Friday 7 July 2017

The Second Homecoming




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.