If Arundhati Roy didn’t exist, we’d have to invent her
The purpose of art is not just to entertain but also to force us to confront our deepest, darkest truths. Truths we ignore, steer clear of, or just turn away from.
Arundhati Roy refuses to let us do that. In her essays and now in her new book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which insists that we look at the invisibles India is teeming with.
She is the presiding deity of the Place of Falling People, those who have slipped through the cracks, those who are hiding in fissures, those who have been forcibly removed to make our cities look pretty and those who have been simply pushed aside by liberalisation - made security guards, cooks, drivers, tour guides, maids who swab our floors while we lift our feet off the floor, militants who question its rule, all papered over, glossed over, in the shiny happy India of television advertisements and government brochures.
Arundhati Roy exists because this India exists. Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness exists because this is the India of surplus people, of those-left-behind, the hijras, the disappeared, the minorities, the militants.
In a book teeming with powerful central characters, Anjum the hijra and S Tilottama, the woman (who may or may not be Roy) loved by three men, what stands out is the little people.
Saddam Hussain, the mini entrepreneur who runs a bird feed business one minute and a funeral parlour the next. Dr Bhagat, he of the precise manner and the white towel on his chair. Mr Gupta who leaves for Iraq but has a very particular taste in sex and loves Anjum in his own way.
Zeenat Kauser who even when she is buried smells of mutton korma the way other women smell of ittar and perfume, Renata Mumtaz Madam, the Romanian belly dancer who wanted to be a classic dancer, Amrik Singh, the deadly mona Sikh who kills Kashmiri militants for pleasure (his favourite line, “Look brother, I am the government of India’s dick and it’s my job to f*ck people” - which sounds far worse in Hindi).
Roy is a marvellous storyteller and her gift for the incisive put down is unequalled. She is also a wonderfully equal opportunity offender, taking on everyone from the Trapped Rabbit (Manmohan Singh) to Gujarat ka Lalla who swept the polls, became Prime Minister and “lived alone, ate alone, and never socialised” (Narendra Modi) to the man with the Farex-baby smile (Anna Hazare) to even the Kashmiris she is supposed to be blindly loyal to (“the only thing that keeps Kashmir from self-destructing like Pakistan and Afghanistan is good old petit bourgeois capitalism, For all their religiosity, Kashmiris are great businessmen”. And there is no better business opportunity than the “peace process”.)
Neither right wing, nor left wing, she is a champion of the wingless, the short changed, the forgottens, the unremembered.
Here she is writing of New India: “Her new masters wanted to hide her knobby, varicose veins under imported fishnet stockings, cram her withered tits into saucy padded bras and jam her aching feet into pointed high-heeled shoes, they wanted her to swing her stiff old hips and re-route the edges of her grimace upwards into a frozen empty smile. It was the summer grandma became a whore.”
It’s also a meditation in violence, the kind that surfaces in India from time to time. “Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg whose humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence,” muses one of Tilo’s three men, the IB agent, Biplab Dasgupta - the other two men in her life end up becoming an establishment journalist (Naga) and a Leonard Cohen-singing Kashmiri militant (Musa) who believes India will self-destruct.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is like a punch to your gut, and if it leaves you winded be grateful. Be grateful you are still alive. Or at least free to die irresponsibly, like Tilottama hopes, “without notice and for no reason”.
Roy shows us another way of living, “in the country of her own skin. A country that issued no visas and seemed to have no consulates”. She shows us the possibility of being the eternal outsider, the Kashmiri “mout”, the madwoman, the one who fell through the cracks. Of finding hope in the midst of despair, of life in the midst of death, sense in the Era of Lunacy, utmost happiness in the Age of Rage.