On the day we spoke, Arundhati Roy was under attack. A lawmaker (and Bollywood actor) from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party had tweeted that Roy be tied and dragged from an Army Jeep for her support for the freedom fighters in Kashmir. His reference connected to a grisly episode from a few days earlier, in which an Indian Army major had trussed up a civilian named Farooq Dar to the hood of his Jeep as a human shield against a stone-throwing mob. The politician has since deleted the tweet, but the pressures Roy faces in India’s constricting political and expressive space continue as dissenting authors, bloggers and academics face the wrath of the Modi Government. There is, as Roy puts it, “much terror in the air.”

It is among just these kinds of macabre realities, and of an atmosphere laden with fear, that Roy penned her much awaited new novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Taking her readers into the winding alleys of Old Delhi, where India’s increasingly beleaguered Muslim minority currently ekes out a beleaguered existence, Roy tells the intertwined stories of Anjum and Tillo, transsexuals (hijras) who also inhabit other margins. We spoke about the novel, Roy’s political writing and the task of articulating India’s complexity via her layered and multi-dimensional fiction- Rafia Zakaria

The Barnes & Noble Review: In the past couple of decades you have written mostly non-fiction. What made you turn to fiction now with Ministry of Utmost Happiness and would you call it a work of “political fiction?”

Arundhati Roy: To me everything is political. I realize that this is a cliché but it is also true. In India issues of caste, of rising cultural or religious nationalism, are in the air you breathe. If you choose to write and not write about them, then the fact that you avoid them is a very political act. There is no way you can hide your politics away in any form of literature that you choose; it is not more or less political than anything else. It (politics) is seeded in the air we are breathing now.

BNR: In your book, you refer many times and with some cynicism to “The New India,” a place fraught with strife and a rabid religious populism. What is the role of the artist in this New India? Must art turn to activism now?

AR: No, what I am saying is that all art is political, whether you are overtly aware of it or not; to avoid looking at what is going on is also political. I do not think that my novel is a manifesto that is masquerading as a story where characters are playing out an ideological map that I have drawn; it is not what I do.

BNR: The fluidity of identity and the question of “passing” are central to the book: men turn to women and then back to men, Muslims pass as Hindus and little girls are dressed as boys. Is this an argument against immutability, against the belief identity is something inherent and unshakeable?

AR: Everybody in the novel has some kind of border running through them. Anjum has the border of gender, for Tillo it is caste, for Nimmo it is Indo-Pakistan, Saddam has caste and religious conversion. Even the graveyard, where much of the action of the book is located, is some kind of border between life and death. The book is also about how, when you harden these borders, this violence of inclusion and exclusion results.

BNR: What, then, of an author’s identity? For instance, what does it mean to be a brown female Indian author who writes in English? What do you make, for instance, of cultural appropriation and what authors like Lionel Shriver have called “the right to write fiction and take on other identities”? Should the fluidity of identity or exploration trump the dynamics of power, of whiteness writing brown-ness?

AR: When you come to India you become witness to the complexity of appropriations, you see that every form of dominance and appropriation goes to the bottom, there is no pure victim and pure oppressor; a system that perpetuates itself and the oppressed are part of the project; it’s very complicated. One cannot make any declarations. As a fiction writer, your world is people and all kinds of people and you have try and do the best by them

BNR: The book is laden with loss: the loss of India’s syncretic past, the loss of people on whose graves new lives are constructed, the loss of old buildings, old ways of living, old stories. There is a sense of endangerment. Is that a reflection of how you feel about the India of now?

AR: Well, I certainly have never felt so much terror in the air, the terror of minority communities, the terror felt by people who do not support the Hindutva project, the silence, the subjugation, the cooption. I have never felt like this ever before. I am the last person who looks back with nostalgia. I know what the past was for women and for Dalits, but what is happening now is terrifying. It’s not about nostalgia; it’s more about the speed with which the idea of justice is disappearing around the corner. There used to be a sense of revolution, people were demanding equality and justice. Now justice has just become a question, Kashmir is occupied, the forests are full of soldiers, there is no clean water to drink, all of us have identity cards, the level of devastation of the land is pretty terrifying as are the ways in which people, Black Africans, Muslims, Dalits, are being lynched. It is terrifying and everyone thinks it’s a great democracy.

