How to Tell a Shattered Story
Cover image: Penguin. For the past two months, the thousand-year-old city of Delhi has been under a shroud of toxic smog. About ten times more polluted than Beijing, Delhi’s air is so poisonous that schools are often shut down. On the roads, car headlights twinkle behind the smoke like distant stars. If you step out wearing an air filter mask (“Useless,” the doctors say) you will glimpse—piecemeal—the facades of Delhi’s age-old tombs levitating in the haze.
Like Delhi mausoleums appearing like pieces of a jigsaw in the haze, graves form the framework of Arundhati Roy’s latest novel. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is an elegy to graveyards and the disenfranchised they have been home to for millennia; to the unknown dead, the dying alive, and those so dispossessed that they might as well be nonexistent. The book is a dirge. Once this becomes apparent, burials show their faces everywhere in its
