Personal is political: the alchemy of happiness in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Abstract

From the title to the text, happiness matters in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. However, happiness has garnered less critical attention than the text’s political, cultural, social, gendered, and realist readings, implicating the impossibility of achieving ‘utmost happiness’ in the post-9/11 world rife with political chaos. Alternatively, this paper claims that by defying the limitations of a political vision, oppressing gendered norms, and social structures that ensnare individuals in unhappy states, the drab graveyard where, Anjum- the Muslim transgender first takes up residence after failing to find happiness in Duniya and Khawabgah, and later sets up ‘a People’s Pool, a People’s Zoo and a People’s School’, the personal becomes a space where everyone, irrespective of gender, class, caste, and religion, can live together happily. Based on this counter reading of the text, this study divulges Roy’s optimistic invocation of the connection between the personal and political as an imaginative manifestation of the alchemy of happiness, which was theorised by Muslim philosopher Ghazali–whereby the divine contemplation experienced at the personal level contributes to communal happiness at the broader scale. Thus, the text philosophizes happiness as a transcendental experience that enables the individual to rise above base material concerns and drives him to the love of God, self, and humanity. This recognition of happiness as a spiritual reality holds the power to turn even a graveyard into paradise.

Keywords:

• Happiness
• 9/11
• personal is political
• humanity
• paradise
• graveyard

REVIEWING EDITOR:

• Oliver Nyambi, University of the Free State, South Africa

SUBJECTS:

• Philosophy
• Religion
• Cultural Studies
• Literature

Introduction

In her novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy has shown the desirability of happiness in human life from personal to political level. Set in the pluralist society of contemporary India, the novel is populated with characters of diverse social, economic, political, and religious origins who view happiness differently based on their own experiences. Though the title of the text explicitly foregrounds happiness, the thematic engagement of happiness within the text is implicitly woven around the problems which these characters of the novel encounter living in post-9/11 Indian society. Often, the independent responses of these characters are mistaken as Roy’s pessimism regarding the attainment of ‘utmost happiness’ in a world rife with political chaos:

In its shifts in narrative personhood and perspective, too, the novel ruptures the possibility of coherent subjectivity, thereby enacting the incoherent human state of the post-9/11 world. The novel’s form thus resists the very synthesis of “utmost happiness” that it depicts at the end—or, at least, offers an ironic counter-reading that emphasizes the fragility, wishfulness, and perhaps illusoriness of that happiness.(Goh, 2021, p. 10)

Recognition of the narratorial shifts and ruptures has seemed to many a sufficient reason to deny the possibility of ‘utmost happiness’ implicated by the text. With the old graveyard setting, the space of absence with which the story opens and ends, and where the major portion of the narration is set, the title of the story is perceived as an ironic hint at the invocation of ‘fragility, wishfulness, and perhaps illusoriness of that happiness’. Mostly, the current research on The Ministry of Utmost Happiness extends the line of critical inquiry from socio-historical to realist concerns, whereby responses to Roy’s engagement with happiness remain secondary. For instance, in considering the realist impulse of Roy’s text, Menozzi (2018) in ‘Too Much Blood for Good Literature’: Arundhati Roy’s ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and the Question of Realism’ approaches happiness as an effect of digressive and contradictory realist poetics of the text. Therefore, the focus of Menozzi’s argument remains more on Roy’s preoccupation with happiness as a strategy to facilitate the role of literature in highlighting the social injustices of contemporary Indian society. The secondary concern with happiness is also evident in ‘The Precarious Lives of India’s Others: The Creativity of Precarity in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ , where Mendes & Lau (2020) focus their attention on the creative agency of the precariat in a society which lacks social inclusion, class integration, economic justice and governmental support. It’s the appropriation of the right of choice that is concluded as the sole instigator of happiness for an imperfect community. Thus, this research refers to happiness provisionally. By contrast, research claims that one who is convinced by this line of argument is operating with too narrow and demanding a conception of the nature of happiness. The fact that Roy is not committed to the attitudes of the characters and does not assume that everyone needs to share the same conception of happiness requires overcoming the rational constraints on the implications of these complex imaginings which differ from the content they govern. For epistemological reasons, this paper argues that the critical neglect to interpret the possibility of happiness inherent in the novel is the consequence of the ‘default view’ of the intelligentsia. The term ‘default view’ indicates the dominance of the secularist worldview, which marginalizes the religious argument in contemporary literary circles (Sweetman, 2006) Recognition of this epistemological bias is crucial for sensitizing the readers to the importance of Roy’s choice of a Muslim transgender as a protagonist for the story that unfolds in the backdrop of 9/11.

