While Filippo Menozzi reads this rejection of the narrative of linear progress, as indicative of Roy’s complex relationship with realism (2018, 28), I argue that Anjum’s insistence on an alternative present can best be understood as an articulation of queer futurity, whose moment of titular happiness is expressly tied to various forms of queer kinship, expressed not as an ultimate goal but in the novel’s, and our, present. In a moment of mistranslation and cultural misunderstanding, however, Anjum instead states: “e’ve come from there…from the other world” (113–114). When Anjum, the hijra main character of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) attends an anti-corruption protest in New Delhi, she encounters a set of activist filmmakers asking attendees to create a message of optimism by stating “another world is possible” on camera.
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