The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness

The narrative jumps slightly backwards in time. Tilo is in the apartment she rents from Dasgupta, considering the baby she has just kidnapped: “The baby was the beginning of something […] The baby was Miss Jebeen returned. Returned, that is, not to her (Miss Jebeen the First was never hers), but to the world” (219).

Going back a bit further, the narrator reveals that Naga was unhappy to see his marriage to Tilo end, and convinced that Tilo’s decision stemmed either from the recent death of her mother, or from what happened years ago in Kashmir; the events at the Shiraz Cinema had caused the already reserved Tilo to begin a “regime of more or less complete isolationism” (221).

The narrator then fills in the details on what happened in Kashmir from Naga’s perspective. After he received the call from Dasgupta, he went to fetch Tilo at the Cinema, where he was met by a talkative soldier who offered to allow Naga to speak to a “reformed” Kashmiri militant—the unspoken condition being that, in exchange, Naga wouldn’t write anything about Tilo’s arrest. However, once the boy was left alone with Naga and Tilo, he admitted that he hadn’t changed his views on Kashmiri independence at all.