According to Magali (2014) fiction produced in response to 9/11 falls into three categories: first, novels that focus directly on the incident of 9/11 with the gory details of tragedies and causalities; second, stories that focus more on the socio-political aftermath of the 9/11; third, stories where 9/11 events serve as a backdrop to explore human relationships and emotions. So, fiction becomes a powerful medium for contributing to contemporary processes of cultural meaning-making to ‘reject an ahistorical and apolitical stance and, thus, implicitly advocate a notion of literature as a dynamic negotiation of the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, politics, culture, and history’. (Magali, 2014, p. 2) Such recognition raises the the question What does Roy’s preoccupation with happiness from the perspective of a Muslim transgender in the post-9/11 era indicate in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness? To address such a question is all the more significant in keeping with the celebratory status of Roy’s fictional wirings as an expression of her social activism:

Roy’s writings ‘have always championed those who have been systematically marginalized to the point of brutalization’, and this is seen in the pre-9/11 Small Things too, as well as in her large body of essays on numerous social, cultural, and political topics. Both of Roy’s novels depict the evils of caste, patriarchy, and other forms of social oppression; the plight of the poor, Dalits, and backward caste communities; the corruption of the police; and the brutality of the police state. (Goh, 2021, p. 5)

Published almost 16 years after 9/11 incident, Roy’s second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is approached in this paper as a vital cultural work that invokes and performs a dynamic negotiation between secular and religious worldviews of happiness while remaining committed to imaginative processes of the fictional world.As a prerequisite to understanding the philosophical implications of Roy’s idea of happiness in a pluralist society consisting of many worldviews, clarification of the worldview that this research embraces in its approach to The Ministry of Utmost Happiness becomes necessary.

In his book Why Politics Need Religion: The Place of Religious Arguments in the Public Square (2006), Brendan Sweetman divides worldviews into two major categories (though not the only views of the world): religious and secular. Centered around God’s existence, religious worldview regards humans, both body and soul, as social beings who experience happiness in spiritual terms through their connection with the surrounding community. Whereas the secular worldview with a physical view of reality and with the emphasis on the absence of God, treats human beings as ‘individual beings first and social beings second.’ (Sweetman 2016, p. 31) Accordingly, the secular worldview holds a material notion of happiness. According to Sweetman (2016):

Human beings are autonomous centres of rationality who must regulate their lives through their own free choices. The meaning of life is to maximize happiness and to minimize pain. Happiness is to be understood, with certain qualifications and limits, as the fulfilment of one’s desires. One main moral principle must be obeyed when fulfilling one’s desires: one can exercise one’s rationality and one’s freedom in making any choice so long as the choice does not harm others. There is no afterlife. (p. 31)

This general outline of the two worldviews is sufficient to understand the logic of the inclusion of competing voices of happiness in Roy’s text. From the secular worldview, happiness in Roy’s world may appear illusory; however, when approached from the religious worldview, the confusion regarding Roy’s approach to optimism gets cleared and gives way to the argument that follows and will not affect conclusions of the earlier secular readings of the text.

Accordingly, the present paper draws on the Islamic concept of happiness detailed in The Alchemy of Happiness which is one of the most translated works of Islamic literature and thought, a well-known work of Ghazali, written nearly one thousand years ago and translated in English by Claud Field in 1901. Unlike the historically and culturally changing views of happiness in Western and Chinese traditions (David et al., 2013, p. 5), the Islamic understanding of happiness remains independent of geographical, social, cultural or temporal influences. In Islam ‘happiness is necessarily linked with the knowledge of God.’ (Field, 1901, p. 12). Considering the agelessness of this concept, this paper utilizes the ideas of Ghazali which are still relevant today for the understanding of happiness in Islam. Ghazali’s major premise of happiness is that knowledge of the self is the key to the knowledge of God. Knowledge of the self deflects from the preoccupation with the physiology of the body and its needs but attends more to the spiritual purity of the human.

