“Where Do Old Birds Go to Die?”: Queer Environmental Geographies and Liminal Spaces in Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Introduction

Urbanity has almost always signified the alienation of individuals from the broader capitalist-colonialist machine. Urban spaces engender loneliness (Curtis & Han, 2022, p. 102). Individuals in such spaces also tend to be more visible than in other spaces, sometimes leading to a forced ‘coming out’ for those who are in gender-minority groups. For instance, transgender children in urban contexts do have the means and agency to define their own identity in some ways, especially with supportive guardians, but the question remains: “What sort of rights will they have? Who should have the power to define sex and gender?” (Schiappa, 2022, p. 48) A large city may have “a more supportive environment” than a less urban region. (Yarbough, 2018, p. 68) However, urban spaces are also rife with both epistemic and empirical violence against marginalised communities.

Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) begins with the question, “Where do old birds go to die?” The words take the reader back to Roy’s Booker Prize-winning, The God of Small Things (1997), in which the precocious Sophie Mol, destined for tragedy, asks the question of adults. Sophie, the “seeker of small wisdoms,” asks: “Where do old birds go to die? Why don’t dead ones fall like stones from the sky?” (Roy, 1997, p. 9) The Ministry of Utmost Happiness addresses the question by connecting it to the deaths of vultures because of the chemicals dairy industries use:

The vultures died of diclofenac poisoning. Diclofenac, cowaspirin, given to cattle as a muscle relaxant, to ease pain and increase the production of milk, works – worked – like nerve gas on white-backed vultures. Each chemically relaxed, milk-producing cow or buffalo that died became poisoned vulture-bait. As cattle turned into better dairy machines, as the city ate more ice cream, butterscotch-crunch, nutty-buddy and chocolate-chip, as it drank more mango milkshake, vultures’ necks began to droop as though they were tired and simply couldn’t stay awake. Silver beards of saliva dripped from their beaks, and one by one they tumbled off their branches, dead.

Anjum, the novel’s protagonist, is introduced in the first chapter as follows: “She lived in the graveyard like a tree” (Roy, 2017, p. 9). By connecting her trans protagonist to vultures and trees, Roy begins by establishing one of the book’s principal concerns: how systemic oppression and hierarchical, institutionalised regulations for living have created spaces that deliberately exclude the environmental and the non-normative. Roy’s passage on vultures includes the image of the many flavours of ice cream a city demands, establishing how the inherently consumerist urban imperative for families with children to go out for ice cream relates to species extinctions. Nobody knows or cares where old birds go to die; moreover, ‘bird’ is often a dismissively feminised term. In an ethnonationalist context, a ‘lower’ class Muslim transwoman has as little space as a dead bird in society’s normative, rigidly regulated structures.