The man was Roshan Lal on his day off from Rosebud Rest-O-Bar. Tilo would meet him seventeen years later, when she returned to the graveyard with Miss Jebeen the Second. Of course she wouldn’t recognize him. Nor would she recognize the graveyard, because by then, it was no longer a derelict place for the forgotten dead.
Once Roshan Lal left, Tilo lay down on Begum Renata Mumtaz Madam’s grave. She cried a little and then fell asleep. When she woke she felt better prepared to go home and face the rest of her life.
That included dinner downstairs, at least once a week, with Ambassador Shivashankar and his wife, whose views on almost everything, including Kashmir, made Tilo’s hands shake and the cutlery rattle on her plate.
The stupidification of the mainland was picking up speed at an unprecedented rate, and it didn’t even need a military occupation.
Then there was the changing of the seasons. “This is also a journey,” M said, “and they can’t take it away from us.”
—NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM
10
THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS
Word spread quickly in the poorer quarters that a clever woman had moved into the graveyard. Parents in the neighborhood flocked to enroll their children in the classes Tilo held at Jannat Guest House. Her pupils called her Tilo Madam and sometimes Ustaniji (Teacher, in Urdu). Although she missed the morning singing by the children from the school opposite her apartment, she didn’t teach her own pupils to sing “We Shall Overcome” in any language, because she wasn’t sure that Overcoming was anywhere on anyone’s horizon. But she taught them arithmetic, drawing, computer graphics (on three second-hand desktop computers she had bought with the minimal fees she charged), a bit of basic science, English and eccentricity. From them she learned Urdu and something of the art of happiness. She worked a long day and, for the first time in her life, slept a full night. (Miss Jebeen the Second slept with Anjum.) With each passing day Tilo’s mind felt less like one of Musa’s “recoveries.” Despite making plans every other day to do so, she had not visited her apartment since she left. Not even after receiving the message Garson Hobart had sent through Anjum and Saddam when they went (out of curiosity to see where and how the strange woman who had parachuted into their lives lived) to pick up some of her things. She continued to pay her rent into his account, which she thought was only fair until she moved her things out. When a few months had gone by with no news from Musa, she left a message with the fruit-seller who brought her his “recoveries.” But she still hadn’t heard from him. And yet, the burden of perpetual apprehension that she had carried around for years—of suddenly receiving news of Musa’s death—had lightened somewhat. Not because she loved him any less, but because the battered angels in the graveyard that kept watch over their battered charges held open the doors between worlds (illegally, just a crack), so that the souls of the present and the departed could mingle, like guests at the same party. It made life less determinate and death less conclusive. Somehow everything became a little easier to bear.
Encouraged by the success and popularity of Tilo’s tuition classes, Ustad Hameed had begun, once again, to give music lessons to students he considered promising. Anjum attended these classes as though they were a call to prayer. She still wouldn’t sing, but hummed the way she used to when she was trying to get Zainab the Bandicoot to learn to sing. On the pretext of helping Anjum and Tilo look after Miss Jebeen the Second (who was growing up fast, getting naughty and being spoiled rotten), Zainab began to spend her afternoons, evenings and sometimes even nights at the graveyard. The real reason—not lost on anyone—was her heady love affair with Saddam Hussain. She had completed her course at the polytechnic and become a pudgy little fashionista who stitched ladies’ clothes to order. She inherited all Nimmo Gorakhpuri’s old fashion magazines as well as the hair curlers and cosmetics that had been put in Tilo’s room to welcome her when she first came. Saddam’s first, unspoken declaration of love had been to allow Zainab to flirtatiously paint his fingernails and toenails scarlet, both of them giggling all the while. He did not remove the nail polish until it chipped off by itself.
Between Zainab and Saddam, they had turned the graveyard into a zoo—a Noah’s Ark of injured animals. There was a young peacock who could not fly, and a peahen, perhaps his mother, who would not leave him. There were three old cows that slept all day. Zainab arrived one day in an autorickshaw with several cages stuffed with three dozen budgerigars that had been absurdly colored in luminous dyes. She had bought them in a fit of anger from a bird-seller who had the cages stacked on the back of his bicycle and was peddling the birds in the old city. Colored like that, they couldn’t be set free, Saddam said, because they’d attract predators in seconds. So he built them a high, airy cage that spanned the breadth of two graves. The budgerigars flitted about in it, glowing at night like fat fireflies. A small tortoise—an abandoned pet—that Saddam had found in a park, with a sprig of clover in one nostril, now wallowed on the terrace in a mud-pit of his own. Payal-the-mare had a lame donkey for a companion. He was called Mahesh for no reason that anyone knew. Biroo was getting old, but his and Comrade Laali’s progeny had multiplied, and they tumbled around the place. Several cats came and went. As did the human guests in Jannat Guest House.
The vegetable garden behind the guest house was doing well too, the soil of the graveyard being as it was a compost pit of ancient provenance. Although nobody was particularly keen on eating vegetables (least of all Zainab), they grew brinjals, beans, chilies, tomatoes and several kinds of gourds, all of which, despite the smoke and fumes from the heavy traffic on the roads that abutted the graveyard, attracted several varieties of butterflies. Some of the more able-bodied addicts were recruited to help with the garden and the animals. It seemed to bring them some temporary solace.
Anjum mooted the idea that Jannat Guest House should have a swimming pool. “Why not?” she said. “Why should only rich people have swimming pools? Why not us?” When Saddam pointed out that water was a key element in swimming pools and the lack of it might prove to be a problem, she said poor people would appreciate a swimming pool even without water. She had one dug, a few feet deep, the size of a large water tank, and had it lined with blue bathroom tiles. She was right. People did appreciate it. They came to visit it and prayed for the day (Insha’Allah, Insha’Allah) when it would be full of clean blue water.
So all in all, with a People’s Pool, a People’s Zoo and a People’s School, things were going well in the old graveyard. The same, however, could not be said of the Duniya.