#7 The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
I was forced to go a brief book hiatus, thanks to a great many changes in my life. In between my last book and this one, I completed college, summit-ed a Himalayan mountain (Roopkund, ~16,000ft), started a new job, applied and was awarded a Fellowship with Make a Difference and went on a weekend camp to Bangalore. Admittedly, I would have consistently read through all this last year, but without the burden of the challenge on my head, I decided to just chill and take a much deserved (okay, little deserved?) break. I couldn’t have found a better book to pull me out of my biblio-hibernation, than one by Arundhati Roy. I read Roy’s debut in high school and it had a huge impact on me. I had never before encountered a book so bleak and tragic that could remain so oddly poetic and beautiful throughout. Arundhati Roy’s debut, God of Small Things was released in 1997 and it was received with a lot of critical acclaim, won her a Booker prize and catapulted her to fame. Following this, she has stuck exclusively to non-fiction. Inspired by the likes of Noam Chomskey and Medha Patkar, she has dabbled in political activism and research, keeping us all yearning for her next fiction release. I have followed her political essays over the years, and when she announced her new fiction venture, I immediately ordered it. There was a lot riding on the book. With the God of Small Things setting the literary bar so high, I was itching to see if she could better herself with this one.
In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati doesn’t tell us a single story, she tells us hundreds of tragic tales sprawled across our country’s geography. In the beginning of the book, we are introduced to Anjum, a hijra (transgender) from Delhi, who is world famous. After tragedy befalls her, she takes up residence in a grave, meeting a rag tag bunch of interesting, and equally desolate people. Then we are introduced to Tilo, an eccentric woman in love with a kashmiri militant. Roy takes us through their torrid love affair, set in the background of a cruel war.
Old secrets were folded into the furrows of her loose, parchment skin. Each wrinkle was a street, each street a carnival. Each arthritic joint a crumbling amphitheater where stories of love and madness, stupidity, delight and unspeakable cruelty, had been played out for centuries.
A large chunk of characters in this book are based on actual people. She ‘cleverly’ plays around with their names, making sure it’s never too difficult to guess who she is talking about. Which brings me to my primary criticism about the book.
I found the book too political. Roy found a way to stuff in references to almost all her political outrages in this four hundred page long book. And it’s not as nuanced or subtle as one would have hoped. The overbearing political narrations in the book dampened my reading experience. In the parts where she was solely focussing on a single issue and how it impacted the array of characters , I could feel myself get drawn into the narrative, engrossed by the story. But when she flitted between issues, I was woken up from my reverie and felt like I was reading just another essay of hers.
Skyscrapers and steel factories sprang up where the forests used to be, rivers were bottled and sold in supermarkets, fish were tinned, mountains mined and turned into shiny missiles. Massive dams lit up the cities like Christmas trees. Everyone was happy.
But of course, one thing has not changed in the twenty year gap between her fiction attempts. Her unquestionable writing prowess. The book is filled with witty, meaningful lines and her tell tale style steals the show. Paragraphs read like bewitching poetry that often left me stunned, staring into space in marvel.
Something about the stillness of this hastily abandoned space makes it look like a frozen frame in a moving picture. It seems to contain the geometry of motion, the shape of all that has happened and everything that is still to come. The absence of the person that lived here, is so real, so palpable, that it’s almost a presence.
Arundathi Roy’s books, both God of Small Things and The Ministry.. , have characters eerily like her at their center. Her efforts to describe the protagonist (Tilo) in this one, often feel like a character profile of herself. And I don’t mean this as a negative. Her ability to create these layered, vulnerable characters who seem too raw to be true, comes from her willingness to strip down her own personality, with all its flaws, for the reader.
What did she think of herself? Not much, or quite a lot, depending on how you looked at it.
While this book just doesn’t compare to God of Small Things, it definitely has its own charm. Googling the inspiration for each of the characters was a fun adventure as well. Grab it for the writing. Her inimitable style will creep under your skin and devour you whole.

