Description

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on a panoramic yet intimate journey across the Indian subcontinent, following a varied cast of characters who become swept up in Kashmir’s fight for independence. The tale begins with Anjum, a hijra, unrolling a threadbare Persian carpet in a city graveyard she calls home. Then there is Musa, a Kashmiri freedom fighter; Tilo, his lover; his landlord, a former suitor, now an intelligence officer posted to Kabul; and the two Miss Jebeens—the first a child born in Srinagar and buried in its overcrowded Martyrs’ Graveyard, the second found at midnight, abandoned on a concrete sidewalk in the heart of New Delhi. As this shimmering, deeply humane novel braids these lives together, it reinvents what a novel can do and can be.