Roy & Sejpalgreat metropoles in my part of the world—ancient, modern, planned
and unplanned. A story with highways and narrow alleys, old courtyards,
new freeways. A story in which you would get lost and have to find your
way back. A story that a reader would have to live inside, not consume.
A story in which I tried not to walk past people without stopping for a
smoke and a quick hello. One in which even the minor characters tell
you their names, their stories, where they came from, and where they
wish to go.
I agree, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is fragmented, urgent—I
love the idea of a novel written over almost ten years being urgent—but
I wouldn’t call it bleak. Most of the characters, after all, are ordinary
folks who refuse to surrender to the bleakness that is all around them,
who insist on all kinds of fragile love and humor and vulgarity, which
all thrive stubbornly in the most unexpected places. In the lives of the
characters in both books, love, sorrow, despair, and hope are so tightly
intertwined, and so transient, I am not sure I know which novel of the
two is bleaker and which more hopeful.
I don’t think in some of the categories in which your question is
posed to me. For example, I don’t understand what a “global” novel is.
I think of both my novels as so very, very local. I am surprised by how
easily they have traveled across cultures and languages. Both have been
translated into more than forty languages—but does that make them
“global” or just universal? And then I wonder about the term postcolonial.
I have often used it, too, but is colonialism really post-? Both novels, in
different ways, reflect on this question. So many kinds of entrenched
and unrecognized colonialisms still exist. Aren’t we letting them off
the hook? Even “Indian English fiction” is, on the face of it, a pretty
obvious category. But what does it really mean? The boundaries of the
country we call India were arbitrarily drawn by the British. What is
“Indian English”? Is it different from Pakistani English or Bangladeshi