Twenty years after her debut, Arundhati Roy returned to fiction with a sprawling novel that begins in Old Delhi. Anjum, born intersex and raised as a boy named Aftab, leaves her family to live in the Khwabgah, a house of hijras, and later settles among the graves of a Muslim cemetery, where she gradually builds a refuge for people the city has pushed out.
A second strand belongs to Tilottama, an elusive architecture student, and the three men who love her: a journalist, an intelligence officer and a Kashmiri who becomes a militant. Through them the book enters the violence of the Kashmir valley, with its checkpoints, torture centres and disappeared sons, and the two narratives slowly converge around an abandoned baby.
The novel is restless and openly political, folding in the 2002 Gujarat riots, the anti-corruption protests at Jantar Mantar and Maoist insurgency in central India. Some readers find it diffuse, but its compassion for misfits and its refusal to look away from state violence make it a deliberate counterpoint to tidier portraits of modern India.
Book details
| Author | Arundhati Roy |
|---|---|
| First published | 2017 |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | Literary fiction |
| Type | Fiction |
| Pages (approx.) | 445 |
| Setting | Delhi and the Kashmir valley, 1950s to 2010s |
Themes
- Gender identity
- Kashmir conflict
- Outsiders and belonging
- State violence
- Religious nationalism
Who should read it
Readers who want a politically charged, many-voiced novel about the people left out of India's success story.