Arundhati Roy's second novel is a powerful elegy for a bulldozed world

Nilanjana S Roy reviews The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Author: Arundhati Roy
Publisher: Penguin Random House
No. of pages: 464 pages
Price: Rs 599
 
In the same week that I began reading Arundhati Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, I came across an old interview between Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The Paris Review.
 
He says: “It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.”
 
The challenge faced by the novelist who inhabits a tumultuous country going through interesting times: How do you make up a world that can compete with the truth? One way is to lie outright, become a fabulist – but lies are now firmly the preserve of the fake-news expert, not the novelist.
 
Before the book’s release, a story was circulated about Arundhati Roy on a news site notorious for its hazy grasp of facts. It triggered a familiar sort of controversy – the abusive outrage of online mobs as they zero in on the target of the moment, amplified by the bully-pulpit shouting of television anchors who can speak only in finger-wagging indictments. But the story proved to be a lie. Which raises the interesting question of whether the emotions felt by the outraged and the vengeful were also, then, a form of fiction.
 
For novelists, one approach is to form a defensive alliance with reality – relying on a truthful background, layering actual history with news headlines, doing deep dives into the antecedents of your (non-existent) characters, to create fiction. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness establishes itself in this camp with its first page, an elegy for the disappearing vultures, the “friendly old birds” whose passing, from diclofenac poisoning, goes barely noticed by people who have “so much else to look forward to”.
 
The first guide through the dense and teeming terrain of this 464-page novel is Anjum, who becomes Delhi’s most famous hijra over the years. She finds her way after a series of adventures to a graveyard, which is clearly meant to be far more full of life than the rest of the city. She and her graveyard guild have learnt one truth: Once you fall off the edge of things, you will hold on to other falling people.
 
They take the story through the waning influence of the previous prime minister, the Trapped Rabbit, to the chest-thumping rule of the Parakeet Reich. The mystery of a baby – unpropitiously dark – who appears right next to the Mothers of the Disappeared, in the protest bazaar at Jantar Mantar, connects Anjum and her city with the other parts of the novel.
 
Three men with overlapping lives are linked by their differing relationships with the same woman – S Tilottoma, who has slightly slanting cat’s eyes, an inability to be placed by the usual Indian norms (“she didn’t seem to have a past, a family, a community, a people or even a home”) and who is by turns a delightfully enigmatic, or thoroughly exasperating, free spirit.
 
The men whose lives are intertwined with hers are also shaped by Kashmir and its tangled, bloody conflicts – “Garson Hobart”, the urbane government man, Naga, the narcissistic, charismatic journalist whose compromises place others in danger, and Musa, the earnest, idealistic Kashmiri who becomes a militant.
 
If this was all – a Kashmir story, held together by brutality and perhaps love, a Delhi story, told by an inhabitant so iconic of the city as to be a stereotype – The Ministry of Utmost Happiness would be a baroque and unsatisfying performance.
 
But the great pleasure of reading Ministry is its intricacy, the profusion of lives woven together into a massive tapestry. Some of the most striking passages are about what we used to call “sideys”, side-characters, or tiny sketches, from the origin of the Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services (for the assistance of those whom the graveyards and crematoriums turn away), to the child Miss Jebeen substituting “Mataji” for the chant of “Azaadi” to make her mother turn to her and give her a kiss, to the rescuer-victim identities of an army officer whose story shapeshifts when he moves to Canada. There are two striking mother-and-daughter pairs in the novel, both unconventional, both heart-breaking, and they give Ministry its strong emotional core.
 
Many will read Ministry as non-fiction, seeking to outrage over the Kashmir sections, or the capsule edits Roy offers on Indian politics and the rise of Hindutva. People who favour this approach read novels like test papers, with censoring grades to be handed out to writers – A+, D- or Fs for Fail. An aside to the outrage brigade: It’s often the most bitter critics who become the novelist’s best publicists.
 
If there is a guardian spirit hovering over Ministry, it is the ghost of the renegade mystic Sarmad, beheaded for refusing to bow to the pieties of his time. Ministry has a forebear in Thomas Hardy’s novels – written in a similar vein of deep foreboding, his pessimism and disillusionment clashing with his awareness of the human urge to reach for lust and life.
 
These threads, bringing together the lives of those who fall outside the grand arc of official and unofficial histories, at first seem decorative. But it is these tumultuous marginal lives, not all of them human, and the brilliant digressions around “sideys” that made this novel come to life.
 
Its worst flaws: Some characters veer dangerously close to cliché, and the flavour of news reports, human rights report – the handy explainer, the useful summary – works its way into the more ambitious sections. Despite that, this is a powerful second novel – an elegy for a bulldozed world, Ms Roy’s instincts placing her once again on the side of the outcasts, challenging Delhi’s infamous “insider” culture by foregrounding a far more interesting set of city insiders.
 
At its best, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness can be miraculous in its ability to evoke a thousand small acts of tenderness and everyday pleasures. These are often all that people who are not warriors by nature have as weapons to defend themselves against a time of brutal certainties and rising rage. For all her dark materials, Ministry ends on a note of hope: you can almost believe that things might turn out all right in the end.
 
Email: nilanjanasroy@gmail.com