The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness Quotes

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

Enemies can't break your spirit, only friends can.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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’.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 . . .

they asked the poor what it was like to be poor, the hungry what it was like to be hungry, the homeless what it was like to be homeless.

Nietzsche believed that if Pity were to become the core of ethics, misery would become contagious and happiness an object of suspicion

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.

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.

With Partition, in 1947, Roy writes, "God's carotid burst open on the new border between India and Pakistan and a million people died of hatred. Neighbours turned on each other as though they'd never known each other, never been to each other's weddings, never sung each other's songs." The consequences of that terrible event form the main story of "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

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

She gave the impression that she had somehow slipped off her leash. As though she was taking herself for a walk while the rest of us were being walked – like pets. As

Hide!' she whispered. 'The vegetarians are coming.

The word Hijra, she said, meant a Body in which a Holy Soul lives.

No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she saw it.

She thought of the city at night, of cities at night. Discarded constellations of old stars, fallen from the sky, rearranged on Earth in patterns and pathways and towers. Invaded by weevils that have learned to walk upright.

To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether. A chuckle, after all, could become a foothold in the sheer wall of the future.

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.

N O T H I N G I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there’s lots to write about. That can’t be done in Kashmir. It’s not sophisticated, what happens here. There’s too much blood for good literature. Q 1: Why is it not sophisticated? Q 2: What is the acceptable amount of blood for good literature? y

Having wounded each other thus, deeply, almost mortally, the two sat quietly side by side on someone’s sunny grave, haemorrhaging.

Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration.)

Life went on. Death went on. The war went on.

Breathe gently here, for with fragility all is fraught, Here, in this workshop of the world, where wares of glass are wrought

Women are not allowed. Women are not allowed. Women are not allowed. Was it to protect the grave from the women or the women from the grave?

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.

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.

An Urdu couplet by one of his favorite poets, Mir Taqi Mir: Jis sar ko ghurur aaj hai yaan taj-vari ka Kal uss pe yahin shor hai phir nauhagari ka The head which today proudly flaunts a crown Will tomorrow, right here, in lamentation drown.

She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know. How to un-know, for example, that when people died of stone-dust, their lungs refused to be cremated.

Still the Amaltas bloomed, a brilliant, defiant yellow. Each blazing summer it reached up and whispered to the hot brown sky, Fuck You.

India belongs not to Punjabis, Biharis, Gujaratis, Madrasis, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians, but to those beautiful creatures—peacocks, elephants, tigers, bears…

History would be a revelation of the future as much as it was a study of the past.

To whom did it matter? Did those to whom it mattered matter?

These days in Kashmir, you can be killed for surviving.

All they have to do is to turn around and shoot. All the people have to do is to lie down and die.

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.

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.

And yet , the burden of perpetual apprehension that she had carried around for years - of suddenly receiving news of death - had lightened somewhat. Not because she loved him any less, but because the battered angels in the graveyard that kept watch over their battered charges held open the doors between worlds (illegally, just a crack), so that the souls of the present and the departed could mingle, like guests at the same party. It made life less determinate and death less conclusive. Somehow everything became a little easier to bear.

The crowd made room for the press respectfully. It knew that without the journalists and photographers the massacre would be erased and the dead would truly die. So the bodies were offered to them, in hope and anger. A banquet of death.

She could hear her hair growing.

She said, “I’m not marrying anybody.” When I asked her why she felt that way, she said she wanted to be free to die irresponsibly, without notice and for no reason.

Thinking made her throat ache. That was a good reason not to think about seeing a psychiatrist.

Who was he mourning? She didn’t know. A whole generation maybe.

The story flared, then faded.

In the end it didn’t matter of course.

Sitting next to Tilo, breathing next to her, he felt like an empty house whose locked windows and doors were creaking open a little, to air the ghosts trapped inside it.

The frozen flowers never go away. They hang around somewhere all the time. I think we need to talk about vases. Did you hear the sound of the white flower?

In Kashmir when we wake up and say “Good Morning” what we really mean is “Good Mourning.

there were only three kinds of people in this city – security guards, people who need security guards, and thieves.

They had always fitted together like pieces of an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) puzzle

Socrates asked the key question: why should we be moral?

Poetry, music and literature, he believed, ought not to be interrupted by the banality of war.

