The astute storytelling you’d expect from a novelist of Roy’s status is sadly missing. Indeed, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a genuine paean for the patched integrity of the dispossessed and brutalised and is welcome at a time when words such as ‘poverty’ ‘secularism’ ‘reservation’ and ‘Muslims’ are becoming unwelcome.Īnd yet, despite her ardour, the book is a bit of a mystification. In telling their individual and collective stories, Roy takes on the ambitious project of unmasking the social and political fault lines of the Indian subcontinent. Tilottama and Musa, enigmatic outliers, follow each other through the horrors of violence-ravaged Kashmir as star-crossed lovers and comrades. Saddam Hussein, an untouchable, awaits the day when he can avenge his father’s lynching. Anjum, an Old Delhi hijra and survivor of the Gujarat pogrom, exiles herself to the neighbourhood graveyard after losing the affection of her adopted daughter. The central characters of the book – Anjum, Tilottama, Musa and Saddam – roam in the peripheries of society. However, other than Roy being a celebrity and the book’s intentions, there is little by way of depth and complexity to buttress the novel’s worthiness up to the standards of a Paul Beatty or Kiran Desai, or even Roy’s own previous accomplishment. Within weeks of its publication, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness found itself on the Booker longlist in in July. Arundhati Roy’s second book was much anticipated – after all, one is always in need of a song.

The ministry of utmost happiness book