I waited for something complex to say: Arundhati Roy on her new novel

You need to stay with this book. It is dazzling, but puzzling, gutting but ultimately uplifting, farcical at times, unimaginably cruel at others. It is both real and hallucinatory. But then, this is Arundhati Roy after all, and what would we expect?

It has been 20 years since Roy published The God of Small Things, her debut novel about a pair of twins born in the south-west city of Kerala in India. It was an immediate success, one of those storeyed books that break through from nowhere, a success that publishers are always trying - and failing - to replicate. It won the Man Booker prize and racked up impressive sales - Roy still lives on the royalties, although she gives much of the money to her favourite causes.

On the one hand The God of Small Things is an intimate family saga; on the other it is an intensely political story, sharply critical of the caste system.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness jostles politics to the front of the stage: the occupation of the Kashmir Valley, Hindu nationalism, the massacre in Gujarat of Muslims in 2002.

On the telephone from London, Roy is softly spoken and quietly furious. "India manages to pass itself off as this cuddly democracy but if you really look at it ... do you know there hasn't been a day since 1947 when it became independent, that the army hasn't been actively deployed within the borders of India against its so-called own people? Not a day! Whether it's been in Assam, Punjab, Hyderabad, Kashmir, the number of people who have been killed or maimed or tortured, it's just flown under the radar while this narrative has been confected."

 Just after The God of Small Things was published, politics in India took a sinister turn; what Roy calls a right-wing Hindu-chauvinist government came to power. Within months it conducted a series of nuclear tests and the author launched into years of activism (see Human Writes below).

'It's a book about borders'

While the new novel lays bare the violence of the Indian system, Roy is too clever a writer to make it a manifesto. Her imagination and descriptive powers lift it far above the polemical.

It opens in a graveyard in the Old City of Delhi where a middle-aged woman has made her home. She is Anjum, a Muslim transgender person. "She lived in the graveyard like a tree. At dawn she saw the crows off and welcomed the bats home. At dusk she did the opposite."

 Anjum is a "hijra", the South Asian third sex that refers to hermaphrodites, eunuchs and transgender people. As a young man she leaves her home and joins a community of hijras called a "khwabgah" and embraces her femaleness. "In Urdu it means a house of dreams," explains Roy. "The city is divided into zones and each hijra community has a zone. The way they used to earn money was to go to weddings or births, and they would be given money because they're considered lucky."

 Anjum is exuberantly happy until she travels to Gujarat where she is caught up in the massacre of Muslims in 2002, escaping the butchery only because the soldiers believed it would be unlucky to kill her. "Something breaks in her after that and she becomes silent."

 She moves to the cemetery and gradually builds rooms around the graves. It becomes known as the Jannat Guest House, drawing the liminal people of the city to it.

"She's the hub of all kinds of other people who don't fit into the cast-iron social grid, the social mesh that Indian society is forced into," Roy says. "It's a book about borders. Obviously the incendiary border of gender; there are dalits, or untouchables, who convert to Islam, a porous border between human beings and animals, and between the living and the dead in the graveyard. And then there's Tilo, with the border of caste running through her."

 Tilo is the other main character of the novel, around whom an intense love story swirls. Three men, friends from university days, are in love with her. "She gave the impression that she had somehow slipped off her leash," observes a friend. "As though she was taking herself for a walk while the rest of us were being walked - like pets."

 Through one of the men Tilo gets caught up in the protracted, violent struggle for independence in Kashmir.

 "You can only tell the truth about Kashmir in fiction," says Roy. "The disappeared, the unmarked graves. How the air gets seeded with terror. You can't tell it through human rights reports."

'I was waiting for something complex to say'

 Roy waited this long to write another novel because, "I wouldn't write another one until I was sure there was something complex to say. I'm not in that thing of producing a book every year. If I hadn't written another it would have been fine with me. But I had something that would not remain unwritten."

 Still, it was 10 years in the writing.

 "Suddenly I started getting colonised by these people, and then obsessed. Your mind is always working and the layers are building up and then there was a period when it was almost like breaking stone. How do you go about building this city? In the last couple of years it's just insanity because you're up all day and all night, you're worried about your house burning down. Writing is a combination of discipline and madness."

 The phrase "magical realism" is often attached to Roy's work, but The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is more Indian surrealism.

 She laughs softly. "Yes, you in South Africa would understand that better than Western readers. This kind of realism is probably magical for them, but it's not magical, it's just how it is."

When her characters started talking to her, insisting that she write their story, "I thought how do you break out of this increasingly domesticated form, this easily catalogue-able, easily marketable form of fiction writing that is almost frightened of taking on the big themes?"

And so here it is: baggy, patched, phantasmagorical. A story that spreads out from a bloodied lake in Kashmir to a bloodied house in suburban California, from a gaudy boudoir in Old Delhi to a severe hospital in Kerala. A story of strange, watchful animals and abject souls, of foundling babies and spirits, revenge and redemption, bravery and venality.

"I know the book is complicated, it's a bit like navigating a city," she says. "But there's no sort of easily digestible, neat little thematic way I wanted to write."

An extract from Roy's new book

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is published by Hamish Hamilton

Around her the city sprawled for miles. Thousand-year-old sorceress, dozing, but not asleep, even at this hour. Grey flyovers snaked out of her Medusa skull, tangling and untangling under the yellow sodium haze. Sleeping bodies of homeless people lined their high, narrow pavements, head to toe, head to toe, looping into the distance.

Old secrets were folded into the furrows of her loose, parchment skin. Each wrinkle was a street, each street a carnival. Each arthritic joint a crumbling amphitheatre where stories of love and madness, stupidity, delight and unspeakable cruelty had been played out for centuries. But this was to be the dawn of her resurrection.

Her new masters wanted to hide her knobby, varicose veins under imported fishnet stockings, cram her withered tits into saucy padded bras and jam her aching feet into pointed high-heel shoes. They wanted her to swing her stiff old hips and re-route the edges of her grimace upwards into a frozen, empty smile. It was the summer Grandma became a whore. - Arundhati Roy

Human writes

She may have waited 20 years to publish a second novel, but Arundhati Roy has written dozens of provocative essays and non-fiction works, and travelled the world lecturing on such preoccupations as the rise of Hindu Nationalism, the ongoing war in Kashmir, the oppression of Dalits (once known as Untouchables) and the ravaging effects on the environment caused by mining and dam building.

In 2005 she was invited to sit on a war-crimes tribunal in Istanbul after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. She is a sharp critic of globalisation and US foreign policy, has come out swinging for Tamils in Sri Lanka and the Maoist Naxalites in the forests of central India. Anti-Naxalites burned an effigy of her in Nagpur.

After the publication of The God of Small Things she was charged with obscenity,  and only acquitted after years in court; she has appeared before the Supreme Court of India on charges of criminal contempt of court for protesting a friend’s arrest and in 2010 she was hauled up for sedition in Delhi for “anti-India” speeches. She was once sent to prison for a day for contempt of court while protesting against big dams.

Criticised as shrill and simplistic, Roy is routinely harassed at public appearances and slated in Indian newspapers. In other quarters she is applauded for her vocal activism. In 2002, she won the prestigious Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Award for her ongoing work in the struggle for freedom, justice and cultural diversity. She was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in 2004 for her work in social campaigns and her advocacy of non-violence and in 2006, she received the Sahitya Akademi Award from India's Academy of Letters, for her collection of essays The Algebra of Infinite Justice. She declined to accept it "in protest against the Indian Government toeing the US line by 'violently and ruthlessly pursuing policies of brutalisation of industrial workers, increasing militarisation and economic neo-liberalisation".