The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: A novel

It was herself she was exhausted by. She had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete—a skill that many consider to be the cornerstone of sanity. The traffic inside her head seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights. The result was incessant noise, a few bad crashes and eventually gridlock.

spirituality over sacrament, simplicity over opulence and stubborn, ecstatic love even when faced with the prospect of annihilation.

No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she saw it.

The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.

Anjum began to rewrite a simpler, happier life for herself. The rewriting in turn began to make Anjum a simpler, happier person.

Eventually we decided that the gods weren’t with us and that performing Norman would be inappropriate for the times, so the whole thing was shelved. If you’ll pardon me for making this somewhat prosaic observation—maybe that’s what life is, or ends up being most of the time: a rehearsal for a performance that never eventually materializes.

It had to do with the way she lived, in the country of her own skin. A country that issued no visas and seemed to have no consulates.

He believed that poetry could cure, or at least go a long way towards curing, almost every ailment. He would prescribe poems to his patients the way other hakims prescribed medicine.

Having wounded each other thus, deeply, almost mortally, the two sat quietly side by side on someone’s sunny grave, hemorrhaging.