Magic Carpet Ride
Arundhati Roy captures India’s chaotic beauty in her second novel
ARUNDHATI ROY LIKES to wander at night in the old city of Delhi, near her home, and pay heed to the street folk who survive there among palaces, shrines, temples, mosques and cemeteries. “People are just shoved into the crevices of these crumbling places,” says Roy. She started to think that she had to find a way to make the unseen visible. “What I wanted to do,” she says, “was to write a book in which I never walked past anybody.”
Two decades after her sensational Booker Prize–winning debut, The God of Small Things, the Indian author—better known in recent years as a controversial essayist and political campaigner— has finally come home to fiction. Her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, moves from an informal family of outsiders clustered in an Old Delhi graveyard to the brutal insurgency in distant Kashmir, weaving the lives of her characters into a single narrative. It is a war story, a love story and a group portrait of a divided nation. The novel starts with the hijra Anjum, part of India’s transgender community, unrolling a Persian rug in the city graveyard. Meanwhile, in Kashmir, a triangle of love and rivalry connects former college pals: Musa, a guerrilla; Naga, a journalist; and Tilo, a South Indian activist whose mixed background—with parents from different classes and religions—resembles the author’s.
The novel illustrates the ways in which a divided society can constrain people. If Anjum has to cross the fault lines of gender, Tilo’s position as a hard-to-place outsider strands her on what Roy calls “the border of caste.” “Everyone has borders running through them,” the author says of her characters.
For Roy, it is impossible to write about India without addressing its imbalances. Even today, she says, “everyone is a walking bar code,” their social markers visible. “To write about India without writing about caste would be like ignoring apartheid’s legacy in South Africa. These divisions form the fabric of our lives.” But for all its rigid social constructions, the country also contains a chaos that makes for beautiful fiction. “India is a vast canvas,” she says. “Everything can coexist, anarchy as well as order.”
Now 55, Roy has made her admirers wait for this tumultuous, tragicomic story that honors those who stray across the lines. In the two decades since publishing her first novel, she wrote essays and reportage that flayed injustices both local and global, from the negative ecological impact of big hydroelectric projects in India to support for National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. But she started to lose faith in the power of polemic. “It was about 10 years ago,” she recalls, “that I started feeling that all these urgent interventions weren’t making a difference.” In Kashmir, she heard stories of terror and repression that she says weren’t “possible to express... solely with footnotes and facts and with evidentiary backup.” So she decided to go about her activism in another way. “Fiction seemed to be the right thing to do for me. It sounds peculiar to say this, but it isn’t like I make decisions…. The choice is made for me somehow.”
Her return to fiction, however, doesn’t mean that her reportage and activism were for nothing. “I couldn’t write the kind of fiction I write with a quick turnover,” she says. “All the journeys, and all the writings, and all the things that I have done, very much form the underpinning of the book.”