Thus, approaching The Ministry of Utmost Happiness from a religious perspective guided by Ghazali’s philosophy becomes significant especially in post 9/11 era when the image of Muslims as impassive offenders and instigators of unhappiness in the world has become a popular feature of literary and non-literary Western discourses since 9/11. The unhappiness that the world experienced after 9/11 is perceived to be the consequence of the Islamic ideology of Jihad misunderstood as instigating Muslims to be offensive towards non-Muslims with a promise to be rewarded with paradise in their afterlife. An example of such a sentimental projection is an essay, ‘The Rage and Tide’, by Oriana Fallaci:

I consider them murderers driven by vanity, exhibitionists who instead of pursuing success through movies or politics or sports look for glory in their own death and in the death of others. Who instead of chasing an Oscar award or a Cabinet seat or an Olympic medal, go after a place in the Djanna. The Paradise of the Koran, the Garden of Eden, where according to the Prophet all heroes go and make love with the Uri virgins. I bet they are vain even physically. (2002, p. 63)

Outraged by the incident, her hatred spreads towards Muslims as a collectivity by imagining their faith as misleading them to violence. Fallaci (2002) blames Islam for luring Muslims to reward them with sensual pleasures of paradise in their afterlife. Similar to similar prose narratives, fictional writings across the world have represented the whirlpool of emotions created by this tragic incident in world history. Mostly, creative responses remain occupied with the reductionist image of Muslims as emotional people who are misled by their religious ideology of jihad into violence. This paper argues that Roy’s consideration of happiness in Islam and what makes Muslims happy challenges this widespread fallacious popularity of this perception. Through the experiences of Anjum, a Muslim transgender, Roy dismantles this popular perception by fictionalising the Islamic pursuit of ultimate happiness which obligates a Muslim to strive for communal happiness. Al-Ghazali in The Alchemy of Happiness points out that for a Muslim seeking happiness demands knowledge of the self, God, world and afterlife and sums up this pursuit of happiness as the foundation of political liberty. In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy augments this faith based idea of happiness which is shaped by hope and love, which is not only harmless but also holds power to resolve social and political conflicts causing unhappiness.

Historicising secular vs. Religious worldviews: an overview of happiness

What is happiness? It is a widely debated question that is variedly answered from philosophical, psychological, spiritual, social and literary dimensions, showing the universal appeal of this question (Norton, 2012; David et al., 2013; White, 2006) Due to this widespread scholarly attention, happiness today is commonly understood as ‘an umbrella concept for notions such as well-being, subjective well-being, psychological well-being, hedonism, eudaimonia, health, flourishing, and so on’.(David et al., 2013, p. 3) This idea resonates with Nicholas White’s (2006) assertion that no such algorithm may guarantee a coherent and incontestable explanation of happiness. White in his book A Brief History of Happiness (2006) offers a historical overview of major philosophical conceptualizations of happiness in the Western world. His inclination for the ancient Greek philosophers including Aristotle, Plato, and Aquinas is justified because most of the questions and debates regarding happiness were asked by these Greek philosophers. Successive philosophers, though certainly not all of them, have mostly developed, debated and refined the ideas of their Greek ancestors.

Due to the dominance of Greek philosophy in the Western world since the Renaissance, White (2006) argues that religious understanding of happiness is mostly held with scepticism. This idea is furthered by Norton in Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness: Ethical Inquiries in the Age of Enlightenment (2012). Norton states that ‘the validation of the earthly happiness has long been recognised as one of the Enlightenment’s signal triumphs.’(2012, pp. 30–31) He asserts that under the influence of humanism, Western thinking discarded the Biblical ideology that world is a ‘vale of tears, a state of trial or probation to be endured …while preparing the soul for the next world’ (p. 33) With secularist proposition of happiness as an inalienable birthright of an individual, in contemporary times happiness is postulated as a socially determined emotion ‘shifting through time and space, and embedded in normative social and moral codes regulating appropriate meanings of who should be happy, when and how that happiness should be performed’ (Clisby, 2017, p. 2). In contemporary times, happiness has become a socially, politically, and religiously sought-after emotion.

The alchemy of happiness: specifying the religious worldview

In the preceding sections, the secular and religious division of worldviews with the identification of secularism as the influential worldview in critical debates of happiness challenges the claim of ‘neutrality’ of the secular worldview. Following Sweetman’s (2006) idea that the religious worldview can make valuable, indeed profound contributions to contemporary debates concerning a host of issues in a pluralist society, this research adopts a religious worldview to interpret Roy’s philosophy of happiness in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

With examples and evidence from the Quran and the hadith, two sources of Islamic teaching complemented by biblical references, Ghazali’s work The Alchemy of Happiness offers the Islamic perspective on happiness as transcendental which is suggested by the very word ‘alchemy’ used in the title of the book. Alchemy, a historic precursor of chemistry, is often defined as the transformation whereby a base substance is crystalized, burnt, smelted and alloyed to return it to its golden state. In Ghazali’s Alchemy of Happiness, alchemy symbolizes those internal processes of distillation and purification which generate spiritual purity by effacing the roots of all sins to the regaining of the earthly paradise. These processes, contrary to the usual reproach against them, lead a man to the knowledge of the self, God, world and afterlife. This attainment of knowledge/understanding turns him into a kind, generous, devout and God-fearing individual, however bad he may have been previously; because from now on he is continually filled with great grace and mercy which he has received from God, and with the depths of His wonderful works. When the person gets this knowledge, he is transmuted from unhappiness to the state of happiness (Field, 1901).

