The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has become one of the most
reviewed books since and even before its publication in June 2017. The
anticipatory mêlée
had a sort of cultish tinge akin to that witnessed in the last decade of the
last century before release of Harry Potter books or later in this century when
Steve Jobs had his gadgets visit the humanity to change the trajectory of the
homo sapiens in the manner of cognitive, agricultural and industrial
revolutions. Every single human trajectory has been uniquely uneven leaving
unfilled interstitial spaces for those unable to keep the pace for eclectic
reasons to fall through only to be forgotten by rest of the humanity. They
might be forgotten but the unforgotten also called underprivileged hardly stop
living; as a matter of fact they in their own way live their exhilarating lives
by creating the ministry of utmost happiness where living and non-living;
person and nonpersons share whatever there is to share and critical to their
survival support one another stoically unknown in the ‘real’ world.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is an amalgamation of tales
with arching labyrinths of contemporary tumultuous events where heroes are the
people whose existence in society is acknowledged only when utterly essential.
Protagonist of one of the main stories in the book is a transgender, born as
Aftab who later rechristens herself as Anjum, weaves her existence in a house
aptly called Khwabgah, the house of dreams but not before his/her mother having
exhausted her supplications at the mausoleum of Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed.
Historically, Sarmad, an Armenian Jewish mystic described by Audrey Truschke in
her book on Aurangzeb as an irreverent who had prophesized that Dara Shukoh
would take throne; Aurangzeb had him executed in 1661. Slowly and tortuously,
Aftab realizes his non-status and starts looking for signs for the life that
would have meaning for him; although, it might be said, it was not due to
dearth of love for him.
The house of dream with history dating back to Mughals turns
out to be a quintessential place not only inhabited by queer and transgender
but any perceptional misfit finds there a shelter. But Anjum’s life takes a turn after she survives
the visit to Gujarat during the pogroms against Muslims unleashed under and
provoked by the state administration with, as in Roy’s words,
- “the then chief minister of Gujarat appeared on TV in a saffron Kurta with a slash of vermilion on his forehead, and with cold, dead eyes ordered the burnt bodies of Hindu pilgrims be brought to Ahmedabad, the capital of the state, where they were put on display for the general public to pay their respect”.
Anjum survives only
for being a transgender as the killers, on a Muslim killing spree, did not want
to court a bad luck by killing a transgender. As Arundhati Roy tells
- “nothing scared those murderers more than prospect of a bad luck. After all, it was to ward off bad luck that fingers that gripped the slashing swords and flashing daggers were studded with lucky stones embedded in thick gold rings. It was to ward off the bad luck that the wrists wielding iron rods that bludgeoned people to death were festooned with red puja threads lovingly tied by adoring mothers. Having taken all these precautions, what would be the point of willfully courting bad luck?”
Anjum fresh from the trauma leaves Khwabgah and makes a home
with dead in a cemetery that eventually becomes shelter for the intentionally
and deliberately forgotten. That is where her new companion, originally a
low-caste boy, Dayachand, who later calls himself Saddam Hussein, tells Anjum
the story of orchestrated cow-based lynching of his father. That reflects
foreboding of the lynching season to descend on India with cow as a pretext to
target the most vulnerable Muslims. In time, the dwelling in the cemetery,
called Jannat (Heaven) Guest House becomes a converging point ultimately joined
by another protagonist in the book, the indomitable Tillotama. It is through
Tillotama, Tillo in short, that Arundhati brings the Indian devilry through
inhumane occupation of Kashmir to the fore. Tillo’s story brings to the world,
not that there was left anything unknown, the treachery of Indian occupation of
Kashmir and the heinousness that state resorts in suppression of the
aspirations of freedom. It brings in graphical details the mechanical and
bureaucratic apparatus that the state had built to maintain an aura of Indian
control over state, it only lacked the wherewithal to create an Orwellian state
to affect hearts and minds of Kashmiris. That shortcoming was not for the lack
of trying. The brutal killing of Jalil
Andrabi, a human rights lawyer and firing at the funeral procession of Maulvi
Farooq, though fictionalized are truthful representation of true events. More
than any of those events, the book conveys an unambiguous defiance of Kashmiris
in the face of tortures and deaths; graveyards as a matter of fact became
symbols of resistance and resilience.
The panorama created by Arundhati Roy traverses across a vast
canvas brings in an irrepressible hues of characters caricaturing almost
everyone in Indian politics be it lisping Vajpayee, trapped rabbit Manmohan
Singh or Kejriwal with unsingular look or that manipulated anti-corruption
crusader, the Farex baby faced Anna Hazare. But the book lightens up the most
where the story focuses on the unacknowledged people fallen through the cracks,
who are essential for opulent lives as long as they remain invisible. It’s the
description of things they do to lighten the oppressiveness of their lives like
graphic sacrifice of a water buffalo for Eid that makes the book what it is and
Arundhati Roy who she is; through her prose one can peek into her soul. The irony
is that it might be that those people are as vulnerable as their opulent
counterparts given the political turn of events. The then chief minister of
Gujarat, with cold dead eyes, is now presiding the entire country with
unparalleled power and with quirk of events coupled with personal greed of unscrupulous
politicians, his party is also saddled in power in Kashmir. Not that any of
this matters, Kashmiris have long resolved to not be swayed by politicians of
any color in Delhi or their local facilitators in the valley for their ultimate
goal to breath free air of the pristine valley free of gun-wielding agents and
schemers and to not allow them to traduce anymore than they have already.
At the end one would wish Tillo and her three companions instead
of going to a school for architects had been studying law or
international relations given the trails their individual and shared lives
traverse in the book. For Anjum, her accomplices and collaborators I wouldn’t
change a thing.
