Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

10. How is parenthood, and, more specifically, motherhood, explored in the novel? Discuss in particular the mother-child bonds that Anjum, Tilo, and both Miss Jebeens experience.

11. How is religion a defining feature for characters in the novel and a main source of conflict in the society depicted? How do the differing beliefs and political loyalties affect events that transpire in the novel’s different geographical areas of conflict?

12. What role does gender play in the novel, in terms of how characters are expected and allowed to behave as well as how they respond to certain emotions, events, and treatments? Is gender the primary way a person identifies instead of by religion, political party, ethnicity/country of origin, or even profession?

13. The Landlord’s chapters are the only sections written in the first person. How does that point of view color your understanding of the relationship among him, Tilo, Naga, and Musa, including the knowledge that they met on the set of a play? What makes this web of love so intricate, and how does the war intensify their bonds even as it threatens to shatter them?

14. Musa is one character whose identity must be repressed in various ways to ensure his safety, and even his most arduous disguises are not always successful. What does his struggle and that of others in similar situations (people who disappear and/or transform into others) suggest about the mutability of one’s identity — whether it be by necessity or by organic change? How might you interpret the line “Only the dead are free” in that context (this page)?

15. Discuss the lines of poetry that Tilo writes the end of the book, “How / to / tell / a / shattered / story? / By / slowly / becoming / everybody. /No. / By slowly becoming everything” (this page). How do the main characters — Tilo, Musa, Naga, and Anjum — embody the idea of telling a story through the assimilation of its many fragments?

16. By the end of the novel, how did you interpret the meaning of its title?

Suggested Reading

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

Motherfucker sisterfucker your mother’s cunt your sister’s cock.

O God, thou art the giver of life / Remover of pain and sorrow / Bestower of happiness / O Creator of the Universe / May we receive thy supreme sin-destroying light / May thou guide our intellect in the right direction

She died in her cage, the little bird, / These words she left for her captor— / Please take the spring harvest / And shove it up your gilded arse