Ministry Of Utmost Happiness: A book review.

 Arundhati Roy's decisive remonstration: The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness.

Before you commit yourself to this brutally honest, sometimes too bold, and screaming manuscript about identity, identity, and identity, you need to understand that hidden away in those lines, is a truth waiting to unravel. Roy has used her fiction as a witness, one that will make us see more than we want to. It's not one story but an accumulation of many. It freely talks about Anjum who used to be Aftab once, born with an ambiguity that takes her on a lifetime journey. In her somewhere you will see all those you have forgotten. She becomes a disputed land literally, lives through a physical partition, never overcoming the past that haunts her, and still trying to exist in the present. 

Then you will be introduced to the beautiful yet tragically haunting valley of Kashmir. You will again see those who are born with disputes running in their blood, this time inheriting a land that demands sacrifice. You will read about the radicalization of ideas, some of which will seem just to you. Reasoning for the unreasoned will be thrown your way. A solution for an unsolved query will be presented to you and yet by the end, you won't know the answer. A war hidden away in a white cloth of peace, a peace wrapped in a blood-stained cloth. And lives that were halted, dreams that were consumed, and love that prospered in between the declared normalcy! 

KHWABGAH- the house of dreams:

Roy conjured a brutal tale of an individual on a journey within the self. The beginning was AFTAB, a soraj, blazing, powerful, merciless. The story begins with a mother's fear of her own child, and a mother's inability to accept what's given to her. Roy's complex world had very simple characters at the core. They were people trying to cope with their small realities. Searching for words to explain what they have created. People fighting over their absence in history, battling with language to find themselves in it. And the eventual acceptance that comes after. The end was ANJUM, a sitara, and its genesis was ANJUMAN, a mehfil, a gathering of everybody and nobody.

It's a story of Aftab shedding away the presumed identity that has long concealed what she really was. Her journey from her actual house where she and her family both struggled to find acceptance for each other to Khwabgah where acceptance was given as a welcoming gift to a lost daughter finally reaching home. Roy's Khwabgah was a concealed entity of need that housed so much cruelty and pain. Anjum believed Khwabgah to be her savior, after being abandoned to deal with the riots inside her, she saw Bombay Silk one spring morning and thought she wasn't lost. 

Bombay Silk was the glitch in the matrix that led Aftab to the blue doorway of the haveli the khwabgah. Khwabgah with its wild jealousies, endless intrigues, continuously shifting royalties and never-ending inner battles had Bombay Silk, Bulbul, Razia, Heera, Baby, Nimmo, Mary, Gudiya, and Kulsoom bi. This was the family Anjum had for more than 30 years. Along the way, you will get many definitions, that define the undefinable, try to voice the hidden, screaming acceptance. Nimmo declaring herself an experiment, something that was created to be incapable of happiness. "The riot is inside us. The war is inside us. Indo-Pak is inside us. It will never settle down. It can't" 

The story presented Anjum with salvation during her time at the House of Dreams in the form of a rejected child, Zainab, who made her rewrite a simpler, happier life for her. She became a dock where Anjum unloaded her cargo. Leaving behind all the tragedies, rejections, and faults. When all was going well, Roy intruded into the life of Anjum and took her along with us to experience the horrors of political atrocities taking religious cover as a means to justify ends. In the background, we see the long unsettled tension between the Hindus and Muslims of India, taking the Gujrat massacre as the context. And how afterwards Anjum just couldn't be her normal self.

JANNAT GUEST HOUSE:

After Khwabgah we are introduced to an inn in a graveyard with a Hijra as an innkeeper, Anjum, and her Jannat Guest House. A hub of reassurance for many, a transient for the homeless, and a heaven for those who were escaping. Its inhabitants were the rejects, the outcasts, the lost, and the eventually found. We are introduced to Nimmo again, who became a goat magnate. Saddam Hussain, whose story started long before he became a permanent resident of the Jannat guesthouse. His journey to the Place of the fallen people started when he witnessed religious brutality manifesting itself in common people and the price that was ultimately paid. 

Then we are introduced to S.tilottama and with her, the might of Kashmir, its aching tragedy, and the many men who were engulfed by its conundrum make their way to Anjum's guest house. Tilo brings with her an abandoned child, who was conceived with a brutality that language can't comprehend and carried a name that had a bloodied history of its own; Miss Jabeen the Second. Through her, we came across Musa, Naga, and Dasgupta. And through them, we see Kashmir, a graveyard of lost voices, misplaced trust, and a continuous hungry war.

THE CONCLUSION:

Ministry of utmost happiness is a curious beast, a medley of narratives. A patchwork of secular India that doesn't exist in reality. Roy's characters are lost and found throughout the book, going through life-altering trials, giving more than they can ever receive, reaching undeserving conclusions, living with partitions within themselves, and still being rescued by love and hope. It's an act of activism concealed away in the packaging of fiction.

She weaves a fascinating mess through Tillo and Anjum, taking all of us on a ride of a lifetime. From Delhi to the never-ending war of Kashmir, it's a beautifully orchestrated novel that manages to extract hope from many tragedies its characters have witnessed.