The MINISTRY of UTMOST HAPPINESS

Ms. Roy tears me up yet again. The way my teenage kids would put it – ‘Savage’!

 I read her last book, ‘The God of Small things’ over a decade ago and I still remember experiencing the intense pain and passion of the protagonists. The plot, set in a socio-economic milieu, held together in a single space, making it easy for me to wrap my head around. The Ministry of Utmost happiness, on the other hand picked me up like a strong wave and thrashed me across all borders of the country, my heart, mind and soul.

The back of the book jacket states – 

‘How to tell a shattered story?

By slowly becoming everybody.

No.

By slowly becoming everything.’

I guess that is what this book set out to do – become everybody and everything. If the narrative felt scattered, the storylines disjointed and forcefully joint together, I suppose it was intended to be. 

The narrative is painful and joyful at the same time. It is poetic and journalistic at different times. It is thought provoking at one time followed with vivid imagery of nostalgia and feelings, just a turn of the page away. It is argumentative at one level and compromising at another. It is clear headed and confusing at the same time.  A constant zoom-in and zoom-out – causing a heady dizziness.

In one page, the narrative goes….

“In this way the insurrection began. Death was everywhere. Death was everything. Career. Design. Dream. Poetry. Love. Youth itself. Dying became just another way of living. Graveyards sprang up in parks and meadows, by streams and rivers, in fields and forest glades. Tombstones grew out of the ground like young children’s teeth. Every village, every locality, had its own graveyard…..”

And the very next page…

“Its what Miss. Jabeen would say to him at night as she lay next to him on the carpet, resting her back on frayed velvet bolster (washed, darned, washed again), wearing her own pheran (washed, darned, washed again), tiny as a tea cosy (ferozi blue with salmon pink paisleys embroidered along the neck and sleeves) and mimicking precisely her fathers lying down posture – her left leg bent, her right ankle on her left knee, her very small fist in his big one. Akh daleela Wann. Tell me a story. And then she would begin the story herself….”

And the next page is about the south Indian soldier, from an untouchable class in his own town, in Kashmir as part of the Indian Army fighting the insurgency.

Much like all the wars going on around us – driven by feelings, but clutching at the straws of reason to help rationalize – and the life of the hijra/transgender who that describe their internal battle as the ‘Indo-Pakistan’ wars. Ultimately it is all emotion and passion – everything else is justification. The pointlessness of the loss of lives, damage to morale and fractures across the nation is poignantly drawn out in her brutal narratives – narratives that keep shape shifting in form and vocabulary.

Sometimes we forget that individual lives and their narratives are lost in the battles of the collectives. The ministry of utmost happiness is the tale of every person, on any side of any battle - battles that we are forced to take sides on – when all that matters is individual human lives – better served by not taking any side. All wars, whatever the reason, kills lives and is inhuman. History can teach, if we care enough to learn. Has centuries of historical bloodshed taught us nothing?