IN THEIR WORDS
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.