With the last seeking shelter in love

Arundhati Roy, Il ministero della suprema felicità,
[The Ministry of Supreme Happiness], Guanda

I loved Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (Booker Prize winner in 1997). A few months ago, I received another book of hers from 2017 as a gift. In the twenty years between the two books, the author was an uncomfortable and controversial figure in India, but she never left her native New Delhi. After the first few pages, I realised that this too is a challenging book, to be tackled slowly, not least because the plot is complex and intricate and once again takes us among the lowliest. To begin, we are first among the Hijras of Delhi, with Anjum, who thought she was a boy and then discovered she could also be a woman, and after the 2002 Guyarat anti-Muslim clashes takes refuge in a cemetery. Among the people who come to her is the mysterious Tilo who will lead us, tracing her past, to Kashmir and the country's desire for independence. The story grips the reader, and you wish the book would never end. The characters find themselves at the centre of the eternal challenge between good and evil. In the midst of so much violence and repression, there is a place for love, for caring, for bonding across the boundaries of ethnicity, religion and gender and truly find that supreme happiness referred to in the title.