Arundhati Roy tells a fractured story by becoming everything

The embargo was for June 6, but the scrum to review Arundhati Roy’s new book seemed set on Thursday to breach the fragile oath by those who were handed early proofs of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. And Dawn has got permission to join the melee.

Twenty years since The God of Small Things, The Ministry sets a geographical and cultural shift on Ms Roy’s canvass. Far from her home turf in Kerala, where the Booker-winning book was situated, The Ministry recasts a multi-layered narrative about invincible spirits and their joys and tragedies from a vantage point in an Old Delhi graveyard. There, Anjum the hijra, survivor of the massacre of Muslims in 2002, has set up a home she calls Jannat Guest House.

Had Ghalib lost his way in the narrow lanes of medieval Delhi, Roy would perhaps have helped him find his house. Such is her total grasp of the legendary quarters of the fabled Mughal city that fell on hard times. They are all there in the book, the sweaty teeming poor, the stench from the fish market past the Urdu Bazaar, meandering between Chitli Qabar and Shah Sarmad’s mausoleum, a stone’s throw from the footsteps of the Jama Masjid. Somewhere close-by is the graveyard where Anjum the hijra lives in her tin-roofed Jannat Guest House.

Paradise in a graveyard could be a hidden reference to a state of being, perhaps not too oblique a reference to Kashmir’s ongoing brutalisation. The disputed Himalayan region after all had earned the sobriquet of paradise on Earth from kings and poets. Roy’s story straddles the two paradises and as many graveyards.

The narrative takes us through the military occupation that is cross-dressed as Indian democracy.

Trees and flowers, furtive animals, birds and tiny insects link her two books but they assume a new range of poetic and tragic realities.

On occasions there is straight reporting. As her lens moves from the plight of Anjum in the communal frenzy, the description of rightwing Hindu mayhem in Gujarat zooms in on the disappeared grave of a romantic mediaeval Urdu poet who loved, and wrote about, its people.

“They learned in passing that Wali Dakhani’s shrine had been razed to the ground and a tarred road built over it, erasing every sign that it had ever existed. (Neither the police, nor the mob, nor the chief minister could do anything about the people who continued to leave flowers in the middle of the new tarred road where the shrine used to be. When the flowers were crushed to paste under the wheels of fast cars, new flowers would appear. And what can anybody do about the connection between flower-paste and poetry?)”

Anjum’s Jannat Guest House has its material rationale. “The advantage of the guesthouse in the graveyard was that unlike every other neighbourhood in the city, including the most exclusive ones, it suffered no power cuts. Not even in the summer. This was because Anjum stole electricity from the mortuary, where the corpses required round-the-clock refrigeration. (The city’s paupers who lay there in air-conditioned splendor had never experienced anything of the kind while they were alive.)” By revealing Anjum’s ability to sing a clutch of raags such as Durga and Bhairav Roy explores her own more than cursory involvement with classical music.

The enigmatic Tilottama, or Tilo, the book’s main heroine reveals Roy’s decades-old bonds with Kashmir. A description of a tortured boy at an investigation centre in Srinagar shows Roy’s stoic observation skill and a keen eye for detail. She knows exactly what is afoot, and who drives it. The scene in the investigation room is haunting and Ashfaq Mir, the presiding officer, uses the Kashmiri word for militants — milton. The traumatic visit over, Tilo and her friend’s friend Naga are returning to their hotel in Srinagar.

“On their way to Ahdoos, sitting in the claustrophobic backseat of an armoured gypsy, Naga held Tilo’s hand. Tilo held his hand back. He was acutely aware of the circumstances in which that tentative exchange of tenderness was taking place. He could feel the tremor under her skin. Still, of all the women in the world, to have this woman’s hand in his made him indescribably happy.”

Ahead of the book’s release, a parallel and hostile track of episodes has been playing out on Indian news channels, in fear or in anger with or without reference to the unread book. A BJP legislator and actor called for tying her to a military jeep as a human shield. Rightwing news anchors have declared her anti-national, not a new charge but one among many flung at her since over 20 years. The book could stun them into silence, or perhaps provoke more anger.

However, Tilo’s words of a tragic denouement ring through the closing chapters of the book that will make Roy’s many fans and foes sit up. “How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything.”

Originally published in Dawn, June 2nd, 2017