Arundhati Roy, The Art of Fiction No. 249

 

Arundhati Roy, Photo courtesy of Mayank Austen Soofi

Arundhati Roy, The Art of Fiction No. 249
Interviewed by Hasan Altaf
Issue 237, Summer 2021


 

After her first novel, The God of Small Things (1997), Arundhati Roy did not publish another for twenty years, when The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was released in 2017. The intervening decades were nonetheless filled with writing: essays on dams, displacement, and democracy, which appeared in newspapers and magazines such as Outlook, Frontline, and the Guardian, and were collected in volumes that quickly came to outnumber the novels. Most of these essays were compiled in 2019 in My Seditious Heart, which, with footnotes, comes to nearly a thousand pages; less than a year later she published nine new essays in Azadi.

To see that two-decade period as a gap, or the nonfiction as separate from the fiction, would be to misunderstand Roy’s project; when finding herself described as “what is known in twenty-first-century vernacular as a ‘writer-activist,’ ” she confessed that term made her flinch (and feel “like a sofa-bed”). The essays exist between the novels not as a wall but as a bridge. Roy’s subject and obsession is, throughout, power: who has it (and why), how it is used (and abused), the ways in which those with little power turn on those with less—and, importantly, how to find beauty and joy amid these struggles. The God of Small Things is a novel focused on one family, while The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has a larger scale, but in the questions they ask and the themes they explore, both novels are as “political” as any of her essays. Her essays, in turn, are as powerfully and lovingly written as her fiction, with the same suspicion of purity, perfection, and simple stories.

Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, in India’s northeast, and grew up mostly in Kerala, on the southwestern coast. She left home in 1976 to attend the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi and has lived in the capital ever since, without practicing architecture. (She brought the school and its patois to vivid life in the movie In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, which she told me is now screened there every year for the incoming class.) She has received numerous honors, including the 1997 Booker Prize for The God of Small Things, the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award, the Sydney Peace Prize, the Norman Mailer Prize for Distinguished Writing, and a 2017 Mahmoud Darwish Award, but might take even more pride in the list of those who have found her a thorn in their side. She told me that at a panel at the World Water Forum in 2000, after an executive promoting the privatization of water systems introduced himself by saying he wrote about water “because I’m paid to,” she began by saying, “My name is Arundhati, and I write about water because I’d be paid a great deal not to.”

We conducted this interview over three mornings in Chicago in the fall of 2019 as Roy was visiting the U.S. for speaking engagements. In private, she projects the same passion and urgency as she does in public, but there is a greater opportunity to appreciate her sense of humor as well—a generous one, which seeks always to share what she sees with her interlocutor.

INTERVIEWER

Can you tell me a bit about your reading habits?

ARUNDHATI ROY

When I was growing up in Kerala, to nourish the English part of my brain—there was a Malayalam part, too—there was a lot of Shakespeare and a lot of Kipling, a combination of the most beautiful, lyrical language and some very unlyrical politics, although I didn’t see it that way then . . . I was definitely influenced by them, as I have been later by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, John Berger, Joyce, Nabokov. What an impossible task it is to list the writers one loves and admires. I’m grateful for the lessons one learns from great writers, but also from imperialists, sexists, friends, lovers, oppressors, revolutionaries—everybody. Everybody has something to teach a writer. My reading can switch rather oddly from Mrs. Dalloway to a report about the National Register of Citizens and the two million people in Assam who have been struck off it and have suddenly ceased to be Indian citizens. Ceased to have any rights whatsoever.

A novel that overwhelmed me recently is Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Just incredible—the audacity, the range of characters and situations. It begins with a surreal description of the Volga burning—the gasoline floating on the surface of the water catching fire, giving the illusion of a burning river—as the battle for Stalingrad rages. The manuscript was arrested by the Soviet authorities, as though it were a person. Another recent read was The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, by Giorgio Bassani. It’s about the time just before World War II, when many Jews in Italy were members of the Fascist Party. The Finzi-Continis are an elite Jewish family who live in a mansion with huge grounds and tennis courts. The book is centered around a love affair between the daughter of the Finzi-Continis and a person who is an outsider to that world as the Holocaust closes in. There is something about the unchanging stillness of that compound, the refusal to acknowledge what is happening, even while the darkness deepens around it. It is chilling and so eerily contemporary. All of the entitled Finzi-Continis end up dead. Considering what happened in Stalinist Russia, what happened in Europe during World War II—one is reading, searching for ways to understand the present. What fascinates me is how some of the people who were shot by Stalin’s firing squads died shouting “Long live Stalin!” People who labored in the gulag camps wept when he died. Ordinary Germans never rose up against Hitler, even as he persisted with a war that turned their cities into rubble. I look for clues to human psychology in Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, in the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whom Stalin basically killed, in the poems of Anna Akhmatova and Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov.

