READ
I’ve read a lot
of books for this blog that I haven’t particularly enjoyed. So when I find one
that really speaks to me, it’s an especially pleasant surprise. My selection
for India, The
Ministry of Utmost Happiness, by Arundhati Roy, is just such a book. It
has so many layers and covers such a vast array of people and their stories,
that I can’t possibly do it justice in this short post. Here, however, is a
brief description.
A baby is
born to a family in New Delhi, and the parents are overjoyed that, after having
had three girls, this new baby is finally a boy. Or so they think. They
discover later that their baby actually has both male and female organs – a hermaphrodite.
They name him Aftab and raise him as a boy, but he begins to identify as a
girl. When he is fifteen years old, he changes his name to Anjum and moves into
a house of hijras, people who have adopted “a gender role that is neither
traditionally male nor traditionally female.” From this point on, the author
uses feminine pronouns when writing about Anjum. The house she moves into is
called Khwabgah – House of Dreams – and Anjum lives there happily for many
years. She finds an abandoned three-year-old girl on the street and takes her
in, giving her the name Zainab.
At the age
of forty-six, Anjum, who is no longer happy at Khwabgah, moves out, leaving
Zainab behind with the other hijras who dote on her. Having nowhere to go,
Anjum moves to a cemetery. After a while, she begins to build a home on top of
the graves, and other odds and ends of people begin to join her there – a blind
imam, an untouchable determined to avenge his father’s death, other hijras. She
names the house built on the graves of the dead the Jannat Guest House.
One day,
Anjum and her entourage travel to a part of New Delhi called Jantar Mantar. It’s
an observatory, but in the book, it also seems to act as a type of public
square, where all sorts of people come to promote their causes. In the midst of
all the activity, it is discovered that someone has abandoned a baby girl. Anjum
tries to take the baby with her, but a man prevents her and a fight ensues.
Anjum and the man are both arrested, and the baby disappears.
At this
point, the story moves away from Anjum and focuses on the lives of four people,
now close to middle-aged, who had known each other many years before in a
college drama class. Musa, a Kashmiri separatist, Naga, a journalist, and
Biplab, a member of India’s foreign service, had all been captivated by S.
Tilottama, an architect. Their paths had not crossed very often in the years
since college, but now their lives suddenly become intertwined. The catalyst
for these reconnections is the insurgency in the state of Jammu and Kashmir
that began in the late 1980s. The setting of the book moves from New Delhi to
Kashmir, where the brutality of the Indian government against the Kashmiri
people and the discrimination against the people of this majority Muslim state by
the majority Hindu government are on full display.
Eventually,
the story comes full circle, and a link is established between Anjum and her
entourage and S. Tilottama and her admirers. By this time, there has been so
much information imparted about living outside of gender expectations,
religious bigotry, the horrors of the caste system, the plight of women and
girls, and the corruption of government that the reader despairs of the book
ending happily.
That’s
exactly what it does, though, which brought a huge sigh of relief from me.
The
Ministry of Utmost Happiness contains scenes of utter despair, and
moments of the purest joy. The author is a master of her craft, and this book
is a stunning patchwork of gripping stories and fascinating characters.
COOK
A whole lot
of meat dishes are eaten by the characters in The
Ministry of Utmost Happiness, even though one of the characters,
Zainab, is a collector of animals in need of rescue. “None of her tenderness
towards living creatures, however, got in the way of her voracious meat
eating.” So most of the dishes mentioned in the book were not vegan or veganizable.
One passage talks about a beloved dog named Biroo who has moved into the
graveyard with Anjum and her friends, though – “a beagle who had either escaped
from or outlived his purpose in a pharmaceuticals testing lab.” He receives
shelter and loving care at the Jannat Guest House, where “[h]e drank everything
Anjum drank, ate everything that she ate…” One of those things that Biroo and
Anjum both eat is biryani, a heavily seasoned rice dish. On the International
Vegetarian Union website, I found a recipe for Vegetable Biryani,
which turned out really well. Not sure I would feed anything that spicy to a dog,
though…
GIVE
I had no
trouble finding potential programs to support in India – GlobalGiving’s
website listed a whopping 743 projects. Trying to narrow down the field to
choose just one was difficult. My first thought was to look for a project
serving LGBTQIA people in India, in honor of Anjum, but none of the projects
listed fit that description, and I wasn’t able to find one with an accessible
fundraising platform on any other website. Next, I looked for a project
supporting people in Kashmir, but again I came up empty. I finally decided to
donate to a program providing food, funds, and support to people affected by
the COVID-19 virus. According to the project description: “India's national
lockdown, restricting transit and shuttering most businesses, has had a
devastating impact on low-wage earners, roadside vendors, and struggling
farmers, as jobs are eliminated, road traffic disappears, and market demand
evaporates. This project will fund providing emergency food and supplies to
1200 people in Tamil Nadu who are at risk of starvation and cash grants to 100
farmers and individual enterprises for loan or rent payments.” More information
about this program is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/tamil-nadu-coronavirus-relief/.
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