By Anna Lynn Tom
Arundhati Roy, in her interview with Zac OYeah for The Hindu, says that writing a story is a prayer, a song”. If you have read the prose that she has delicately woven together in The God of Small Things, you would utter that prayer, you would hear that song. It was her first novel and it won the Booker Prize in 1997. And twenty years after her first and only fictional novel, Roy has released her second work of fictionThe Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
The hype around her new book
Roys writing is like her description of Esthas memories in The God of Small ThingsLike old roses on a breeze. You see the smell, you hear the colours, you taste the age and you feel the stories. It stirs the deepest recesses of your soul. Hence, it is only natural that her new book is being talked about with great hype.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness promises to be a tale that weaves together all of the issues that Roy has stood for and rallied against the sad songs of Kashmir, the wounds of the Maoists in Central Indian forests and the perils of fundamentalist thoughts.
Social commentary knitted in a literary masterpiece
The first time I came across The God of Small Things, I was too young to understand the social significance of such a novel and too hung over her descriptions You could row Jam if you wanted, India is a free country”. But with every re-read, I could decode the layers of meticulously chosen words that she had intertwined in a tapestry of language.
It was the heart-touching story of a family, a family inhabiting a time, and a time that segregated human souls on the basis of socially-constructed labels of caste and gender. Roy describes this segregation in few fragmented sentences That it really began when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And, how much?. Even today in the case of the ‘Love Laws’, we are forced to ask, has time really passed?
In deconstructing the mystery of the author, we discover that she is trying to break down these ‘Love Laws’, which constricts our nation, through the magic of her literary narrative.
Fiction is a powerful tool
The country and its people have not taken very kindly to Roys views on various issues. She has supported the separation of Kashmir from India, she has opposed the war in Afghanistan, she has spoken against the oppression of Adivasis in the case of Narmada Bachao Andolan and the Muthanga incident. She has also vocally criticised the actions of the Indian government against the Maoists.
Roy, in her various interviews, has admitted to being apprehensive of the response of the audience to her works and the dangers posed to her own life because of her political stance. But in her own words, fiction has chosen her as the medium of narrating the story this time around. It is not in a political essay or a protest speech. Roy has always shared a special relationship with language, even before her venture into architectural studies. Her books, therefore, encapsulate wordplay and linguistic structures to reflect the settings of her stories.
There is the mystery of recounted characters and the magic of poetic language in her writing. In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, she interweaves Kashmiri-English into the text. She describes it as a language of war, occupation and pain.
The mystery and magic decoded
With such intricate layers interwoven into a much-awaited book, the expectations are bound to be high. While there are many who look forward to the rich literary content of her metaphorical prose, there are others who want to see what furore she may stir with a book that brings her controversial viewpoints into stories and there are still others who want to read a narrative written through the lens of a well-known activist and political essayist.
In The God of Small Things, Roy narrates the secret of the great storiesthey have none. They are the ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. The ones you have heard and want to hear again. My prayer and song for The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is just that it would be a great story I would want to know again. In the very words of its creator, that must be its mystery and its magic.
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