INTERVIEWER

A lot of Russians.

ROY

[laughs] A lot of Russians, right now, yes. There is something so juicy about the way they could take on a big narrative. And, of course, Chekhov, who can do it in that microscopic way, too. I enjoy the way they refuse to stay in their lanes. Especially now that the traffic regulations are getting stricter, the lanes are getting narrower and more constricted. Everybody, writers, readers, public conversation in general is being straitjacketed. Controlled from every direction, up, down, and sideways. In India, cultural censorship is literally meted out by mobs on streets, mostly with tacit blessings from the government. We seem to be approaching a kind of intellectual gridlock.

INTERVIEWER

Your writing hasn’t really ever been tempted to go into the microscopic, short story mold—the novel seems like the form you chose.

ROY

I love immersing myself in the universe of a novel for years. There is never a time when I am more alive. Some writers suffer through that process, but I enjoy it. Being in that universe, that imperfect universe, is like being in prayer—it is separate from the product or the end or the success or the nonsuccess of the product. What a horrible word for a novel—product. My apologies.

INTERVIEWER

What is that product? What is a novel supposed to be?

ROY

I think there is an increasing danger of novels becoming too streamlined, domesticated. When you read Vasily Grossman or the big Russian novels, they are wild and unwieldy, but now there’s a way in which literature is being commodified and packaged—is it romance, is it a thriller? Commercial? Literary? What shelf should we put it on? And now we have the phenomenon of the M.F.A. novel, which can often be a beautifully confected product. There are no rough edges. The number of characters, the length of chapters, it’s all skillfully orchestrated—and I’ll say that male novelists are allowed leeway there. They’re more easily allowed the big canvas. But with a woman, it’s like, How many characters are there in that book? Isn’t it a bit too political? I’d ask them, How many characters are there in One Hundred Years of Solitude or War and Peace or whatever? I sometimes feel that the settled classes, the contemporary cultural czars who are the arbiters of taste in the arts and in literature, are often wary of the real, deep, unsettling politics that are not part of accepted pedagogy—we are expected to write within a sort of default worldview, in which the ideas of what constitutes progress, enlightenment, and civilization are agreed upon. But I think that is changing now. It’s being challenged by young writers and poets, challenged from many directions, from across the world.

INTERVIEWER

The idea of a confected product is interesting, in that it also limits the subjects a writer is “allowed” to talk about, or what they can bring together into one book—as though a family story shouldn’t have a political dimension or vice versa. In Ministry, you say of Tilo that she “had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete,” which seems to speak to the way you work, too—in the novels themselves and in the way you move between genres.

ROY

A novelist can’t keep discrete worlds. Your business is to smash them together, against each other. The academic world, the journalistic world, the NGO world, they like to keep things discrete—this is a climate change dossier, in this room we deal with Hindu nationalism, that is the war and peace industry admin bloc, this is international finance, this is the environmental issues funding department, in this room we administer and ponder upon issues regarding caste, race, gender, and other identities. Sometimes, when I’m in a cruel mood, I think it’s a bit like a taxonomy of funding applications. But in order to really understand these things, to radically understand them, you have to look at the interplay. To truly understand the conflict in Kashmir you have to be aware of not just the dynamics of a military occupation, but also the geography of the place, the control of natural resources, the importance of the rivers in that region. When violence breaks out between two communities in Odisha, apart from the history of conflict between those communities, you must also look out for the bauxite mountain and the mining companies working in the neighborhood. To understand how the Indian economy works, knowing finance is not enough. You need to look at it through the prism of caste. You need to have a circle of eyes, many pairs of eyes arranged all around your head and a skin that is osmotic. At least that’s the kind of novelist I want to be. That has been my life’s tragedy as well as my holy grail. It has blown my life apart and then glued the pieces together. Sometimes I wish I could be otherwise—some other kind of person.

INTERVIEWER

Your work points out both details and generalities—deliberately, as you said, smashing these things together, or zooming in and out.

