The Ministry of Utmost Happiness : Book Review

 

MELODIOUS and BRAVE

I was reading and thinking- I will never find something like this again… The style of writing and story building and revealing- all mesmerized me in the most unique way. Arundhati Roy’s writings can constitute a genre themselves. The name that came up to my mind for this genre is- ‘Arundhati’.

If you try to focus on one story of this book, you wouldn’t find any. There are a number of stories, each scattered here and there. All the pieces assembled together looked like life. Life is more of an interaction of stories than a single story with a single protagonist.

The first character we find here is Anjum (also my namesake!). Is Anjum a he or she? We can’t say, neither her mother could say when she was born-

In Urdu, the only language she knew, all things, not just living things but all things - carpets, clothes, books, pens, musical instruments - had a gender. Everything was either masculine or feminine, man or woman. Everything except her baby. … Was it possible to live outside language?

So, we meet Anjum, whose most prominent identity in the society where we live would be a hijra. She is a hijra before she is anyone else. She lives with other hijras in Khwabgah, the House of Dreams. Does living in Khwabgah make its residents happy?

‘No one’s happy here. It’s not possible. Arre yaar, think about it, what are the things you normal people get unhappy about? Price-rise, children’s school-admissions, husbands’ beatings, wives’ cheating, 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. The war is inside us. Indo-Pak is inside us. It will never settle down. It can’t.'

The never-ending Hindu-Muslim riots in this sub-continent got a prime attention in this book. Anjum being not only a Hijra but also a Muslim encountered such a riot whose effects would not leave her for many years.

She tried to un-know what they had done to all others - how they had folded the men and unfolded the women.

The book gives us a different picture of Kashmir other than the picture of the heavenly flower valley that comes in our minds. In this picture we see less of divine landscape and more of graveyards. Tombstones grew out of the ground like young children’s teeth. Another never-ending fight of India - about this land of Kashmir, caused a lot of young Kashmiris’ deaths. Families of young boys seek their sons day after day, waiting to receive the dead bodies when they hear of their deaths. Some were delivered in sacks, some in small polythene bags … notes pinned to them by the quartermasters of death said: 1 kg, 2.7 kg, 500 g.

On one of the tombstone we would read the following prose that would be imprinted in our minds-

Ab waha khaak udhaati hai khizaam
Phool hi phool jahaan thay pehle

Now dust blows on autumn breeze
Where once were flowers, only flowers.

Another tombstone, relatively small, of a four years old girl who used to ask for bedtime stories to her father, held that child’s adorable appeal and how she refused to buy ‘the witch and the jungle’ story.

Akh daleela wann
Yeth manz na khan balai asi
Na aes soh kunni junglas manz roazan

Tell me a story,
There wasn’t a witch
And she didn’t live in the jungle

How does a father function after burying his four years old daughter? Does life go on the same? Kashmir wouldn’t be pictured the same to me ever.


We see post 9/11 reactions. Arundhati described the Afghan families who fled from their land after post 9/11 attacks and came to Old Delhi-

By December Old Delhi was flooded with Afghan families fleeing warplanes that sang in their skies like unseasonal mosquitoes and bombs that feel like steel rain.

How Arundhati juxtaposes words that don’t come to our minds instinctively but suit completely for the description. Her most unique writing style...


I started my review with two adjectives, one of which was ‘brave’. This is why-

Gujarat ki ka Lalla had swept the polls and was the new Prime Minister. People idolized him, and temples in which he was the presiding deity began to appear in small towns. A devotee gifted him a pinstriped suit with LallaLallaLalla woven into the fabric. … He popularized the practice of mass yoga in community parks. At least once a month he visited a poor colony and swept the streets himself.

If you live in India or any neighboring country, you probably know this LallaLallaLalla fabricated suit wearing person and many more things. Writing in this bold manner throughout the book makes it brave.


Not a story was merely a story. Each one was very much un-story. We come to know about another major character - Tilo, Tilottoma. Everything about her was so unconventional and raw. I could see Arundhati’s own shadow on her. Tilo wrote a bunch of stories (they were also unstories) and titled the collection as ‘The Reader’s Digest Book’. Each of the unstories asks the reader one or two questions with or without options. These questions reflected a sense of mockery which can only come from a person who saw a lot of things, knew more things than one should know (probably she tried to un-know things like Anjum?). One such question was-

Q2: What is the acceptable amount of blood for good literature?

The melancholy of this question answers why Arundhati chose to write unstories instead of a conventional story with a conventional hero who solves all problems by all possible unconventional means.




The city was a character itself.

Skyscrapers and steel factories sprang up where forests used to be, rivers were bottled and sold, fish were tinned, mountains mined and turned into shining missiles. Massive dams lit up the cities like Christmas trees. Everyone was happy.

Also the streets of the city-

All day long the roads were choked with traffic. The newly dispossessed who lived in the cracks and fissures of the city, emerged and swarmed around the sleek, climate-controlled cars, selling cloth dusters, mobile phone chargers, model jumbo sets, business magazines, pirated management books (How to Make Your first Million, What Young India Really Wants)... The passengers looked out of their car windows and saw only the new apartment they planned to buy, the Jacuzzi they had just installed and the ink that was still wet on the sweetheart deal they had just closed. They were calm from their meditation classes and glowing from yoga practice.
. . . . . . .  

Fiercely competitive TV channels covered the story of the breaking city as ‘Breaking News’. Nobody pointed out the irony. They unleashed their untrained, but excellent-looking, young reporters, who spread across the city like a rash, asking urgent, empty questions; they asked the poor what it was like to be poor, the hungry what it was like to be hungry, the homeless what it was like to be homeless. ‘Bhai sahib, yeh bataaiye, aap ko kaisa lag raha hai…?’ Tell me brother how does it feel to be…? The TV channels never ran out of sponsorship for their live telecast of despair.

Sad truths surrounded me as I turned page after page. Arundhati brought the adivasis, the movements on arising issues in Jantar Mantar (the Shahbagh of Delhi) and told us the lives and deaths of people who sleep at night on the pavements of the cities where dogs, goats, cows and humans share the same bed.

The shattered pieces of stories interacted with each other like double-decker flyovers. I fell in love with the characters. Anjum, Saddam Hussain, Tilo, Azad Bhartiya - they became a family to me I could not think of before.

I am a fan of realistic literature. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness will always stay with me as a reality. I want to thank Arundhati for writing it. I loved you too while I was falling in love with your book.