\n\u201cUnless fiction becomes disobedient, it will become irrelevant,\u201d Roy told Books and Arts.
\nThe above might be an aesthetic manifesto, but it\u2019s also the rule by which Roy lives her life.
\nWith nonfiction titles ranging from The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2002) to Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014) Roy has been busy employing her hypodermic intellect and elastic prose to take on all manner of social injustice.
\nShe\u2019s been charged with sedition and faced obscenity trials. All the while, devotees of The God of Small Things have been waiting with baited breath.
\nRoy, whose arrival on the world stage was sudden and jarring, said the expectations put on her to be a bestseller-writing machine turned her off the craft.
\n\u201cTo put something as profound, as wonderful as a novel onto a conveyer belt was just not something I was prepared to do,\u201d she said.
\nBut sometimes a group of characters walks into your head and refuses to be ignored.
\n\u201cThey [the characters] just ganged up on me and they were like \u2018do it!\u2019\u201d
\nA thousand things at once
\nThe result of Roy\u2019s two-decade break is The Ministry of Utmost Happiness \u2014 over 400 pages of exuberant polyphony.
\nThe novel begins with the story of Anjum, a hijra: someone who identifies as neither fully male nor female.
\nAnjum\u2019s story is told in the sensuous, lilting tone that made Roy famous in the 90s.
\nBut from there the novel breaks out in all kinds of directions, taking in the lives of a number of outcast and eccentric people.
\nStylistically too, the book contains multitudes, from letters to abstract ruminations to sections approaching the political thriller genre.
\nRoy said it was the only ways she could accurately convey the sensation of living now.
\n\u201cYou\u2019re getting strange text messages on your phone, there\u2019s TV going, there\u2019s all kinds of things going on.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s [life] all fractured, there\u2019s never one feeling, it\u2019s a thousand things at once.\u201d
\nIncendiary borders
\nThe conceit of fracturing might be the novel\u2019s central theme: its characters are split by social and personal strata, whether it be caste, gender or religion.
\n\u201cAll the characters in this book are people who have some kind of incendiary border running through them,\u201d Roy said.
\n\u201cShe\u2019s a character like the others, very unique, very individual.\u201d Roy insists this hybridity goes to the very heart of contemporary Indian culture.
\n\u201cThere\u2019s all these languages that we live with all the time in India, nothing happens in one language,\u201d she said.
\n\u201cHow do you find a way of absorbing those cadences and the wisdom of people who are thinking and fighting and praying in different languages?
\n\u201cYou can\u2019t do it in some obedient way.\u201d
\nDespite its formal experimentation and massive scope, the novel never really abandons Roy\u2019s sensitive, altruistic and humane view of the world.
\n\u201cSome people assume that the name of the novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, is satirical, and that it\u2019s really about terribly sad things,\u201d Roy said.
\n\u201cBut it\u2019s not satirical, because I do believe that the most radical thing the human race can do is to redefine the recipe for happiness that\u2019s been handed down to us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"