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10 June 2017

It has been 20 years since Arundhati Roy's Booker Prize winning debut The God of Small Things was published, so the arrival of her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, is the cause of considerable excitement. As ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 4 makes it available as a , what do we need to know about this outspoken and internationally acclaimed author?

The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness is Arundhati Roy's first novel since her celebrated debut , which won the Booker Prize in 1997. This new novel takes us on a mesmerising journey from Old Delhi to Kashmir and back, and the lives of a cast of vivid characters are intimately interwoven.

When you read the novel or listen to it as our Book at Bedtime, you'll be introduced to a range of places, characters, events and expressions, in English and Urdu.

Without giving away too much, we can say that an important aspect of the story involves the Indian Hijra community and the central character, Anjum's, place within it.

It’s extremely rare as an abridger to meet the author whose work you are about to tackle, especially the day before you begin. But I was lucky enough to be at a pre-launch event for The Ministry of Utmost Happiness with the producer Liz Allard and we were introduced. Arundhati Roy, bright-eyed and disarming, was understandably wary. I mentioned a small section of the novel that might go. She held up her hand with a smile. ‘Don’t tell me. Please - I don’t want to know.’

It’s a heavy responsibility to fillet a writer’s work. My job is to retell the story for the listener in the writer’s words, keeping the best bits, staying true to the atmosphere, the meaning, the rhythms of the original. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness contains many stories - scores of them - it has glimpses of India’s past and a powerful recreation of her present. It has beauty, humour, politics, tension and a tender love story. The characters are built up from small details, while at the same time the great arc of their lives is revealed. How on earth to get all that into 15 X 15 minute episodes?

It requires a certain steeliness. For the first five episodes I needed to keep the character of Anjum, and her life story, at the forefront and allow the other characters – her mother and father, the other Hijras in the Khwabgah – to fall away. Stories of shrines, of the red fort in Delhi, of the international art world and the downtrodden of India fell prey to the blue pencil or were conjured up in a few brief sentences that cried out to stay. I tried to keep as much as I could. I tried to keep the flavor of India, the kaleidoscopic vision of Old Delhi alive.

Only then the novel abruptly veers from the story of Anjum to follow another path. In the second week of the abridgement we switch to a story of Kashmir and four characters Tilo, Musa, Biplab and Naga. It is a love story, but also so much more. A lament for the injustices in Kashmir; an anger at the war waged there, a feeling for the beauty of the place and people. I have had to cut stories that digress from the main thrust and at the same time keep Anjum – whenever she appears – in the listeners’ minds.

Plot comes to the fore but description, motive, complexity must somehow remain. I’m always aware that an actor’s reading gives the author’s words new potency and the narrative and the dialogue are brought vividly to life. In the end I trusted to that and to the undeniable spell that Arundhati Roy weaves with her iridescent prose and magical set pieces. The abridgement is a slimmed-down version, the book after a diet perhaps, but a story and a listening experience that I hope stands very much on its own.

In Episode 5, Anjum is in Delhi amongst the political protesters at the , with her friend who goes by the nickname of ‘Saddam Hussein’. First of all though, there is a nativity.

In our preview clip, you can hear Indira Varma read from the opening of Episode 5:

"She appeared quite suddenly, a little after midnight. No angels sang, no wise men brought gifts. But a million stars rose in the east to herald her arrival. One moment she wasn’t there, and the next – there she was on the concrete pavement, in a crib of litter: silver cigarette foil, a few plastic bags and empty packets of Uncle Chipps. She lay in a pool of light, under a column of swarming neon­lit mosquitoes, naked."

Here's a sumptuous passage from Episode 12, which describes travelling by shikara in Srinigar...

"In those days the little city of Srinagar died with the light. The shops closed, the streets emptied. At the bus stop a man sidled up to Tilo and asked her her name. From then on, she was passed from hand to hand.

An autorickshaw took her from the bus stand to the Boulevard. She crossed the lake in a shikara lounging on the bright, floral cushions... The lake was deadly quiet. The rhythmic sound of oars in the water might well have been the uneasy heartbeat of the Valley"

We hope you enjoy listening to - all 15 episodes are now available as a .

In the meantime, the last word goes to the author. Here she is talking with Kirsty Young on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs...