The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

In the same apartment, some time before, Tilo sits satisfied, observing the sleeping baby that she has kidnapped. In front of her are balloons and a days-old cake, surrounded by ants, on which “Happy Birthday Miss Jebeen” is written in icing. Tilo is happy, for she knows that for her, “the baby [is] the beginning of something.” More specifically, the baby is Miss Jebeen returned. “True,” Tilo thinks, “the Happy Meadow [has] fallen. But Miss Jebeen [is] come.”

When Tilo leaves her marriage with Naga, he is distraught, and asks her what he’s done wrong. In Tilo’s eyes, Naga is simply an old aristocrat who has inherited the snobby airs of his Brahmin parents. For his part, Naga wonders if the recent death of Tilo’s mother has affected her decision to leave him. He is devastated that she is leaving, as he came to love her independence, the fact that she seems to live “in the country of her own skin. A country that issue[s] no visas and seem[s] to have no consulates.” Naga admits to himself that he married Tilo principally because he “couldn’t reach her,” and wonders why she married him—perhaps, he fears, because at the time she needed a cover.

When Naga picks Tilo up from the interrogation center in Kashmir, he is startled by her changed demeanor—she is polite and greets him, which she usually doesn’t. The two don’t have much time to talk before Ashfaq Mir, a Kashmiri Deputy Commandant in the Indian Army, walks in. Back from dealing with the “protests, firings, killings, [and] funerals” that, in the commandant’s words, comprise the “Srinagar Special,” Ashfaq has been asked to hand over Tilo himself. In spite of Commandant Mir’s almost obsequious politeness, he manages to establish himself as a clear authority in the situation, and Naga senses that something “heinous” has happened “from, if nothing else, the quality of air in the room—it tremble[s].”

Ashfaq Mir orders tea and biscuits. While waiting for these to be served, Naga reads a poster on the wall, on which is written: “We follow our own rules / Ferocious we are / Lethal in any form / Tamer of tides / We play with storms / U guessed it right / We are / Men in Uniform,” which Ashfaq jokingly describes as “in-house poetry.” In a chatty mood, the commandant shares with his audience how in his college days, he, too, was a Kashmiri separatist but, after losing several family members in the struggle for Azadi, or “freedom,” he has come to “see the light.” He also thinks aloud, wondering what will happen after Azadi. “What will we do to each other?” He asks rhetorically. Ashfaq believes that if the legendary Azadi is ever achieved, the many different violent sects of Islam in Kashmir will annihilate one another.

Naga observes the extent to which Ashfaq Mir has essentially been brainwashed by the Indian government, and has to control himself not to challenge the army official. Instead, he turns his gaze towards a whiteboard on the wall, on which many names are listed. Next to half of the names, the word “killed” is written in parentheses. Before Naga says anything, Ashfaq says that all of the names are Pakistani and Afghani, insisting that the army never kills Kashmiri boys—“unless they are hard-core.” His “barefaced lie [hangs] in the air unchallenged.”

Seemingly out of nowhere, Ashfaq Mir offers to show Naga a Kashmiri militant. “Shall I order him for you?” he asks Naga. The militant arrives; he is a young, very thin boy named Aijaz, and several of his limbs are broken. Ceremoniously, Ashfaq Mir explains to Naga and Tilo that most militants are between 17 and 20 years old, and are “brainwashed, indoctrinated, and given a gun.” Quickly, Ashfaq Mir clarifies that Aijaz has been “neutralized.”

Naga, for his turn, realizes that Ashfaq Mir is offering a sort of Kashmiri deal, essentially exchanging an interview with Aijaz for Naga’s journalistic silence over whatever happened to Tilo the night before. Before leaving the room, Ashfaq turns to Aijaz and introduces Naga as a journalist. “He writes against us openly,” the Commandant explains, “but still we respect and admire him. This is the meaning of democracy. Some day you will understand what a beautiful thing it is.” When Naga doesn’t say anything, Ashfaq realizes that he wishes to interview Aijaz one-on-one, and makes a big show of leaving the room.

Aijaz knows who Naga is—the names of many left-wing Indian journalists circulate among members of the militancy, who believe their writing can be useful for the Independence cause. Believing the best about Naga, Aijaz bravely chooses to tell the truth—which isn’t what Ashfaq Mir has said at all. Aijaz reveals that he has been tortured, and that, not at all neutralized, he admires his jihadist mentors more than his own parents. In the middle of Aijaz’s speech, four policemen enter the room bearing excessive amounts of food. Ashfaq Mir serves the food himself on two plates—there is no plate for Aijaz. Once the military men have left the room again, Aijaz continues talking, revealing that the military supplies his militant group with weapons. He says he wants “to kill the murderers of [his] people,” and tells Naga to write that down.

