The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.

Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.

She knew he’d be back. No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she saw it. She sensed that in some strange tangential way, he needed her shade as much as she needed his. And she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.

They had always fitted together like pieces of an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) puzzle- the smoke of her into the solidness of him, the solitariness of her into the gathering of him, the strangeness of her into the straightforwardness of him, the insouciance of her into the restraint of him. The quietness of her into the quietness of him.

Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.

Love, after all, is the ingredient that separates a sacrifice from ordinary, everyday butchery.

If you’ll pardon me for making this somewhat prosaic observation – maybe that’s what life is, or ends up being most of the time: a rehearsal for a performance that never eventually materializes.

She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know

Even in the most uneventful of our lives, we are called upon to choose our battles...

Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labours and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we continue to coexist – continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the centre holds, as long as the yolk doesn’t run, we’ll be fine. In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view.

I don’t know where to stop, or how to go on. I stop when I shouldn’t. I go on when I should stop. There is weariness. But there is also defiance. Together they define me these days. Together they steal my sleep, and together they restore my soul. There are plenty of problems with no solutions in sight. Friends turn into foes. If not vocal ones, then silent, reticent ones. But I’ve yet to see a foe turning into a friend. There seems to be no hope. But pretending to be hopeful is the only grace we have . . .

K H A D I J A S A Y S . . . In Kashmir when we wake up and say ‘Good Morning’ what we really mean is ‘Good Mourning’.

Sleep came to them, quick and easy, like money to millionaires.

I use the word love loosely, and only because my vocabulary is unequal to the task of describing the precise nature of that maze, that forest of feelings

I saw a man on a bridge about to jump. I said, ‘Don’t do it!’ He said, ‘Nobody loves me.’ I said, ‘God loves you. Do you believe in God?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Are you a Muslim or a non-Muslim?’ He said, ‘A Muslim.’ I said, ‘Shia or Sunni?’ He said, ‘Sunni.’ I said, ‘Me too! Deobandi or Barelvi?’ He said, ‘Barelvi.’ I said, ‘Me too! Tanzeehi or Tafkeeri?’ He said, ‘Tanzeehi.’ I said, ‘Me too! Tanzeehi Azmati or Tanzeehi Farhati?’ He said, ‘Tanzeehi Farhati.’ I said, ‘Me too! Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Uloom Ajmer, or Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Noor Mewat?’ He said, ‘Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Noor Mewat.’ I said, ‘Die, kafir!’ and I pushed him over.

She knew very well that she knew very well that she knew very well.

In a while he reached across the table and took her hand in his. He could not have known that he was trying to comfort a building that had been struck by lightning.

The TV channels never ran out of sponsorship for their live telecasts of despair. They never ran out of despair

It was herself she was exhausted by. She had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete—a skill that many consider to be the cornerstone of sanity. The traffic inside her head seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights. The result was incessant noise, a few bad crashes and eventually gridlock.

Trees raised their naked, mottled branches to the sky like mourners stilled in attitudes of grief.

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.

Destroying us. You are constructing us. It’s yourselves that you are destroying.

Dear Doctor, If you like you can change every inch of me. I'm just a story.

She could hear her hair growing. It sounded like something crumbling. A burnt thing crumbling. Coal. Toast. Moths crisped on a light bulb. She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, travelling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them.

But eventually, the Elixir of the Soul that had survived wars and the bloody birth of three new countries, was, like most things in the world, trumped by Coca-Cola.

She wasn’t a woman who smiled and said hello.

One day Kashmir will make India self-destruct in the same way. You may have blinded all of us, every one of us, with your pellet guns by then. But you will still have eyes to see what you have done to us. You're not destroying us. You are constructing us. It's yourselves that you are destroying. Khuda Hafiz.

Mar gayee bulbul qafas mein Keh gayee sayyaad se Apni sunehri gaand mein Tu thoons le fasl-e-bahaar 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

People—communities, castes, races and even countries—carry their tragic histories and their misfortunes around like trophies, or like stock, to be bought and sold on the open market.