The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness

The narrative once again backtracks, introducing Musa’s daughter Jebeen, who always insisted on being called “Miss.” She was not quite 3 years old when she died, struck by a bullet that also killed her mother. The pair had been watching a funeral procession for a moderate Kashmiri separatist who had been shot by a Muslim extremist, when the Indian soldiers stationed nearby heard an explosion and began shooting into the crowd, killing 17 people in total:

Later it was established that the explosion had been caused by a car driving over an empty carton of Mango Frooti on the next street. Who was to blame? Who had left the packet of Mango Frooti (Fresh ’n’ Juicy) on the street? India or Kashmir? Or Pakistan? Who had driven over it? The facts were never established. Nobody was blamed. This was Kashmir. It was Kashmir’s fault (330).

Together with the other victims of the massacre, Miss Jebeen and her mother were buried in a cemetery known as Martyrs’ Graveyard.

Although the rebellion in Kashmir had been steadily escalating for years, Musa himself wasn’t initially involved in the insurgency. Nevertheless, his quietness during the funeral attracted the attention of the authorities, and he was brought to see Major Amrik Singh. Singh, as a friend of Musa’s father, was outwardly friendly, extending his condolences for Musa’s loss and claiming to want to help Musa find work. When Musa rejected these offers, Singh caught him as he was turning to leave and publicly offered him a bottle of whiskey:

Everybody, the audience as well as the protagonists of the play that was unfolding, understood the script. If Musa spurned the gift, it would be a public declaration of war with Amrik Singh—which made him, Musa, as good as dead. If he accepted it, Amrik Singh would have outsourced the death sentence to the militants […] Whatever else they disagreed about, [every militant group] agreed that death was the punishment for collaborators and friends of the Occupation (348).

Musa turned down Singh’s gift and immediately prepared to go into hiding. He left home the following day and joined the insurgency, although he did his best to “persuade his comrades to hold on to a semblance of humanity, to not turn into the very thing that they abhorred and fought against” (352).

Roughly nine months later, he sent a note to Tilo with the address of a houseboat in Kashmir. Tilo came and was shown inside by a young man named Gulrez, who carried two kittens in his pockets and told Tilo what had happened to Musa’s family. Musa arrived later and explained—over a dinner Gulrez prepared—that Gulrez was developmentally disabled and had to stay on the boat for his own safety: “He can’t live in the village […] it’s too dangerous for him. Gul-kak is what we call a ‘Mout’—he lives in his own world, with his own rules” (360).

Later that night, Tilo and Musa slept together and traded stories of the time they’d spent apart. Tilo spent the next ten days touring Kashmir, sometimes accompanied by Musa. On the tenth night, she once again stayed on the Shaheen, and was woken in the middle of the night by a military raid. Musa had left a few hours earlier, but the soldiers beat Gulrez and threw one of his kittens overboard. They then brought Gulrez and Tilo to a rendezvous, Amrik Singh, who took Gulrez ashore and shot him.

Singh took Tilo to the Shiraz Cinema and handed her over to a female interrogator, ACP Pinky. However, by asserting her connection to Dasgupta, Tilo was able to avoid major injury and secure her release. Once Naga took her to a hotel, Musa managed to get in touch with Tilo via a go-between who brought her to a safe house. There, Musa told Tilo that she wasn’t safe on her own, and that she ought to either marry or return to her mother; he promised, however, to find her when the war ended. On the way back to the hotel, Tilo stopped at Gulrez’s grave, as well as those of Arifa and Miss Jebeen.

Tilo married Naga shortly after returning to Delhi, but after only two months of marriage, she realized she was pregnant by Musa. She chose to have an abortion not because of the child’s paternity, but because “she worried that the little human she produced would have to negotiate the same ocean full of strange and dangerous fish that she had had to in her relationship with her mother” (397). She left the hospital in a daze and ended up wandering into a cemetery where she laid down on a grave and cried. This cemetery was the one where Anjum would later make her home, and which Tilo herself would eventually return to.