall. Five are dead and several are injured. The television newscasters are in shock, but the first-person narrator isn’t: “blasts evoke a range of emotions in [him], but sadly, shock is no longer one of them.” The narrator finds himself in an old apartment in a nice neighborhood. He owns the apartment, but his tenant is nowhere to be found. He has been sent home from the foreign service because his drinking habit has worsened, and he is supposed to check into rehab to deal with his health before returning to Kabul, where he is stationed. Although the situation there is dangerous—his office has been attacked twice—the narrator longs to return. He is addicted to Kabul’s “battle of wits.”
The new, first-person narrator shows himself to be a jaded bureaucrat, desensitized to the atrocities of the wars that occur in the region of the world where he lives. That he would long to return to Kabul because he is addicted to its “battle of wits” is a harrowing admission. As a functionary of the government, the narrator should be seeking in all ways possible to reduce the violence that occurs in the city where he is stationed. However, his cold appreciation for the violence demonstrates not only how numb he and the Indian government have become to violence, but also how perhaps they might not be working towards reducing violence at all.
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While he waits to be declared fit for service, and avoids the rehab he is supposed to be doing, the narrator has decided to check in on his tenants. The neighborhood where the apartment is situated was, when he bought it, up-and-coming, but since then the area has become over-built, full of middle-class families and constantly under construction. The apartments are glossier and more expensive looking, and the streets are full of upper-caste Indians and white expats alike. There’s even a new elementary school, where children are taught English nursery rhymes from a young age. The narrator observes that, in spite of the construction and the smell of waste, “compared to Kabul or anywhere else in Afghanistan or Pakistan […] this foggy little back lane […] is like a small corner of Paradise.”
The narrator’s use of the word “Paradise” in this passage invites readers to compare this neighborhood with Anjum’s “paradise”—Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services. According to this narrator, “paradise” looks like the increasing influence of Western cultures in India (as evidenced by the expats and the English instruction in the nursery school), as well as the dominance of upper-caste Indians without any lower-caste people in sight. This is essentially the opposite of Anjum’s “paradise,” which includes almost exclusively people who lack class privilege and is entirely disassociated from the influence of Western culture.
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Having seen his fair share of suffering during the foreign service, posted in various neighboring countries, the narrator thinks highly of India. He even scorns the “grumbling intellectuals and professional dissenters” who complain about the country, observing that they “can only [complain] because they are allowed to. And they are allowed to because, for all [India’s] imperfections, [it is] a genuine democracy.” This is why the narrator is proud to serve the country’s government.
When the narrator discovers that the apartment he rents out on the second floor of the building is empty, he goes downstairs and his first-floor tenant’s wife invites him to have some tea. He observes, with some dismay, the tacky interior decorating to which she has subjected his property: watermelon pink painting on the walls, cheap wood furniture. As the two sit down to have tea, the woman’s maid—who the narrator imagines to be an indigenous woman from a poor region of the country—crawls beneath their feet to clean the floor. The narrator thinks of how his father, who has “reflexive hostility towards Christian missionaries and their flock, would have called [the maid] Hallelujah.”
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As they drink tea, the woman explains to the narrator what has happened with her upstairs neighbor, who seems to have left quite suddenly. She shares a vague story involving a baby and the police. The narrator remembers his tenant—although tenant is “something of a euphemism,” as he has romantic feelings for the tenant. In spite of the fact that the narrator admits to loving her, the two never have had any sort of romantic relationship.
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The narrator first meets his tenant in 1984, when Indira Gandhi is assassinated by her Sikh bodyguard—spurring mob lynching of Sikhs all across the country. The narrator remembers that he even saw a lynching, which, like the explosions, failed to shock him at the time—he observes that “normality, in [his] part of the world, is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence.” At the moment of such political unrest, the narrator and his tenant are involved in the production of a play called Norman, Is That You? but decide to postpone the opening day due to the political moment.
