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Chapter 8
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
Miss Jebeen the First has always insisted on being called “Miss.” In the early years of the Kashmir occupation, being called “Miss” was one of the many obsessions that gripped the people of the valley—young ladies wanted to be called “Miss” and go roller skating, while young men wanted to become physical trainers. This culture boomed alongside the prevalence of weapons, grenades, spies, and special ops. Many of the fashionable young women also wanted to grow up and become nurses, although Miss Jebeen didn’t live long enough even to learn to roller skate. She is buried in the martyr’s graveyard, which has a sign at the entrance that reads, “We Gave Our Todays for Your Tomorrows.”
In this passage, Roy discusses with levity and humor the ways in which Kashmiri culture flourishes in the face of the violence that plagues the region. Roy creates juxtaposition between something as sweet as a young child insisting on being called “Miss,” or young girls wanting to roller skate, and the rapid weaponization of the region. In doing this, she demonstrates how the Kashmiris’ resilience allows them to continue to tend to matters of daily life even in the midst of such violence.
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Themes
By the time she dies, Miss Jebeen hasn’t “notched up” many todays, but then again “the algebra of infinite justice [is] never so rude.” She is buried alongside her mother, Arifa Yeswi, who dies by the same bullet as her young daughter—it passes through Miss Jebeen’s temple into her mother’s heart. In photos of Miss Jebeen’s corpse, the blood from her bullet wound looks “like a cheerful summer rose arranged just above her left ear.” In the massacre in which mother and daughter die, 15 others are also slain.
That a young child would be viewed as a martyr for Kashmiri independence shows how dire the violence has become. Kashmiris are so desperate for freedom, and so many lives have been lost in the fight to obtain it, that they need to believe that somehow all of the death will lead to something in the future. By casting their dead as martyrs, Kashmiris attempt to make meaning out of what would otherwise be senseless violence.
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For Kashmiris, the maintenance of the martyr’s graveyard is an act of resistance, respecting the lives of those who have fought to free Kashmir. When the graveyard was founded, a gunman from the resistance was the first to be buried there. Some believe, though, that an “empty duffel bag,” not a corpse, was buried. When asked whether this is true, one of the founders of the graveyards replies to his young interlocutor, “This is the trouble with you youngsters, you have absolutely no idea how wars are fought.” Of course, those who believe in the integrity of the graveyard assume the rumor about the duffel bag is just another lie perpetuated by the “Rumors Wing in Badami Bagh, Military HQ, Srinagar; just another ploy by the occupation forces to undermine” the resistance movement. (The existence of this wing of the military, it must be said, is also a rumor itself.)
Whether it was founded by a “real” martyr or not, the martyr’s graveyard in Srinagar is filling up “at an alarming pace.” As the resistance movement grows and conflict with the military becomes all the more commonplace, Kashmiri doctors, lawyers, students, and engineers alike are seduced by the idea of martyrdom. Exchanging the tools of their trades for machine guns, many Kashmiri young men join the various Islamic resistance organizations. In doing so, they commit to lives that, if short, are entirely dedicated to the movement for Kashmiri independence.
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Themes
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But passionate young men aren’t the only ones who are seduced by the myth of martyrdom. Also intrigued are Kashmir’s many, inevitable businessmen, who involve themselves in the increasing sales of grenades, guns, and other weaponry, distributing these “like parcels of choice mutton at Eid.” In the process, they become wealthy, and with wealth come both property and women.
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In this climate, “dying [becomes] a new way of living” and “tombstones [grow] out of the ground like young children’s teeth.” There is a graveyard in every town in Kashmir, no matter how small the population. As the tourism industry evaporates and the military moves in with more and more men, the job market disappears—except, of course, for the gravediggers, for whom there is always far too much work.