Ashfaq Mir soon reenters the room, asking Naga to reconfirm any facts from Aijaz before publication of the article. “He’s a terrorist, after all,” the Commandant says, “My terrorist brother.” Ashfaq gives Naga and Tilo permission to leave, and they do. In the car on the way back, Naga takes Tilo’s hand, and asks her whether she knows if Commander Gulrez was Musa. She replies that based on the way the body looked, she couldn’t tell. But this isn’t exactly the truth—based on the condition of the body, it is true, Tilo wouldn’t have been able to tell who it was. But she knows that it wasn’t Musa. It is based on this initial lie that their relationship is constructed—Tilo always remains a little mysterious, a little out of Naga’s grasp, and when she finally decides to leave him, he has been anticipating it for a while.

Still, when Tilo tells Naga she is leaving him, he is shocked and, taking the advice from a colleague, decides to beat her, if unconvincingly. This is all Tilo needs as impetus to leave him, and that very day, she packs some of her things and is gone as soon as Naga drives to work. Once Tilo is out of his life, Naga begins a “string of gloomy affairs” with women closer to him in social status. His mother’s favorite, a member of minor royalty, is nicknamed the Princess, and has “milk-white skin and glossy hair.” Naga asks the Princess if she would like to move in for a “trial run” and she says yes, but that she needs to liberate the home of Tilo’s chi before doing so. While packing up Tilo’s things, Naga comes across the medical files from Tilo’s mother’s stay at the hospital.

Naga has never met Tilo’s mother, Maryam Ipe, although he has heard of her. A Syrian Christian from South India, Maryam founded a very successful and innovative high school, focused on empowering young women to follow their dreams. Although Maryam claims that Tilo is her foster daughter, looking at photographs of the two of them, it is obvious that this is not true—the two are identical, save for their complexions. In fact, Maryam named Tilo, Tilotamma, which means “sesame seed,” because she was “jet-black” and tiny as a baby. Although Tilo is Maryam’s daughter by birth, Maryam for her whole life pretended she was her foster daughter, to spare her conservative Christian family the embarrassment of their daughter having given birth out of wedlock.

Because Tilo has never been close with her mother, Naga is surprised when Tilo begins to visit Maryam every day in the office when the older woman has fallen ill. In the hospital, Maryam is so delirious that the doctors are surprised she has recognized her daughter. In her altered state, Maryam becomes obsessed with asking after the “caste, sub-caste, and sub-sub-caste” of the nurses who attend her before allowing them even to touch her. The nurses, familiar with this kind of behavior from patients, are generous and kind.

As Maryam’s health worsens, she becomes belligerent and uncooperative with everyone, constantly planning her escape from the hospital and insulting the nurses. The doctors think it would be best for her to be strapped to her bed, but Tilo doesn’t like this idea. So she comes up with a way to calm her mother down: she simply sits by her side and writes down whatever Maryam says, no matter how incoherent. Naga, now leafing through the piles of documents Tilo has left behind, finds these notes and begins to read them. The document reads as a pretty much incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness, but it does allow to see the extent to which Maryam has become preoccupied with class in her ill health. She constantly mentions the “shit-cleaner” caste, for instance. At one point, this upsets Tilo so much that she breaks a chair in the hospital.

Reading through the notes makes Naga realize that he still loves Tilo, and he tells the Princess he’s not able to be with her anymore. Meanwhile, Tilo is in the apartment she has rented from Biplab with the baby she has kidnapped. Tilo knows that no one in the neighborhood knows the truth about her baby, or suspects her of kidnapping. Still, she wants to be cautious, and asks her friend Dr. Azad Bhartiya for advice. He suggests that she and the baby flee to Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services, and gives Tilo Saddam Hussain’s contact card, which Tilo recognizes as the same card Saddam left when he followed her home from the protest the first night she had the baby. So, Tilo calls Saddam, and arranges for him to pick her and the baby up that evening.

As she prepares to leave her home for good, Tilo—as Biplab does just days later, when he discovers her gone—goes through her things, looking for what she needs to bring with her as well as what she needs to hide. For her, the most “incriminating” things in her apartment are what Musa refers to as his “recoveries”—documents he salvaged from a flood that devastated Kashmir years earlier. Tilo contemplates whether she needs to bring them with her; after all, Musa has the only other key to her apartment. But the documents are very important: pictures of Musa’s daughter, Miss Jebeen, her mother, Arifa, and Musa’s artificial identification cards from various nationalities. On the back of an old airline ticket, Musa has written part of a mourning song. Tilo wonders what Musa was mourning, and thinks to herself, “A whole generation, maybe.”

On a half-written letter, Tilo reads Musa’s exhausted words: “I don’t know where to stop, or how to go on […] there is weariness, but there is also defiance. Together they define me these days.” Indeed, Tilo thinks, it is shocking that Musa is still alive after so many years of involvement in the Kashmiri conflict. He feels that he is protected because he has faked his own death—“How can they kill me again?” he jokes with Tilo—but Tilo isn’t convinced, and worries for him.

