THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS

By Arundhati Roy

Being one of the best protest novels ever written, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness talks about war and death, power and control, the marginalized and the oppressors. If you read it, you may come to notice that the plot lacks subtlety, and instead prefers to take the bull by its horns.

The author has not written the book with the purpose of indulging its audience in drama. She pushes her readers to think and to realize the resistance movements embodied within and outside each character. All the characters in the novel have varied lives and struggles, but somehow they intersect and fit together perfectly.

Roy depicts India as it is, a raucous community of beggars, nationalists, anti-nationalists, protestors, transgenders, kashmiris, oppressors, naxalites, dreamers, idlers, scammers.The novel is weaved around the people in our democracy, who watch the events go by from sidelines, the misfits. It takes us through the story of Anjum, a woman trapped in a man's body, and Tilo (S.Tillotama). Tilo is one half of the couple that forms the love story that is braided into Anjum’s narrative. The love story takes us 30 years back. Three men fell in love with Tilo, while they were all working on a play production. The four of them are as different as they could be, however their lives are intertwined in mysterious ways, which they would only get to know many years later.

The most important part of the novel takes place in Kashmir. It sheds light on the identity of individual people in Kashmir, their want of freedom, and the twisted tales of power toxicity and the dirty game of politics.

All in all the book is a medley, a mehfil of distinct narratives. I never thought that a single book could contain so much of everything. It will make you feel joy, sadness, pain, but above all it will make you feel human.