ROY

It’s not conscious on my part, but I think it probably has a lot to do with how one is culturally positioned inside India, in which everybody is expected to live in a rigid grid of caste, community, religion, ethnicity. Transgressions lead to anything ranging from “honor” killing to ostracism. If you fall outside that grid, as I do—not really belonging to a particular caste or particular community, for example—then you become the outsider on the inside.

Let me explain that. It’s not that I come from an oppressed caste or a community that has been exploited over generations. On the contrary—my mother belongs to the very elite, closed Syrian Christian community of Kerala, like Ammu in The God of Small Things. My father, my hard-drinking father, whom my mother left when I was about two, came from the other end of the country, Bengal. His family was extremely Westernized but not Christian. For three generations my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my father separately, individually, converted to Christianity. I have a cousin who has embraced Islam, another Judaism. My father is buried in a Christian graveyard in a place called Burari, on the outskirts of Delhi. But ironically, my mother, because she married outside the community and then got divorced, is sort of excommunicated and will not be buried in a Syrian Christian graveyard. Not that she wants to be. Despite this, and despite the hostility she once faced from her community, she stayed on in Kerala, where she still lives and works. But I fled. I came to Delhi, studied architecture, and am now embedded in a personal world that I have put together for myself—I am a writer without a “people.” But my writing has created my community for me . . . it has become my passport to places that are otherwise not always welcoming to other people—to the islands on the Brahmaputra in Assam, where many of the people that have been struck off the National Register of Citizens live, into the brutalized valley of Kashmir where my dearest friends live and work, or the forests of Central India, where a guerrilla war is being waged. I go to those places because I know that unless I go and talk to people, I will never be able to understand the patterns and particularities, the uniqueness as well as the universality, the almost maddening complexity of the world I want to write about. The greatest reward for a writer is the invitation to enhance your understanding—not in a journalistic sense necessarily, because I make no claims to neutrality. The amount of time that I have spent rattling around in vehicles, in strange places with people who know their communities, their villages, their environments like they know themselves . . . that’s my people, in a way. It’s not a territorial community, it’s like we’re all walking on lily pads floating on the surface of a lake or on stepping-stones on a rushing river. Or maybe we are the lily pads and the stepping-stones. It’s my floating island of understanding—the people of my literature, the people who my literature is made up of.

INTERVIEWER

Part of how you live in the world—maybe part of how you have to live in the world, in a city like Delhi—is language. It has always had an important, conscious place in your work—Hindi, English, Malayalam, Urdu, Kashmiri, among others, like the Telugu/English/Urdu letter that Dr. Azad Bhartiya translates in Ministry. People are translating for each other or to each other or just “each other” constantly.

ROY

When I am writing, I am always translating. I think my brain gets wired in a different way when I am writing in English what Musa would be thinking in Urdu, for example. Or, even if I don’t know Telugu, I know how Telugu people speak English, and I know how Malayalis speak English. [laughs] For me, English is like a rubber band. I have to make it do what all these different languages do.

INTERVIEWER

And you grew up speaking English and Malayalam, is that right?

ROY

As I said, my mother is from Kerala, where we speak Malayalam, and my father is from Bengal, where they speak Bengali. But I was born in Shillong, then part of Assam, now in a state called Meghalaya. When I was born, my parents were already not getting on, so while they fought I was farmed out to the tea pickers’ quarters, where the workers spoke a patois called Baganiya. Bagan is a garden. These were Adivasis, indigenous people, brought from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh. Cruelly exploited to this day. That was the first language I knew, I think. Then my parents divorced and I came to Ooty, where they speak Tamil. So, in my earliest years I used to know a little bit of Hindi, then English, then Malayalam.

INTERVIEWER

And the schools you went to in Kerala, were those English language or Malayalam?

ROY

Initially, when I was growing up in Ayemenem, I didn’t go to school, and used to speak Malayalam. When my mother started the school that she still runs, I studied there, and at that point there was serious punishment for us if we spoke in Malayalam—we had to write I will speak in English, I will speak in English—a hundred times. Sometimes five hundred times. It’s not like that anymore though, her school. Now the junior classes are conducted in Malayalam. Then I was sent to boarding school where the language of instruction was English.

INTERVIEWER

You also pay very close attention to “official” or political language in your fiction—­the police list in The God of Small Things, the way Anjum in Ministry keeps using hijra while Saeeda adopts terms like MTF and FTM and cis­gender, and labels like “untouchable” or “scheduled caste.”

