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.
Prologue-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
In a brief Prologue, the narrator describes how Delhi’s flying foxes leave their home in the graveyard to fly around the city every evening. During the night, crows take their place in the graveyard, which used to be inhabited by “old white-backed vultures, custodians of the dead for more than a hundred million years” (5). The vultures, however, have died out as a result of ingesting too much diclofenac—a muscle relaxant given to cows to increase their milk production and meet the city’s growing demand for ice cream and other dairy products: “Not many noticed the passing of the friendly old birds. There was so much else to look forward to” (5).
Chapter 1 Summary: “Where Do Old Birds Go to Die?”
A woman named Anjum lives in a Delhi graveyard, “endur[ing] […] casual cruelty [from passers-by] like a tree would—without flinching” (7). Anjum, it later emerges, is a Hijra who was born intersex. The narrator hints at this in the opening pages, explaining that a man Anjum once knew told her that her name spelled backwards was “Majnu”—a romantic hero from Middle Eastern folklore—only to realize he was mistaken:
Her name spelled backwards would be Mujna, which wasn’t a name and meant nothing at all. To this she said, ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m all of them, I’m Romi and Juli, I’m Laila and Majnu. And Mujna, why not? […] I’m a mehfil, I’m a gathering. Of everybody and nobody, of everything and nothing’ (8).
Eventually, Anjum meets and befriends an old blind imam named Ziauddin. He asks her about the burial practices for Hijra, and Anjum responds by pointedly asking him how he feels when he hears people discussing color. Finally, however, she asks whether “the All-Seeing, Almighty One who put us on this Earth [hasn’t] made proper arrangements to take us away” (9). The imam leaves, but Anjum expects he will come back to see her again out of loneliness.
Prologue-Chapter 1 Analysis
Although it’s very short, the Prologue to The Ministry of Utmost Happiness sets the tone for much of the novel that follows, introducing key themes and images. Roy first establishes that Delhi’s Muslim graveyard—a place readers are likely to associate only with death—is a delicately balanced ecosystem where flying foxes and vultures share a home. This idea that life can flourish in the midst of death is one that recurs throughout the novel, both literally (in the “guest house and funeral parlor” Anjum establishes in the middle of this cemetery) and figuratively (in the relationships characters manage to forge even in the midst of violence and suffering).
In fact, for the kinds of characters the novel mostly deals with, Roy suggests that life on the borders of life and death may be the only form of existence possible. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness tells the stories of India’s marginalized peoples—hijras, Kashmiris, Dalits, etc.—and the fact that so many of its characters make their home in a graveyard points to just how precarious their existence is. In the Prologue, the death of the cemetery’s vulture population foreshadows this; the vultures are poisoned as a result of India’s efforts to modernize, implying that other groups who have managed to eke out a living in India in the past may no longer be able to do so as time goes on.
The first of these marginalized characters Roy introduces is Anjum, an aging Muslim Hijra who moved to the cemetery after she was attacked in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat. The experience left Anjum—who had already struggled to make peace with herself as a Hijra—deeply traumatized. Nevertheless, Roy suggests that Anjum’s very pain and marginalization can serve as a means of connecting to others. During her conversation with Ziauddin, for instance, the barbs the two exchange over one another’s sore spots (Anjum’s sex and Ziauddin’s blindness) actually lay the groundwork for their friendship: “Having wounded each other thus, deeply, almost mortally, the two sat quietly side by side on someone’s sunny grave, hemorrhaging” (9). Anjum’s description of herself as a “gathering of everybody and nobody” (9) is also telling, because it suggests that the ambiguity of her position as a Hijra deepens her ability to empathize with those around her; she can take multiple perspectives in a way that many people can’t. Over the course of the novel, the home she establishes in the cemetery becomes a haven for other outcasts and misfits.
