On the top floor of a small building on a quiet lane in central Delhi, the writer Arundhati Roy greets me at the door of her apartment, accompanied by two eagerly barking dogs, whose names, she tells me, translate as Mrs. Filthy Darling and Beloved of the Earth. “Filth and Dirt,” Roy says cheerfully as she welcomes me into her large, sunny kitchen and starts making coffee in an Italian moka pot—“It’ll be weak, South Indian–style, OK?” she says with a laugh.
With its high ceilings, bookcase-lined walls, and political posters (one shows a bobby with a beat stick: SEDITION PROTECTS DEMOCRACY), her apartment has the airy yet lived-in feel of an artist’s loft. I take a seat at a farmhouse table, near a vase of exceedingly tall, bright-orange lilies. Roy is wearing a crisp, cream-colored salwar kameez with matching dupatta. When I comment on her stylishness she says, “I run away from tradition, I run away from modernity, and then—you find your own space.”
It’s been fifteen years since we first met—I came to Delhi in 2002 to write about Roy’s fearless political activism for this magazine—and at 57, she seems virtually unchanged. Her curly hair may be grayer (“Gray pride,” she likes to joke), but her wide eyes, lined lightly in kohl, remain merry, and her easy laugh is the same. She’s in a fine mood, having been up much of the night overseeing “the comma wars” between her American and British copy editors at Knopf and Penguin UK over the proofs of her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, her first since 1997, when The God of Small Things was published.
To say Roy’s latest venture into fiction has been long awaited is an understatement. An instant best seller, The God of Small Things—which Junot Díaz calls “one of the single most important novels written in English”—won the Man Booker Prize and quickly went on to become a global literary phenomenon. After working on the new novel for ten years, last August Roy texted her British agent, David Godwin, with one word: “Done.” Godwin got on the first plane to Delhi. He was nervous when she handed him the manuscript. “But then I read the opening,” he says, “and thought, Yeah, we’re back.” When The Ministry of Utmost Happiness comes out this month, it will be published in 30 countries.
From the novel’s beginning—“She lived in the graveyard like a tree”—one is swept up in the story. “She” is Anjum, born a hermaphrodite in Old Delhi, who, after being raised as a boy named Aftab, goes to live as a woman in a nearby home for hijras (the South Asian term for transgender women). Headstrong and magnetic, she becomes the spokesperson for the hijra community. But after barely surviving a Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, Anjum renounces everything to set up a solitary new life in a cemetery, where she builds a guesthouse among the gravestones that gradually becomes home to a colorful cast of characters.
More than 400 pages long, The Ministry is a densely populated contemporary novel in the tradition of Dickens, Tolstoy, and García Márquez. If The God of Small Things was a lushly imagined, intimate family novel slashed through with politics, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, though primarily set in Delhi, encompasses wildly different economic, religious, and cultural realms across the Indian subcontinent and as far away as Iraq and California. Animating it is a kaleidoscopic variety of bohemians, army majors, protesters, police chiefs, revolutionaries, and lovers. “She has the instinct of sympathy for the underdog,” says Roy’s friend the writer Pankaj Mishra. “It’s a rare gift. She’s always with the people who are powerless.”
With her exquisite and dynamic storytelling, Roy balances scenes of suffering and corruption with flashes of humor, giddiness, and even transcendence. In one poetic passage a baby is found “on the concrete pavement, in a crib of litter: silver cigarette foil, a few plastic bags and empty packets of Uncle Chipps. She lay in a pool of light, under a column of swarming neon-lit mosquitoes, naked. Her skin was blue-black, sleek as a baby seal’s.” To read the book is to hear Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, and all kinds of English, and to be flooded with impressions of India right now. As Díaz says, “If you really want to know the world beyond our corporate-sponsored dreamscapes, you read writers like Roy. She shows you what’s really going on.”
At 1:00, Roy’s neighbor, the literary editor in chief of Penguin India, Meru Gokhale, knocks on the door with homemade ravioli and tomato soup for lunch, and cover proofs. Spreading them out on the table, they decide on matte rather than glossy for the off-white cover, inspired by a Muslim marble grave. “Everyone is fucked over in the story, so it’s OK if the book gets fucked up,” says Roy, who curses frequently, the words in striking contrast to her musical voice. She seems to have taken the same sly delight in peppering the new novel with a spectacular array of obscenities—“I swear by your mother’s cock” is one—that punctuates her flowing prose with adrenaline jolts.
