The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness

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