No doubt Roy, who has spent much of the last two decades immersed in politics (she became a vocal supporter of the Kashmiri separatist movement, and a critic of Hindu nationalism), means for the many fragments and digressions to open out her story into a panoramic mosaic of modern India, and the countless social, political, religious and cultural issues roiling just below the surface of everyday life. There are references to national tragedies in the unending “supermarket of sorrow,” like the Bhopal toxic gas disaster of 1984 and the Gujarat riots of 2002, and a multiplication of alarming anecdotes involving murder, rape, torture and mutilation, as well as more mundane episodes of loss and grief.

Image Credit... Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

These horrifying incidents, and Roy’s introduction of myriad minor characters, however, do not result in a Bruegel-esque portrait of a country but instead feel like poorly stage-managed detours from the compelling stories of Roy’s two heroines: the transgender woman Anjum (born Aftab), who’s gone to live in a Delhi graveyard; and Tilo, a former architecture student, who travels to Kashmir to visit her longtime friend and sometime lover Musa, a freedom fighter, who is in constant danger and constantly on the run.

Anjum’s divided soul and Tilo’s complicated romantic life seem meant as metaphors of sorts for the subcontinent’s own divisions over history and religion, but “Ministry” never becomes a transporting parable about modern India the way that, say, Salman Rushdie’s dazzling “Midnight’s Children” did. Roy’s gift is not for the epic but for the personal, as “The God of Small Things” so powerfully demonstrated. Clearly, the intervening years of writing often didactic nonfiction — on subjects like nuclear tests, political corruption and Hindu extremism — have not damaged her gift for poetic description or her ability to map the complicated arithmetic of love and belonging.

Roy effortlessly captures the love Anjum feels for an abandoned child named Zainab, whom she adopts as a daughter; and the friendship she develops with a young man who calls himself Saddam Hussain and who also takes up residence in the graveyard. Roy’s depiction of Tilo and Musa’s furtive romance in Kashmir has a cinematic quality — a reminder of her work as a screenwriter — as well as a genuine poignancy and depth of emotion.

It’s when Roy turns from the specifics of her characters’ lives and tries to generalize about the plight of India that her writing can grow labored and portentous: “Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labors and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we continue to coexist — continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another.”