On either side of the apartment is a terrace full of potted plants, an oasis. Roy seems to appreciate her aerie and be aware of the need to leave it. “You can get insulated,” she says. “I made sure that didn’t happen.”
Twenty years ago, in the wake of her best-selling debut, many assumed that Roy would get right back to fiction. But while she enjoyed being feted for GOST and still lives off the royalties, she was uncomfortable with the ways that India was shifting politically. Although technically the world’s largest democracy, India has witnessed the rise of an all-too-familiar strain of nationalism, religious extremism, and censorship that threatens freedom and minorities. “I found it hard to see what you see around you,” she says, “and just splash about enjoying your own good fortune.” Then, in 1998, India conducted nuclear tests in the desert bordering Pakistan; its neighbor responded in kind. “Unexpected people were celebrating it,” she says. “I knew if I didn’t say something, it would be assumed that I was part of the celebration.” The result was “The End of Imagination,” a searing essay about the high-stakes risks of nuclear saber-rattling that was published in India’s Outlook and Frontline magazines. The piece “immediately got me kicked off the pedestal of the fame goddess,” Roy says. “And I began a journey into worlds that I’ve spent the last 20 years writing about,” referring to her many political essays, subsequently collected in more than a dozen nonfiction books.
When I met Roy in 2002, the country was in a renewed standoff with Pakistan, and she had taken on the role of political critic. Through provocative articles and lectures around the world, she responded to the rise of Hindu nationalism, the ongoing war in the Kashmir Valley, the oppression of Dalits (formerly Untouchables), environmental degradation related to mining and dam-building, and the perils of economic globalization. “With each piece, I’d think I didn’t want to do it, because I’d get into trouble again,” she says. “But you can’t help it.”
As she turned into an unapologetic public intellectual in the vein of Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky, some dismissed her as a polemicist who should get back to novel-writing. Others held her up as a much-needed agent of change. I asked Roy then if she thought she would write more fiction, and she said, “I hope so. It’s difficult living in a time like this. . . . Whatever I write next, all that will go into it.”
Her platform continued to broaden. She was invited to sit on a war-crimes tribunal in Istanbul in 2005 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and when the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, paid a state visit to India in 2015, she requested a meeting with Roy. “Sister Roy really is an internationalist connecting what’s going on in one corner of the globe with what’s going on in another,” says the philosopher and activist Cornel West. “She is bearing intense moral witness.”
It comes at a cost. Roy has been brought before the Supreme Court of India on charges of criminal contempt of court (for the second time) for protesting a friend’s brutal arrest. And while people regularly stop to take selfies with her, she has also been burned in effigy. Another friend, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, compares her to George Orwell. “Goons have smashed chairs on the stage where she is speaking,” he says, “and spies stand at the edges of the room taking notes on what she says.” But Roy has no desire to leave India. “As a writer,” she says, “I’m just in the paws of this place, and this place is in the paws of me.”
It’s hard to imagine Roy’s new novel existing without her nonfiction. “I’m pretty sure that I’m fundamentally a fiction writer. Nonfiction is the fretwork,” she says. “Politically, whatever positions I’ve taken, I’ve taken. That was a march. This is something else. This is a dance.”
Roy’s social world in Delhi is interwoven with friendships from the 30-plus years she has lived in the city since she arrived here to study architecture. Her writing has brought her into contact with authors far and wide, including John Berger, with whom she was very close before he died; Naomi Klein; Eve Ensler; and Wallace Shawn. One night as we part she tells me she is headed out with a group of friends from her days teaching aerobics in her early 20s. “I never let go of anyone,” she says. “We can speak in shorthand, a kind of code, in movie dialogue.” She is strongly connected to those who share her sense of mission. “I’m a person who’s been very much a part of concentric rings of solidarity.”