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The play is directed by David Quartermaine, a gay Englishman who has moved to Delhi from Leeds whom the narrator admires. In the play, Naga, one of the narrator’s classmates, plays Norman, while the narrator plays Norman’s lover, Garson Hobart. Both he and Naga study history at Delhi university, and they grew up together. Tilo, short for Tilotamma, is the set and lighting staff member of the play, and she is a student of architecture. The narrator is instantly infatuated with her, although she “[doesn’t] look like any of the pale, well-groomed girls [he knows] at college. Her complexion [is] what the French would call café au lait (with very little lait).” Unlike other girls her age, Tilo doesn’t care about her appearance. Indeed, her “complete absence of a desire to please, or to put someone at their ease, could, in a less vulnerable person, have been construed as arrogance.”
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At first, the narrator can’t place where Tilo is from, but due to her accented English, he guesses Kerala. He learns that her father is not in the picture, and her mother, originally from a high-caste Syrian-Christian family in Kerala, got pregnant as a teenager and gave Tilo up for adoption, only to adopt her own baby herself. Tilo isn’t close to her family, and never goes home for the holidays. Both Naga and the narrator try to charm Tilo, but she only has eyes for a third member of their play—Musa Yeswi.
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Musa, like Tilo, studies architecture, and while the two are very close the narrator can’t tell if they seem more like siblings or lovers. Musa is a quiet Kashmiri young man very dissimilar to Naga, who adores attention and seems able to change not only his personality, but his very appearance, to please those in whose company he finds himself. Musa, on the other hand, seems to want to draw attention away from himself, but has a quiet sort of strength. He is gentle and serene, and his pale Kashmiri complexion starkly contrasts with Tilo’s dark skin.
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Once they graduate from architecture school, Tilo and Musa drift apart. Musa returns to Kashmir, Tilo begins to work in an architecture firm. But Tilo and the narrator see each other occasionally, and one day, after visiting the shrine of a famous poet, the narrator goes to her house for the first time. The two smoke hashish, and although the narrator wants to tell her about his feelings for her, he doesn’t. Instead, he asks if she plans to marry Musa, which she answers by saying she won’t marry anybody at all. That night, the narrator, who at the time still lives in his parents’ house, marvels at how different his own life is from Tilo’s. While he is a comfortable member of the upper-middle-class, surrounded by attentive family, she is all alone, poor, seemingly without the foundations that are so imperative in the narrator’s own life.
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While away, Musa has become involved in the Kashmiri résistance. Tilo, seemingly having moved on from her romance with him entirely, marries Naga weeks after Musa’s death. But the narrator continues to love her unrequitedly. After all, his Brahmin family “would never accept her—the girl without a past, without a caste—into the family.” Indeed, the narrator has chosen a much more acceptable path for himself. He’s married a Brahmin woman, with whom he has two daughters. One of them hopes to become a human rights lawyer, which the narrator initially thinks is merely “teenage rebellion against her father,” but later he comes to recognize that human rights law can be respectable and “even lucrative.” The narrator has never imagined doing anything that would upset his family’s comfortable lifestyle, and yet, when Tilo reenters his life, asking to rent a room in his apartment building, he puts his family at risk.
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The Naga that Tilo has married is very different from the teenage boy she once knew. He has gone from an idealistic, overly intellectual, radically left student to an “unemployable intellectual” to a mainstream journalist. Along the way, Naga has advocated for a great number of leftist causes, most of which have nothing to do with each other. Indeed, the narrator observes, “what has remained consistent [in Naga’s political opinion] is only the decibel level.” In the narrator’s eyes, Naga has a “handler” in the government, and, as a well-respected journalist in the field, he is a “valuable asset” for the Intelligence Bureau. Naga writes articles that help to settle down human rights groups when they’re upset, when, as the narrator puts it, their facts “need[] correcting.” Because Naga is the first to get breaking new from the government, he quickly rises to even greater success in his field.
