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Prologue and Chapter 1: "Where Do Old Birds Go to Die?"

• NOTE: The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Roy, Arundhati. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Knopf, 2017.

• The majority of this novel is related from the perspective of a third-person omniscient narrator and is written in the past tense.

• The Prologue focuses on the extinction of the white-backed vultures of India, poisoned by diclofenac, a muscle relaxant given to cattle.

• The Prologue concludes with the narrator asserting no one paid much attention to the disappearance of the vultures because there was “so much else to look forward to” (5).

• Chapter 1 is again narrated in the third person and focuses on an unnamed female character that lived in a graveyard and talked to the animals around her. The narrator notes that she lived like a tree.

• An English-speaking man told her that her name translated...

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