Despite her numerous circles, Roy sees herself as a creature of solitude. “The most un-Indian thing about me is how alone I am,” she says. She keeps a place to write in the winding alleys of Old Delhi, about a half-hour’s drive from her apartment. “Don’t call it a writing studio,” she says as we head there one afternoon. “That sounds so New York. Call it a refuge.” Leaving the car at Turkman Gate, one of the original portals to the old city, she pulls me deftly through an oncoming barrage of auto-rickshaws, motorbikes, and cars. “These streets are in me, and these goats,” she says, as we pass one dressed in a burlap sack eating from the gutter.
Walking under a tangled web of electrical lines, we pass storefronts straight out of her novel, selling saris, jewelry, cell phones, glasses, hardware, and legumes. At dusk, we climb the stairs to her landlady’s apartment and flat roof, where we are served butter cookies and tea from white china cups as the landlady’s family gathers around. Clearly at ease, Roy says, “You don’t find this in the First World—where you walk through shit and into love.”
Across the way, Roy’s “refuge” is a clean and simple room of plain white walls with blue trim around the windows, a desk, and a single bed with a dark-red coverlet. The kitchen is a floor above, along with a wall-to-wall bookshelf crammed with everything from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to Alice Munro.
On our way down, Roy walks out onto the narrow balcony overlooking the busy alleyways and rests her forearms on the wooden railing. This, she tells me, is where she dreamed up the novel. “I was disciplined, writing during the weeks at home, and coming here only on the weekends,” to think and plan. I ask, “So no country house for you?” She laughs. “People offer me all sorts of nice places to work, but pristine places scare me.”
As we leave, weaving through the noisy traffic, she asks, “Isn’t it a good sound track to write a novel to?”
“Why?” I ask. “Because it drowns out all the doubting voices?”
She looks back, surprised. “No, because it reminds you that no matter how much you think things should be put in order, all is actually chaos.”
She may have an affinity for chaos, but Roy nonetheless finds ways to step back from it. A few days later she takes me to the birthplace of the thirteenth-century Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, which adjoins a Muslim cemetery. It’s not the invented graveyard of the novel, she says, but a peaceful place she returned to over and over in the course of writing. From there we go to the nearby Old Delhi neighborhood where she lived in her 20s while working at the National Institute of Urban Affairs. “Each day, I would rent a bicycle for a rupee and cycle to work,” she recalls. “At the end of the day I would cycle home, and all the beggars sitting out in the street would greet me: ‘So you survived another day, too?’”
It was at this job that she met Pradip Krishen, a film director who cast her as a tribal girl in his film Massey Sahib, and with whom she would go on to collaborate on two movies. One, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, is a cult classic about “stoned architecture students” that she wrote and he directed. They eventually married. When a third film project fell through, Roy, who had started writing GOST, turned to the novel full-time.
These days Krishen and Roy are friendly. (Though not officially divorced, they keep separate homes and lives.) Roy is funny about her love life, telling me she has many sweethearts, including the one responsible for the tall orange lilies on her kitchen table. “My harem,” she jokes, saying mysteriously, “They are all in The Ministry’s acknowledgments.” When she was at architecture school, she says, “my name on the roster was S. A. Roy, so a lot of people called me that.” (Her given name is Suzanna.) “My sweethearts call me Roy. Almost no one calls me Arundhati.” She laughs her easy laugh once more and adds, “None of the simple things in my life are simple.”
That includes her relationship with her mother, Mary Roy. A Syrian Christian from Kerala, Mary scandalized her conservative community not only by marrying outside the faith but then by leaving her Hindu husband and returning home with two small children in tow. Atypically for her generation, she raised Roy and her older brother, Lalith, on her own. Roy tries to return to Kerala (where The God of Small Things is set) every couple of months to see her family. She says she feels “delicious vengeful feelings toward that parochial community that excommunicates you before you’re three years old because you don’t have the right pedigree. . . . And yet the minute I see the rivers and the coconut trees, I know that this is my landscape, my geography. It’s a very strange contradiction.”
A lot has changed since Roy was a child, but the old houses and the Meenachil River—where she would catch fish for lunch with a bamboo pole—remain much the same. Roy clearly developed a strong sense of self-reliance from her mother, who, 50 years ago, founded a school in two rooms rented from the local Rotary Club with just five students—two of them her own children.
