“D’you know why God made Hijras?” she asked Aftab one afternoon while she flipped through a dog-eared 1967 issue of Vogue, lingering over the blonde ladies with bare legs who so enthralled her.
“No, why?”
“It was an experiment. He decided to create something, a living creature that is incapable of happiness. So he made us.”
Her words hit Aftab with the force of a physical blow. “How can you say that? You are all happy here! This is the Khwabgah!” he said, with rising panic.
“Who’s happy here? It’s all sham and fakery,” Nimmo said laconically, not bothering to look up from the magazine. “No one’s happy here. It’s not possible. Arre yaar, think about it, what are the things you normal people get unhappy about? I don’t mean you, but grown-ups like you—what makes them unhappy? Price-rise, children’s school-admissions, husbands’beatings, wives’cheatings, Hindu-Muslim riots, Indo-Pak war—outside things that settle down eventually. But for us the price-rise and school-admissions and beating-husbands and cheating-wives are all inside us. The riot is inside us. The war is inside us. Indo-Pak is inside us. It will never settle down. It can’t.
(Arundhati Roy "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness")
Leave a comment