The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

Musa is at Jannat Guest House for his third and final night. It is his and Tilo’s last time together—in the morning, he will go to Kashmir, and he will never return. He and Tilo lie in bed, reading poetry to one another. Tilo shows him one poem that she wants to be an epitaph. It reads: “How / to tell / a / shattered / story? / By / slowly / becoming / everybody. / No. / By slowly becoming everything.”

 That night, Anjum is too restless to sleep. She decides to go for a walk and takes Miss Jebeen the Second with her. As they pass the main road, the child needs to go pee and, when she’s done, “lift[s] her bottom to marvel at the night sky and the stars and the one-thousand-year-old city reflected in the puddle she [has] made.” Mother and daughter go back and go to sleep, like everyone else. Everyone except Guih Kyom the dung beetle, who is “on duty” lying on his back to catch the sky in case it falls. But he knows that everything “would turn all right in the end […] because they had to. Because Miss Jebeen, Miss Udaya Jebeen, [is] come.”