My friend left his book behind on a Thursday. By the time I noticed it, it had sat there for a few hours and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get it back to him until Monday.
So that weekend, I read it.
And that’s how I began reading The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
I chowed through it that weekend, trying to get to a point where I felt like I understood what was going on. When I gave it back to him on Monday, I hadn’t had much luck. But I was fascinated.
The book starts with two paragraphs about vultures that used to haunt a part of Delhi but have been killed off by Diclofenac—a kind of cow muscle relaxer deadly to vultures.
And with just the vultures, a tension begins to build: the tension of boundaries.
Nearly every boundary—every war—of humanity (but specifically, India) unfolds over the next five hundred pages. The author, Arundhati Roy, leaves no stone unturned.
Religion.
Borders.
Gender.
Life and death (hence the vultures and the opening line, “She lived in the graveyard like a tree”).
Etc.
But my favorite? The boundary Roy blurs between violence and peace.
She explores the war between India and Pakistan, the highly militarized but beautiful state of Kashmir, the religious massacre of 2008, and so many other moments in India’s history on a deeply human level, introducing the reader to characters who blur the boundaries and quietly asking what this blurring means for them.
She likens this boundary, in particular, to an egg, and when I saw my friend a few weeks later (both of us having finished the book by then), I had to know what he thought of it.
She writes, of a massacre of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 following the death of Indira Ghandi, “it was as though the Apparition whose presence we in India are all constantly and acutely aware of had suddenly surfaced, snarling, from the deep, and had behaved exactly as we expected it to. Once its appetite was sated it sank back into its subterranean lair and normality closed over it. Maddened killers retracted their fangs and returned to their daily chores—as clerks, trailers, plumbers… Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence.”
I read this portion for my friend and he said, “you know, when I read that part, I couldn’t help but think of America.”
I’ve been thinking about this comment a lot.
It’s an interesting comparison. From where I’m writing, in the U.S., it’s easy to consider India a developing nation and America the leader of Western civilization—occupants of two opposing hemispheres, languages, even foods.
But where India’s history includes the aforementioned incidents, America’s includes numerous assassinations of political figures, the Jim Crow South, and, of course, the Epstein files.
In many ways, even just this year, the yolk feels like it is running.
The book ends in the graveyard, the one where “She lived… like a tree.” An assortment of the book’s characters live in a guesthouse there (blurring the boundary of the permanency of death with the impermanency of a guesthouse!), where each of the rooms has a bed for the living and a grave of one of the dead. (Cozy.) They name the guesthouse the Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
It is a place where the characters can’t forget about the yolk. The violence that has occurred in each of their own lives is such that they are marred by it, which made the guesthouse, initially, a place where they go to hide and heal.
But because they cannot hide from the yolk, they cannot forget about what lives inside them—and each of us—nor can they hide behind words like “civilized.”
And so the guesthouse becomes a place that is honest. And by doing so, it becomes the Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