After flying down to Kochi and driving two hours south to the town of Kottayam, I find Mary Roy in a sunny office at the heart of the verdant hillside Pallikoodam campus. With extensive grounds—including a swimming pool, playing fields, and gardens—Mary’s school now serves some 470 students, from nursery to twelfth grade, some of whom have matriculated to Harvard or Johns Hopkins.
With short salt-and-pepper hair, Mary, at 83, is physically frail, yet regal in a charcoal salwar kameez and three strands of silver pearls. “I didn’t want to start a school. The inspiration was my children,” she tells me. Advised by two nuns, Mary decided her students wouldn’t be burdened by excessive amounts of homework, would play sports, and would learn about “nuclear weapons and the pyramids,” she says. Teaching social awareness was a priority, and she herself took on the Supreme Court of India in the 1980s to successfully overturn an inheritance law that discriminated against women.
Armed with this unconventional education and example, Arundhati and her brother left when they were nine and ten to attend Lawrence, a prestigious private boarding school in Chennai, where Lalith says “Suzie” excelled as student, orator, and athlete. At Lawrence, “you had to fight for yourself,” says Lalith, who works in seafood export (Roy calls him a “prawn broker”). “She was very independent. My mum had groomed her to be tough.” It was a challenging relationship, and not long after arriving in Delhi, Roy had a falling out with her mother and cut off all contact for the next four years.
“My mother’s such a fabulous influence in my life, not motherly and nurturing in that way,” says Roy. “She’s the calcium in my bones, the steel in my spine, from warring with her.” Mother and daughter eventually reconciled. “But there was no Bollywood moment,” Roy says. “I was a writer when I was three years old. Even when she was raging at me I could see she was in pain. As a child, to be able to understand an adult is a terrible thing.”
On my last visit to Roy, I find her at home in a meeting with a young leader in the Dalit-rights movement. The Supreme Court has met to say it will discuss Roy’s case in a month’s time but later postpones it. (“The process is the punishment,” she says wryly.) And she is about to go to the London Book Fair to give a reading from The Ministry to 1,000 Penguin UK employees at the Barbican Centre, to deliver 26 carefully marked proofs of the book cover to her publishers with all her notations, and to meet with her many translators to discuss the nuances of the prose. “You end up thinking in so many languages and dialects,” she says. “We are living in Babel now.”
(Source: Vogue)
With its high ceilings, bookcase-lined walls, and political posters (one shows a bobby with a beat stick: SEDITION PROTECTS DEMOCRACY), her apartment has the airy yet lived-in feel of an artist’s loft. I take a seat at a farmhouse table, near a vase of exceedingly tall, bright-orange lilies. Roy is wearing a crisp, cream-colored salwar kameez with matching dupatta. When I comment on her stylishness she says, “I run away from tradition, I run away from modernity, and then—you find your own space.”
It’s been fifteen years since we first met—I came to Delhi in 2002 to write about Roy’s fearless political activism for this magazine—and at 57, she seems virtually unchanged. Her curly hair may be grayer (“Gray pride,” she likes to joke), but her wide eyes, lined lightly in kohl, remain merry, and her easy laugh is the same. She’s in a fine mood, having been up much of the night overseeing “the comma wars” between her American and British copy editors at Knopf and Penguin UK over the proofs of her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, her first since 1997, when The God of Small Things was published.
To say Roy’s latest venture into fiction has been long awaited is an understatement. An instant best seller, The God of Small Things—which Junot Díaz calls “one of the single most important novels written in English”—won the Man Booker Prize and quickly went on to become a global literary phenomenon. After working on the new novel for ten years, last August Roy texted her British agent, David Godwin, with one word: “Done.” Godwin got on the first plane to Delhi. He was nervous when she handed him the manuscript. “But then I read the opening,” he says, “and thought, Yeah, we’re back.” When The Ministry of Utmost Happiness comes out this month, it will be published in 30 countries.
From the novel’s beginning—“She lived in the graveyard like a tree”—one is swept up in the story. “She” is Anjum, born a hermaphrodite in Old Delhi, who, after being raised as a boy named Aftab, goes to live as a woman in a nearby home for hijras (the South Asian term for transgender women). Headstrong and magnetic, she becomes the spokesperson for the hijra community. But after barely surviving a Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, Anjum renounces everything to set up a solitary new life in a cemetery, where she builds a guesthouse among the gravestones that gradually becomes home to a colorful cast of characters.
