The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Arundhati Roy
Penguin Random House
464 pages; 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
