74 pages • 2 hours read
Arundhati RoyThe Ministry Of Utmost Happiness
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Tenant”
The narrative jumps slightly backwards in time. Tilo is in the apartment she rents from Dasgupta, considering the baby she has just kidnapped: “The baby was the beginning of something […] The baby was Miss Jebeen returned. Returned, that is, not to her (Miss Jebeen the First was never hers), but to the world” (219).
Going back a bit further, the narrator reveals that Naga was unhappy to see his marriage to Tilo end, and convinced that Tilo’s decision stemmed either from the recent death of her mother, or from what happened years ago in Kashmir; the events at the Shiraz Cinema had caused the already reserved Tilo to begin a “regime of more or less complete isolationism” (221).
The narrator then fills in the details on what happened in Kashmir from Naga’s perspective. After he received the call from Dasgupta, he went to fetch Tilo at the Cinema, where he was met by a talkative soldier who offered to allow Naga to speak to a “reformed” Kashmiri militant—the unspoken condition being that, in exchange, Naga wouldn’t write anything about Tilo’s arrest. However, once the boy was left alone with Naga and Tilo, he admitted that he hadn’t changed his views on Kashmiri independence at all. Naga then escorted Tilo to a hotel, asking whether the “Commander Gulrez” who was killed was, in fact, Musa and took her ambiguous response as confirmation that it was. She agreed to marry Naga a few weeks later.
After 14 years of marriage, however, Tilo found that she couldn’t continue leading a double life. Naga tried everything to convince her to remain in the marriage, but Tilo began to stay at her office for longer and longer stretches, eventually leaving Naga’s house completely.
Afterward, Naga had a series of affairs, eventually settling into a relationship with a wealthy upper-class widow. However, while cleaning out Tilo’s things so that his girlfriend could move in, Naga came across a medical file on Tilo’s mother—a woman from an “old, aristocratic Syrian Christian family” who gave birth out of wedlock and only “adopted” (243) her biological daughter months later. Although Tilo held this against her mother, she went straight to her bedside during her final illness.
Tilo’s mother was disoriented in the last days of her life, which made her a difficult patient; she aggressively questioned hospital staff about their caste status, “insulted everybody around her in a hard-core dialect of guttersnipe Malayalam” (248), and tried to escape several times. Tilo eventually discovered that the only way to calm her down was to take dictation on whatever she was saying, and it was these nonsensical notes that Naga had found in the medical file. After going through these papers, Naga realized he was still in love with Tilo and broke up with his girlfriend.
For the next four years, Tilo lived in the rented apartment. After bringing Miss Jebeen the Second home, however, she sees a police notice about the kidnapping and calls Dr. Bhartiya for advice; he suggests that she get in touch with Saddam Hussain or Anjum to inquire about staying at Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services. She does so, and Saddam arranges to secretly pick her and the baby up.
As Tilo waits to move, she wonders what to do with several boxes of incriminating “recoveries” Musa had saved from a flood in Kashmir: photos of his family, passports and credit cards under false names, a gun, newspaper clippings, etc. One of these boxes also contains a notebook Tilo kept during her trips to Kashmir in the years following Musa’s supposed death. This “Reader’s Digest Book of English Grammar and Comprehension for Very Young Children” is full of grim stories about the Kashmir occupation and insurgency, as well as questions about the morals that can be drawn from them. Musa has also given Tilo a box full of documents related to the Amrik Singh murder-suicide, which he got from the American social worker who handled their case. This box also contains several statements related to Singh’s murder of the human rights lawyer Jalib Qadri—the event that had caused Singh to be placed on desk duty on the night Tilo was arrested.
Tilo places all the “recoveries” in the freezer and prepares to leave, leaving behind Saddam Hussain’s card in case Musa stops by. Saddam arrives in a garbage truck and picks Tilo and Miss Jebeen up, taking them to the cemetery where Anjum has organized a welcome party.
Chapter 8 Analysis
As Roy backtracks to explore Naga’s relationship with Tilo and the role he played in events in Kashmir, Tilo’s significance to the novel becomes clearer. Tilo’s history and the ways in which it has shaped her continue a motif that first appeared in Anjum’s story: motherhood. This is a complicated subject for both women, though not for the same reasons; Anjum has always wanted to be a mother but can’t physically bear children, while Tilo felt rejected by her own mother and consequently fears becoming a parent herself. Like so much else in the novel, however, Anjum’s and Tilo’s anxieties are also symbolic, with motherhood standing in for questions about each character’s identity as an Indian.
Throughout India’s struggle for independence, nationalists used the idea of “Mother India”—or India personified as a Hindu goddess—as a rallying cry. The problem with this, from the novel’s perspective, is that it defines India in terms of Hinduism and consequently implies that members of minority religions aren’t truly Indian; Roy describes, for instance, how the old man-baby “electrified Hindu chauvinists (who were already excited by the Mother India map) with their controversial old war cry, Vande Mataram! Salute the Mother!” (107). Anjum's and Tilo’s troubled sense of themselves as mothers and daughters speaks to the challenge of claiming Indian nationality as a Muslim or Christian woman.
All of this makes Tilo’s decision to take home an abandoned baby doubly important. Although Tilo herself has no conscious explanation for her actions, she senses that “the baby [is] the beginning of something […] Miss Jebeen the Second, when she was grown to be a lady, would settle accounts and square the books. Miss Jebeen would turn the tide” (219). It later emerges that Miss Jebeen the First was Musa’s daughter, who was accidentally shot and killed by Indian soldiers. At a basic level, then, Tilo sees her rescue of this second child as a way of righting the wrongs done to the first. However, Roy repeatedly underscores that Miss Jebeen the Second is important not just to Tilo, but also to society as a whole; in the above passage, for instance, Miss Jebeen the Second seems destined to redeem all of India. One way in which she might do this, then, is by transforming Tilo and Anjum’s relationship to motherhood, and by allowing them to define it on their own terms. Symbolically, this would have implications for India as a whole; instead of defining Indian identity in terms of loyalty to the Hindu motherland, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness suggests defining it in terms of embracing (and mothering) the most vulnerable and outcast groups in Indian society.
Meanwhile, this chapter continues to explore issues of trauma and division. For the 14 years of her marriage to Naga, Tilo lives a double life; she is the wife of a man whose family is part of India’s ruling class (and who is increasingly aligned with the status quo himself), but the emotional center of her life is still in Kashmir and with Musa. The emotional aftereffects of her experiences in Kashmir, combined with the prejudices of Naga’s family (Tilo is relatively dark skinned, and Naga’s parents never approved of her) only heighten her sense of “living a life that wasn’t really hers at an address she oughtn’t to be at” (235), so she leaves Naga in an attempt to alleviate the “traffic inside her head [that] seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights” (236). Her departure, however, doesn’t initially bring her much relief, at least where her separation from other people is concerned. Always guarded, Tilo cuts herself from others entirely after her arrest in Kashmir:
[Tilo] had never been a particularly friendly country even at the best of times. But its borders were sealed and the regime of more or less complete isolationism began only after the train wreck at the Shiraz Cinema (221).
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, however, is in part a story about love across divisions, and Roy uses the image of national borders to underscore the point that Tilo, like the different religious and ethnic groups the novel explores, will need to reject strict boundaries and “isolationism” in order to heal.