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Themes
The day Miss Jebeen and Arifa die, they are sitting on the balcony outside their home watching the funeral procession of a local professor who was active in the movement for Azadi but disagreed with the more radical new resistance groups. After several warnings from the militants, Abdullah continued to speak out against their action. And so, he was assassinated to prove to the people of Srinagar that “there was to be no more of that folksy, old-world stuff.” What the murdered professor disagreed with about the new resistance groups was their strict definition of Azadi: “What does freedom [Azadi] mean? There is no God but Allah.”
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With the rise of the new resistance movement, the people of Srinagar are thrown into indecision. While, on the one hand, the less-strict militants are more pleasant to live with—they flirt with young women, write poetry, and are stylish—the “Strict Ones,” perhaps because they are so strict, seem more capable of winning the war against the Indian Army. Ultimately, the Strict Ones take over (not necessarily because they have the support of the people, but because they out-fight the less strict ones). But the struggle for control over the village for the militants is seemingly unending: each “line” of thought ends up creating “more lines and sublines. The Strict Ones beg[et] even Stricter Ones.” In this way, the militants fight against each other just as much as they fight against the Indian army’s occupation.
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Themes
On the day of the professor's funeral, Arifa wants to honor the deceased professor but doesn’t want to put Miss Jebeen in danger by going out into the street to join the funeral procession. They watch from the balcony, where Arifa imagines they are safe. Meanwhile, the Indian Border Security Force watches the funeral procession from the sidelines as well: hidden and barricaded in bunkers on the side of the road, with machine guns pointed at the mourners just in case something happens. Out of nowhere, there is an explosion “loud enough and close enough to generate blind panic.” The soldiers emerge from their bunker already shooting straight into the unarmed crowd. Even as the crowd runs away, soldiers shoot to kill into their backs. Thinking a bomb may have been thrown from a house, they shoot into the balconies. One of these bullets kills both Arifa and Miss Jebeen.
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After the massacre is over, within an hour shops have reopened, the street has been cleaned —“blood [has been] directed into the open drains” and normalcy, “always a declaration,” has been declared. It is discovered that the explosion came from a car driving over an “empty carton of Mango Frooti on the next street,” but there is no further investigation into the causes of the massacre. In the public mind, “this [is] Kashmir. [The massacre is] Kashmir’s fault.”
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When he buries his wife and daughter, Musa is quiet and withdrawn. In fact, he is so quiet and withdrawn that it seems suspicious, and, after the funeral, he is picked up from his home and taken to the Shiraz Cinema Interrogation Center.
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Photographs taken of Miss Jebeen at her funeral become wildly popular in the world of the documentation of suffering. They are reprinted time and time again “in papers and magazines and on the covers of human rights reports that no one ever read[s].” In India, however, the photograph of the dead child is not met with as much sympathy from the audiences—they find the images of “Bhopal Boy,” one of the Union Carbide gas leak victims, to be much more compelling.
At the mass funeral in which Miss Jebeen and Arifa are buried, many young men, rage ignited inside them like a fire, begin leaping very high in the air “like flames kindled from smoldering embers.” The Indian army thinks this activity could be related to sympathies towards militant causes, and later, their informers “who mingle[] with the crowd and [shout] slogans as passionately as everybody else (and even mean[] them)” will submit photo evidence of the jumping young men, each of whom will, in the coming days, be taken into custody by the military.
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Themes
When Musa is arrested, he is at home grieving Arifa’s and Miss Jebeen’s deaths after the funeral. His father, Showkat Yeswi, is the one to announce with surprise that Major Amrik Singh wishes to talk to Musa. Showkat is a close friend of the major—he supplies building materials to the military—and so isn’t too concerned that his son will go into custody.
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When Musa arrives at the Shiraz Cinema interrogation center, he sees dozens and dozens of chained, tortured men on the floor of a brightly lit lobby, where the cinema’s old snack bar continues “to advertise things it no longer stock[s]” and now functions as a desk where those about to be tortured—or, if they’re lucky, truly just interrogated—are registered. Musa, however, isn’t registered, and goes straight up the stairs to Major Amrik Singh’s office, where he invites Musa to sit down and immediately tells the soldiers accompanying him to leave.
