Azadi - Arundhati Roy

me in ways I could never have imagined.
Somewhere along the way, slow-cooking began again. Folks began to drop in on me. Their visits grew more
frequent, then longer, and eventually, pretty brazenly, they moved in with me: Anjum, an Urdu speaker from Old
Delhi, came with her adopted daughter, Zainab, and a laconic, cloudy dog called Biroo. A young man who called
himself Saddam Hussain showed up on a white horse he introduced as Payal. He said his real name was Dayachand
and that he was a Chamar, a skinner from Jhajjhar in Haryana. He told me a terrible story about what had happened
to his father. He spoke in a sort of Mewati-Rajasthani that I found hard to understand. He showed me a video of the
execution of Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, that he kept on his cell phone. It was Hussein’s courage at the
moment of his death, he said, even if he had been a bastard, that had made Dayachand convert to Islam and take the
name Saddam Hussain. I had no idea what the connection between the video and his father was.
A rail-thin man with his right arm in a plaster cast, his shirt-sleeve flapping at his side, slid in like a shadow. He
refused all offers of food and drink. The man handed me a piece of paper that said:
My Full Name: Dr. Azad Bhartiya (Translation: The Free Indian)
My Home Address: Dr. Azad Bhartiya, Near Lucky Sarai Railway Station, Lucky Sarai Basti, Kokar, Bihar
My Current Address: Dr. Azad Bhartiya, Jantar Mantar, New Delhi
My Qualifications: MA Hindi, MA Urdu (First Class First), BA History, BEd, Basic Elementary Course in Punjabi, MA Punjabi ABF (Appeared
But Failed), PhD (pending), Delhi University (Comparative Religions and Buddhist Studies), Lecturer, Inter College, Ghaziabad, Research
Associate, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Founder Member Vishwa Samajwadi Sthapana (World People’s Forum) and Indian Socialist
Democratic Party (Against Price-rise).
I offered him a cigarette. He went outside to smoke it, and returned only after a few weeks. That was the
beginning of Dr. Bhartiya’s drifting in and out of my home. It continues to this day. The next to come was the
opposite of a drifter. Biplab Dasgupta, from the Universe of English, was an officer of the elite intelligence services
currently posted in Kabul. He asked me to call him what his friends called him—Garson Hobart—the name of the
character he had played in a college play. He arrived with an expensive bottle of whisky, from which he drank
steadily. He seated himself at my table and, without so much as asking, used my pen to start writing something,
from which he never looked up except to occasionally enunciate the Latin name of a bird, as though he were
checking the spelling by saying it out loud. Later it occurred to me that he might have been doing it to trouble future
translators in whose languages the scientific taxonomy of birds and trees, with their genus and species names that
identified each of them as unique, did not exist. Hobart’s expression changed—in fact, almost everything about him
changed—when my doorbell rang, and I found a man and woman standing outside. The woman turned out to be
Hobart’s tenant, who had apparently gone missing. Her name was Tilotamma, and the man with her was Musa, her
Kashmiri lover who seemed to know Hobart, too. They came in carrying cartons of papers and files, and towers of
dusty documents. She put up a few sheets of paper on the fridge and secured them with a magnet. It was a word list,
an alphabetically organized lexicon:
Kashmiri–English Alphabet
A: Azadi/army/Allah/America/Attack/AK-47/Ammunition/Ambush/Aatankwadi/Armed Forces Special Powers Act/Area Domination/Al Badr/Al
Mansoorian/Al Jehad/Afghan/Amarnath Yatra
B: BSF/body/blast/bullet/battalion/barbed wire/brust (burst)/border cross/booby trap/bunker/byte/begaar (forced labour)
C: Cross-border/Crossfire/camp/civilian/curfew/Crackdown/Cordon-and-Search/CRPF/Checkpost/Counter-insurgency/Ceasefire/Counter-
Intelligence/Catch and Kill/Custodial Killing/Compensation/Cylinder (surrender)/Concertina wire/Collaborator
D: Disappeared/Defence Spokesman/Double Cross/Double Agent/Disturbed Areas Act/Dead body
It went on to cover the whole of the English alphabet, all the way to Z. When I asked what it was for, she said it
was to help innocent Indian tourists in Kashmir to communicate better with the locals. She betrayed no signs of
sarcasm or irony. Musa said nothing. He melted into the surroundings so quickly that I forgot he was there.
After a while Tilotamma’s ex-husband, Nagaraj Hariharan, came by, looking for her but pretending not to. For
some reason, he had brought his mother-in-law Maryam Ipe’s fat medical file from a Cochin hospital. He showed it
to me, even though I made it clear that I had no interest in the blood profiles and oxygen saturation charts of
complete strangers. It was only much later that I saw the notes that contained Maryam Ipe’s ICU hallucinations. I
could not have imagined that, if you study people’s hallucinations long enough, they tell you more than volumes of
sentient conversation ever could.
Major Amrik Singh, a tall Sikh officer of the Indian Army, arrived, denying several extrajudicial killings that I
hadn’t even accused him of, insisting that he was being made what he called an “escape goat.” Once he picked up on