Humanness

“She was the fourth of five children, born on a cold January night, by lamplight, in Shahjahanabad, the walled city of Delhi. Ahlam Baji, the midwife who delivered her and put her in her mother’s arms wrapped in two shawls, said, ’It’s a boy.’ Given the circumstances, her error was understandable. A month into her first pregnancy Jahanara Begum and her husband decided that if their first baby was a boy they would name him Aftab. Their first three children were girls. They had been waiting for their Aftab for six years. The night he was born was the happiest of Jahanara Begum’s life.

The next morning, when the sun was up and the room nice and warm, she unswaddled little Aftab. She explored his tiny body—eyes nose head neck armpits fingers toes—with sated, unhurried delight. That was when she discovered, nestling underneath his boy-parts, a small, unformed, but undoubtedly girl-part. Is it possible for a mother to be terrified of her own baby? Jahanara Begum was.

Her first reaction was to feel her heart constrict and her bones turn to ash. Her second reaction was to take another look to make sure she was not mistaken. Her third reaction was to recoil from what she had created while her bowels convulsed ... Her fourth reaction was to contemplate killing herself and her child. Her fifth reaction was to pick her baby up and hold him close while she fell through a crack between the world she knew and worlds she did not know existed. There, in the abyss, spinning through the darkness, everything she had been sure of until then, every single thing, from the smallest to the biggest, ceased to make sense to her. In Urdu, the only language she knew, all things, not just living things but all things—carpets, clothes, books, pens, musical instruments—had a gender. Everything was either masculine or feminine, man or woman. Everything except her baby.

Yes of course she knew there was a word for those like him—Hijra. Two words actually, Hijra and Kinnar. But two words do not make a language. Was it possible to live outside language? Naturally this question did not address itself to her in words, or as a single lucid sentence. It addressed itself to her as a soundless, embryonic howl. Her sixth reaction was to clean herself up and resolve to tell nobody for the moment. Not even her husband. Her seventh reaction was to lie down next to Aftab and rest. Like the God of the Christians did, after he had made Heaven and Earth. Except that in his case he rested after making sense of the world he had created, whereas Jahanara Begum rested after what she had created had scrambled her sense of the world." ~ From “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” by Arundhati Roy

“Fiction writing is the closest thing I know to prayer. Because… when I write fiction, it’s, to me, the opposite of an argument. It’s like creating a universe. You know, it’s like doing everything you can to create a world in which you want people to wander, you know?

I think the world is unconsoled right now… We need to redefine what is being defined for us as the path to happiness or to progress or to civilization… Happiness is not a building or an institution that is there forever. It’s fragile. And you enjoy it when you can, and you may find it in the most unexpected places...

The worlds that have been ripped apart… in the subcontinent, where I live, it’s as though people have ceased to be able to speak to each other. Again, I don’t mean in real languages, of Hindi, Urdu or Malayalam, but it’s as though people who live in cities, they don’t even know how to go into a village anymore. You know, they don’t even understand what it means to live on the land anymore. People who live there don’t know what to do when they come into the other modern world. I mean, India has always lived in several centuries simultaneously, but it’s just becoming almost psychotic now. And also, I mean, in real terms, we live in several languages, in real languages. Here I do mean Urdu and Hindu and English, and all of that together.

And all the—and fundamentally, I think what I mean is that there is a danger of fiction becoming domesticated, you know, of too much of a product that has to be quickly described, catalogued, put on a particular shelf, and everybody has to know what is the theme. And, to me, I wanted to blow that open. You know, what is the theme? The theme is the air we breathe. The theme is the politics that affects our lives. It’s not just news headlines. You know, what happens in Kashmir or what happens with people who have been displaced or what happens in intimate spaces, all of it can only be presented as part of a universe in fiction, because you can’t do it otherwise.

Anjum, who was Aftab, is not a signifier. This is not a sort of social history of the trans community. She’s a character, like many other characters in the book, very unique, very much herself. And when she’s born in the walled city and grows up, and then when she—she actually moves out of her home to a place close by called Khwabgah, which in Urdu means "the House of Dreams," where she lives with a community of other people, none of whom is like herself. You know, even inside the Khwabgah, though there are many trans women, people who are—Anjum, for example, she’s a hermaphrodite, but there are others who are men, who are Muslim and don’t believe in having surgery, some who do. There are Hindus. There are Sunnis. There are Shias. So, they themselves are a very diverse community. But they look at the world and call it duniya, which means "the world" in Urdu, which is something else. But they have a history of being sort of inside and outside the community, which sort of predates the kind of Western, liberal, rights-based discourse, though, even in the story, as it modernizes, you know, there is that feudal story overlapping with the new, modern language and so on.

But actually, Anjum, though she does have this incendiary border of gender running through her—all the characters have a border, which is, for example, one of the—she moves into the graveyard, and she builds—eventually, she builds a guest house, called Jannat, which is the Paradise guest house. And one of the people who becomes a very close comrade of hers is a young man who was—who is a Dalit, who has watched Hindu mobs beat his father to death, as is happening every day now with Muslims and Dalits, because he was transporting a carcass of a dead cow, and so he’s beaten to death by people who call themselves cow protectors. And he converts to Islam, and so—and calls himself Saddam Hussein, because he’s very impressed by this video he sees of Saddam’s execution and the disdain he shows for his executioners. So Saddam has this border of caste and religious conversion—incendiary in India—running through him. The other major character is a woman called Tilottama from the south, and she is also a person of indeterminate origins as far as India is concerned. There’s Musa, who is now a Kashmiri, fighting, with the national border running through him.

So, it’s not conceptual. I mean, what happens is that India is a society of such minute divisions, such institutionalized hierarchies, where caste is a mesh that presses people down and holds them down in a grid. And so, all these stories somehow are about people who just don’t fit into that grid and who eventually create a little community, and a kind of solidarity emerges, which is a solidarity of the heart. You know, it’s not a solidarity of memorandi or academic discourse, but a solidarity which is human, which is based on unorthodox kinds of love—not even sexual love or anything, it’s just based on humanness…”

~ Suzanna Arundhati Roy (born 1961) is an Indian author. She is best known for her novel The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997. This novel became the biggest-selling book by a nonexpatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist for human rights and environmental causes. Arundhati Roy has returned to fiction and has just published her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. The Washington Post has praised her novel, writing,  "This is a remarkable creation, a story both intimate and international, swelling with comedy and outrage, a tale that cradles the world’s most fragile people even while it assaults the Subcontinent’s most brutal villains. ... [It] will leave you awed by the heat of its anger and the depth of its compassion," they wrote. The Indian literary critic Nilanjana Roy has hailed the novel as, quote, "an elegy for a bulldozed world."