More than 400 pages long, The Ministry is a densely populated contemporary novel in the tradition of Dickens, Tolstoy, and García Márquez. If The God of Small Things was a lushly imagined, intimate family novel slashed through with politics, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, though primarily set in Delhi, encompasses wildly different economic, religious, and cultural realms across the Indian subcontinent and as far away as Iraq and California. Animating it is a kaleidoscopic variety of bohemians, army majors, protesters, police chiefs, revolutionaries, and lovers. “She has the instinct of sympathy for the underdog,” says Roy’s friend the writer Pankaj Mishra. “It’s a rare gift. She’s always with the people who are powerless.”
With her exquisite and dynamic storytelling, Roy balances scenes of suffering and corruption with flashes of humor, giddiness, and even transcendence. In one poetic passage a baby is found “on the concrete pavement, in a crib of litter: silver cigarette foil, a few plastic bags and empty packets of Uncle Chipps. She lay in a pool of light, under a column of swarming neon-lit mosquitoes, naked. Her skin was blue-black, sleek as a baby seal’s.” To read the book is to hear Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, and all kinds of English, and to be flooded with impressions of India right now. As Díaz says, “If you really want to know the world beyond our corporate-sponsored dreamscapes, you read writers like Roy. She shows you what’s really going on.”
At 1:00, Roy’s neighbor, the literary editor in chief of Penguin India, Meru Gokhale, knocks on the door with homemade ravioli and tomato soup for lunch, and cover proofs. Spreading them out on the table, they decide on matte rather than glossy for the off-white cover, inspired by a Muslim marble grave. “Everyone is fucked over in the story, so it’s OK if the book gets fucked up,” says Roy, who curses frequently, the words in striking contrast to her musical voice. She seems to have taken the same sly delight in peppering the new novel with a spectacular array of obscenities—“I swear by your mother’s cock” is one—that punctuates her flowing prose with adrenaline jolts.
On either side of the apartment is a terrace full of potted plants, an oasis. Roy seems to appreciate her aerie and be aware of the need to leave it. “You can get insulated,” she says. “I made sure that didn’t happen.”
Twenty years ago, in the wake of her best-selling debut, many assumed that Roy would get right back to fiction. But while she enjoyed being feted for GOST and still lives off the royalties, she was uncomfortable with the ways that India was shifting politically. Although technically the world’s largest democracy, India has witnessed the rise of an all-too-familiar strain of nationalism, religious extremism, and censorship that threatens freedom and minorities. “I found it hard to see what you see around you,” she says, “and just splash about enjoying your own good fortune.” Then, in 1998, India conducted nuclear tests in the desert bordering Pakistan; its neighbor responded in kind. “Unexpected people were celebrating it,” she says. “I knew if I didn’t say something, it would be assumed that I was part of the celebration.” The result was “The End of Imagination,” a searing essay about the high-stakes risks of nuclear saber-rattling that was published in India’s Outlook and Frontline magazines. The piece “immediately got me kicked off the pedestal of the fame goddess,” Roy says. “And I began a journey into worlds that I’ve spent the last 20 years writing about,” referring to her many political essays, subsequently collected in more than a dozen nonfiction books.
When I met Roy in 2002, the country was in a renewed standoff with Pakistan, and she had taken on the role of political critic. Through provocative articles and lectures around the world, she responded to the rise of Hindu nationalism, the ongoing war in the Kashmir Valley, the oppression of Dalits (formerly Untouchables), environmental degradation related to mining and dam-building, and the perils of economic globalization. “With each piece, I’d think I didn’t want to do it, because I’d get into trouble again,” she says. “But you can’t help it.”
As she turned into an unapologetic public intellectual in the vein of Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky, some dismissed her as a polemicist who should get back to novel-writing. Others held her up as a much-needed agent of change. I asked Roy then if she thought she would write more fiction, and she said, “I hope so. It’s difficult living in a time like this. . . . Whatever I write next, all that will go into it.”
