Arundhati
Roy (2017). The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Penguin, pp. 445
When Arundhati Roy debuted with The God of Small Things, we were
introduced to the expanse of spaces between people in her world, that both
shaped and blurred them. Love, hate and everything between flowed among the
characters like subterranean rivers, silent and deep. Exactly two decades after
her first novel, she has arrived with The
Ministry of Utmost Happiness. This is a story that is a world apart from
that intimate exploration of the tiny village-world of Aymanam of her first
novel. The world that this story takes places is all of India that is relegated.
It is the spirit that pervades border and the heartland with equal alacrity, which
does not fit with the temperament of the big narrative that makes India today.
The protagonist is
characteristically, a trans-person, who is also a single parent. She occupies
the ultimate borderland-between the alive and the dead- and lives in a cemetery
in old Delhi. Strangers, who are mostly renegades, pass through and affectionately
people her world. They come from the forests of central India to the valley of
Kashmir, belong to all genders, creed and credo. They fight a narrative that
steals their truth, hides their identity and muffles their voices. Yet, they
are all thieves of another kind- secret keepers of conscience and inheritors of
a disowned pedigree. In the corner, away from the rest of the world, they find
friendship and fellow feeling, laughter and love.
Between the first and the second
novel, there is a two decade long pause- in which Roy traveled many worlds
within India. Her books of non-fiction, Listening
to Grasshoppers, Broken Republic and
The Algebra of Infinite Justice,
critique and question the Indian state from the point of view of the adivasis,
the displaced people at the wrong end of development and communities at the
borderlands, especially Kashmir. Through this work of fiction, Roy explores the
intensity of what it means to be marginal and the terror and insanity of
violence that pervades lives at the margin. On her impulse to write fiction
again, she recently remarked in an interview to The Hindu, “There was this huge sense of urgency when I was writing
the political essays, each time you wanted to blow a space open, on any issue.
But fiction takes its time and is layered. The insanity of what is going on in
a place like Kashmir: how do you describe the terror in the air there? It is
not just a human rights report about how many people have been killed and
where. How do you describe the psychosis of what is going on? Except through
fiction.” It is these layers of truth and the insanity of violence that is at
the heart of this stunning second novel.