Still going through boxes, Tilo comes across old mobile phones, guns, cyanide pills, ammunition, and newspaper clippings. On one article, someone has underlined a quote from the Chief Minister of Kashmir: “We can’t just go on digging all the graveyards up. We need at least general directions from the relatives of the Missing, if not pointedly specific information. Where could be the greatest possibility of their disappeared kin being buried?”

Finally, Tilo comes across a notebook filled with her own writing. She remembers how, in the days just after she left Naga, she traveled to Kashmir almost obsessively. She didn’t even see Musa every time she went. Rather, her travels centered around collecting documentation of the conflict, although with no particularly specific focus. There, she took pictures, wrote down seemingly arbitrary phrases and quotes, and collected memorabilia. Even she didn’t know, exactly, what she was looking for—the project was “an archive of recoveries; not from a flood, but from another kind of disaster.”

Tilo has titled her book “The Reader’s Digest Book of English Grammar and Comprehension for Very Young Children.” In it are a series of mock test questions based on the horror of daily life in Kashmir. For instance, the first one tells the story of an old Kashmiri man, imprisoned by the military, whose son dies. On the day his son passes, the soldiers open his cell and let him out, saying, “you wanted Azadi? […] Congratulations! Today your wish has come true. Your freedom has come.” Once he is released, the villagers “[cry] more for the shambling wreck who [comes] running through the orchard in rags […] than they [do] for the boy who [has] been murdered.” Beneath, Tilo has written the questions: “Q1: Why did the villagers cry more for the shambling wreck? Q2: Why did the wreck shamble?”

The remaining stories in the book focus on detailing instances of corruption and violence on behalf of predominantly the Indian army, and also local militant groups. Innocent civilians are shot by unknown gunmen, framed for murder, jailed and tortured by police. An entry titled “Khadija says,” reads simply, “In Kashmir when we wake up and say ‘Good Morning’ what we really mean is ‘Good Mourning.’” The penultimate entry, titled “Nothing,” written by Tilo in the first person, reads, “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.”

Reading the book causes Tilo to remember her times with Musa outside of Kashmir. She recalls one instance in which the two accompanied a group of children from an army orphanage in Kashmir on a trip to Delhi. The two went with the group to the Red Fort to see the Sound and Light show. Of these trips, Musa believes that instead of teaching the children to “love their country,” as the army intends, the young Kashmiris are, instead, getting to know their enemies.

The last box Tilo has to unpack contains documents about Major Amrik Singh, which she and Musa have complied together. Beneath the reports written by Ralph Bauer, the LCSW who helps Amrik Singh and his wife to get asylum in the United States, is a pile of documents Tilo has never seen before. They are all different police accounts of the murder of a Sikh in Kashmir. All accounts report the dead body wearing the same clothing, covered in blood, and with his eyes gouged out. The very last report incriminates Amrik Singh for the murder of the Sikh man, who, according to all witnesses, was innocent.

After reading through the documents, Tilo resolves to leave them—they are legal documents, after all, she thinks, and contain no incriminating evidence. She places Musa’s “recoveries,” including his gun, knife, phones, passports, and other identification documents in her freezer. She also stores Saddam Hussain’s card alongside these, so Musa will know where to find her if and when he comes looking. By three in the morning, she is packed and ready to go, and waits for Saddam to come and pick her up.

While she waits, Tilo is unable to sleep. At one point, she gets a mass text on her phone inviting her to celebrate International Yoga Day with a celebrated guru. She responds, writing, “Please let’s not.” Out the window, she sees three women who work in construction holding pickaxes and shovels as they wait for one of their children to pee. Watching them, Tilo thinks to herself that nothing in the city belongs to the women: “Not a tiny plot of land, not a hovel in a slum, not a tin sheet over their heads.” When they leave, the street is empty again.

But it isn’t long before Saddam Hussain arrives. He drives a garbage truck, in which he has picked up a dead cow to dispose of, as a form of disguise. He believes no police will stop a garbage truck. Tilo smells him almost as soon as she hears him.

When the posse arrives at Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services, Anjum is waiting. She has set up a party to welcome Tilo and the baby, and Zainab, Nimmo, Imam Ziauddin, and Ustad Hameed are all awaiting the arrival of the baby and her adoptive mother. Anjum has already set up a room for Tilo, although she was unsure of what kind of décor a “real woman, from the Duniya” would want. At Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services, thanks to her warm welcome, Tilo feels for the first time that “her body [has] enough space to accommodate all of its organs,” that she has “found a home for the rest of her life.” Anjum has cooked all night, and the party feasts at dawn, making sure to set aside some food for the homeless and the municipal officers Anjum is sure will come by later in the day.

Meanwhile, while the baby is passed around from arm to arm, she “embark[s] on her brand-new life in a place similar to, and yet a world apart from where, over eighteen years ago, her young ancestor, Miss Jebeen the First had ended hers.”