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Themes
This isn’t the first time Musa is crossing paths with Major Amrik Singh. The major has imposed his friendship on Musa’s father, Showkat, who, although he does business with the military, doesn’t necessarily want to be intimately involved with an army officer but can’t refuse. After the major’s first visit, Showkat begins to suspect his son of being part of a militancy group, checking his fingers for a “trigger callus” and asking Musa whether he knows anything about “boxes of ‘metal’ being moved through [their] family’s orchards.” Although Musa doesn’t know anything, Showkat insists that his son be present for the major’s next visit, in which the major takes of his belt to show his pistol to his guests. By the time this occurs, the people of Srinagar have already heard of the many disappearances and murders that Amrik is suspected of, and father and son alike become nervous.
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Themes
In his office, the first thing Major Amrik Singh does is order tea and offer Musa his condolences, “genuinely unaware of the irony of picking up a man whose wife and child [have] just been shot and bringing him forcibly, under armed guard, to an interrogation center.” Musa remembers all of the frightening things he has heard about the major, who seems to greatly enjoy his violent job. At some point, Musa heard that the Major, thrilled by the chase and capture game of killing militants, referred to himself as the “Jannat Express”—the jihadi militants’ fast-track to their final destination, paradise. The major is even rumored to have released a high-priority terrorist that he had captured, only to enjoy the thrill of seeking him out again. Musa believes that it is in this manipulative, violent spirit, that he invites him to the interrogation center to apologize.
When the tea arrives, Musa recognizes the tea-bearer, a captive, formerly very successful, militant. The militant leaves the room after saluting and saying “Victory to India!” At this point, Major Amrik Singh subtly offers Musa a job in construction with the army, but Musa does not respond and asks to leave. As he walks out the lobby, where there is a “torture break” taking place, Musa makes eye contact with a bleeding boy whom he knows, and plans to tell the boy’s mother, who is searching desperately for her son, that he has seen him.
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But before Musa can make his final escape, Major Amrik Singh appears at the staircase, shouting that he has completely forgotten something. The something is a bottle of whiskey for Showkat—a subtle trick, for if Musa does not accept, “it would be a public declaration of war with Amrik Singh […] which [makes] him, Musa, good as dead.” But if he does accept, he admits that his Muslim father drinks, which would put his family in danger from the Islamist militant groups.
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Knowing the risks of his decision, Musa does not accept the whiskey. That night, after writing a loving letter to the deceased Miss Jebeen and leaving a note for his sister to take to the mother of the boy he saw in the interrogation center, Musa leaves home indefinitely to begin his life underground. Although he never fully joins any particular group, he participates in various resistance groups, trying to persuade “his comrades to hold on to a semblance of humanity, not to turn into the very thing they abhor[] and [fight] against.”
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When Musa has been on the run for nine months, Tilo comes to Kashmir for the first time. Tilo is at her usual tea stall when she receives a cryptic note from an unknown messenger bearing and address in Kashmir and a date for her to arrive. Although she has not heard from Musa in a long time, she goes, knowing the note has something to do with him. On her first bus ride into Kashmir, Tilo is struck by the beauty and fertility of the autumn season in the region. And yet, simultaneously, she is acutely aware that there are soldiers everywhere, in all of the beautiful apple orchards and paddy fields. Because she and everyone else on the train are “in the rifle-sights of a solider, whatever they might be doing […] they [are] a legitimate target.”
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When Tilo’s bus arrives in Srinagar, a stranger meets her at the station and takes her to a houseboat on the lake. On the way to the boat, she learns that her escort’s name is Gulrez. The next day, as Tilo admires the small but lovely houseboat and the beauty of the surrounding lake, she and Gulrez get to know each other, and she learns that Musa will soon join them. Gulrez shows her pictures of Miss Jebeen and Arifa’s funeral, and Tilo understands that the women are Musa’s family. Musa finally arrives later that night, and although they are the same age, Tilo notices that Musa looks much older. She also notices the calluses on his trigger finger. Musa tells Tilo that he and Gulrez share the same name—in militant circles, Musa is known as Commander Gulrez.