Somehow the idea of dictating things, Tilo said, seemed to make her mother feel that she was still the captain of the ship, still in charge of something, and that calmed her down considerably.

She described how, when her brother’s body was found in a field and brought home, his fists, clenched in rigor mortis, were full of earth and yellow mustard flowers grew from between his fingers.

I am weary of worldly gatherings, O Lord What pleasure in them, when the light in my heart is gone? From the clamor of crowds I flee, my heart seeks The kind of silence that would mesmerize speech itself

He sensed she was drifting on a tide that neither he nor she could do much about. He couldn't tell whether her restlessness, her compulsive and increasingly unsafe wandering through the city, marked the onset of an unsoundness of mind or an acute, perilous kind of sanity. Or were they both the same thing?

The foreign newspapers had dumped the old exotics in favor of the younger generation. The exotics didn’t suit the image of the New India—a nuclear power and an emerging destination for international finance. Ustad

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.

Duniya ke mehfilon se ukta gaya hoon ya Rab Kya lutf anjuman ka , jab dil hi bujh gaya ho Shorish se bhagta hoon, dil dhoondta hai mera Aisa sukoot jis pe taqreer bhi fida ho I am weary of worldly gatherings, O Lord What pleasure in them, when the light in my heart is gone? From the clamour of crowds I flee, my heart seeks The kind of silence that would mesmerize speech itself

Diclofenac, cow aspirin, given to cattle as a muscle relaxant, to ease pain and increase the production of milk, works—worked—like nerve gas on white-backed vultures. Each chemically relaxed, milk-producing cow or buffalo that died became poisoned vulture bait.

There was no tour guide on hand to tell her that in Kashmir nightmares were promiscuous. They were unfaithful to their owners, they cartwheeled wantonly into other people’s dreams, they acknowledged no precincts, they were the greatest ambush artists of all. No fortification, no fence-building could keep them in check. In Kashmir the only thing to do with nightmares was to embrace them like old friends and manage them like old enemies.

When the sun grew hot, they returned indoors where they continued to float through their lives like a pair of astronauts, defying gravity, limited only by the outer walls of their fuchsia spaceship with its pale pistachio doors. It isn’t as though they didn’t have plans. Anjum waited to die. Saddam waited to kill.

Mohabbat goliyon se bo rahe ho Watan ka chehra khoon se dho rahe ho Gumaan tum ko ke rasta katt raha hai Yaqeen mujhko ke manzil kho rahe ho

For the first time in her life, Tilo felt that her body had enough room to accomodate all of its organs.

It had to do with the way she lived, in the country of her own skin. A country that issued no visas and seemed to have no consulates.

There were rumours and counter­rumours. There were rumours that might have been true, and truths that ought to have been just rumours.

There seems to be no hope. But pretending to be hopeful is the only grace we have . . .

Foreigners only see what they want to see. Earlier it was snake charmers and sadhus, now it is the superpower things, the Bazaar Raj.

In the years to come, when the war became a way of life, there would be books and films and photo exhibitions curated around the theme of Kashmir’s grief and loss.

The Believers come with their guns, their prayer beads and their own Destroy-Yourselves Manual.

Do you make all your life’s big decisions based on mobile phone videos?

Addiction has its own mnemonics- skin, smell, the length of the loved one's fingers. In Tilo's case it was the slant of her eyes, the shape of her mouth, the almost invisible scar that slightly altered the symmetry of her lips and made her look defiant even when she did not mean to, the way her nostrils flared, announcing the displeasure even before hr eyes did.

Once you have fallen off the edge like all of us have, including our Biroo,” Anjum said, “you will never stop falling. And as you fall you will hold on to other falling people. The sooner you understand that the better. This place where we live, where we have made our home, is the place of falling people. Here there is no haqeeqat. Arre, even we aren’t real. We don’t really exist.

In every part of the legendary Valley of Kashmir, whatever people might be doing—walking, praying, bathing, cracking jokes, shelling walnuts, making love or taking a bus-ride home—they were in the rifle-sights of a soldier. And because they were in the rifle-sights of a soldier, whatever they might be doing—walking, praying, bathing, cracking jokes, shelling walnuts, making love or taking a bus-ride home—they were a legitimate target.