As per religious worldview, knowledge of God is the primary cause which excites happiness. According to Ghazali ‘He who knows God, even in this world, dwells, as it were, in a paradise’ (Field, 1901, p. 84). The question then arises how a man arrive at the knowledge of God to be happy? According to Ghazali ‘knowledge of the self is the key to the knowledge of God’ (Field, 1901, p. 5). For any knower of his body, Ghazali sees the ignorance of God’s power, wisdom and love as a mere folly; He who creates him from a mere drop of water; He who has engineered his body to perfection; He who has abundantly supplied him the food and lodgings. Such knowledge leads to the knowledge of God. Moreover, real self-knowledge is known to the person who knows the difference between his body and the soul. The body subject to decay, ‘so to speak, is simply the riding animal of the soul and perishes while the soul endures’ (Field, 1901, p. 27). Believing in the death of the body which snatches away worldly delights makes the world appear as a witch to the knowing heart and the worldly desires as ‘trifles’ that consume the time and energy of the as ‘this world is a stage or marketplace passed by pilgrims on their way to the next. It is here that they provide themselves with provisions for the way’ (Field, 1901, p. 27). Happiness in Islam is spiritual rather than material. That is to say, it is ‘invisible, indivisible, unconfined by space and time, and outside the categories of quantity and quality; nor can the ideas of shape, colour, or size attach’ (Field, 1901, p. 17) to it. Worldly things as ‘trifles’ that ‘swallow up the whole of a man’s time and energy’ (Field, 1901, p. 30) depict the immateriality of happiness which frees the soul from the unnecessary pursuit of worldly things. A person who desires pleasure through the attainment of worldly remains in a perpetual state of restlessness. The understanding of the self on both the physiological and spiritual plane is considered in Ghazali’s writing by comparing the body to the traveller and the soul as the ­kingdom and the world as the middle stage of the journey. According to Ghazali, the attainment of this knowledge lies in contemplating upon the work of nature as the driving power behind all transmutations:

Whoever will seriously contemplate the past eternity during which the world was not in existence, and the future eternity during which it will not be in existence, will see that it is essentially like a journey, in which the stages are represented by years, the leagues by months, the miles by days, and the steps by moments. What words, then, can picture the folly of the man who endeavors to make it his permanent abode, and forms plans ten years ahead regarding things he may never need, seeing that very possibly he may be under the ground in ten days!’ (Field, 1901, pp. 29–30)

The temporal existence of the world manifested through the comparison of life with a journey is the sign from God to shift the locus of happiness from this life to the afterlife. A person ignorant of this reality remains unhappy through the pursuit of happiness in earthly matters. Whereas, knowledge of the journey makes the person happy by caring only for the knowledge and good deeds which are the only things he would carry with him in the next world. If the consciousness of the person is dominated by the transience of life, then the reason trivializes the material desires and inspires him to contemplate on ‘what art thou in thyself, and from whence hast thou come?’ (Field, 1901, p. 6). Thus, the ultimate purpose of life is not only to know God but also to love him. When the goal is identified, the world becomes paradise. The source of this happiness is knowledge instead of the accumulation of bodily and worldly riches. The focus shifts from self to others… from receiving end to serving end. In Ghazali’s words, ‘love is the seed of happiness’ (Field, 1901, p. 22). Believing that the reunion with God is the end of the journey, the happiness this reunion will bring to the soul is directly proportionate to the devotion and love of God the body had in the world. According to Ghazali, by practising the seven signs of love of God, even earth becomes a paradise for him. Among them are: firstly, death is not feared or disliked; secondly, personal will is surrendered to God’s will; thirdly, constant remembrance of God; fourthly, love for entire humanity and creation; fifthly, privacy and retirement (tranquillity) for the devotion is desirable; sixthly, worship becomes easy; lastly, infidelity and disobedience to God is hated.