Her platform continued to broaden. She was invited to sit on a war-crimes tribunal in Istanbul in 2005 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and when the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, paid a state visit to India in 2015, she requested a meeting with Roy. “Sister Roy really is an internationalist connecting what’s going on in one corner of the globe with what’s going on in another,” says the philosopher and activist Cornel West. “She is bearing intense moral witness.”
It comes at a cost. Roy has been brought before the Supreme Court of India on charges of criminal contempt of court (for the second time) for protesting a friend’s brutal arrest. And while people regularly stop to take selfies with her, she has also been burned in effigy. Another friend, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, compares her to George Orwell. “Goons have smashed chairs on the stage where she is speaking,” he says, “and spies stand at the edges of the room taking notes on what she says.” But Roy has no desire to leave India. “As a writer,” she says, “I’m just in the paws of this place, and this place is in the paws of me.”
It’s hard to imagine Roy’s new novel existing without her nonfiction. “I’m pretty sure that I’m fundamentally a fiction writer. Nonfiction is the fretwork,” she says. “Politically, whatever positions I’ve taken, I’ve taken. That was a march. This is something else. This is a dance.”
Roy’s social world in Delhi is interwoven with friendships from the 30-plus years she has lived in the city since she arrived here to study architecture. Her writing has brought her into contact with authors far and wide, including John Berger, with whom she was very close before he died; Naomi Klein; Eve Ensler; and Wallace Shawn. One night as we part she tells me she is headed out with a group of friends from her days teaching aerobics in her early 20s. “I never let go of anyone,” she says. “We can speak in shorthand, a kind of code, in movie dialogue.” She is strongly connected to those who share her sense of mission. “I’m a person who’s been very much a part of concentric rings of solidarity.”
Despite her numerous circles, Roy sees herself as a creature of solitude. “The most un-Indian thing about me is how alone I am,” she says. She keeps a place to write in the winding alleys of Old Delhi, about a half-hour’s drive from her apartment. “Don’t call it a writing studio,” she says as we head there one afternoon. “That sounds so New York. Call it a refuge.” Leaving the car at Turkman Gate, one of the original portals to the old city, she pulls me deftly through an oncoming barrage of auto-rickshaws, motorbikes, and cars. “These streets are in me, and these goats,” she says, as we pass one dressed in a burlap sack eating from the gutter.
Walking under a tangled web of electrical lines, we pass storefronts straight out of her novel, selling saris, jewelry, cell phones, glasses, hardware, and legumes. At dusk, we climb the stairs to her landlady’s apartment and flat roof, where we are served butter cookies and tea from white china cups as the landlady’s family gathers around. Clearly at ease, Roy says, “You don’t find this in the First World—where you walk through shit and into love.”
Across the way, Roy’s “refuge” is a clean and simple room of plain white walls with blue trim around the windows, a desk, and a single bed with a dark-red coverlet. The kitchen is a floor above, along with a wall-to-wall bookshelf crammed with everything from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to Alice Munro.
On our way down, Roy walks out onto the narrow balcony overlooking the busy alleyways and rests her forearms on the wooden railing. This, she tells me, is where she dreamed up the novel. “I was disciplined, writing during the weeks at home, and coming here only on the weekends,” to think and plan. I ask, “So no country house for you?” She laughs. “People offer me all sorts of nice places to work, but pristine places scare me.”
As we leave, weaving through the noisy traffic, she asks, “Isn’t it a good sound track to write a novel to?”
“Why?” I ask. “Because it drowns out all the doubting voices?”
She looks back, surprised. “No, because it reminds you that no matter how much you think things should be put in order, all is actually chaos.”
She may have an affinity for chaos, but Roy nonetheless finds ways to step back from it. A few days later she takes me to the birthplace of the thirteenth-century Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, which adjoins a Muslim cemetery. It’s not the invented graveyard of the novel, she says, but a peaceful place she returned to over and over in the course of writing. From there we go to the nearby Old Delhi neighborhood where she lived in her 20s while working at the National Institute of Urban Affairs. “Each day, I would rent a bicycle for a rupee and cycle to work,” she recalls. “At the end of the day I would cycle home, and all the beggars sitting out in the street would greet me: ‘So you survived another day, too?’”
