The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness

“No one’s happy here. It’s not possible. Arre yaar, think about it, what are the things you normal people get unhappy about? […] [F]or us the price-rise and school-admissions and beating-husbands and cheating-wives are all inside us. The riot is inside us. The war is inside us. Indo-Pak is inside us. It will never settle down. It can’t.” 

Nimmo Gorakhpuri’s account of what it is like to be a Hijra is critical to the ways in which the novel explores questions of division and difference. As she describes it, the mismatch between a Hijra’s mind and body is a source of constant conflict and trauma similar to the ethnic, class, and religious schisms that divide India itself. Consequently, when she claims that this tension makes true happiness impossible for Hijras, she’s also implying that happiness is impossible in India at large. However, it’s debatable whether the novel upholds this view of things, since ambiguity and difference, as painful as they can be, are repeatedly shown to be preferable to uniformity and certainty.

“The planes that flew into the tall buildings in America came as a boon to many in India too. The Poet-Prime Minister of the country and several of his senior ministers were members of an old organization that believed India was essentially a Hindu nation and that, just as Pakistan had declared itself an Islamic Republic, India should declare itself a Hindu one. Some of its supporters and ideologues openly admired Hitler and compared the Muslims of India to the Jews of Germany. Now, suddenly, as hostility towards Muslims grew, it began to seem to the Organization that the whole world was on its side.” 

The above passage is a good example of how Roy situates the plot of the novel against the broader backdrop of Indian culture and history. This is another way in which Roy alerts readers to the fact that The Ministry of Utmost Happiness isn’t simply a story about individual characters, but also about the broader trends and forces in India that those characters embody. In this case, Roy is also filling readers in on the history behind one of the central problems in the book: the Indian government’s attempts to impose a Hindu identity on the entire country, which at best renders non-Hindus invisible as Indian citizens, and at worst leads to their deaths. This passage links the rise of Hindu nationalism to 9/11 and the Western world’s “War on Terror.” Throughout the novel, Roy will associate India’s oppression of vulnerable populations with its efforts to modernize along Western lines.   

“The Khwabgah was called Khwabgah, Ustad Kulsoom Bi said, because it was where special people, blessed people, came with their dreams that could not be realized in the Duniya. In the Khwabgah, Holy Souls trapped in the wrong bodies were liberated.” 

The Khwabgah is the first of many places in the novel that function as refuges for people who can’t live in the “Duniya”—that is, the real world. Elsewhere, for instance, Roy describes how Gulrez comes to stay on the HB Shaheen because his disability would almost certainly get him killed by Indian soldiers, and how Jannat Guest House takes in a group of brightly colored birds whose plumage would attract the attention of predators in the wild. However, while these spaces allow difference and ambiguity to thrive, their existence is often tenuous; the HB Shaheen is raided by government forces, the Khwabgah’s name (“House of Dreams”) lends it an elusive quality, and Jannat Guest House is situated in a cemetery, with death quite literally on every side.

In fact, some of these “refuges” are no safer than the outside world at all; toward the end of the book, for instance, Revathy explains her choice to remain part of the Communist resistance, knowing she’s likely to die, by saying, “I cannot leave my Party. I cannot live outside” (431). Places like the Khwabgah offer glimpses into possible utopian societies not so much because they guarantee happiness or safety, but because they at least admit the possibility of “dreams” that the rigid and oppressive world outside refuses to even consider. 

“Across the city, huge billboards jointly sponsored by an English newspaper and the newest brand of skin-whitening cream (selling by the ton) said: Our Time is Now. Kmart was coming. Walmart and Starbucks were coming, and in the British Airways advertisement on TV, the People of the World (white, brown, black, yellow) all chanted the Gayatri Mantra: Om bhur bhuvah svaha Tat savitur varenyam Bhargo devasya dhimahi Dhiyo yo nah pracodayat […] (And may everyone fly BA.).” 

The above passage illustrates the complex ties between modernization, capitalism, and nationalism in Roy’s novel. India signals its status as a global superpower by adopting Western-style consumerism, which isn’t surprising given that, at least in this case, Western corporations are effectively sponsoring India’s transformation. Although these companies may pay lip service to India’s own culture and history, they do so in pursuit of their own agenda, as when British Airways uses a Hindu mantra to promote themselves. These companies often exploit and exacerbate preexisting divisions and prejudices; the slogan “Our Time is Now” ostensibly refers to the great future in store for all of India, but the fact that it’s being promoted by a skin-whitening cream suggests that not all Indians (e.g. darker skinned ones) are part of the “our” expected to benefit from the country’s growing wealth and power.  