BNR: The novel plays great attention to the vocabulary of violence. For instance, you present the Kashmiri English alphabet constituted entirely of references to state violence and to religious extremism. You also present an array of vile insults that rain down on hijras. When words exist and cement division and subjugation, can they ever be erased, made to not exist? Can the verbal architecture of hate that they represent ever be dismantled?

AR: The thing is, this language of hate — it’s like something being dripped into our bloodstream. You just look at the language being deployed by politicians during elections, you don’t know how you can come back to any place of sanity. It was unleashed at Partition, but even then there was at least an attempt to nominally say that India was a socialist and secular republic. Now you feel that the Constitution is going to be changed, at least for those who are marginalized, who are minorities, or who are the people who don’t agree with this ideology (even if they don’t come from the oppressed class). The Government today, all of whose members belong to the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevakh Sangh) that was founded in 1925, has been moving to this idea of a Hindu nation for a while. However, 9/11 gave them impetus, and the pogrom in Gujarat, it was more brazen because it dovetailed into the Islamophobia in the rest of the world. It is so today also.

BNR: Delhi and Kashmir are both enclaves for India’s Muslims, where they eke out lives of desperation or revolution. What made you set the book in these contested spaces?

AR: It is a very different scenario for Kashmiris, because at least they are a majority where they are; there are no mobs roaming the streets and they have the dream of freedom. In the rest of India, in the villages, there is a terrifying scenario, where a person can be lynched for something like moving their cattle. They cannot respond, because the immediate consequence is collective punishment (for all members of that minority). There is great anger over dispossession and all that anger is being funneled downwards and on Dalits and Muslims. This is, of course, the way Governments win elections; they provide means via which the dispossessed can channel the anger further down, on those even more dispossessed.

BNR: Is there a parallel in America?

AR: There is a political parallel there but there is also a big difference. Trump is not supported by the institutions of Government (in the way Modi is in India) and he is not supported by the media. In India, it is deeper: lots of institutional support, no one is mocking Modi, all the chess men are in place, history and syllabi are being re-written. It is a pretty dark tunnel.

BNR: You’ve described your political essays as a “march” and your fiction as a “dance” what do you mean when you say that?

AR: All the political essays were written at a time when things were closing in, something was happening, there was military being deployed in the streets or into the forests. Every time I wrote one I would say I am not writing another one, yet you cannot keep quiet and then again you get into trouble. When I write political essays, my body is different; it’s a body of a fighting force. When I write fiction I am never in a hurry, never trying to write anything necessary. In writing (this book) over the last ten years, and all these people (characters) have lived with me, I have been keen to make sure to love them even in the wicked world. I am not interested in timeliness; it is a more dreamy and beautiful process. When I was writing this book, what I wanted to do was look at a story like the map of a great city, the whole of it, and then never walk past anybody, sit down in places or go down a blind alley. I wanted to make the background, the foreground and the city a person, to not be frightened of politics and yet to not submit to some idiotic template or some chess men character. Ministry of Utmost Happiness is the product of that experiment. All the characters are real to me and in that sense the book is like a tree that has been nourished by what I know.

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Lisa Ko’s first novel, The Leavers, has already won the PEN/Bellweather Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, an honor it surely deserves for its depiction of the tribulations of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Beyond that, and perhaps even more admirable, it is an exceptionally well written, fully realized work of art portraying the circumstances and inner worlds — the motives and emotional weather — of its two central characters. They are Peilan Guo, a woman who has paid to be smuggled into the U.S. from Fujian Province, China, and her American-born son, Deming.

Restless, ambitious, and bold — and pregnant by a boy from her village — Peilan leaves China, unable to bear the prospect of living out her days in a rural backwater, married to a man with whom she has little in common. She is one of the first women from her village to take this drastic and dangerous step, not the least of its perils being the $47,000 debt she has to repay to loan sharks who fund these ventures. She ends up in New York with no language, no skills, a child on the way, and the pressure of twice-monthly payments to people who do not mess around. Ceaseless effort and determination get Peilan, now called Polly, through her first couple of years, during which she lives in worse-than-dormitory conditions, works in a sweatshop for long hours, and, in time, juggles the baby with all that. Eventually, it becomes impossible to hold a job and keep her child, so she, like many other Chinese women, she sends her son, now a year old, back to China to be raised, in her case, by her widowed father. When, five years later, the old man dies, Peilan arranges for six-year-old Deming to be sent back to the U.S.