To be or not to be: Roy’s philosophy of happiness in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

The story of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness approaches happiness from various conceptions; however, the focus in this paper is narrowed to the character of Anjum, a Muslim transgender, who defies the social perception of being a ‘khushi khor-happiness hunter’ or as ‘creature incapable of happiness’ (Roy, 2017, p. 18) to consider how the alchemy of happiness operates within Roy’s fiction. Opening in the drab graveyard setting, with a death-like trans, ‘she’ is introduced to a reader as a tree who does not flinch an inch ‘to see which small boy had thrown a stone at her, didn’t crane her neck to read the insults scratched into her bark’ (p. 3). So, the names with which society calls her include—’clown without a circus, queen without a palace’ (Roy, 2017, p. 3). The delay in disclosing her proper name in contrast to the names given by the society gives a clue to her unhappiness early on in the text. Following her tree-like existence in the graveyard, the narrator reminisces the details of her naming, re-naming and un-naming by a man remembered as The Man Who Knew English:

Her name written backwards (in English) spelled Majnu. In the English version of the story of Laila and Majnu, he said, Majnu was called Romeo and Laila was Juliet. She found that hilarious. ‘You mean I’ve made a khichdi of their story?’ she asked. ‘What will they do when they find that Laila may actually be Majnu and Romi was really Juli?’ The next time he saw her, the Man Who Knew English said he’d made a mistake. Her name spelled backwards would be Mujna, which wasn’t a name and meant nothing at all. (Roy, 2017, p. 4)

Anjum’s ‘hilarious’ reaction over the English man’s verdict as ‘meant nothing at all’, and the way she comically admits the variability of the names for herself with a response becomes telling: ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m all of them, I’m Romi and Juli, I’m Laila and Majnu. And Mujna, why not? Who says my name is Anjum? I’m not Anjum, I’m Anjuman. I’m a mehfil, I’m a gathering. Of everybody and nobody, of everything and nothing. Is there anyone else you would like to invite? Everyone’s invited’ (Roy, 2017, p. 4). Thus, her positive acknowledgement of the self transforms her meaningless naming into a special kind of name. She prizes her name as both the literal and symbolic signifier of her value as a ‘gathering’ that is unknown to society. Since in the words of Imam Ghazali ‘man was not created in jest or at random, but marvellously made and for some great end. Although he is not from everlasting, yet he lives forever; and though his body is mean and earthly, yet his spirit is lofty and divine’ (Field, 1901, p. 1). Symbolically, this onomastic enquiry by the man whose name Anjum forgets and remembers him as ‘The Man Who Knew English’ ironically hints at the common ignorance of English people regarding the Muslim idea of happiness. Despite the conflicting understandings of Anjum’s name, the laughter that they share implies the underlying respect needed for humanity.

Thus, the pessimism which is felt at the onset of the narration gradually dispels as the narration progresses and reaches chapter ten which is named after the book title as The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, where the same graveyard turns into Anjum’s kingdom. Thereafter setting up the Janat Guest House and Funeral parlour, along with ‘People’s pool and People’s Zoo’ (Roy, 2017, p. 188), Anjum rules happily over the old cemetery which turns into a residential hub of the ones ‘fallen out, or been expelled’ from Dunya. The utmost happiness was felt by everyone when Anjum mooted the idea of building a swimming pool in the graveyard and Sadam objected to the idea by saying that ‘water was a key element in swimming pools and the lack of it might prove to be a problem.’ (Roy, 2017, p. 188). Anjum’s optimism gets noticeable for denying materialism as necessary for the soulful experiencing of happiness:

poor people would appreciate a swimming pool even without water. She had one dug, a few feet deep, the size of a large water tank, and had it lined with blue bathroom tiles. She was right. People did appreciate it. They came to visit it and prayed for the day (Insha’Allah, Insha’Allah) when it would be full of clean blue water. So all in all, with a People’s Pool, a People’s Zoo and a People’s School, things were going well in the old graveyard. The same, however, could not be said of the Duniya. (Roy, 2017, p. 188)

With the graveyard setting, Anjum’s transition from Duniya to graveyard symbolises the body’s transcendence from physical to soulful journey in the pursuit of ‘utmost happiness’. The spiritual alchemy which operates this change in Anjum, like that which transmutes her from being a ‘happiness-hunter’ to the minister of Jannat Guest House and Funeral Parlour, People’s Pool, People’s Zoo and People’s School, is not easily accessible, nor to be found in the secular readings of the text.

