The greatest paradox in the world is that life on the edge is the way of existing that most connects you with the soul, with a possible God and with the world around you. The imperious need for the small makes you value what you have inside, without the artifice of what you could have had outside of having been born in another place, in another cradle ... And it is tragic, bitter, no doubt, but it is a real statement and round as the ground that your bare feet tread.
Delhi is probably not the best place to be born. The probability of stagnating in poverty is 101% and yet, if you are born, if you survive ..., you live. You make it even more than rich and powerful, oblivious to the drama of wondering if you are going to be able to eat, or even drink. I insist, it is deeply tragic, unfair and paradoxical, but at the levels of the soul and spirit, it sure is so.
And about this we read in The Ministry of Supreme Happiness. A ministry that we know through various characters from Delhi, from Kashmir, from depressed and punished areas of India where these tiny beings shine like Anyum, who made a cemetery her home, or like Tilo, in love with so many lovers to whom he embraced eagerly to sublimate his misery.
Miss Yebin also shine, with which our hearts just shrink, as well as many other people from that distant India who Arundhati Roy He teaches us with his clear intention of denunciation, showing us the greatness of all those inhabitants of the underworld and the monstrosity of space and time that they had to live.
Because the point is that this feeling on the edge as an intense and unequaled form of existence, where the spirit if there is one and a distant God seem to look closely at each other, what it does not offer is, by any of its edges, happiness of being alive.
You can buy the book The Ministry of Supreme Happiness, Arundhati Roy's new novel, here: