74 pages • 2 hours read
Arundhati RoyThe Ministry Of Utmost Happiness
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Khwabgah”
Jumping backwards in time, the narrator recounts the first several decades of Anjum’s life. She was born to Jahanara Begum and Mulaqat Ali—a “hakim, a doctor of herbal medicine, and a lover of Urdu and Persian poetry” (16) who prided himself on being descended (at least in theory) from a Mongol emperor. When Anjum was born, the midwife, Ahlam Baji, mistook her for a boy, and her parents named her Aftab. Jahanara quickly discovered that Aftab was actually intersex but was too frightened to tell her husband. Instead, she resolved to pray at a dargah (shrine) to Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed—an Armenian convert to Islam who was eventually executed for expressing religious doubts.
Without knowing the story behind the shrine, Jahanara faithfully prayed for years for Aftab to be “heal[ed]” (15). However, when Aftab passed the age at which boys were traditionally circumcised, Jahanara realized she needed to tell her husband the truth. Mulaqat responded by taking Aftab to a doctor, who said that surgery and medication could physically transform Aftab into a boy, but that he would likely have “Hijra tendencies” (21). Mulaqat ignored this and began to save up money for the treatment.
Meanwhile, Aftab had encountered a Hijra living at the Khwabgah (“House of Dreams”) near Anjum’s home. Aftab was fascinated with the woman and spent much of his time hanging out around the Khwabgah, which was home to Muslim, Hindu, and Christian Hijra. Eventually, he managed to befriend several of the Hijra, including the overseer, Ustad Kulsoom Bi, and a young woman named Nimmo Gorakhpuri.
The physical changes of puberty came as a shock to Aftab, who was repelled so much by his newly masculine appearance and voice that he stopped singing. Eventually, he decided to run away from what the Hijra called the Duniya (“World”) to live in the Khwabgah, where he became Anjum, and undergoing surgery and taking hormones to look and sound more physically female.
Anjum grew up to be a successful and celebrated Hijra, appearing in foreign documentaries and news articles. Nevertheless, she remained unsatisfied, and at age 46 began to talk about leaving the Khwabgah. She had recently adopted an abandoned toddler whom she named Zainab, and she dreamed of living an “ordinary” (33) life with her daughter:
[Anjum] was caught unawares by the fact that it was possible for one human being to love another so much and so completely. At first, being new to the discipline, she was only able to express her feelings in a busy, bustling way, like a child with its first pet […] She overfed [Zainab], took her for walks in the neighborhood and, when she saw that Zainab was naturally drawn to animals, got her a rabbit—who was killed by a cat on his very first night at the Khwabgah—and a he-goat with a Maulana-style beard who lived in the courtyard (35-36).
As Zainab grew older, however, Anjum’s precarious happiness began to unravel. She became jealous and suspicious of a younger Hijra named Saeeda whom Zainab had taken a liking to. When Zainab fell victim to a series of fevers, Anjum concluded that Saeeda must have cursed her. She also suspected Saeeda of being behind the increasingly tense political climate in India; in the aftermath of 9/11, Hindu nationalism grew more popular, threatening the safety of the country’s Muslim minority.
Eventually, Anjum decided she needed to make a pilgrimage to a shrine in Ajmer—a city in northern India—and made plans to travel with a family friend named Zakir Mian. While stopping in Ahmedabad on the way back, however, Anjum and Zakir were caught up in a wave of Hindu violence (itself a response to the killing of several Hindu pilgrims); Zakir was killed, and Anjum was only spared because killing a Hijra was thought to be unlucky.
The experience traumatized Anjum, who began wearing men’s clothing and grew increasingly withdrawn and paranoid. She rejected the attempts of her housemates to reach out to her and frightened Zainab, who spent increasingly more time with Saeeda. After that, Anjum left the Khwabgah entirely, taking up residence in the graveyard where her father was buried. Although she initially only had a sleeping roll and a few possessions, she slowly built a house amongst the tombstones:
Over time Anjum began to enclose the graves of her relatives and build rooms around them. Each room had a grave (or two) and a bad. Or two. She built a separate bathhouse and a toilet with its own septic tank (72).