Roy’s fiction does not give a direct route to her philosophy of happiness. More than the direct reference to happiness, it’s the absence of happiness through which her idea of happiness can be determined. The birth of Aftab–turned–Anjum is one of the major incidents through which the idea of happiness is implicitly hinted at. In the highly gendered society of Delhi, an old Indian city, Jahan Ara Begum spent a night of happiness after her midwife announced the birth of a baby boy. For a mother of three daughters, happiness over birthing a male child-heir to family’s male line, surpassed her delivery pains. Next morning, with ‘unhurried delight’ when the mother lovingly unswaddled her bundle of joy, her happiness turned into terror ‘when she discovered, nestling underneath his boy-parts, a small, unformed, but undoubtedly girl-part’ (Roy, 2017, p. 11). This shocking unearthing leads to a series of reactions which are powerful enough to conceptualise a mother’s idea of unhappiness. From intense physical agony to utter disbelief, the mother’s traumatic response reveals her paralyzed mental state to the point where she wants to ‘hold him close’ and disappear from the world. Through the detailed projection of a mother’s unhappy encounter with the baby’s body, the text projects the gendered idea of happiness. For Jahan Ara, known as a strong woman in the locality, her unhappiness was the consequence of her knowledge of societal repercussions that bodies like ‘Aftab’ had to face. She kept the secret of the baby in her heart for years and only confided with her husband when she could no longer take the pressure to delay the plan for his circumcision. From their medical consultations to cultural grooming, both mother and father did their best to safeguard him from the harsh reality of his existence, but all their efforts started collapsing down as the body of their ‘Aftab’ grew against the gendered expectations of the body’s rigid binary manifestations.

Against all parental efforts, neither could Aftab escape his ‘body’ nor the ridicule which the body’s transgression of the normative gendered boundaries. If happiness is a gendered experience, then it is also a social necessity. As he grew up and started realising his body’s misfit social position, unhappiness started coiling inside his very existence. How could a young child with curiosity for learning and exceptional talent for singing deflect the unnerving laughter of his classfellows in the school who questioned his bodily existence as ‘He’s a She. He’s not a He or a She. He’s a He and a She. She-He, HeShe Hee! Hee! Hee’ (Roy, 2017, p. 13). For a person social isolation withers away any possibility of happiness. The happiness which the school kids found in ridiculing him, not only isolated Aftab to withdraw from the school but triggered his interest in the world beyond Duniya. Through the catalyst narration of Aftab’s birth that shocked her mother to the silent resignation of his father to the laughter of the school children, Roy points the social inclination towards the outward appearance of the body to the total neglect of the inward reality of the heart that mourns over this social disapproval.

Anjum-turned-Aftab’s transferral from ‘Duniya’ gives an excess to the socially controlled notion of happiness where an individual’s compliance with societal norms and standards can only guarantee happiness in life. By accepting the hard reality of his marginalized transgendered identity in Duniya Anjum ‘entered that ordinary, broken-down home as though he were walking through the gates of Paradise’ (Roy, 2017, p. 17). In truth, his entrance into a ‘broken-down home’ was the pursuit of happiness which he realised was not possible with his material existence but only in dreams as implied by Khawabgah- dreamland- where his desire to find happiness is soon dispelled.

In the text, the idea of happiness is explicitly brought up in the conversation between Anjum-turned-Aftab (who later changed his name to Anjum) and Nimmo, the two transgender characters inside Khawabgah- ‘the House of Dreams’ (Roy, 2017, p. 19). Contrary to the architectural details of Khawabgah, as an ‘ordinary, brokendown home’ (Roy, 2017, p. 20), Aftab’s frequent visits to the place gave him the delight of being in paradise. On an occasion of one such visitation, when young Aftab was ‘happier than he had ever been before’ (p. 23), and felt that happiness was within his reach, Nimmo dispelled his happiness as nothing more than the stuff of fantasy. Much in a Socratic manner, Nimmo assumes the role of a philosopher, and Aftab becomes his pupil thereby, Nimmo inquires him: ‘Do you know why God made Hijras?’ (Roy, 2017, p. 230). To Aftab with an ecstatic mental state for being admitted to the only place in his world ‘which seemed to shift, to slide over, like a school friend making room for him on a classroom bench,’ (Roy, 2017, p. 19). answer this question was unknown. Yet as a transgender person, Aftab found the outside world as a chaotic mass of contradictions ever since his birth so he was very much keen to know the reason for his creation. However, the explanation that Nimmo gave overturned his happiness, and was hard for him to accept Nimmo’s claim that ‘it was an experiment. He decided to create something, a living creature that is incapable of happiness. So he made us’ (Roy, 2017, p. 23). Aftab tried to dismantle her opinion by insisting that they were all happy in the Khawabgah. Truth be told, so Nimmo settles the matter once and for all:

