GUIH KYOM
It was Musa’s third night in Jannat Guest House. He had arrived a few days ago like a deliveryman, with a Tempo full of cardboard cartons. Everybody was delighted to see the animation on Ustaniji’s face when she set eyes on him. The cartons were stacked against the wall in Tilo’s room, crowding up the space she shared with Ahlam Baji. Tilo had told Musa as much as she knew about everyone in Jannat Guest House. On that last night she lay next to him on her bed, showing off her prowess in Urdu. She had written out a poem she’d learned from Dr. Azad Bhartiya in one of her notebooks:
Mar gayee bulbul qafas mein
Keh gayee sayyaad se
Apni sunehri gaand mein
Tu thoons le fasl-e-bahaar*
“That sounds like the anthem of a suicide bomber,” Musa said.
Tilo told him about Dr. Azad Bhartiya and how the poem had been his response to police questioning in Jantar Mantar (on the morning after the said night, the concerned night, the aforementioned night, the night hereinafter referred to as “the night”).
“When I die,” Tilo said, laughing, “I want this to be my epitaph.”
Ahlam Baji muttered a few insults and turned over in her grave.
Musa glanced at the page in the notebook that faced the one in which Tilo had written the poem.
It said:
How
to
tell
a
shattered
story?
By
slowly
becoming
everybody.
No.
By slowly becoming everything.
That was something to think about, he thought.
It made him turn to his love of many years, the woman whose strangeness had become so dear to him, and hold her close.
Something about Tilo’s new home reminded Musa of the story of Mumtaz Afzal Malik, the young taxi driver whom Amrik Singh had killed, whose body had been recovered from a field and delivered to his family with earth in his clenched fists and mustard flowers growing through his fingers. That story had always stayed with Musa—perhaps because of the way hope and grief were woven together in it, so tightly, so inextricably.
He would leave for Kashmir the next morning, to return to a new phase in an old war from which, this time, he would not return. He would die the way he wanted to, with his Asal boot on. He would be buried the way he wanted to be—a faceless man in a nameless grave. The younger men who would take his place would be harder, narrower and less forgiving. They would be more likely to win any war they fought, because they belonged to a generation that had known nothing but war.
Tilo would receive a message from Khadija—a photograph of a young, smiling Musa and Gul-kak. On the back, Khadija would write Commanders Gulrez and Gulrez are together now. Tilo would grieve deeply at Musa’s passing, but would not be undone by her grief because she was able to write to him regularly and visit him often enough through the crack in the door that the battered angels in the graveyard held open (illegally) for her.
Their wings did not smell like the bottom of a chicken coop.
On their last night together, Tilo and Musa slept with their arms wrapped around each other, as though they had only just met.
—
Anjum was restless that night and unable to sleep. She pottered around the graveyard inspecting her property. She stopped for a moment at Bombay Silk’s grave and said a prayer and told Miss Udaya Jebeen, who was perched on her hip, the story of how she had first set eyes on Bombay Silk while she was buying bangles from the bangle-seller at Chitli Qabar and had followed her all the way down the street to Gali Dakotan. She bent down and picked up one of Roshan Lal’s flowers from Begum Renata Mumtaz Madam’s grave and put it on Comrade Maase’s grave. That little act of redistribution made her feel much better. She looked back at Jannat Guest House with a sense of contentment and accomplishment. On impulse, she decided to take Miss Udaya Jebeen out on a brief midnight ramble to familiarize her with her surroundings and see the city lights.
She walked past the mortuary, through the hospital car park on to the main road. There wasn’t much traffic at that hour. Still, to be safe, they stayed on the pavement, threading their way through parked cycle rickshaws and sleeping people. They passed a slim, naked man with a sprig of barbed wire in his beard. He raised a hand in greeting, and hurried off as though he was late for the office. When Miss Udaya Jebeen said, “Mummy, soo-soo!” Anjum sat her down under a street light. With her eyes fixed on her mother she peed, and then lifted her bottom to marvel at the night sky and the stars and the one-thousand-year-old city reflected in the puddle she had made. Anjum gathered her up and kissed her and took her home.
By the time they got back, the lights were all out and everybody was asleep. Everybody, that is, except for Guih Kyom the dung beetle. He was wide awake and on duty, lying on his back with his legs in the air to save the world in case the heavens fell. But even he knew that things would turn out all right in the end. They would, because they had to.
Because Miss Jebeen, Miss Udaya Jebeen, was come.
* * *
* She died in her cage, the little bird, / These words she left for her captor— / Please take the spring harvest / And shove it up your gilded arse
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wove the love and friendship that I received from those whose names I mention below into a carpet on which I thought, slept, dreamed, fled, and flew around during the many years it took me to write this book. My thanks to: John Berger, who helped me start and waited for me to finish.
Mayank Austen Soofi and Aijaz Hussain. They know why. I don’t need to tell.
Parvaiz Bukhari. Same as above.
Shohini Ghosh, beloved madcap, who queered my pitch.
Jawed Naqvi for music, wicked poetry and a house full of lilies.
Ustad Hameed, who showed me that you can skydive, snorkel and hang-glide between any two notes of music.
Dayanita Singh, with whom I once went wandering, and an idea was ignited.
Munni and Shigori in Meena Bazaar for long hours spent shooting the breeze.
The Jhinjhanvis: Sabiha and Naseer-ul-Hassan, Shaheena and Muneer-ul-Hassan, for a home in Shahjahanabad.
Tarun Bhartiya, Prashant Bhushan, Mohammed Junaid, Arif Ayaz Parray, Khurram Parvez, Parvez Imroze, P. G. Rasool, Arjun Raina, Jitendra Yadav, Ashwin Desai, G. N. Saibaba, Rona Wilson, Nandini Oza, Shripad Dharmadhikary, Himanshu Thakker, Nikhil De, Anand, Dionne Bunsa, Chittaroopa Palit, Saba Naqvi and Reverend Sunil Sardar, whose insights are somewhere in the foundations of The Ministry.
Savitri and Ravikumar for our travels together and for so much else.
J. J. (Heck.) But she’s in here somewhere.
Rebecca John, Chander Uday Singh, Jawahar Raja, Rishabh Sancheti, Harsh Bora, Mr. Deshpande and Akshaya Sudame, who have kept me out of prison. (So far.) Susanna Lea and Lisette Verhagen, World Ambassadors of Utmost Happiness. Heather Godwin and Philippa Sitters, who woman the base camp.
David Eldridge, jacket-designer extraordinaire. Two books, twenty years apart.
Iris Weinstein for perfect pages.
Ellie Smith, Sarah Coward, Arpita Basu, George Wen, Benjamin Hamilton, Maria Massey and Jennifer Kurdyla. Close readers, serious-shit copy-editors and brilliant protagonists in the transatlantic comma wars.
Pankaj Mishra, First Reader, still.
Robin Desser and Simon Prosser. Dream editors.
My wonderful publishers, Sonny Mehta, Meru Gokhale (for publishing plus comfort food), Hans Jürgen Balmes, Antoine Gallimard, Luigi Brioschi, Jorge Herralde, Dorotea Bromberg and all the others whom I have not personally met.
Suman Parihar, Mohammed Sumon, Krishna Bhoat and Ashok Kumar, who kept me afloat when it wasn’t easy.
Suzie Q, mobile shrink, dear friend and best cabbie in London.
Krishnan Tewari, Sharmila Mitra and Deepa Verma for my daily dose of sweat, sanity and laughter.
John Cusack, supersweetheart, co-drafter of the Fleedom Charter.
Eve Ensler and Bindia Thapar. Beloveds.