For a while all is well: Anjum has a career, a chosen family, and adopts a small child whom she finds in the street one day, naming her Zainab. A chance sighting of a famous Hijra who goes by the name of Bombay Silk sparks a series of reactions that finish with Aftab’s name change (to Anjum), a move out of her parents’ house and into the house known as the Khwabgah, or House of Dreams, where other Hijras live and work, mostly as specialist courtesans. Though Aftab’s parents attempt to raise their child as a boy, by the time Aftab is old enough to be aware of difference, he knows that he’s a she. Roy opens with the birth of a Hijra: born as Aftab, our protagonist is quickly found to have two sets of genitals-one male, one female. If it doesn’t entirely float, either, that is due not so much to the inclusion of political material per se as to the sheer quantity that Roy is willing to include, a proliferation of detail that doesn’t always pull its weight within the framework of the story.

It is in many places gripping, moving, and fueled by a burning rage at India’s human rights record. Arundhati Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, does not sink. With the weight of all that expectation, you could sink. If you then take twenty years to produce that elusive follow-up, well. If your first novel was a barnstorming global sensation that won the Booker Prize, doubly so. The Great Reread, #5: I Capture the Castle, by Dodie SmithĪ second novel is a tricky thing.April 2023: superlatives for the rest of it.

The ministry of happiness