Anjum's narrative is interrupted by an apparently-unrelated one. In the"summer of scams",where the wind drives"sheets of grit,soda-bottle caps and beedi stubs before it,smacking them into car windscreens and cyclists'eyes",a baby appears"in a crib of litter:cigarette foil,a few plastic bags and empty packets of Uncle Chipps".
Then another shift,into the first person narrative of a ruminative alcoholic,"the landlord",who thinks about the angles of a friendship between himself,his university friend Nagaraj Hariharan and Tilottama,an architecture student."The moment I saw her,"he reflects,"a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her."A third man,Musa,becomes crucial to this part of the story,and it is the luminous love story between him and Tilo that comes to seal the novel's connections.
"Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one,"wrote John Berger,an epigraph Roy uses forThe God of Small Things,just as Michael Ondaatje does,with slightly different wording,for his 1987 novelIn the Skin of a Lion. His novel reminds the reader:"Trust me,this will take time but there is order here,very faint,very human."
Perhaps Ondaatje's paean to gentleness and creativity is stronger than Roy's,whose work studies cruelty,fear and stasis as much as it celebrates the restorations and kindnesses that stand against destruction.
The Ministry of Utmost Happinesscollects histories and counter-histories,evidence and its refutation,testimony unearthing truth and testimony reversing it,Hindi,Urdu,Sanskrit and English. It punctuates lyricism with curses and catalogues.
It contains such an abundance of strands,letters,taxonomies,lies and digressions that towards the middle,my faith in its direction wavered. At times the bulk of necessary testimony weighs heavily on the novel's narrative bones. Yet this is the work of bearing witness to divergent histories. Just as Ondaatje's novel re-inscribes the stories of the workers who build Toronto's Bloor Street Viaduct,this novel collects the lives of the marginal and silenced,those written out of history.
Junot Díaz has suggested:"If you really want to know what's going on beyond our corporate-sponsored dreamscapes,you read writers like Roy."In the decades since the publication ofThe God of Small Things,Roy's activism has powered her non-fictional writing. Her essayThe End of Imagination responded to India's testing of nuclear weapons in Rajasthan in 1998.
Roy's art and activism have long been enmeshed,like British-Indian musician Nitin Sawhney,whose 1999 albumBroken Skin is framed by samples of then-Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihdri Vajpayee's celebration of the testing and US physicist J Robert Oppenhemier's quoting theBhagavad Gita to describe his sense of terrible responsibility after the first successful detonation of the atomic bomb in 1945:"Now I am become Death,the destroyer of worlds."
Each artist's work is divisive. Roy's friend,Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee has described"goons smashing chairs on the stage where she is speaking". One of the characters in Indian-Australian Aravind Adiga'sSelection Day suggests that"what we Indians want in literature,at least the kind written in English,is not literature at all,but flattery. We want to see ourselves depicted as soulful,sensitive,profound,valorous,wounded,tolerant and funny beings. All that Jhumpa Lahiri stuff."
This bracing assessment (unfair to Lahiri,whose 2013 novelThe Lowland,for instance,centres on the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency and environmental degradation) may extend to readers beyond India.
While this novel is closer to Adiga's portrait of a riven,chaotic India inThe White Tiger than the flattering portrait he describes,its exquisite,moving centre lies with almost-impossibly hard-won acts of love and courage.
One character saves a young torture victim at the moment he makes a decision that will imperil his own life. An abandoned newborn whose first experience of touch is her mother's gun to her forehead is joyously adopted by several mothers. Lovers hold their faith amidst grief and violence.
"How to tell a shattered story?"writes Tilo in a poem:"By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything."As the novel attempts this,flux,weight and chaos surround moments of lyrical precision and emotional clarity.
How to read a shattered story? With patience and the kind of trust Ondaatje asks for,with attention and energy repaid by wonder.