20-year wait for Arundhati Roy's 'next' novel is (almost) over. Can we deal with it?
Many of us have been waiting for a long time to read what she writes next.
She has kept us guessing, meanwhile flooding the Indian intellectual discourse with her fiery takedown of nasty (hyper)nationalism and corrupt Big Capital. She spoke out, penned firebrand editorials, did books that became must read expositions of crony capitalism, casteism, the RSS-BJP factory production of Hindutva and other "newsy" stuff.
But where was Arundhati Roy's "second novel"?
For a good two decades, it was nowhere but in the dreams and fantasies of the global literati. It had acquired a mythical status, inasmuch as it was yearned for, almost like a lover. A twenty-year wait later, almost like Edmond Dante of The Count of Monte Christo, the Book will finally be with us.
Next year.
20 years since the Booker prize-winning blockbuster debut - The God of Small Things - has Arundhati Roy finally allowed her publishers to announce that her second novel, intriguingly titled The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, will be published in 2017.
Hamish Hamilton UK and Penguin India are the publishers.
Indeed it's a landmark literary development. At a time when books are done, not written, and are launched, not read, Roy took an astronomical 20 years to let it out from her. It's almost as if she was fiercely guarding it inside, nursing that second child, allowing it to become a literary combatant well-versed to take on the million ideological adversaries who will be erected in its way, trashing and hailing it at once, utterly flummoxed by its brash Arundhati Roy-ness.
"I am glad to report that the mad souls (even the wicked ones) in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness have found a way into the world, and that I have found my publishers," said Roy in the publicity email sent out on Monday afternoon.
There they were - the mad souls, the wicked ones. Roy's wickedness, to be precise, lies in her ability to unnerve everyone at once. According to Mayank Austen Soofi, her most prolific photographic diarist and perhaps a great friend, she's a "literary terrorist". He's right.
The God of Small Things, the peg on which her infinite global superstardom once hung, now seems like a prefatory note only. The fragile, delicately pictured world of Rahel and Estha puncturing the bloody narcissism of Keralite Communists now lightyears away.
Nevertheless, GoST is the point zero of a phenomenon called Arundhati Roy. She may not agree, of course.
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| Arundhati Roy. [Photo credit: Mayank Austen Soofi] |
In her 1998 essay The End of Imagination, Roy reflected on the Big Bomb (it was right after India's second nuclear test at Pokhran) and the Big Fame, both part of that endless circuit of consumption, global capital. In lines that seem prescient even after 19 years, she wrote:
"If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti- Hindu and anti-national, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I am a citizen of the earth. I own no territory. I have no flag. I'm female, but have nothing against eunuchs. My policies are simple. I'm willing to sign any nuclear non-proliferation treaty or nuclear test ban treaty that's going. Immigrants are welcome. You can help me design our flag. My world has died. And I write to mourn its passing. India's nuclear tests, the manner in which they were conducted, the euphoria with which they have been greeted (by us) is indefensible. To me, it signifies dreadful things. The end of imagination."
And:
"Last year I was one of the items being paraded in the media's end-of-the-year National Pride Parade. Among the others, much to my mortification, were a bomb-maker and an international beauty queen. Each time a beaming person stopped me on the street and said 'You have made India proud' (referring to the prize I won, not the book I wrote), I felt a little uneasy. It frightened me then and it terrifies me now, because I know how easily that swell, that tide of emotion, can turn against me. Perhaps the time for that has come."
In a way, Roy has been self-arsoning her accidental, yet richly-deserved "fame", liquidating it at the altar of blinding intellectual honesty. Whether it's her account of "Walking with the Comrades" in the jungles of Dantewada, or tearing apart the big American rationale for Iraq-Afghanistan Wars, and now, co-writing that unsayable Snowden treatise in Things That Can And Cannot Be Said with John Cusack, Roy stepped on landmines each and every time, blowing herself up along with the grand narratives that had held those bastions of repression together.
By not writing her own book, her second novel, what the world expected her to write, she rebelled against her own biography, her stardom, her amazing brilliance, tested her "fans" like a teasing goddess of unsurpassed power. She flirted with being a "one-book-wonder", kept her writer friends hanging, neglected their sage advice and did what she wanted.
She returned her national award late last year, adding her name to the "award wapsi" campaign led by other prominent Indian writers and artists to protest against the "climate of intolerance". Like a wilful, precocious, feisty little girl who'll never learn manners, Roy kept us twiddling our predictable thumbs.
Now that her "next" is really not a figment of imagination, that The Ministry of Utmost Happiness will soon see the light of the day and illuminate dark recesses of our unelectrified minds, can we handle it?
Can we absorb, digest, accept, embrace an Arundhati Roy novel at a time when supporting Pakistani actors for their right to travel and work freely without doling out stringent national condemnations can threaten our very lives? When Kashmir is in a lockdown that is on its 90th day, and a bararge of medical, rapey metaphors are being peddled to prove one's patriotism. When a mere cartoon can land us in jail, and the meat in our refrigerator can see us lynched to death? When our religion and caste hang like mythical albatrosses around our necks and when TV studios wage wars that are more poisonous and dangerous than the blood-bullet-bang-border games set off periodically as deflection techniques.
Arundhati Roy's novel is sure to be a Pandora's Box of deeply unsettling questions, may be a few extremely unpalatable answers. The prognosis will be positive as she unveils her prescription like a 21st century doctor and saint, the feral prophet of unapologetic intellectual inquiry, squarely calling out the ideological cancer spreading all across the body of the nation.
How do we cope with Arundhati Roy's next?