The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Roy's sprawling novel gathers India's outcasts around Anjum, a hijra who leaves her communal household to make a home, and a guesthouse, in an Old Delhi graveyard, while the war in Kashmir sends its wounded into the story. Delhi is the heart: the House of Dreams in the old city, the graveyard where Anjum builds her Jannat Guest House, the protest ground of Jantar Mantar, and the great Jama Masjid; the Kashmir Valley runs alongside as the wound outside the setting.

Anjum

The Khwabgah, Old Delhi

Part 1

Born Aftab and becoming Anjum, she finds a place among the hijras of the Khwabgah in the old city, a fragile sanctuary of the in-between. When violence and grief drive her out, she carries the old city's layered, wounded history with her into a stranger refuge.

Part 1

inferred Anjum grows up and lives for years in the Khwabgah, the House of Dreams, a hijra household in the lanes of Old Delhi near the Jama Masjid; the specific house is invented and sited in that real old-city quarter.

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Anjum

The graveyard (Jannat Guest House)

Part 1

Among the tombs Anjum raises a guesthouse and gathers a chosen family of the city's rejected, turning a place of death into a strange paradise. The graveyard community, open to all the discarded, is Roy's central image of a shelter built by those the nation has thrown away.

Part 1

inferred Anjum leaves the Khwabgah to live in a Delhi graveyard, where she gradually builds rooms among the graves into the Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services; sited at a graveyard in the real city.

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