‘No one’s happy here. It’s not possible. Arre yaar, think about it, what are the things you normal people get unhappy about? I don’t mean you, but grown-ups like you – what makes them unhappy? Price-rise, children’s school-admissions, husbands’ beatings, wives’ cheatings, Hindu–Muslim riots, Indo–Pak war – outside things that settle down eventually. But for us the price rise and school admissions and beating-husbands and cheating-wives are all inside us. The riot is inside us. The war is inside us. Indo–Pak is inside us. It will never settle down. It can’t.’ (Roy, 2017, p. 23)

Here was a series of reasons, explanations cum-complain convincing in every way and conveyed in simple language that seemed to shake Aftab’s hope for happiness. Nimmo’s purpose was to utterly change the worldview of this rather confused youth. The criteria of happiness constituted in the reasons Nimmo lists for rendering them ‘incapable of happiness’ is significant on three counts. Firstly, it reveals her distrust of God by considering the creation of a transgender body as in jest or for laughter. Secondly, she dismisses any hope of happiness to be found in Khawabgah. Thirdly, Nimmo’s understanding of happiness summarizes the economic, communal, gendered and political ideals of happiness revered by Indian society. This reply by Nimmo, reported to be the only one who had completed high school and with a strong obsession for Western women’s fashion, conceived this failure of happiness on her body-world problem. For Nimmo, happiness is the self’s desire for bodily pleasure and mental delight. Since Nimmo’s sense of self was exclusively related to the body and its relation to the things external to the body only in this world, she misidentifies God as the cause of their spiritual dilemma. So, ‘her words hit Aftab with the force of physical blow’ (Roy, 2017.p. 23).

On the contrary, Razia despite her ‘un-memoried and un-anchored mind’ (Roy, 2017, p. 22), turned ‘unerringly towards government schemes’ (Roy, 2017, p. 22), to comprehend this unhappiness altogether differently. Similar to the contrast found in Nimmo’s fascination for Western women’s fashion with Razia’s devotion to the act of ‘feeding pigeons on the roof’ (Roy, 2017, p. 22), thus the good of soul noticeably hopes that happiness can be achieved in their lives. She evaluates the reality of unhappiness as a consequence of the government’s mismanagement rather than the failure of Divine creation. Razia appears to be lost to the world but believes that the possibility of happiness as within reach if the government helps them with opportunities to behave appropriately in the world. Despite their lasting bond of friendship and shared moments of happiness, Nimmo’s negation of happiness is found unacceptable by Aftab who seems to be ideologically convinced by Razia’s line of argument. Thus, begins the clash between secular and religious riots inside her soul. However, the final blow to her materialistic faith of happiness comes with the airplanes that hit the Twin Towers in New York:

One evening Anjum was upstairs in her room putting a cold compress on the Bandicoot’s hot forehead when she heard a commotion in the courtyard… She picked Zainab up and ran down the stairs…A commercial airliner had crashed into a tall building. Half of it still protruded out, hanging in mid-air like a precarious, broken toy. In moments a second plane crashed into a second building and turned into a ball of fire. The usually garrulous residents of the Khwabgah watched in dead silence as the tall buildings buckled like pillars of sand. There was smoke and white dust everywhere. Even the dust looked different – clean and foreign. Tiny people jumped out of the tall buildings and floated down like flecks of ash. It wasn’t a film, the Television People said. It was really happening. In America. In a city called New York. (Roy, 2017, pp. 25–26)

The 9/11 incident which shook the real world, also shattered Anjum’s dream land of Khawabgah where Anjum lives after moving out of Duniya.The time when the two airplanes hit the Twin towers, she was busy taking care of the young Zainab abandoned outside the stairs of mosque. The detailed description of the 9/11 incident with the ensuing political chaos is central to storyline of the novel. Utter shock and insecurity experienced by Anjum while watching the footage of the incident on TV is central to the storyline of the novel. Her visit to the holy shrine of Ajmer Sharif to ensure the safety of Zainab became the key catalyst moment of the narration. She became a humiliated victim of Gujrat riots when attacked by ‘Thirty thousand saffron parakeets with steel talons and bloodied beaks, all squawking together: Mussalman ka ek hi sthan! Qabristan ya Pakistan! Only one place for the Mussalman! The Graveyard or Pakistan!’ (Roy, 2017, p. 36) Anjum’s narrow escape of death when someone from the crowd said ‘Nahi yaar, mat maro, Hijron ka maarna apshagun hota hai. Don’t kill her, brother, killing Hijras brings bad luck’ (Roy, 2017, p. 36), she returned Khawabgah broken inside not to witness the massacre or to escape the death, but for getting an answer to the Divine purpose in creating her ‘imperfect’ body. The same identity that has made his life miserable also became the reason for her exemption from communal vengeance. Thus, the gruelling details which the reader knows about her experience remain unknown to the people around Anjum. Whenever someone questioned her about the details of incident ‘It was God’s will,’ (Roy, 2017, p. 29) remained her only reply. Suffering becomes the vehicle through which Anjum achieves spiritual transcendence, and her suffering comes to an end once transcendence and spiritual elevation are conferred.