“It was there, right next to the Mothers of the Disappeared, that our quiet baby appeared. It took the Mothers a while to notice her, because she was the color of night. A sharply outlined absence in the shadows under the street light.” 

The baby that “appears” in this passage goes on to become Miss Jebeen the Second: a figure Roy suggests embodies hope for India’s future. It’s more significant that Roy depicts her arrival in such anticlimactic terms: She is simply an “absence” that everyone initially overlooks. In part, this is a statement about racial prejudice in India; the baby has dark skin, which is generally viewed as undesirable. In a sense, however, it’s the very fact that Miss Jebeen is initially invisible that makes her an emblem for a better India, since Roy suggests that that India would necessarily have at its heart the people and groups it previously considered unimportant and disposable.  

“He, a revolutionary trapped in an accountant’s mind. She, a woman trapped in a man’s body. He, raging at a world in which the balance sheets did not tally. She, raging at her glands, her organs, her skin, the texture of her hair, the width of her shoulders, the timbre of her voice. […] He, who believed he was always right. She, who knew she was all wrong, always wrong. He, reduced by his certainties. She, augmented by her ambiguity. He, who wanted a law. She, who wanted a baby. A circle formed around them: furious, curious, assessing the adversaries, picking sides. It didn’t matter. Which tight-arsed Gandhian accountant stood a chance in hell in a one-to-one public face-off against an old, Old Delhi Hijra?” 

The confrontation between Anjum and Aggarwal provides some of the novel’s most explicit insight into Anjum as a character, and into her broader relevance to the novel’s themes. In this passage, Roy juxtaposes the very things that make Anjum “wrong” or “ambiguous” in society’s eyes—her body and the confusion it causes for those who want to “[fill] in forms and [tick] boxes”—to her desire for a child. Roy links Anjum’s “ambiguity,” as well as the pain it has caused her, to her capacity for love. She further underscores this by contrasting Anjum with her polar opposite: a man who is “normal” in every way, but whose normalcy makes him so sure of himself that he becomes blind to everyone around him, except in his determination to make others conform to his rules and “laws.” 

“We sit here like caged animals, and the government feeds us useless little pieces of hope through the bars of this iron railing. Not enough to live on, but just enough to prevent us from dying. They send their journalists to us. We tell our stories. For a while that lightens our burden. This is how they control us.”

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is deeply concerned with the politics of storytelling. Roy repeatedly suggests, for instance, that victims of wars, disasters, etc. are forced to tell their stories in a way that caters to their audience’s expectations in order to have any hope of receiving help. This passage, which comes from Azad Bhartiya’s “News & Views,” touches on a similar but perhaps even more disturbing idea: that allowing someone to tell their story is actually a way of “controlling” them. The implication is that the story functions as an escape valve, and that with the “burden” of pain temporarily lifted, the storyteller remains content with their circumstances, despite having effected no real change.  

“Behind her plain, unfashionable spectacles, her slightly slanting cat-eyes had the insouciant secretiveness of a pyromaniac. She gave the impression that she had somehow slipped off her leash. As though she was taking herself for a walk while the rest of us were being walked—like pets.” 

Because Roy first introduces Tilo through the eyes of Dasgupta, this description of her aids the reader in understanding both characters. Tilo does lead an unrestrained life, avoiding most emotional entanglements so that she can, as she puts it, “be free to die irresponsibly, without notice and for no reason” (163). Her behavior, however, is partly the result of trauma, and therefore less romantic than Dasgupta suggests here. This in turn speaks to Dasgupta’s character; although he lives a conventional life upholding the political status quo, part of him resents these restraints and long for (what he imagines to be) Tilo’s more adventurous existence. 

“People—communities, castes, races and even countries—carry their tragic histories and their misfortunes around like trophies, or like stock, to be bought and sold on the open market.” 

In many ways, Dasgupta’s remarks in this passage echo the novel as a whole; throughout The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy draws attention to the ways in which people package the stories of their trauma for public consumption. Dasgupta’s dismissive tone, however, implies that he considers this a form of personal indulgence, whereas Roy suggests that it’s the only possible response to a world that considers everything in terms of value and expense; in effect, people try to ensure that their stories are “worth” hearing in the hopes that someone will address the underlying problems. Dasgupta, however, is what he himself calls a “tragedy-less man.” He occupies a relatively privileged position in society, and consequently hasn’t thought about how others struggle to make their voices heard.  

