The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and Chronicle of a Last Summer

TWO CHEERS FOR TWO FICTIONAL SPILLOVERS

(On a curious look into The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundahthi Roy and Chronicle of a Last Summer by Yasmine El Rashidi.)

Fazal Rahman

Reading two flawed masterpieces back to back is definitely a curious accident. Two books, two worlds, sharing some features in their own unique fashions, one of them familiar to all, yet one cannot fail to appreciate a delightful coincidence when it offers itself: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundahthi Roy and Chronicle of a Last Summer by the Egyptian writer Yasmine El Rashidi.

MoUH is a pan-Indian novel, taking in its stride almost all the battle-fronts boiling up in present day India, keeping in the back ground its history right from Partition-cum- Independence resulting in the birth of two nations, proceeding through the birth of a third in the form of Bengla Desh, the Emergency, the anti- Sikh pogroms, the rise of the saffron storm, the Babri masjid demolition, the Gujarat genocide, the Hazare movement and the Modi- ascendancy. Just 75 pages into the novel and you have already been through all these epochs and, the author being who she is, we are already on the lookout for other action fronts, namely, the vibrant popular uprisings in the country. Thus, the action moves to Kashmir, the cauldron of eternal unrest in India, and takes on several of the major characters attached to the enigmatic Tilo, and exposes the folly that is the military solution to a politically spawned human tragedy. Past two third into the novel we begin to ask: where is Bastar? And lo, here we go: So Long a Letter (apologies to Mariama Ba), this time from a mother-turned-Maoist-turned-martyr, seeking the well-being of the child that is mainly a stand-in to connect these widely, and wildly, divergent worlds. One feels, perhaps, there is one singular let-down in the case of the north-east conflict which alone has not received any fictionalized aliases in the novel. Or, am I wrong? Did I skip a clue? Despite all these artful pen-strokes, this is indeed a novel that is going to be the definitive book so far in recording the many post-Independence historical traumas of the country with a marked pan-Indian outlook.

The other book I stumbled upon right after MoUH was Chronicle of a Last Summer by Yasmineh El Rashidi, the debut novel by the much younger writer from Egypt. This one is less spacial, in fact there is one single locality where the entire action takes place, namely, the summer-scorched Cairo of three decades from 1984 to 2014. But what it lacks in spacial diversity it gains in larger temporal magnitude, taking in its stride the history of modern Egypt from the times of King Fuad in the early years of the twentieth century right to the post- Arab Spring El Sisi regime. While the pre- Nasser period is kept in remote back ground, the power transitions since have been dealt with as intimately connected to the action. Mostly violent, these transitions encompass every such epochs from the one that caused the power shift from Nasser to Sadat, whose assassination then ushered in the Mubarak regime. The rampant corruption and unrest during the period led to the rift between the Brotherhood and the Communists and, also, the State and, in tune with popular uprisings elsewhere in the Arab world, accelerated the Revolution. All these turbulent epochs are mirrored in the fate of a singular, sprawling family in which the protagonist comes of the age, from a six-years old naive girl-child to a film-maker-turned- writer in her 30's, sharing spiritual insights into the political zombie-land that was Egypt, with her father-figure uncle and idealist left-activist cousin, who, like her long-exiled Baba, has been through terrible phases of State repression and protracted imprisonment. Yet, despite all the hardships he had endured, cousin Dido still stands for political engagement and despises the protagonist's stance of inaction and mute witness, including the writer’s career which he thinks has no place in his homeland, though he is a voracious reader himself. In fact, the key question the novel posits is about the disguise of complicity in the form of silence. And yet, in the novel, the line between idealistic revolution and anarchy born of frustration is very much thin indeed.

The brief over view above illuminates certain similarities between the two novels. In all, it comes to this: both the writers are deeply and passionately involved with the fate of their respective countries and do not shy away from calling a spade a spade. Arundhathi Roy is perhaps the most eloquent, sharp and fearless critic of Indian polity today with a no-nonsense whiplash face-à-face with powers that be, be it the Supreme Court or the very Empire seated in Washington DC. Equipped with the legacy of a gem of a novel that one is tempted to call, after the fashion of her latest offering, 'The Alchemy of Utmost Aesthetics', she had in waiting a world of readers when she announced her second. And, knowing her unflinching intellectual and political engagements in the issues raging anywhere in the country during the two decades between GoST and MoUH, none had any doubts whatsoever about what she would come up with for subject matter. And yes, she has delivered. Perhaps a little too much. Like a cartographic representation of the other India you wouldn't see in tourist manuals. The same holds true in the case of the other novel in question as well. Chronicle of a Last Summer is only one third of Arundhathi Roy's book in length, and is told in one single narrator perspective as opposed to the many character- perspectives of the bigger one. The gender issues addressed in both novels are drastically different since MoUH takes in its ambit the limitless gender tensions embodied in the first protagonist Anjum's hijra community, while the protagonist’s predicament in CoLS is defined by the repressive attitudes of a patriarchal society towards women and girl child. Nonetheless, the novel is not any less ambitious. Yasmine El Rashidi is at pains to create a convincing narrative voice to the protagonist since, as a girl child, she is denied of opportunities available to her male counterparts in political engagements. The mute-witness stance of the protagonist which cousin Dido deplores is therefore more of a social making than any personal trait. As a journalist who grew up in Cairo, Yasmine El Rashidi knew the social-political forces that informed the unrest in the country and, being a woman, she also knew how that muteness in a girl child was formed. Throughout the novel, under the pressures of creating the picture of a people rendered helpless witnesses to a system marked by out-and-out corruption and repression, the focus falls on perceived expositions of political situations and thus politics overrides fiction. The result is that fictional possibilities by way of characterization or creating an emotionally engaging world that the family situation abundantly offers are largely ignored. It does succeed in educating the naive protagonist both in the awed family tradition and in the issues in the country at large, but teaching history, or, for that matter, teaching anything, doesn't make good fiction. Clearly another case of a flawed fictional ambition.

The moral: too much anger spoils poetry.

(08.07.2017)