The narrator remembers how Naga, as a youth, always had a fiery talent for rhetoric. He recalls how, in elementary school, Naga made a powerful speech about the futility of religion, for instance, and observes that in the current political climate—"as the saffron tide of Hindu Nationalism rises in our country like the swastika once did in another”—Naga would have been expelled, or worse, for making such a speech. Indeed, even the narrator’s colleagues in the government are ultra-conservative, what he calls “closet Brahmins” who hide their deep investment in the caste system from the public eye. The narrator himself is a twice-born Brahmin, which is why he is accepted among his colleagues. In spite of his own conservative leanings and complicity in the oppressive government, it saddens the narrator to see Naga so “housebroken.”
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When the narrator is stationed in Kashmir, Naga is working as a journalist in the region. As the Kashmir conflict is an area of government work of which human rights activists are heavily critical, Naga’s role there proves exceptionally useful to the narrator and his team—although Naga still sees himself as an honest, left-leaning journalist. The narrator himself observes the violence in Kashmir as exaggerated, but, principally, he blames the various factions of Islam in the region for annihilating one another. Indeed, he observes that it is to the Indian government’s advantage that there are “eight or nine versions of the ‘True’ Islam battling it out in Kashmir.” Some of the most radical, he admits, are actually funded by the government. And Kashmiri businessmen help out by investing in the Peace Process—which, the narrator is quick to observe, is “an entirely different business opportunity from peace itself.”
One fall day, the narrator is working with the Governor of Kashmir, and has just finished listening to His Excellency’s morning briefing when he receives a strange phone call from the Joint Interrogation Center, which operated out of the Shiraz Cinema. The narrator shares that it wasn’t the government that shut down the Cinema, rather, Jihadist extremists who had done so years before, arguing that cinema was simply a vehicle for Hindu propaganda. The call comes from Major Amrik Singh, who, contrary to custom, addresses the narrator by his name—Biplab Dasgupta. Hearing from the Major distresses the narrator, who has been dealing with the troubles that the unhinged Major has caused in the region with unnecessary and indiscreet murders. (The Major does indeed prove to be an unstable character—years after his time in Kashmir, he murders his wife and three children while on asylum in the United States.)
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Major Amrik has big news for Biplab—he has captured an “A-Category terrorist,” Commander Gulrez. Biplab, for his turn, is not impressed. Because the military is incentivized to capture, torture, and kill “A-category” terrorists, it seems that every Kashmiri captured is a dreaded member of Jihadist movements. But, more interestingly to Biplab, the major reveals that he has also captured a “ladies,” who isn’t Kashmiri. This is unusual. The captured woman has been handed over to ACP Pinky, the only female in the military force and yet one of its most brutal interrogators. But the captee has announced that she has an important message for Biplab, which she has sent via Major Amrik: “G-A-R-S-O-N H-O-B-A-R-T.”
Biplab realizes instantly that the woman who has been captured is Tilo, which leads him to wonder if Commander Gulrez—the “A-category” terrorist that Major Amrik Singh has captured—is, in fact, Musa. Biplab immediately wants to get Tilo out of capture, but instinctually he wishes to distance himself from the woman he loves. So he calls up Naga and asks him to go and take Tilo away from the interrogation center, and orders for Tilo’s immediate release.
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Once Naga has brought Tilo to his hotel, Biplab requests that he put Tilo on the next plane to Delhi. Naga replies, “She’s not freight, Das-Goose,” referring to Biplab’s college nickname, Das-Goose-da, which Naga would pronounce in a German accent. Biplab reflects on his name, admitting that he has never forgiven his parents for naming him Biplab—revolution. He has considered changing his name to something “more peaceful like Siddhartha or Gautam,” but has decided not to. Rather, he continues existing as Biplab, a revolution, “in the innermost chamber of the secret heart of the establishment that calls itself the Government of India.”
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While Tilo is recovering from her time in the interrogation center, the situation in Kashmir continues to worsen. The body count rises, and Biplab is advised not to go back to the city from the Governor’s house that day. Even from the Governor’s house deep within the forest, Biplab can hear the cries of Kashmiris protesting the deaths of their compatriots. “Azadi! Azadi! Azadi!” they cry. While Biplab understands that the word in their dialect loosely means freedom, he finds irony in the fact that no Kashmiri defines the word exactly the same way, or associates it with the same “ideological and geographic contours.” But, he believes, the Kashmiris are not confused—quite the opposite. Rather, they operate with “a terrible clarity that exists outside the language of modern geopolitics. All the protagonists on all sides of the conflict, especially [the government exploit] this fault line mercilessly.”
