ARUNDHATI ROY The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Reviewed by Linda Godfrey
Roy shows a deft hand when writing about the lives of the lowest and the most successful with equal detail.
This is Arundhati Roy’s second novel in 20 years. Her first, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize in 1997 and this one was longlisted last year. In the intervening 20 years Roy has been very active politically and has written eight non-fiction books — about the caste system in India, about dams being built and displacing the poor, and the fight for independence in Kashmir, among other topics. These years of political action have found a fictional outlet in this new work.
There are two main characters, Anjum and Tilo, whose stories we follow among a cast of thousands. In the first half of the book Anjum, born Aftab, is a hermaphrodite until she undergoes surgery. She leaves her parents’ home and lives in a house with other hijras:
Once she became a permanent resident of the Khwabgah, Anjum was finally able to dress in the clothes she longed to wear – the sequined, gossamer kurtas and pleated Patiala salwars, shararas, ghararas, silver anklets, glass bangles and dangling earrings. She had her nose pierced and wore an elaborate, stone-studded nose-pin, outlined her eyes with kohl and blue eye shadow and gave herself a luscious, bow-shaped Madhubala mouth of glossy red lipstick. Her hair would never grow very long, but it was long enough to pull back and weave into a plait of false hair. She had a strong, chiseled face and an impressive, hooked nose like her father’s. She wasn’t beautiful in the way that Bombay silk was, but she was sexier, more intriguing, handsome in the way some women can be.
It’s a long and intricate description, and the book is full of overly long descriptions at 445 pages, but Roy is giving respectful space to all the characters in her book, as, I think, she would like all people to be treated. She writes about the lives of the lowest and the most successful with equal detail.
On a visit to a Gujarati shrine, Anjum is caught up in a massacre of Hindu pilgrims and the subsequent government reprisals against Muslims, and retreats – temporarily shedding her brightly coloured clothing for more masculine Pathan suits – to a graveyard. There she sets up a shelter and attracts around her a small, permanent community of misfits. There are patchworks of narratives about many characters.
The chapter roughly halfway through the book, titled ‘The Landlord’ shifts to another place and social class altogether, and into the first-person narrative of a privileged man in the Indian Public Service. He is filling us in on the next set of characters: Tilo, an architect; her husband Naga, a journalist; and Musa, the love of Tilo’s life who is now fighting for Kashmiri independence.
From here, following Tilo, the novel devolves into a long and discursive history of, plus an up close and personal view of, the politics of the struggle between Kashmir and India.
It veers heavily into the territory of peace journalism, a practice that frames conflicts as consisting of many parties pursuing many goals, and aims to shed light on the structural and cultural causes of violence as they affect the lives of people in a conflict arena. In this section of the book, we read graphic scenes of mass torture with descriptive passages of broken bodies:
The tub was for waterboarding, the pliers for extracting fingernails, the wires for applying electric shocks to men’s genitals, the chilli powder was usually applied on rods that were inserted into prisoners’ anuses or mixed with water and inserted down their throats.
Tilo herself is captured, but gets herself out of trouble by using the secret word given to her by an old friend.
Roy is writing about the flexibility of identity and the choices you make when you create an identity for yourself. The characters build and shape their identities, often dictated by the results of a street riot. She shows a deft hand when writing about her characters. Trying to cram this ‘identity-building’ theme into shape in the middle of a long discursive journalistic piece on the war for independence in Kashmir hasn’t quite worked. However, the book is worth reading for its insights into everyday life in India and a clear-eyed account of the war in Kashmir.
Arundhati Roy The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Hamish Hamilton 2017 PB 464pp $32.99
Linda Godfrey is a writer, editor and Program Manager of the Wollongong Writers Festival. She has a Masters of Professional Writing from UTS and is writing a novel about cults.
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