Azadi - Arundhati Roy

The Chief Minister with cold eyes and a vermillion forehead would go on to win the next elections. Even after the Poet-Prime Minister’s
government fell at the Center, he won election after election in Gujarat. Some people believed he ought to be held responsible for mass murder,
but his voters called him Gujarat ka Lalla. Gujarat’s Beloved. 20
Anjum lives in the graveyard for years, at first as “a ravaged, feral specter, out-haunting every resident djinn and
spirit, ambushing bereaved families who came to bury their dead with a grief so wild, so untethered, that it clean
outstripped theirs.” 21 Gradually, she recovers and begins to build a house for herself, each room enclosing a grave.
This eventually turns into the Jannat Guest House. When municipal authorities say that it is illegal for squatters to
live in the graveyard and threaten to demolish it, she tells them that she isn’t living in the graveyard, she is dying in
it. The Jannat Guest House blossoms when Saddam Hussain—former mortuary worker, watchman, and now smalltime
entrepreneur— arrives to live there with his horse, Payal. And when Anjum’s old friend, the blind Imam
Ziauddin, moves in, the enterprise expands into the Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services. Guest rooms and
funeral services are offered entirely on the whims of the CEO. Those whims are unashamedly partial to people and
animals, living as well as deceased, for whom the the duniya has no place.
Sometimes I feel that my world, too, is divided very simply into two kinds of people—those whom Anjum will
agree to accommodate in her guest house or inter in her graveyard, and those she will not.
Anjum knows that the place she has created is not merely a physical shelter. It’s not your run-of-the-mill
poorhouse. Because it is not only the poor and hard-done-by who gather around her. Here she is, explaining to
Saddam Hussain the meaning of the place they call their home. The Biroo she refers to is her dog, whom she rescued
off the streets:
“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.” 22
People come and go, live and die in the Place of Falling People. Life germinates between the graves. Anjum’s
graveyard boasts a vegetable garden and even a small swimming pool for poor people. Even though it has no water,
local people are proud of it and bring their children to see it. At funerals and weddings, all manner of prayers are
murmured and sung, all manner of vows exchanged. They include a reading of the Islamic Fateha, a recitation of
Shakespeare’s Henry V , and the singing of the Hindi translation of “The “Internationale.”
One day, Dr. Azad Bhartiya—who translates his own name to mean the Free Indian—tireless pamphleteer and
hunger striker and steadfast friend to Falling People, reads Anjum a long letter, translating it into Urdu for her. The
letter is from a Comrade Maase Revathy, the biological mother of a baby whom Anjum found abandoned in a place
called Jantar Mantar—Delhi’s gathering place for protesters and hunger strikers, and home to Dr. Azad Bhartiya,
who has lived there on the pavement for seventeen years. Anjum adopts the baby and brings her to the graveyard.
The letter Dr. Bhartiya reads is a long account of the mother’s life as a guerrilla fighter in the forests of central India,
the circumstances that led to the birth of her baby, and the reasons that have compelled her to abandon it. At first
Anjum—who longs to be a mother—is hostile, because she cannot countenance the idea of a woman who has
abandoned her child. But gradually she begins to listen to the story of this faraway woman, whose concerns are so
different from her own but whose grief is just as wild and just as complicated. The letter ends with a Lal Salaam, a
red salute:
“Lal Salaam Aleikum,” was Anjum’s inadvertent, instinctive response to the end of the letter. That could have been the beginning of a whole
political movement, but she had only meant it in the way of an “Ameen” after listening to a moving sermon. 23
There it is then—between Anjum, Saddam, and their companions, the political compact of today’s uprising,
assembled in Anjum’s graveyard. Jai Bhim. Inquilab Zindabad. Lal Salaam Aleikum. But these are only the soul of
the revolution. Not the revolution itself. Because there is none of the stuff of which revolutions are made in Anjum’s
graveyards. There are no flags. There is no flag-waving, no pledge-taking. No slogans. No hard borders between
male and female, human and animal, nation and nation, or even life and death.
The presiding deity in the Jannat Guest House is Hazrat Sarmad, who blessed Anjum when she was a newborn.
Hazrat Sarmad was a Jewish Armenian who traveled from Persia to Delhi three hundred years ago. He renounced
Judaism for Islam and then renounced orthodox Islam for Love. He lived naked on the streets of Old Delhi, reciting
poems of love until he was beheaded on the steps of Delhi’s Jama Masjid by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.
Sarmad’s shrine is clamped like a limpet to the sheer face of the Jama Masjid. To Anjum and those who seek her
shelter, Sarmad is the Saint of the Unconsoled, Solace of the Indeterminate, Blasphemer among Believers, Believer
among Blasphemers. He is the battered angel who keeps watch over his battered charges, who holds the doors
between worlds open (illegally) and who never allows the circle to close. And so it is that through that illegal crack,
that unclosed circle, Kashmir comes drifting into Anjum’s graveyard. And the forbidden conversation begins.