the ministry of utmost happiness sparknotes

In the mid-to late-1990s, Musa becomes involved with the Kashmiri separatist, or freedom, movement that calls for the Muslim-majority region called Kashmir to break from Hindu-majority India. Tilo is dark-skinned and intelligent in university, she is close with an architecture student from Kashmir, named Musa Yeswi.Īs the story unravels, the reader learns that Musa and Tilo reconnected after university and after the death of his wife Arifa and their daughter, Miss Jebeen. However, two of the men who loved her during their college days-an old bureaucrat nicknamed “Garson Hobart” and a mainstream journalist named Naga who becomes her husband-also provide their first-person account of the impression she made. Like Anjum’s story, Tilo’s story is told through the third-person. The narrative then shifts towards focusing on this woman, whose name is S. Anjum falls in love with the child, and when she disappears, tracks the baby to the house of the woman who has taken her. One day, a baby is found at an old observatory in Delhi where various activists gather. Jannat Guest House becomes home to other marginalized and persecuted characters like herself. There, Anjum transforms the cemetery into a guest house, called “Jannat” (or “Paradise”) Guest House, and creates Jannat Funeral Services. However, at the age of 46 years old, Anjum survives a massacre in Ahmedabad and leaves the Khabgah in order to move into a cemetery ten minutes away. Anjum remains with the Khwabgah for 30 years, during which time she raises a little girl named Zainab.

The 18-year-old Anjum then falls in with the residents of the so-called “Khwabgah,” meaning “House of Dreams.” Many of the residents of the Khwabgah are either hermaphrodites or transsexuals. When Aftab reaches puberty, he elects for gender reassignment surgery and becomes Anjum, a glamorous, affectionate woman. The novel opens with Aftab, a hermaphrodite born in Old Delhi.

In her novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, author Arundhati Roy uses multiple perspectives to tell a layered, multidimensional story that spans the Indian Subcontinent and multiple decades. The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Roy, Arundhati.

The ministry of utmost happiness sparknotes