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Musa tells Tilo that Gulrez is a mout—in his words, someone who “lives in his own world, with his own rules.” One day, Gulrez thought he saw the Pakistani army coming to liberate the Kashmiris, and ran towards them, trying to kiss their hands. In response, the soldiers—who were from the Indian army—shot Gulrez in the thigh and beat him with their rifles, leaving him for dead. Traumatized, Gulrez now tries to run whenever he sees a solider, which is “the most dangerous thing to do.” Musa adds that almost all of the mout have been killed in Kashmir, “because they don’t know how to obey orders.” Musa wonders if that’s why they need mout people—to teach them how to be free. Tilo challenges him, saying, “Or how to be killed?” To this, Musa responds, “Here, it’s the same thing. Only the dead are free.”
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After dinner, Musa begins to tell Tilo about his family. When she asks about Arifa, immediately wanting to know if Musa loved her, he says yes, and that he had wanted to tell Tilo out of respect for their relationship. He shares that he met Arifa “in the most horrible way” in 1991, when Kashmiris thought Azadi was about to be theirs. Hearing about Musa’s wife makes Tilo remember when she had thought of him as “her people” and “they had been a strange country together for a while, an island republic that had seceded from the rest of the world.”
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Distracted by talking about the wildness of 1991 in Srinagar, Musa interrupts his story and asks Tilo if they should go inside. Before entering Tilo’s bedroom, he asks if he can come in, which makes her feel sad and distanced from him. But she soon forgives him, and kisses him as he sits on her bed. After they make love—although it is “less lovemaking than lament,” they hold each other and momentarily reject the real world they life in “call[ing] forth another one, just as real. A world in which maet [give] orders and soldiers need[] eardrops so they [can] hear them clearly and carry them out correctly.”
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As she lies on top of Musa, Tilo remembers a day when the two were in college together and Maqbool Butt, a revolutionary Kashmiri separatist, was hanged publicly in Delhi. At the time, she herself didn’t pay much attention, nor did any other student at the university. But Musa said to her with quiet intensity, “Some day you’ll understand why, for me, history began today.”
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While in bed together, Musa shares with Tilo the story of Gulrez’s rooster, Sultan. Gulrez was very attached to the animal, who followed him everywhere like a dog. One day, the army arrived in Gulrez’s village and made everyone assemble. Sultan, of course, came and stood beside Gulrez. One of the army captains sent his dog to kill Sultan, and the soldiers took the dead rooster to eat for dinner. Since then, Gulrez curses Sultan, saying, “If you didn’t know how to live with the military, why did you come into this world?”
The two continue talking into the night, and Musa finally tells Tilo the story of Miss Jebeen and Arifa. The “horrible way” in which he met Arifa, apparently, was in the middle of a bombing. Musa went out wearing nice boots after a fight with his father, who told him to take them off, because they made him look like a militant. Musa left anyway to run errands at the stationary store, and a grenade exploded on the street right outside. Soldiers attacked everyone in all the stores, destroying everything they see, and beating Musa. When they left him, he checked to see if his new boots were okay, when he saw Arifa resting her head on them. For him, “it was like waking up in hell and finding an angel on [his] shoe.” Seemingly unperturbed by the bombing, Arifa smiled at Musa and said, “Nice boots.”
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Tilo and Musa soon fall asleep and, when they wake up, Tilo watches Musa say his prayers—something she has never seen him do before. Afterwards, Musa comes to her and tells her that the hardest thing for Kashmiris to fight against is, surprisingly, pity. For them, self-pity is easy to fall into, but at the same time, it is “debilitating” and “humiliating.” For him, rather than Azadi, the conflict is a fight to maintain the dignity of the Kashmiri people. But he believes that in order to fight, Kashmiris must “simplify […] standardize [… and] reduce [themselves]…everyone has to think the same way, want the same thing…[they] have to make [themselves] as single-minded…as monolithic…as the army [they] face.”
