The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“How to tell a shattered story?

By slowly becoming everybody.

No.

By slowly becoming everything.”

Arundhati Roy’s book, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” is a shattered story that takes readers slowly to a world where identity matters through religion, political ideology, region, class, gender, past and so on but despite all these differences there are something that connects everyone; fear, anger but also love and empathy.

I started reading this book last year, but couldn’t keep going with it for long, so I kept it aside. Last month, I started it again. I can’t usually keep going with books, I don’t find interesting. But just as I find little incidents and characters that relate little bit with stories around me, I get hooked.

For me there were two things that connected me with this book; an incident in real life and shared political reality.

The book starts with tragedies of Anjum’s life, a transgender woman who finds refuge in a Delhi cemetery. But before I could read more, this first character directly took me back to 2017 when I was living in Karachi University’s hostel. One day, heading back to hostel after getting some grocery from a nearby store with my friend, we encountered a transgender woman, finding a rikshaw to take her home (if that really existed). She moved from one rikshaw to another, but none seemed interested to even let her sit in. Instead some men standing nearby started calling her names, snatching her scarf hanging on her shoulder while others laughed. Her eyes were all wet, her black mascara melting all over her cheeks and she stood there completely alone, scared and helpless. We felt terrible but being women ourselves outnumbered by men in the street, we could hardly help. That incident disturbs me to this day and makes me question how some people in our society are completely left out only to suffer.

Anjum’s life is no less. She takes us to a journey in “Khwab Gah” into lives of people like herself and to “Jannat Guest House” –a home she creates for outcasts in middle of a Delhi cemetery. She also takes us to the political landscape of newly partitioned India and India of today where Hindu nationalism is all that matters and so many lives taken by Hindu-Muslim religious violence and riots since 1947.   

Each character in the novel has a story of its own. Tilottama or Tilo, another important character, a woman who we see as an architect, eventually develops sympathy for the Kashmir region through her Kashmiri friend, Musa –a freedom fighter and with whom she has an affair. With her journeys in the region, she discovers torture camps, extra judicial killings and how young men disappear and go missing for years while their widows and half-widows, orphans and half-orphans, sisters, brothers and old parents protest to eventually get themselves killed as well.

And then many of them prefer travelling all the way to the nation’s capital, Delhi where human rights activists join them from all over the country including those fighting in the forests of South India against security forces that are trying to clear the land up for large companies. Fears of all kinds, pain, misery and empathy for humanity is what connects all these people in Delhi, yet they return empty handed without justice served in anyway.

Parts of the book dig deep into the injuries that systematic political oppression and brutalities create in society not only developing opposing opinions but also dividing people into extreme opposite groups. Sometimes, this seems too much political for fiction and sometimes too much fiction for political realities. And while the more it draws us closer to political and social realities, the more we deliberately want to free ourselves and drift apart from what we have experienced for so long in our very own ways.