characters in the ministry of utmost happiness

The background story of a troubled relationship with her mother clarifies little Tilo’s quiet yet determined resistance to the system. For instance, Tilo remains from beginning until the end a right mystery and a mute stoic who is just as committed to the cause of justice as she is to paying timely rent for a room she does not inhabit. They are above reproach, modelling all that is morally good with those on the right side of history. Tilo, Musa, Anjum and Saddam enter the plot as types: each is representative of an identity or allegiance, who rise and fall with the tide of events surrounding them.

Its characters follow a predetermined trajectory and consequently do not develop. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is noble in its vision, ambitious in its scope and dreadful in its editing. The astute storytelling you’d expect from a novelist of Roy’s status is sadly missing.

Indeed, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a genuine paean for the patched integrity of the dispossessed and brutalised and is welcome at a time when words such as ‘poverty’ ‘secularism’ ‘reservation’ and ‘Muslims’ are becoming unwelcome.Īnd yet, despite her ardour, the book is a bit of a mystification. In telling their individual and collective stories, Roy takes on the ambitious project of unmasking the social and political fault lines of the Indian subcontinent. Tilottama and Musa, enigmatic outliers, follow each other through the horrors of violence-ravaged Kashmir as star-crossed lovers and comrades.

Saddam Hussein, an untouchable, awaits the day when he can avenge his father’s lynching. Anjum, an Old Delhi hijra and survivor of the Gujarat pogrom, exiles herself to the neighbourhood graveyard after losing the affection of her adopted daughter. The central characters of the book – Anjum, Tilottama, Musa and Saddam – roam in the peripheries of society. However, other than Roy being a celebrity and the book’s intentions, there is little by way of depth and complexity to buttress the novel’s worthiness up to the standards of a Paul Beatty or Kiran Desai, or even Roy’s own previous accomplishment. Within weeks of its publication, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness found itself on the Booker longlist in in July. Arundhati Roy’s second book was much anticipated – after all, one is always in need of a song.

Characters in the ministry of utmost happiness