Title: The Ministry of Utmost
Happiness
Author: Arundhati Roy
Publisher: Penguin Random House
ISBN:
9780670089635
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Pages: 445
Source: Flipkart Review Program
Rating: 4.5/5
She lived in the graveyard like a
tree. At dawn she saw the crows off and welcomed the bats home. At dusk she did
the opposite. Between shifts she conferred with the ghosts of vultures that
loomed in her high branches. She felt the gentle grip of their talons like an ache
in an amputated limb. She gathered they weren’t altogether unhappy at having
excused themselves and exited from the story.
I think it is not an easy task to
write few words on brilliance. You hesitate, You slow down a bit, You go
through the pages over and over. Literally, I have been struggling with
right words while writing this piece on Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost
Happiness. Perhaps, you could relate this uneasiness.
I should not be biased but I am
helpless. To be Honest, Arundhati Roy is among those authors, who drew me
closer to fiction. And made me believe I could survive on reading. She is the
epitome of Brilliance. She had proved it twenty years back, by fascinating us
with small things and I’m happy to say, she didn’t lose that
charm in her recent novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness as well.
Basically, Arundhati Roy has woven so
many characters with two main Protagonists, who were all trying to place the
broken pieces back together. We could relate to their resilience, empathy,
their daily struggles for survival with their determination to find hope.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
begins with Anjum, a delhi based famous Hermaphrodite (Hijra), once Aftab. Since
childhood he has been facing denial. Whereas all he wants acceptance to his natural
self, and then he finds out a prostitute Bombay Silk, who is running a shelter—House of Dreams. Aftab gets fascinated by this place, leaves his home and turned into Anjum, a transgender. How Anjum’s journey ends with city
graveyard? I would not spoil the magic of Roy’s storytelling, by telling the
whole plot but eagerly want to share this extract.
Do you know why God made hijras?” Anjum’s housemate Nimmo asks her
one day. “It was an experiment. He decided to create something, a living
creature that is incapable of happiness. So he made us.” Think about it, she
says. What are the things regular people get upset about? “Price-rise,
children’s school-admissions, husbands’ beatings, wives’ cheatings,
Hindu-Muslim riots, Indo-Pak war—outside things that
settle down eventually. But for us the price-rise and school-admissions and
beating-husbands and cheating-wives are all inside us. The riot is inside us. Indo-Pak
is inside us. It will never settle down. It can’t.”
As story sets in modern India, Roy tried to draw reader’s attention
on some socio-political issues as well, that go hand in hand with fiction. First
six chapters covers the story of Anjum, and then comes Roy’s second
Protagonist, Tilo— an illegitimate child, belongs to a group of Kashmir Independence
fighter. Roy has beautifully woven this character Tilo and her relationship
with Musa, (her lover, maybe, maybe not). Rest story revolves around her only.
Yes! I agree, In some parts,
I too feel disconnected, her description
on many events (Gujarat Riot’s, Kashmir, capitalism, 1984 riots, naxalism) made
me doubt if I am reading fiction or else? , but This is Arundhati Roy, It takes courage to do experiment and weave the brutal truth, especially the part on martyrdom.
Overall, Characters are so engaging, that they seemed real to me, I
could sense their pain, at some point I wished to continue with their revolutionary
Journey. I mostly loved her balanced
narrative, it accomplished to transport me into another realm, if I talk about Roy's writing, It is breathtaking, lyrical, and beautifully written, especially Tilo's Part.
Roy focused on many issues as caste and gender, and most
importantly what I learnt —who are we to pass comments on someone’s existence,
how could we judge someone on the basis of their faith, color, body fat, religion,
and upbringing.
In an interview with Barnes and Noble, Arundhati Roy mentioned “Everybody
in the novel has some kind of border running through them. Anjum has the border
of gender, for Tillo it is caste, for Nimmo it is Indo-Pakistan, Saddam has
caste and religious conversion. Even the graveyard, where much of the action of
the book is located, is some kind of border between life and death. The book is
also about how, when you harden these borders, this violence of inclusion and
exclusion results."
All in all, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy can
be read by hundred ways, it is up to you how you perceive the art and respond
to rhythm of storytelling. I would like to say "Go read this beautifully executed
book" Highly Recommended!
READER’s MOMENT
I don’t know where to stop, or how to
go on. I stop when I shouldn’t. I go on when I should stop. There is weariness.
But there is also defiance. Together they define me these days. Together they
steal my sleep, and together they restore my soul. There are plenty of problems
with no solutions in sight. Friends turn into foes. If not vocal ones, then
silent, reticent ones. But I’ve yet to see a foe turning into a friend. There
seems to be no hope. But pretending to be hopeful is the only grace we have . .
.
She didn't stop him. She knew he'd be
back. No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she
saw it. She sensed that in some strange tangential way, he needed her shade as
much as she needed his. And she had learned from experience that Need was a
warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.
They had always fitted together like
pieces of an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) puzzle- the smoke of her into
the solidness of him, the solitariness of her into the gathering of him, the
strangeness of her into the straightforwardness of him, the insouciance of her
into the restraint of him. The quietness of her into the quietness of him.”
There was no tour guide on hand to
tell her that in Kashmir nightmares were promiscuous. They were unfaithful to
their owners, they cartwheeled wantonly into other people’s dreams, they
acknowledged no precincts, they were the greatest ambush artists of all. No
fortification, no fence-building could keep them in check. In Kashmir the only
thing to do with nightmares was to embrace them like old friends and manage
them like old enemies.”
It had to do with the way she lived,
in the country of her own skin. A country that issued no visas and seemed to
have no consulates.
ABOUT AUTHOR: Arundhati Roy is an Indian writer who
is also an activist who focuses on issues related to social justice and
economic inequality. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of
Small Things, and has also written two screenplays and several collections of
essays.
For her work as an activist she received the Cultural Freedom Prize awarded by the Lannan Foundation in 2002.