The novel, which moves back and forth through time, filling in the lives of mother and son, begins with this ominous sentence: “The day before Deming Guo saw his mother for the last time, she surprised him at school.” Deming is eleven, and he and Polly have been living in a cramped, decaying apartment in the Bronx with Polly’s lover, Leon, his sister, Vivian, and her son, Michael, who is about Deming’s age. The adults labor at jobs legal workers disdain: Polly absorbing the abuse and toxic fumes of a nail salon, her hands eaten by corrosive solvents; Leon, wearing out his body working in a slaughterhouse, lugging around and processing meat carcasses; and Vivian, cleaning apartments and sewing piecework for a pittance.

Today, Deming is hoping his mother won’t discover that he has been given detention. All he wants is to be back at the apartment “in front of the television, where, in the safety of a laugh track, he didn’t have to worry about letting anyone down.” On the way home they argue about Polly’s plans to move both of them to Florida — which is to say, away from New York, where he now feels at home. When his mother fails to return from work the next day, he believes it’s his fault, that he has, indeed, let her down. Just what happened to Polly is revealed only much later, to both her son and the reader. I will say only that her story, which occupies a good portion of the novel, is one of many shadings and much complexity of character.

After a few months living with Leon, Vivian, and Michael, Deming is uprooted again, adopted by a childless, middle-aged white couple, Peter and Kay Wilkinson, who live in Upstate New York. They both teach at a university and are worthy and well meaning, but perhaps not entirely aware of who Deming is — as neither, increasingly, is he. His confusion is only aggravated by his new parents telling him his name is now Daniel Wilkinson, the change meant to help him fit into a community in which he is the sole Asian.

Throughout the novel, Ko builds on Deming/Daniel’s perplexity about his identity, his sense of abandonment, and his futile, self-immolating attempts to appease people. He grows into a young man who knows he is disappointing his adoptive parents through his lack of interest in or aptitude for academic learning: his sporadic attempts to placate them only leave both him and them frustrated. The only thing he is really good at and truly interested in, is music: playing the guitar. But here too – undermined by the anxieties set in train by his early abandonment — he manages to let down another friend.

He becomes addicted to online poker and racks up horrendous debt. Gambling and the mystery of luck and contingency have a special attraction for Deming, for he has, from a young age, been fascinated almost to obsession with the idea of the other lives he might have led had fate dealt a different card at any juncture. A sense of randomness underlies his feeling of uncertain, ungrounded identity: “He could be living in Sunset Park, or in the Bronx, or Florida or some place he’d never heard of. He had imagined his doppelgangers living the lives he hadn’t, in different apartments and houses and cities and towns, with different sets of parents, different languages.”

All this begins to sound depressing as hell, but Ko is so psychologically penetrating, so acute in her passing observations and deft in the quick views she affords of her characters’ inner lives and surroundings, that her skill and empathy give real joy. For one thing, she shows aspects of the world that those who were born to security and material comfort will not even notice. Here, as just one example, is a character who has been used to the crudest form of immigrant life but who has finally settled in affluence: “There was very little sound in our apartment, only the refrigerator hum and other vague whirrings that powered the constant pleasantry of the place, keeping our life steady and moderate.”

I don’t think it’s going to far to reveal that matters improve for Deming — and for his mother — in a believable and satisfying way. There is an element, however, that will leave the reader’s blood boiling, and that is Ko’s depiction of a detention camp for illegal immigrants in Texas, a place she calls Ardsleyville. This hell-on-earth — of crowded Kevlar tents, foul food, inadequate plumbing, arbitrary, cruel punishments, and almost nonexistent access to medical or legal assistance — is clearly based on Willacy County Correctional Center in Raymondville, Texas, a privately run “tent city” in which almost 3,000 undocumented immigrants were detained behind chain-link fences topped with razor wire. It was closed down in 2015 after a protest by inmates erupted into a riot that destroyed much of the facility. Still, the times being what they are, this place of horror seems most likely to be rebuilt and opened again. Reminding us to be alert to such renewed outrages is just one of the achievements of this fine novel.

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