Friends from Anjum’s old life came to visit her, and she made the acquaintance of new people like the Imam. He eventually moved in with Anjum, and their home became known as “Jannat Guest House.” A young man who gave his name as Saddam Hussain also moved in. Later, he explained to Anjum that he converted to Islam after his father—a Dalit—was falsely accused of killing a cow and murdered by a mob. He took his new name after seeing a video of Saddam Hussein’s execution, since he wanted to meet his own punishment with similar composure when and if he ever succeeded in avenging his father’s death. In the meantime, however, he uses the skills he developed during years of odd and semi-legal jobs to help Anjum and Ziauddin begin a funeral business for “those whom the graveyards and imams of the Duniya had rejected” (84).
Chapter 2 Analysis
Although Anjum largely disappears for the mid-section of the novel, Roy’s choice to begin The Ministry of Utmost Happiness with her is significant. As Chapter 1 began to establish, Anjum’s status as an intersex woman and a Hijra makes her a very literal embodiment of several of the novel’s concerns; her identities not only place her on the margins of society, but also give rise to an inner turmoil that Nimmo Gorakhpuri at one point likens to the violent divide that exists between India’s Hindus and Muslims. When Nimmo claims that the gap between a Hijra’s male body and female identity precludes happiness, the novel is therefore also questioning what kind of happiness (or existence at all) is possible in a country with such deep splits along ethnic, caste, religious, etc. lines.
Although Roy doesn’t settle this question in this section of the book, Anjum can’t exist happily in what the Hijras call the “Duniya”—the “real world” that exists beyond the fantastical world of the Khwabgah that the Hijras themselves live in. This “House of Dreams” is one of the many alternative spaces the novel establishes for people who can’t fit into “ordinary” society, and Anjum does manage to find some form of contentment inside it. Her happiness is temporary, however; as the attack in Gujarat demonstrates, Anjum can’t escape the identities that mark her as different; she’s attacked because she’s Muslim and then spared because it’s considered bad luck to kill a Hijra. The idea that, as a Hijra, she might inadvertently bring good luck to her attackers by surviving further complicates Anjum’s already conflicted relationship to her gender and is presumably one reason why she can’t continue living at the Khwabgah.
In fact, Anjum no longer wants to live at all in the aftermath of the attack, which is why she chooses to relocate to a graveyard; it’s a place where she can “[wait] to die” (96). Given that the name of Anjum’s home there—Jannat—translates as “paradise,” it’s even possible to read Anjum as already dead in a figurative sense. In Roy’s novel, however, the boundaries between life and death are fluid, and if Anjum is dead in a certain sense, it’s nevertheless the case that the house she establishes in the cemetery is more vibrant and thriving than many places in the everyday world. Jannat Guest House is also “paradise” in the sense of being a utopian society in which people of all kinds—Dalits, Muslims, the disabled, the dead, the living—exist side by side and in harmony. In this way, it functions as another alternative to the Duniya, albeit one that quite literally exists on the verge of extinction.
Another theme that begins to take shape in this chapter is the nature and purpose of storytelling. In many cases, characters use stories as a way of affirming their identity (especially if their identity is in some way fragile). Mulaqat Ali, for instance, copes with life as a persecuted religious minority with stories about being descended from India’s one-time rulers; in this way, he affirms not only that being Muslim is something to be proud of, but also that it is compatible with being Indian. Ustad Kulsoom Bi does something similar (though even more explicit) when she takes the Hijras in her care to see a sound and light show about Indian history, just for the moment when a court eunuch can be heard laughing:
The moment passed in a heartbeat. But it did not matter. What mattered was that it existed. To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether (55).
The suggestion in the above passage that it’s possible to “write someone out” of history is a reminder that stories are malleable and can be altered for either good or ill purposes. One example of the former is the rewriting that occurs at Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed’s shrine; few visitors know the man’s real story, but by filling in the details according to their own needs, they both find comfort and unknowingly honor “Sarmad’s insubordinate spirit, intense, palpable and truer than any accumulation of historical facts could be” (14). In other instances, however, the rewriting of stories is more suspect; Anjum’s interviewers, for instance, consistently alter the details of her happy childhood “to suit readers’ appetites and expectations” (30). The implication is that readers can’t imagine a happy storyline for a Hijra, and those expectations may shape the way the stories of real-life Hijras play out. The passage also suggests that stories about suffering are a commodity in a way that stories about happiness aren’t—an idea that will crop up again in the chapters dealing with Kashmir.
