74 pages • 2 hours read
Arundhati RoyThe Ministry Of Utmost Happiness
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 7 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Landlord”
The narrative switches to the first person as a man later identified as Biplab Dasgupta takes over. Dasgupta is an Indian intelligence officer who is home in Delhi on leave. While there, he visits a house he rents to various tenants, one of whom informs him that the upstairs tenant, whom she describes as “not a normal person,” has left as a result of something involving “a baby and the police” (153).
Dasgupta manage to get into the upstairs apartment, revealing that he has been in love with the woman living there—S. Tilottama or “Tilo”—since they were both in college three decades ago. He and a fellow history major, Nagaraj Hariharan (“Naga”), were cast in a play, and Tilo was an architectural student working on the set and lighting. Dasgupta was immediately fascinated by Tilo, despite her aloofness and apparent disinterest in her appearance and manners: “The complete absence of a desire to please, or to put someone at their ease, could, in a less vulnerable person, have been construed as arrogance. In her it came across as a kind of reckless aloneness” (158). Both Naga—”boisterous, witty,” and “a great showman” (161)—and an architectural student named Musa Yeswi shared Dasgupta’s love for Tilo.
After school, the students went their separate ways: Musa returned to his home in Kashmir, Tilo joined an architectural firm, Dasgupta joined the Bureau of Intelligence, and Naga went through “many transitions from an irreverent, iconoclastic student to an unemployable intellectual on the radical Left, to being a passionate advocate of the Palestinian cause […] to mainstream journalism” (166). It was through his work in journalism that he ended up reconnecting with Dasgupta, who asked him to spin a story in the government’s favor. Naga agreed because Dasgupta had previously helped out an ex of his, but over time he began to move away from his leftist roots in earnest.
Not long after Dasgupta and Naga began their “collaboration” (167), they ran into Tilo. Dasgupta, who was posted in Kashmir, received a call from a notoriously bloodthirsty army officer named Amrik Singh. Sing explained that a woman who had been captured during a raid had asked for Dasgupta and also called him “Garson Hobart”—Tilo’s old nickname for him. Realizing who the woman must be, Dasgupta concluded that the “Commander Gulrez” killed during the same raid must have been Musa, who became a separatist after the Indian Army killed his wife and daughter.
Dasgupta asked Naga, who was in Kashmir on journalistic assignment, to fetch Tilo from army headquarters. Naga did, and Dasgupta received word a few weeks later that he and Tilo were getting married. At the wedding, Dasgupta was shocked by Tilo’s appearance; her head had been shaved while she was in custody, and she looked broken: “Naga held Tilo’s hand right through the evening. Musa’s ghost was wedged between them. […] It was as though the three of them were getting married” (188).
After the wedding, Dasgupta largely lost touch with the couple. Fourteen years later, however, Tilo abruptly contacted Dasgupta about an apartment he was renting out, saying she needed an office for her work as a graphic designer; in reality, she was separating from Naga, and spent the next four years living in the apartment.
This brings the story up to the narrative present, where Dasgupta drinks from a bottle of whiskey and explores Tilo’s apartment. Here, he finds papers that include an account of police brutality and corruption, and two framed photos: one is of a dead child who has been shot through the head, and the other is of a young man standing on a houseboat with flowers tucked behind his ears and two kittens “crouching in the bowl of his large hands” (194). Dasgupta also discovers several photos of Amrik Singh in various disguises, as well as a case file from California explaining that Singh and his wife Loveleen sought political asylum in the United States. The file contains statements by both Singh and Loveleen, the latter of whom alleges that the Indian police tortured her. It also alludes to a complaint of domestic abuse that Loveleen eventually withdrew, and Dasgupta notes that Singh killed himself, his wife, and his sons a few months after the asylum case was filed.
Now drunk and upset, Dasgupta falls into an uneasy sleep, mistaking a visit by Saddam Hussain and Anjum for a dream; when the two appear at the door and say they have come to collect Tilo’s things, Dasgupta allows them to do so. After they leave, he finds a list of words related to the Kashmiri occupation and insurgency scrawled in a cupboard. He wonders why Tilo is “still wallowing in this old story” (214) and wishes he were back on assignment in Kabul.
Chapter 7 Analysis
Chapter 7 marks a sharp departure from the novel’s earlier chapters, introducing readers to an entirely new set of characters. In some ways, this shift is significant because it is so abrupt. One central them in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness concerns division and ambiguity, and the fragmented structure of the novel underscores the difficulty of piecing together widely different and often contradictory stories into one narrative. This also helps explain Roy’s reliance throughout this chapter on unusual forms of narrative (e.g. the case report on Amrik Singh). These provide perspectives on the novel’s themes and events that differ from what a more conventional narrative offers; Tilo’s “Kashmiri-English Alphabet,” for instance, often juxtaposes words in ways that capture the strangeness and horror of life in Kashmir. For example, the “R” entry contains both matter-of-fact descriptions of brutality (“rape”) as well as the jargon and euphemisms that aim to obscure that brutality—”RPG,” which, as Tilo notes, stands for “rocket propelled grenade” (213). The disjointed feeling of the novel speaks to what Tilo later describes as the problem of “tell[ing] a shattered story” (442)—accurately reflecting the experiences of broken people and societies.
Furthermore, this section of the story does continue to explore the other themes Roy establishes in the novel’s first chapters. In many ways, the struggle for independence in Kashmir intersects with questions of modernization and India’s relationship with the Western world. Dasgupta, for instance, says the following about the movie theater the Indian Army now uses as an interrogation center:
We hadn’t shut down a functioning cinema hall and turned it into an interrogation center. The Shiraz had been shut down years ago by an outfit called the Allah Tigers. It ordered the closing of all cinema halls, liquor shops and bars as being un-Islamic and ‘vehicles of India’s cultural aggression’ (177).
The implication, which Musa confirms later in the novel, is that some Kashmiris have adopted extremist interpretations of Islam less for religious reasons and more as a refutation of cultural imperialism, which is reshaping Indian society and which India is in turn bringing to Kashmir. The fact that the movie theater ends up being used as a place to imprison and torture Kashmiris suggests that the Tigers were right: The Indian government’s stance toward Kashmir was and is “aggressive.” However, the changes the movie theater undergoes can also be read as a tongue-in-cheek reminder that some forms of imperialism are more violent than others; in trying to remove all Indian influence from Kashmir, the Tigers have inadvertently made it more entrenched and brutal.
One of the most significant ways this chapter does diverge from what preceded it—specifically, that it’s narrated in the first person. In fact, excluding texts-within-the-text like Bhartiya’s “News & Views,” the chapters told by Dasgupta are the only sections of the novel written in the first person. This choice is significant given that Dasgupta’s perspective on the events surrounding Tilo’s arrest eventually proves to be incomplete and inaccurate; the first version of the story that Roy provides is the wrong one. This partly reflects the novel’s interest in how stories are told and retold, but it may also be a commentary on the fact that Dasgupta is, as he puts it, a “tragedy-less man […] [an] upper-caste, upper-class oppressor from every angle” (198). He is one of the few characters in the novel who is not marginalized by race, sex, ethnicity, religion, or any other factor, so the fact that he alone speaks directly to the reader raises questions about who is able to speak and be heard in India.