“Naga’s pursuit of Tilo had not turned out as planned. She was meant to be just another easy conquest, yet another woman who succumbed to his irreverent brilliance and edgy charm and had her heart broken. But Tilo had crept up on him, and become a kind of compulsion, an addiction almost. […] It was the haughtiness (despite the question mark over her ‘stock,’ as his mother had not hesitated to put it.) It had to do with the way she lived, in the country of her own skin. A country that issued no visas and seemed to have no consulate.” 

In addition to further underscoring Tilo’s emotional reserve, the above passage offers insight into Naga’s character. Roy’s description of Naga here is in line with Dasgupta’s earlier portrayal of his friend as charming and something of a womanizer. Naga, however, is drawn to Tilo precisely because of her apparent indifference to him. Like Dasgupta, who sees in Tilo’s free-spiritedness the remedy to his own conventionality, Naga hopes that Tilo’s “haughtiness” can provide him with something he lacks—specifically, a check on his own pride and self-satisfaction. 

“I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there’s lots to write about. That can’t be done in Kashmir. It’s not sophisticated, what happens here. There’s too much blood for good literature. QI: Why is it not sophisticated? Q2: What is the acceptable amount of blood for good literature?” 

The above passage comes from Tilo’s “Reader’s Digest Book of English Grammar and Comprehension for Very Young Children”—a collection of tongue-in-cheek stories she wrote during various trips to Kashmir over the years. It’s therefore an example of Roy’s reliance on unconventional forms of narrative within the novel. Her use of these texts-within-texts gives the novel a patchwork feel that mirrors its subject matter: “shattered” people and countries that are attempting to put themselves back together (442). The content of this entry also speaks to Roy’s interest in storytelling. Tilo’s pointed question about the “acceptable amount of blood” in “good literature” critiques the idea that stories need to be framed or packaged in a way to gain an audience. In fact, the novel suggests that stories involving “too much blood” are often precisely the ones that most need to be told and heard in order to put an end to violence, oppression, and exploitation.

“Nothing in the city belonged to the women. Not a tiny plot of land, not a hovel in a slum, not a tin sheet over their heads. Not even the sewage system. But now they had made a direct, unorthodox deposit, an express delivery straight into the system. Maybe it marked the beginning of a foothold in the city.” 

Although The Ministry of Utmost Happiness primarily follows the stories of a few major characters, Roy’s detailed descriptions of the people and events that surround them are crucial to the novel’s meaning. In this passage, for instance, Tilo watches as a young boy urinates in the street and his mother—a poor migrant worker—uses a bottle of water to wash the waste down a manhole cover. The moment therefore captures much of what the novel has to say about India’s marginalized people. It not only depicts the poverty that many Indians live in, but also suggests that for a group of unwanted, dispossessed people, any kind of physical presence is a form of resistance; the government may ignore the needs of the child and his mother, but it can’t ignore their bodies or bodily waste. 

“For the first time in her life, Tilo felt that her body had enough room to accommodate all its organs.” 

In this passage, Roy draws on the motif of bodily organs to capture Tilo’s immediate sense of relief after moving into Jannat Guest House. Like many of the other characters in the novel, Tilo’s life has been marked by internal tension—in particular, the strain caused by marriage to Naga as well as her relationship with Musa and her ties to Kashmir. Roy has previously described this strain in terms of competing or clashing forces within Tilo: “The traffic inside her head seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights. The result was incessant noise, a few bad crashes and eventually gridlock” (236). Now, however, Tilo finds that she can be at peace with the existence of this “traffic.” The different drives and impulses within her, as symbolized by her organs, are no longer competing with one another for “room.”  

“As the war progressed in the Kashmir Valley, graveyards became as common as the multi-story parking lots that were springing up in the burgeoning cities in the plains. When they ran out of space, some graves became double-deckered, like the buses in Srinagar that once ferried tourists between Lal Chowk and the Boulevard.” 

Roy’s comparison of the war in Kashmir to urbanization in India at large captures the relationship between modernization and violence in the novel. The death and destruction in Kashmir appear to set that region apart; while the rest of India builds cities, it is building graveyards. Elsewhere in the novel, however, Roy makes it clear that urban and capitalist expansion produces casualties as well. The Kashmiri insurgency is itself a business opportunity for many, such as “black marketers, bigots, thugs and confidence-tricksters” (320). The apparent contrast between “double-deckered” graves and “double-deckered” tourist buses underscores the connection between the two. 

“Although Miss Jebeen, always naughty, sometimes shouted Mataji! (Mother) instead of Azadi!—because the two words sounded the same, and because she knew that when she did that, her mother would look down at her and smile and kiss her.” 

