Books&writers

India by speaking out against nuclear testing, the rise of Hindu nationalism and, in recent years, human rights abuses in Kashmir. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is an explicitly political text. It is, on some level, an effort to make sense in fiction of the senselessness she has seen and written about in decades of essays and journalism.

For readers who have held and cherished The God of Small Things for 20 years without paying attention to what Roy has done since, the new book may well disappoint. Roy, however, was never even sure if she’d write a second novel at all. It was only when she started travelling to Kashmir to document the insurgency and the government response that she felt compelled to begin the new project. “It wasn’t really possible to write it as reportage,” she said. “The only truth could be fiction.”

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness follows several intertwining threads, beginning with the story of Anjum, who was Aftab, an intersex woman born in Shahjahanabad, the historically Muslim walled city in Delhi. Roy’s main characters all have what she considers internal borders. Anjum is born with both male and female genitalia (she refers to her internal divide as Indo/Pak), is initially raised as a boy, but identifies early on as a woman. She eventually finds and joins a community of hijra – eunuchs, transgender and intersex women in Delhi – which she leaves after surviving an anti-Muslim pogrom. She settles in a graveyard, which she slowly converts into a kind of guest home and community for fellow outsiders.

Anjum is joined in her graveyard home by Saddam Hussein, a former lowercaste Hindu who took on a Muslim identity after watching his father slaughtered by an upper-caste mob. He takes the name of Iraq’s late dictator, impressed by the stoicism Hussein showed at the gallows. Tilo, like Roy of Syrian Christian descent, comes to the graveyard as well with a baby found at a protest, which we later learn was abandoned by its mother, a Maoist rebel who was gangraped by the Indian police.

The abandoned baby is based on a real incident Roy witnessed at a protest. The various outrages, too, have roots in things she has seen and reported on, including the Maoist insurgency in central India, the subject of her 2011 book Walking With the Comrades. Still, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is more than just a recitation of horrible acts done to powerless people. There are moments in the book of real humour and grace. The love story of Tilo and Musa, played out against the backdrop of violence in Kashmir, exists on the page in fractured moments that are brief but nevertheless unforgettable.

There are quietly, less explicitly, brutal images as well, several of which are haunting: Anjum, spared by the mob because it’s considered bad fortune to kill a hijra. (“They left her alive. Unkilled. Unhurt. Neither folded nor unfolded. She alone. So that they might be blessed with good fortune. Butcher’s luck.”) A torturer, before releasing Tilo, running his hand over her bare scalp: “a butcher’s blessing. It would take Tilo years to get over the obscenity of that touch.”

There are the threads here of what might have two or three better novels if they had been developed on their own. As it stands, they never settle into a single, convincing whole. But if The Ministry of Utmost Happiness doesn’t fully work as art, it is effective as an act of public witness. Indeed, there is something to be admired in Roy’s insistence on packing so much in: Kashmir and inter-caste violence, hijra, Maoists, pollution and India’s never-ending war on the poor. She has seen so many things in the last 20 years – so much poverty and injustice, so much hypocrisy, violence and beauty – it seems churlish now to insist that she leave any of it out.