In the last photograph of her, the bullet wound looked like a cheerful summer rose arranged just above her left ear. A few petals had fallen on her kaffan, the white shroud she was wrapped in before she was laid to rest.

She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, traveling 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. She thought of the city at night, of cities at night. Discarded constellations of old stars, fallen from the sky, rearranged on earth in patterns and pathways and towers.

I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there’s lots to write about. That can’t be done in Kashmir. It’s not sophisticated, what happens here. There’s too much blood for good literature.

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…

NOTHING I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there’s lots to write about. That can’t be done in Kashmir. It’s not sophisticated, what happens here. There’s too much blood for good literature. Q 1: Why is it not sophisticated? Q 2: What is the acceptable amount of blood for good literature?

Not everyone in the village was happy with the idea of having an Untouchable man's statue put up at the entrance. Particularly not an Untouchable who carried a weapon. They felt it would give out the wrong message, give people ideas. Three weeks after the statue went up, the rifle on its soldier went missing. Sepoy S. Murugesan's family tried to file a complaint, but the police refused to register a case, saying that the rifle must have fallen off or simply disintegrated due to the use of substandard cement- a fairly common malpractice- and that nobody could be blamed. A month later the statue's hands were cut off. Once again the police refused to register a case, although this time they sniggered knowingly and did not even bother to offer a reason. Two weeks after the amputation of its hands, the statue of Sepoy S. Murugesan was beheaded. There were a few days of tension. People from nearby villages who belonged to the same caste as S. Murugesan organized a protest. They began a relay hunger strike at the base of the statue. A local court said it would constitute a magisterial committee to look into the matter. In the meanwhile it ordered a status quo. The hunger strike was discontinued. The magisterial committee was never constituted. In some countries, some soldiers die twice.

A t magic hour, when the sun has gone but the light has not, armies of flying foxes unhinge themselves from the Banyan trees in the old graveyard and drift across the city like smoke. When the bats leave, the crows come home. Not all the din of their homecoming fills the silence left by the sparrows that have gone missing, and the old white-backed vultures, custodians of the dead for more than a hundred million years, that have been wiped out. The vultures died of diclofenac poisoning. Diclofenac, cow-aspirin, given to cattle as a muscle relaxant, to ease pain and increase the production of milk, works – worked – like nerve gas on white-backed vultures. Each chemically relaxed, milk-producing cow or buffalo that died became poisoned vulture-bait. As cattle turned into better dairy machines, as the city ate more ice cream, butterscotch-crunch, nutty-buddy and chocolatechip, as it drank more mango milkshake, vultures’ necks began to droop as though they were tired and simply couldn’t stay awake. Silver beards of saliva dripped from their beaks, and one by one they tumbled off their branches, dead. Not many noticed the passing of the friendly old birds. There was so much else to look forward to.

I had become something of a bird man – a passion that has remained with me – and could tell a Himalayan griffon from a bearded vulture and could identify the streaked laughing thrush, the orange bullfinch, Tytler’s leaf warbler and the Kashmir flycatcher, which was threatened then, and must surely by now be extinct. The trouble with being in Dachigam was that it had the effect of unsettling one’s resolve. It underlined the futility of it all. It made one feel that Kashmir really belonged to those creatures. That none of us who were fighting over it – Kashmiris, Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese (they have a piece of it too – Aksai Chin, which used to be part of the old Kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir), or for that matter Pahadis, Gujjars, Dogras, Pashtuns, Shins, Ladakhis, Baltis, Gilgitis, Purikis, Wakhis, Yashkuns, Tibetans, Mongols, Tatars, Mon, Khowars – none of us, neither saint nor soldier, had the right to claim the truly heavenly beauty of that place for ourselves. I was once moved to say so, quite casually, to Imran, a young Kashmiri police officer who had done some exemplary undercover work for us. His response was, ‘It’s a very great thought, Sir. I have the same love for animals as yourself. Even in my travels in India I feel the exact same feeling – that India belongs not to Punjabis, Biharis, Gujaratis, Madrasis, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians, but to those beautiful creatures – peacocks, elephants, tigers, bears . . .’ He was polite to the point of being obsequious, but I knew what he was getting at. It was extraordinary; you couldn’t – and still cannot – trust even the ones you assumed were on your side. Not even the damn police.