The above passage demonstrates both the literal and symbolic significance of motherhood in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. “Azadi” means “freedom,” and in Kashmir it’s used as a rallying cry by those seeking a separate Kashmiri nation. By having Miss Jebeen shout the word “mother” instead, Roy hints at the relationship between motherhood and nationhood in the novel: characters like Tilo and Anjum, who struggle to come to grips with themselves as mothers or daughters, also tend to struggle to fit into their motherland. The passage also serves as a humanizing moment for a character who might otherwise be merely a symbol of the destructiveness of the war in Kashmir; Miss Jebeen’s playful “naughtiness” adds realism to Roy’s portrayal of her and makes her ultimate death more poignant. 

“They had always fitted together like pieces of an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) puzzle—the smoke of her into the solidness of him, the solitariness of her into the gathering of him, the strangeness of her into the straightforwardness of him, the insouciance of her into the restraint of him. The quietness of her into the quietness of him.” 

The above account of Tilo and Musa’s night on the Shaheen best illustrates Roy’s ideas about love across barriers and divisions. As Roy describes them here, Tilo and Musa are almost opposites; Tilo is eccentric as well as solitary by nature, whereas Musa has lived a conventional life up until this point, marrying and having children, while also (in Tilo’s own words) “belong[ing] so completely to [his] people” that he resembles a “gathering” (365) himself. As a result, there is something “unsolvable” about their relationship, but this doesn’t prevent them from “fitting together” like puzzle pieces and finding comfort in their shared traumas. As Roy puts it: “What happened that night on the HB Shaheen was less lovemaking than lament. Their wounds were too old and too new, too different, and perhaps too deep, for healing” (368). 

“[W]e as a people—as an ordinary people—have to become a fighting force […] an army. To do that we have to simplify ourselves, standardize ourselves, reduce ourselves […] everyone has to think the same way, want the same thing […] we have to do away with our complexities, our differences, our absurdities, our nuances … we have to make ourselves as single-minded […] as monolithic […] as stupid […] as the army we face. But they’re professionals, and we are just people. This is the worst of the Occupation […] what it makes us do to ourselves. This reduction, this standardization, this stupidification […] Is that a word? […] This stupidification […] this idiotification […] if and when we achieve it … will be our salvation. It will make us impossible to defeat. First it will be our salvation and then […] after we win […] it will be our nemesis. First Azadi. Then annihilation.” 

According to Musa, the worst thing about the war in Kashmir is what he calls “stupidification,” or the need to minimize internal differences to more effectively wage war on the Indian Army. The problem with this is not simply that the insurgency becomes continuously more extreme and intolerant, but that the elimination of all diversity of thought (or religion, ethnicity, etc.) leads to “annihilation.” In a literal sense, Musa likely means that the religious extremism now intertwined with the insurgency will likely lead to civil war if and when Kashmir ever becomes a nation in its own right. Metaphorically, however, the implication is that difference is an integral part of what gives life value and meaning, and that trying to eradicate it leads to a symbolic death. Roy implies that Musa’s beliefs have shaped the role he himself plays in the insurgency, since he not only works to curb the rebellion’s violence but also refuses to “belong to any one particular organization” (352). Musa is unwilling to “simplify himself” (352) by committing to a single faction or agenda at the exclusion of all others. 

“Amrik Singh untied Tilo and helped her to her feet. He made a show of dusting the hair off her shoulders. He put a huge hand protectively on her scalp—a butcher’s blessing. It would take Tilo years to get over the obscenity of that touch.” 

The above passage is an example of one way in which Roy creates a sense of cohesiveness even while juggling several, very different storylines—namely, by repeating not only images or ideas but specific phrases. In this case, the idea of a “butcher’s blessing” echoes the “Butcher’s Luck” that Anjum fears she brought to her attackers in Gujarat by walking away alive. The exchange also captures the essence of the survivor’s guilt that plagues many of the novel’s characters; Tilo is spared (and even “blessed”) by the same man who killed Gulrez, and consequently feels that her own life has been tainted by Gulrez’s death. 

“Tilo had been careless. She returned from the Valley of death carrying a little life.” 

Although The Ministry of Utmost Happiness depicts life and death as interrelated, it avoids suggesting that life can grow out of death in any straightforward way. Tilo becomes pregnant as a result of the time she spends with Musa in Kashmir, but Roy doesn’t frame this as the happy outcome of a terrible situation; Tilo, fearing she would prove inadequate as a mother, chooses to have an abortion and remains broken by her experiences in Kashmir. Tilo’s relationship with Musa will in fact provide the context for her adoption of an abandoned child, whom she names after Musa’s long-dead daughter. By having Tilo terminate this pregnancy, however, Roy avoids easy and unrealistic solutions to the problems of trauma and death.