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The protestors outside the forest house where Biplab is sheltered are, in fact, at public funerals. For Kashmiris, those who die in conflict with or at the hands of the Indian government are martyrs for the cause of independence. On occasions like this, the crowds get riled up, and the police must remain vigilant, but “out of sight.” The Indian government operates under the assumption that allowing the people to take to the streets to mourn their dead gives them an opportunity to channel their frustration at the government, so it doesn’t turn into “an unmanageable cliff of rage.” That’s why, in all of the years of the Kashmiri conflicts, the police have allowed the Kashmiri people to “mourn[], [weep], and shout[] their slogans”—and, soon after that, to go back home.
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The next day, once things have settled, Biplab drives to Naga’s hotel to meet him and Tilo, only to discover that the two of them have already left. A few weeks later, he receives an invitation to their wedding. He feels responsible for the marriage, which he deems to be ill-fated—he knows that Tilo would never willingly marry a journalist whom she knows to be corrupt. And yet again, Biplab chooses not to tell her how he feels, and attends the wedding as a guest. There, Tilo wears no makeup, and is even almost bald. She looks nothing like a traditional bride. Meanwhile, Naga’s family, who, like Biplab’s, are high-caste and wealthy, clearly disapprove of Naga’s choice of bride. Naga’s young niece even asks her grandmother innocently if Tilo is a “nigger,” to which Naga’s mother replies, “We don’t use words like nigger anymore […] We say negro.”
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This is the last time Biplab sees Tilo until, four years before the present moment, she sees his name in the paper under an advertisement for a tenant in a second-floor apartment. She says she needs space to work as a freelance illustrator, and soon moves in. At the time, Biplab is on placement with the Ministry of Defense, and is at home alone. When Tilo moves into the apartment upstairs, Biplab is excited.
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In the present moment, in Tilo’s abandoned apartment, Biplab senses, from looking at all of the Post-Its, documents, and the photographs in the place, that there is something dangerous about the life she has been leading. Among the photographs is one of a dead child, four or five years old, wrapped in a shroud. The wound on the child’s temple has bled onto the white shroud, leaving a “rose-shaped stain.” Biplab wonders immediately if the child is Musa’s daughter. The other is a picture of a Kashmiri man holding a pair of kittens. Biplab opens a green file and begins to look at the documents it contains. Here, even more mysteriously, Tilo has pictures of a public toilet. But these photos have an explanation.
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In a document titled “Ghafoor’s Story,” a first-person narrator has written down the story of what happened in that public toilet. Biplab reads that outside that particular public toilet, the narrator and a friend are walking when they hear Special Task Force vehicles pull up on the road. The soldiers force the narrator and his friend to cross the street at gunpoint, telling them that “an Afghan terrorist [has escaped and has run] into the toilet.”
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The soldiers ask the narrator and his friend to go in and ask the terrorist to surrender, and, fearing for their lives, the two try to resist, only to have the Special Task Force soldiers put pistols to their heads. The narrator’s friend tells him to cooperate with the soldiers, who he says are just trying to make a scene. Eventually they enter, and find a man in the drain, whom they realize is Kashmiri and not Afghan. They ask him to come out, but he seems to be unable to speak or move. After some time, they watch the man die in front of them, covered in human waste.
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Once the man has died, the soldiers give the narrator and his friends crowbars and spades to dig the dead body out of the manhole. It is then that the narrator discovers what had happened—the soldiers had tied up the man and put him in the manhole earlier, after he had been badly tortured. The Special Task Forces officers ask the two to sign a paper that reads that the STF has “tracked down and killed a dreaded Afghan terrorist who was cornered in a public toilet in Nawab Bazaar.” But the truth, according to the narrator, is that the dead man was simply a laborer from Bandipora. Filled with regret, the narrator recalls the eyes of the Kashmiri in the manhole, thinking that they were “forgiving eyes, understanding eyes.”