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Musa leaves soon after describing this to Tilo, and tells her to wait for a woman called Khadija to show her around Kashmir. Tilo travels with various friends of Musa’s around Kashmir, seeing orchards upon orchards and graveyards upon graveyards. At one point, she meets a woman whose brother died. The hands of his corpse, when it was brought home, “were full of earth and yellow mustard flowers grew from between his fingers.”
After Tilo’s travels around the valley, she returns to the houseboat alone where she was with Musa. Briefly, Musa dines with her one evening, but is much more stressed than he was the last time they were together. Eighteen have been killed in the city that day. Musa leaves right after dinner, asking her not to come out onto the balcony to say goodbye to him, although she doesn’t listen. In the middle of the night, the police and military break into the houseboat, beating Gulrez and demanding to know where “he” is. They gag Tilo and tie her hands behind her back. Every time Gulrez tells them that he doesn’t know where “he” (presumably, Musa) is, the police beat him harder. The police guide the blindfolded Tilo and the wailing Gulrez onto a boat, surrounding both with armed guards.
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The man in charge is a Sikh officer in a green turban, and Tilo guesses correctly that he is Major Amrik Singh. Tilo prays that the police squadron will not catch up with Musa, who departed just an hour before, hidden at the bottom of a rowboat. And her prayer is answered, although by someone “unlikely to [be] God.” Musa is nowhere to be found, but when the soldiers dock the boat, Tilo hears a gunshot and an explosion. They return with “no Gulrez,” but carrying a “heavy, shapeless sack that needed more than one man to lift.” Gulrez, who “left the boat as Gul-kak Abroo return[s] as the mortal remains of the dreaded militant commander Gulrez,” and the death count for the day shoots from eighteen to “eighteen plus one.”
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Once his men have murdered Gulrez, Major Amrik Singh tells Tilo that she has been charged with “being the accomplice of a terrorist,” but that nothing will happen to her if she tells them everything. He wants to know everywhere she’s been while in Kashmir, everyone she’s met, and how she knows Gulrez. The major reminds Tilo that he and his team “already know the details,” and that she won’t be helping them; on the contrary, they will be testing her. But stubbornly, filled with hatred for the major’s blank, emotionless stare, Tilo resolves not to say anything, no matter what the circumstances.
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When the boat docks in front of the Shiraz Cinema Interrogation Center, Tilo is handed over to ACP Pinky for questioning. ACP Pinky brings Tilo into the interrogation room, which, with its ample supply of “hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, ropes” and other assorted equipment, does not make much of an effort at disguising its true function as a torture chamber. The Assistant Commandant gives Tilo a piece of paper and tells her to write, warning her not to waste her time. On this paper, Tilo writes the message “G-A-R-S-O-N H-O-B-A-R-T” for Biplab.
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When ACP Pinky returns to the room, she is in the company of Major Amrik Singh, and Tilo observes from their behavior with one another that they are “more than just colleagues.” When the major reads Biplab’s name on the note that Tilo has written, he asks how she knows him. ACP Pinky doesn’t miss a beat, and asks Tilo how many men she sleeps with at the same time. Tilo doesn’t respond, not out of resilience, but out of exhaustion. Still, ACP Pinky observes that the major seems to admire Tilo’s quiet strength, and she suspects that it is for this admiration—not, as the major says, because Tilo has written down the name of a high-ranking official—that he tells Pinky to “find out what [she] can” but without leaving any injury marks on Tilo.
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Offended by her lover’s attention to Tilo, ACP Pinky is upset that she hasn’t been allowed to leave injury marks. Under this constraint, she hardly knows how to torture someone, as no injury marks “[is] not a courtesy extended to Kashmiris.” She slaps and kicks Tilo (slaps and kicks “[come] under the category of ‘questioning’” and not torture) but receives no response. Meanwhile, Major Amrik Singh has gotten in touch with Biplab, and realized just how important an official Tilo’s contact is. He rushes back to the room to make sure ACP Pinky hasn’t done Tilo any real damage, and discovers that his colleague has “found a cheap, clichéd way around her problem” and has had the military camp’s barber shave Tilo’s head.