Among the large cluster of examples of Anjum’s knowledge of God’s love, power and wisdom, the anecdote of Anjum and the blind Imam’s brief dialogue related to the funerary rituals of transgenders in the graveyard gives explicit evidence of Anjum’s knowledge of God’s. This dialogue is found in the novel’s opening chapter, ‘Where do the old birds go to die?’ providing the reader with an insight into Anjum’s knowledge of God. The blindness of the imam, who once led the prayers in the mosque, is noticeable when he asks Anjum ‘Is it true that even the Hindus among you are buried, not cremated?’(p. 5) Anjum’s answering of imam’s question with a series of questions ‘True? Is what true? What is Truth?’ (p. 5) reveals her anger for more than his curiosity of the afterlife fate of humans like her than his inquiry for truth. His physical blindness thus turns to spiritual blindness when he ‘muttered a mechanical response. ‘Sach Khuda hai. Khuda hi Sach hai’. Truth is God. God is Truth. The sort of wisdom that was available on the backs of the painted trucks that roared down the highways.’ (p. 5) The narrowness of his vision becomes further exposed when he puts another question ‘‘Tell me, you people, when you die, where do they bury you? Who bathes the bodies? Who says the prayers?’ (p. 5) Such questions communicate the opposite to his claims of knowing the truth, so provokes Anjum’s reply with another ironical question ‘Imam Sahib, when people speak of colour – red, blue, orange, when they describe the sky at sunset, or moonrise during Ramzaan – what goes through your mind?’ (p. 5) Yet Anjum’s final set of questions carries the kernel of her logic by juxtaposing the limited knowledge of the imam with the wisdom of the ‘All-seeing, Almighty One’:

‘You tell me,’ she said. ‘You’re the Imam Sahib, not me. Where do old birds go to die? Do they fall on us like stones from the sky? Do we stumble on their bodies in the streets? Do you not think that the All Seeing, Almighty One who put us on this Earth has made proper arrangements to take us away?’ (p.5)

Most convincingly, the happiest moment of her life is when Nimmo gifted her mobile phone. It was not the gadget that enthralled her but the already installed MMS of the rooster ‘who seemed to say ‘Ya Allah!’ each time he flapped his wings. Anjum was floored. Even a simple rooster knew! From that day onwards her faith deepened’ (p. 69). Her act of watching the video multiple times becomes really poignant when she exclaims to have ‘a direct line to God’ (p. 69). Her conviction of hearing about faith God’s existence even by the flapping of a birds wing thus, strengthens her happiness within the graveyard.

Concluding thoughts

This research claims that Roy’s fiction by focusing on the idea of happiness in the life of a Muslim amid all political chaos and warfare serves as a political corrective to the long-held bias against the Islamic ideology of happiness, which is negatively viewed as a threat to the world peace. In setting up Anjum’s ministry in the graveyard which ensures the peaceful co-existence of Muslims, Hindus, Christians and other ‘fallen’ members of Duniya, Roy materializes the gender-neutral, relative and integrative rather than disintegrative notions of happiness as preached by Muslim philosophy. Anjum’s faith in God never once shattered even after having undergone the most humiliating experiences of life, over the seeming cruelty of society. In contrast to Nimmo’s secular attitude towards happiness, Anjum’s faith in God testifies that seeking happiness demands faith. This research takes Anjum’s reply ‘It was God’s will,’ was all she would say’ (Roy, 2017, p. 29) as one of the novel’s deeper, more serious assertions that when an individual gets independent of the fear of death, social judgment and the disapproval of men in proportion to her dependence on God, the riots inside her body calms down and the soul starts experiencing the true happiness to the point that the graveyard turns into paradise.

Acknowledgement

This research is supported via funding from Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia under the project number (PSAU/2024/R/1445).

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Aisha Jadoon

Aisha Jadoon is currently working as Assistant Professor, Department of English at Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia. She has a PhD in English Literature from the National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad. Her doctoral research focused on the representation of divorced women in post-colonial fiction. In her present role, she is pursuing her research interests concerning the oppression of Muslim women in fiction and life writings. She is interested in Postcolonial Literature, especially in Indian/Pakistani Fiction, feminism and religion.