It was at this job that she met Pradip Krishen, a film director who cast her as a tribal girl in his film Massey Sahib, and with whom she would go on to collaborate on two movies. One, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, is a cult classic about “stoned architecture students” that she wrote and he directed. They eventually married. When a third film project fell through, Roy, who had started writing GOST, turned to the novel full-time.
These days Krishen and Roy are friendly. (Though not officially divorced, they keep separate homes and lives.) Roy is funny about her love life, telling me she has many sweethearts, including the one responsible for the tall orange lilies on her kitchen table. “My harem,” she jokes, saying mysteriously, “They are all in The Ministry’s acknowledgments.” When she was at architecture school, she says, “my name on the roster was S. A. Roy, so a lot of people called me that.” (Her given name is Suzanna.) “My sweethearts call me Roy. Almost no one calls me Arundhati.” She laughs her easy laugh once more and adds, “None of the simple things in my life are simple.”
That includes her relationship with her mother, Mary Roy. A Syrian Christian from Kerala, Mary scandalized her conservative community not only by marrying outside the faith but then by leaving her Hindu husband and returning home with two small children in tow. Atypically for her generation, she raised Roy and her older brother, Lalith, on her own. Roy tries to return to Kerala (where The God of Small Things is set) every couple of months to see her family. She says she feels “delicious vengeful feelings toward that parochial community that excommunicates you before you’re three years old because you don’t have the right pedigree. . . . And yet the minute I see the rivers and the coconut trees, I know that this is my landscape, my geography. It’s a very strange contradiction.”
A lot has changed since Roy was a child, but the old houses and the Meenachil River—where she would catch fish for lunch with a bamboo pole—remain much the same. Roy clearly developed a strong sense of self-reliance from her mother, who, 50 years ago, founded a school in two rooms rented from the local Rotary Club with just five students—two of them her own children.
After flying down to Kochi and driving two hours south to the town of Kottayam, I find Mary Roy in a sunny office at the heart of the verdant hillside Pallikoodam campus. With extensive grounds—including a swimming pool, playing fields, and gardens—Mary’s school now serves some 470 students, from nursery to twelfth grade, some of whom have matriculated to Harvard or Johns Hopkins.
With short salt-and-pepper hair, Mary, at 83, is physically frail, yet regal in a charcoal salwar kameez and three strands of silver pearls. “I didn’t want to start a school. The inspiration was my children,” she tells me. Advised by two nuns, Mary decided her students wouldn’t be burdened by excessive amounts of homework, would play sports, and would learn about “nuclear weapons and the pyramids,” she says. Teaching social awareness was a priority, and she herself took on the Supreme Court of India in the 1980s to successfully overturn an inheritance law that discriminated against women.
Armed with this unconventional education and example, Arundhati and her brother left when they were nine and ten to attend Lawrence, a prestigious private boarding school in Chennai, where Lalith says “Suzie” excelled as student, orator, and athlete. At Lawrence, “you had to fight for yourself,” says Lalith, who works in seafood export (Roy calls him a “prawn broker”). “She was very independent. My mum had groomed her to be tough.” It was a challenging relationship, and not long after arriving in Delhi, Roy had a falling out with her mother and cut off all contact for the next four years.
“My mother’s such a fabulous influence in my life, not motherly and nurturing in that way,” says Roy. “She’s the calcium in my bones, the steel in my spine, from warring with her.” Mother and daughter eventually reconciled. “But there was no Bollywood moment,” Roy says. “I was a writer when I was three years old. Even when she was raging at me I could see she was in pain. As a child, to be able to understand an adult is a terrible thing.”
On my last visit to Roy, I find her at home in a meeting with a young leader in the Dalit-rights movement. The Supreme Court has met to say it will discuss Roy’s case in a month’s time but later postpones it. (“The process is the punishment,” she says wryly.) And she is about to go to the London Book Fair to give a reading from The Ministry to 1,000 Penguin UK employees at the Barbican Centre, to deliver 26 carefully marked proofs of the book cover to her publishers with all her notations, and to meet with her many translators to discuss the nuances of the prose. “You end up thinking in so many languages and dialects,” she says. “We are living in Babel now.”
(Source: Vogue)
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