“‘This is his mazar,’ Anjum said. ‘Hindus aren’t buried. They don’t have mazars, badi Mummy,’ Zainab said. Maybe it’s the whole world’s mazar, Tilo thought, but didn’t say. Maybe the mannequin-shoppers are ghosts trying to buy what no longer exists.” 

Before marrying Zainab, Saddam Hussain brings his friends and fiancée to a mall outside of Delhi to “introduce” them to his father, who was killed there before the area was made into a shopping center. Like those in Kashmir who “die twice” (324), Saddam’s father is therefore the victim of a kind of double extinction; he is not only murdered on account of his caste, but the site of his murder is then covered up and forgotten in the rush to expand the city outwards.

Although Zainab correctly notes that Saddam’s father would not have been buried regardless, the fact that his “mazar” (mausoleum) is a mall is disrespectful; the building of the mall presumably displaced poor farmers and laborers very much like Saddam’s family. Although the group goes on to symbolically “bury” Saddam’s father in the cemetery, this passage (and the entire episode in the mall) serves as a reminder that the world outside Jannat Guest House remains a violent and destructive one. In fact, as Tilo sees it, the outside world is effectively dead already, and all that remain are “ghosts” trying (ironically) to “buy” something that capitalism has destroyed. 

“Anjum said a prayer and asked [Hazrat Sarmad] to bless the young couple. And Sarmad—Hazrat of Utmost Happiness, Saint of the Unconsoled and Solace of the Indeterminate, Blasphemer among Believers and Believer among Blasphemers—did.” 

Hazrat Sarmad is an important symbol in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and this passage captures his significance through what appear to be a series of oxymorons: Sarmad is the patron of both happiness and sadness, belief and unbelief, etc. However, Roy describes him as the “Solace of the Indeterminate.” He is a guide for anyone who fails to fit into absolute and mutually exclusive categories like “happy” and “sad,” and therefore a symbol of acceptance of the kinds of ambiguity and diversity the novel celebrates. His blessing of Zainab and Saddam’s marriage provides the novel with a hopeful ending and cements the idea that the community that has grown up around Jannat Guest House is a model for the rest of the world. 

“Each of the listeners recognized, in their own separate ways, something of themselves and their own stories, their own Indo-Pak, in the story of this unknown faraway woman who was no longer alive.” 

Although Revathy herself never technically appears in the novel as a character, she is an important presence whose story encapsulates several of Roy’s key concerns—most obviously, the violence perpetrated against India’s poor and marginalized populations. It also, as this passage suggests, echoes key motifs and events in other characters’ stories. Revathy’s torture and rape, for instance, is a more brutal version of what Tilo undergoes at the Shiraz Cinema, and the response Revathy’s mother has to her birth parallels that of Anjum’s mother, Jahanara Begum: “She was expecting twins. White color, like her and her husband. But I came out. I was black and weighty. Seeing my color Mother was unconscious for two days” (424). The fact that Revathy’s letter encompasses so much of what has happened in the novel further underscores the significance of her child, Miss Jebeen the Second, who is herself the culmination of the characters’ different “stories” and “Indo-Paks.” 

“What will become of me? I’m a little like Amrik Singh myself—old, bloated, scared, and deprived of what Musa so eloquently called ‘the infrastructure of impunity’ that I have operated within all my life. What if I self-destruct too? I could—unless music rescues me. I should get in touch with Naga. I should work on that podcast idea. But first I need a drink.” 

The above quote illustrates the changes Dasgupta has undergone over the course of the novel. Dasgupta built his entire career as an intelligence officer on the “infrastructure of impunity” he mentions; as a relatively well-off Hindu man, he didn’t need to sympathize with the struggles of (for example) Kashmiri Muslims, and in fact contributed to those struggles himself. Going through Tilo’s papers has forced him to reconsider these beliefs and become aware of the wrongs he has done over the course of his life. It isn’t clear, however, that this knowledge will spark positive change in his life; although he talks about wanting to start over as a podcast host, his final words suggest that he’s simply going to keep drinking and eventually “self-destruct.” In this way, Dasgupta’s situation mirrors the crossroads that India itself is at, since it too is threatened with “self-destruction” if it doesn’t evolve and become more tolerant of its diverse population.