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Unconvinced by the story, Biplab judges it terrible. He feels strongly that Kashmiris are always exaggerating the wrongs done to them, the things they suffer. After all, he thinks, Kashmiri militants have done their fair share of horrible things to Indian soldiers. “If one has to choose,” he thinks, “then give me a Hindu fundamentalist any day over a Muslim one.” He remembers the Pakistani Army’s action in East Pakistan as a “clear case of genocide,” and refers to the Indian Army as the great liberator of Bangladesh.
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Drawn to another packet of documents, Biplab picks up two sachets of photos labeled “Otter Pics” and “Otter Kills.” Upon opening them, he realizes to his disappointment that they are not pictures of otters at all—instead, they contain more documentation about Kashmir. They are all pictures of soldiers in the Indian Army, the first featuring a Sikh solider posing triumphantly over the body of an obviously dead young man. The following pictures are all images of the same solider in different situations. The soldier’s face is “blank and expressionless.” Biplab finds another document in the same carton that is a resume for a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) in Clovis, California—the city where Major Amrik Singh was granted asylum and murdered his family. Biplab realizes the photos of the solider are photos of the major. The documents the major used to apply for asylum are also attached.
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Before reading the asylum questionnaires, Biplab is so overwhelmed that he pours himself a drink—although he knows, of course, that he shouldn’t. The testimonials provided by Major Amrik Singh and his wife, Loveleen Singh, are startingly different. The major claims to have been made into a scapegoat by the Indian government for the wrongful murder of a human rights activist, and, because he has been blamed for the incident, the major is in danger of being tortured and killed in India. Loveleen, by contrast, provides a long, detailed narrative about having been captured and tortured by police after her husband, framed for the murder of a Muslim human rights activist, refused to take the blame. Once she is freed, she and her husband are forced to flee Kashmir, but are pursued all throughout India by “Muslim terrorists.”
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Biplab doesn’t believe the stories for one second, and, in fact, observes that in Kashmir they “would be received as slapstick comedy.” But the LCSW in charge of determining whether the Singh family qualified for asylum, Ralph Bauer, seems to have believed them. He has diagnosed Loveleen and Major Singh with PTSD, and suggests that they be granted asylum as they are being sought after by terrorists around the world. Biplab wryly thinks to himself that they almost got away with it. He then wonders why Major Singh had committed suicide and murdered his entire family years before, if he had been able to get asylum. He wonders if it really was a suicide, but stops himself—he knows it doesn’t matter to him, the Indian government, or even the California police.
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Biplab, overwhelmed with the bounty of strange documentation he has found in Tilo’s apartment, begins to drink heavily and soon falls asleep. He is woken up by a knock at the door. Delirious, he opens the door to two strangers who enter the room: “a young man in dark glasses and an older man. Older woman. Man. Woman-man.” The woman introduces herself as Anjum, and says she and her friend Saddam Hussain have come to collect Tilo’s things for her. They gather baby toys and clothes from the cupboards, and Anjum asks Biplab if he wants to take a message for Tilo. Without hesitation, he tears a page out of one of her notebooks and writes “GARSON HOBART” on it. Anjum and Saddam leave, and Biplab is left wondering whether it has all been a hallucination.
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Now awake, Biplab continues to dig through Tilo’s documents. He finds something she’s written, a dictionary that appears to be incomplete. It is called “Kashmiri-English Alphabet,” and lists the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet, all associated with words commonly used in Kashmir. For instance, A is for Azadi, America, Afghan, Ammunition; F is for funerals; H is for HRV (human rights violations), Half-widows, and Half-orphans; I is for interrogation; N is for NGO and NTR (Nothing To Report); Q is for Quran/Questioning; and Z is for Zulm (oppression). Biplab is reeling. Why, he wonders, is Tilo still “wallowing in this old story?” Especially if Musa isn’t around, “filling her head with this trash”?
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