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Upset that ACP Pinky has done this to Tilo, Major Amrik Singh attempts to make up for it in some way by “put[ting] a huge hand protectively on her scalp—a butcher’s blessing. It [will] take Tilo years to get over the obscenity of that touch.” He apologizes, and orders for talcum powder and a balaclava to put on Tilo’s head.
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Two hours later, Naga arrives to collect Tilo, escorted into the room where she waits by the cheerful Ashfaq Mir. Half an hour later—after Ashfaq has offered them food, brought them Aijaz to interrogate, performed an overly ceremonious handover—Naga brings Tilo to the hotel where he is staying, hands her two sleeping pills, and orders for hot water to be brought for her to have a bath. Tilo is surprised by his consideration, which is a trait she has never recognized in him before. Naga suggests that they take the next flight to Delhi, but Tilo doesn’t want to leave Kashmir until she hears from Musa. Luckily, the next morning, Khadija knocks on her door, bearing news.
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Khadija has brought Tilo a fresh change of clothes and invites her to go with her through the city. She tells Tilo that Musa is alive, and plans to attend Gulrez’s funeral. Together, they “step[] out of the hotel and into the streets of the city that [comes] alive only when it [has] to bury its dead.” In the city, the streets are packed with people who have come to honor the funerals of Gulrez and the others that died the day before. Even small children shout Azadi, showing their solidarity with the martyrs that have died. Tilo tells Khadija that she wants to attend the funeral as well, but Khadija responds saying that no women are allowed near the grave, anyway. Tilo wonders, “[Is] it to protect the grave from the women or the women from the grave?”
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Khadija takes Tilo to a safe corner of the city, where it seems that militants rather than the army are in charge. There, she gives Tilo her backpack, which someone has saved from the houseboat, and invites Tilo to take a nap and have some tea. Musa will arrive in two or three hours, Khadija explains. When he arrives, he sits next to Tilo on the mattress Khadija has laid out, “wishing he could wake her up into another, better world.” He tells Tilo that it isn’t safe for her to stay alone when she goes back to Delhi, that she should live with friends, or someone like Naga. He promises that they will win the Kashmiri war, and that after that, he and Tilo will be together again—although this never does happen.
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Before going back to the hotel, Tilo and Khadija go to visit Gulrez’s grave. While at the graveyard, Tilo also pays a visit to Miss Jebeen’s grave, as well as Arifa’s. Back at the hotel, Tilo knocks on Naga’s door in the middle of the night, and the two sleep together “on a purely secular basis.”
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When Tilo has been married to Naga for two months, she discovers that she is pregnant, although she and Naga have never slept together. Knowing the father is Musa, Tilo considers keeping the baby, naming it Gulrez if it’s a boy or Jebeen if it’s a girl. Tilo has no particular desire to be a mother, and ultimately, fearing that the baby she brings into the world will have to navigate the same painful challenges that she has had with her own mother, Maryam, Tilo choses to abort. She does not have enough money to go to a private hospital, and doesn’t want to ask Naga, so she goes to the public hospital.
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There, she is treated with hostility by patients and doctors alike, who believe that abortion is immoral. The doctors tell her they cannot use anesthetic unless they have a signed consent form from someone who’s accompanied her, “preferably the father of the child.” Tilo agrees to abort even without it, and passes out during the operation from pain. When she wakes up, she is in the general ward, where there is more than one patient in every bed. She observes that it feels “like a wartime ward. Expect that in Delhi there [is] no war other than the usual one—the war of the rich against the poor.” When she leaves the hospital, Tilo goes to an “abandoned Muslim graveyard” behind the hospital to rest. She falls asleep on a grave and, when she wakes up, feels “better prepared to go home and face the rest of her life.”
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