Arundhati Roy aims high in ‘The Ministry’
Topics are weighty, but it’s ultimately a searing love story
Arundhati Roy has written a fiercely unforgettable novel about gender, terrorism, India’s caste system, corruption and politics.
Despite that ambitious agenda, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Knopf, 444 pp.,
out of four) is really a love story with characters so heartbreaking and compelling they sear themselves into the reader’s brain. Roy, whose The God of Small
Things won the 1997 Booker Prize, Britain’s top award for fiction writing, challenges the mildly informed American reader with unfamiliar language throughout the novel, but the meaning behind her words is never in doubt.
Anjum — born Aftab — is a hijra, a female trapped in a male body. His proud father tries to force the boy to be a man, but Anjum leaves home at 15 to live in a crumbling courtyard home called the House of Dreams with other gender outcasts. In India, hijras are both worshiped and feared. Beyond the sex trade, their work is to appear at weddings and other celebrations, offering blessings or curses if their fee is not paid.
Feeling she was born to be a mother, Anjum takes in an infant abandoned on the steps of a mosque in Delhi. But a few years later, when a tragedy befalls Anjum and daughter Zainab turns from her traumatized mother to another hijra for support, Anjum flees to set up a home in a nearby graveyard.
Another abandoned child sets off the second plotline, of Musa and the oddly entrancing Tilo, college friends and former lovers who remain entwined. Tilo, an architect, takes in a baby she sees abandoned in a trash heap during a protest.
Musa is a Kashmir militant, fighting a decades-long battle with India and Pakistan over control of the region. His nemesis is an Indian military officer named Amrik Singh, whose diabolical cruelty in tracking Muslim terrorists knows no bounds. Singh sets his sights on Musa, who appears and disappears in Tilo’s life, connected by a network of sympathizers and friends.
Terrorist? Militant? Freedom fighter? Friend? Roy’s novel is marbled with mordant anecdotes and sardonic humor that hit their marks on the absurdity of nationalism, caste, fundamentalism, war, gender politics and the human condition.
Ministry is not an easy read, but it is a worthy one, sending the reader into a world of smoky grays that most Westerners likely see only in black and white.