Skip to main content

Utmost Happiness



Book Review

The world today resembles the macabre settings in the gothic novels: horror, death and a little romance. Unlike in those novels, however, there is no resolution of the problems.  Life today is, as Arundhati Roy’s novel under review says, “a rehearsal for a performance that never eventually materializes.”  It is impossible to make a neat narrative with the traditional elements of beginning, crisis, climax and resolution.  The world is full of debris left by the horror and death.  A writer is condemned to gather the fragments lying shattered all over and put them together to make as meaningful a picture as possible.  This is what Roy’s novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, does. 

The novel tells the story of many people – too many people, in fact – one of whom is a transgender Anjum who “lived in a graveyard like a tree” after a tragedy that befell her during the 2002 Gujarat riots.  Though Anjum is a Muslim she was not killed by the rioters because of the belief that “Hijron ka maarna apshagun hota hai”.  Anjum realises with horror that she, a hijra, is a “Butcher’s luck”. 

It is a butchers’ world.  The butchered are human beings.  The graveyard is the right place for the human beings.  Anjum builds her home in the graveyard and even the municipality bureaucrats (who are compared to the hijras because of their unique dexterity to smell a celebration and arrive there to demand their share) don’t dare to evict her from there.  She makes her home in the graveyard so fine that she calls it Jannat House. 

Later in the novel, in Kashmir, Major Amrik Singh of the Indian Army compares himself to a travel agent who facilitates the Kashmiri jihadis to reach their jannat where their houris are waiting for them.  He calls himself Jannat Express though he is more fond of a sexual metaphor: “Dekho mian, mein Bharat Sarkar ka lund hoon, aur mera kaam hai chodna.” 

Anjum finds her jannat in the graveyard.  Major Amrik Singh finds it in “fucking” the jihadis.  In search of her personal jannat is Tilottama, the other major character, whose name is shortened to Tilo.  Tilo is a dark-skinned Malayali who studied architecture in Delhi, smoked Ganesh beedies kept in a Dunhill cigarette packet, and wore an ill-fitting shirt bought from the second-hand clothes market outside the Jama Masjid.  Her quest for her personal jannat will link Anjum’s Delhi with the jihadis’ Kashmir. 

One of the many jihadis in Kashmir is Musa, Tilo’s classmate in Delhi School of Architecture.  Tilo joins him in Kashmir and there is a bit of gothic romance.  Musa who lost his wife and child in a counter-terror attack knows very well that Tilo is a rare specimen.  He knows that if he had married her he would be wearing the hijab and she would be running around the underground with a gun.  That’s Tilo, the quintessential rebel which is what Arundhati Roy is.

Musa knows well that the Indian government has made Kashmir a land of “duplicity”.  Jannat is far, too far, from Kashmir.  “Duplicity is the only weapon we have,” says Musa.  “You don’t know how radiantly we smile when our hearts are broken.  How ferocious we can turn on those we love while we graciously embrace those whom we despise.”

The utmost happiness lies in Anjum’s graveyard jannat. 

This is a novel about the fragmented world or the fragmented Bharat where cows are better off at least policy-wise.  It is about how India is destroying itself with its hatred of certain people.  The novel makes use of a lot of fragments like diary entries, letters, lessons written by Tilo for The Reader’s Digest Book of English Grammar and Comprehension for Very Young Children and so on to tell the story.  The author’s creative genius is evident in the novel.  But the novel fails to satisfy a serious reader at some level.  (Non-serious readers won’t go beyond a few pages anyway.) There are too many characters and too many fragments which don’t combine into an aesthetically unified whole, a whole which is greater than the sum of the parts. 

The socio-political activist in the author has superseded the literary artist.  Nevertheless the novel is a valuable contribution especially in the current scenario where the waters in all the holy rivers of the country have been riled by much vindictive politics. 

Acknowledgement: I'm indebted to a blogger-friend who gifted me a copy of the novel. 

Comments

  1. I have only read the books'Kindle sample. Going to buy it to read. The sample surely gives a little peep into her creative ability to show the drama as it happens in front of you.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. All the best with the book. Her style is stunning in many places.

      Delete
  2. The reader's digest book and the commentary of Tilo's mother on her dead bed, are the two out of my many such favorite pieces in the novel.

    Metaphors were evident in them. But as you said earlier, she did use the raw elements in them, perhaps because the writer in her contrived to make a clear point to the world.

    The writer in her don't see the thin line dividing fiction and reality. The Writer, a frustrated writer, a hopefully hopeless writer, a foolishly genius writer, a writer who could have easily made loads of money by selling her genius but decided to gulp the bitterness of nationalists, pseudo nationalists.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You are right, Roy's bitterness got the better of her. Perhaps, she is too genuine to control her powerful emotions aesthetically. That aestheticism might have reduced the effect of the novel considerably. As it is, it is raw and hits us directly. We deserve that. The actual people who should feel the hit won't, however.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...

Dine in Eden

If you want to have a typical nonvegetarian Malayali lunch or dinner in a serene village in Kerala, here is the Garden of Eden all set for you at Ramapuram [literally ‘Abode of Rama’] in central Kerala. The place has a temple each for Rama and his three brothers: Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna. It is believed that Rama meditated in this place during his exile and also that his brothers joined him for a while. Right in the heart of the small town is a Catholic church which is an imposing structure that makes an eloquent assertion of religious identity. Quite close to all these religious places is the Garden of Eden, Eden Thoppu in Malayalam, a toddy shop with a difference. Toddy is palm wine, a mild alcoholic drink collected from palm trees. In my childhood, toddy was really natural; i.e., collected from palm trees including coconut trees which are ubiquitous in Kerala. My next-door neighbours, two brothers who lived in the same house, were toddy-tappers. Toddy was a health...

Dark Fantasy

An old friend of mine was with me in my kitchen when Amazon’s delivery man rang to know the location of my residence. He was the same person who delivered all my cat food subscriptions regularly. “The location shown is confusing,” he explained. “I haven’t ordered anything,” I said having checked my profile on Amazon. He delivered the pack promptly enough and I was curious to see what it was. X, my friend, was in the kitchen cooking the prawns he had brought all the way from Kochi, his own city which reeks of seafoods naturally. “Dark Fantasy,” he mused when he saw the content of the package. Someone had sent me a box of Dark Fantasy cookies. I’m sure there isn’t any person on earth who keeps dark fantasies about me in their (her, as alleged by X) conscious/subconscious/unconscious mind. I wasn’t ever such a charming person at any time in my life. “Dark fantasy,” X said refusing to believe my deprecatory self-assessment though he knew it was quite true. “You never know where ...