ROY

The more I think about it, the more I realize how important this is to me—to be alert to public language, as well as the search for my own private language. When the nuclear tests happened in the nineties, for example, there was a complete change in the public language that was permissible to use in India.

The idea that India had announced itself as a nuclear power, much of the commentary had to do with a new, aggressive Hindu nationalism, meant that portraying people as “real” or “true” Indians, the stigmatization and profiling of religious minorities, particularly Muslims, became acceptable. Overt Islamophobia became customary. That shift in the language is what made me write “The End of Imagination”—my essay on India’s nuclear tests. Then, when I traveled to the Narmada Valley and wrote about the antidam movement, there was a different language. People would refer to themselves as paps—project-affected persons. Are you a pap? No, my name is not on the list. In Assam now, because of the National Register of Citizens, there is a new vocabulary. Fisherfolk in far-flung islands use English words like doubtful voters, declared foreigners, and genuine citizen, and worry about how to organize legacy documents. In Kashmir the military occupation has spawned its own vocabulary. It’s laid out in Tilo’s Kashmiri–English dictionary in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. And then there is the language of caste—the abhorrent traditional usage, the repulsive official terms. The way in which, in several vernaculars, women and people from Shudra and Dalit castes will be referred to in disrespectful ways that are coded into language itself.

How am I to explain all this to you? The story is, for me, life itself. The telling of the story is a story in itself. And the language in which the story is told is another whole story in itself. Because, in this part of the world, language is an ocean teeming with shoals of language fish and word fish.

INTERVIEWER

I think in one essay, you use the phrase “Language is the skin on my thought.”

ROY

That was not in an essay, it was just something I said when people were talking to me about The God of Small Things. Sometimes people think of language as something that you construct or choose. But, for me, it is never that. It arrives organically, to tell the story that needs to be told. It comes to me, like as an audio track, as music almost. When I write, I don’t write a lot and then redraft and throw things away. It’s more like I hear it. And then there’s an enhancement, but there isn’t a great amount of redrafting. Recently I was tidying up my cupboards and I found all these papers, sections of Utmost Happiness. They were written eight years ago, and there are pages, whole paragraphs, in which nothing has changed. It’s almost like these sentences and phrases appear as colored threads, and then it is a question of weaving them into a fabric.

INTERVIEWER

Can you say more about that idea—enhancement?

ROY

Let me see . . . for example, in The God of Small Things the first image I had, which isn’t of course the way the book actually starts, was a picture of a pair of seven-year-old twins in a sky-blue Plymouth with the sun reflected in its tail fins, small billboards advertising pickles on its luggage rack on the roof and stuck at a railway level crossing while a massive communist demonstration swirls around it. And the idea of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness germinated with this moment—an abandoned baby girl appears on a sidewalk at midnight in a place called Jantar Mantar in Delhi, which is a place where protest movements from all over the country used to converge. My goodness—it just occurs to me as I think this through—this thing I seem to have with children and political protests! Something about being born into resistance and chaos . . . When I say enhancement, what I mean is that I might write that paragraph about that baby that appeared, or the children at the level crossing, but around that, the oyster-novel secretes its story, layer by layer. In the case of both novels, those chapters are not the opening ones. But they are somehow the nerve center of the novel. That’s what I meant by enhancement.

INTERVIEWER

Something like a revolution in a graveyard happens frequently in your writing—­there is a discrepancy or an unexpectedness to places, even to metaphors. At the beginning of The God of Small Things, you describe something as domestic as rain in a garden with a very violent metaphor, plowing up the earth “like gunfire.” And in Ministry there is a bullet wound “like a cheerful summer rose.” As if things are in a sense the opposite of what we might expect them to be, especially in terms of this kind of violence or peace.

ROY

I’ve never thought of it like that before you pointed it out . . . the juxtaposition of those two metaphors. But yes, I think that things are seldom what they appear to be. We have to peel off the layers of publicity from almost everything . . . peace, love, death, rain, sunshine, established ideas of normalcy, motherhood, families . . . for me, personally, the family’s been a very violent place. A very, very violent place. Terrifying. All of my breakage happened there. Whenever I see an advertisement with the vision of the perfect house in which the happy family lives, I’m filled with foreboding. What saved me was a raft of friendship—intense friendships and great loves. Not bloodline and “the family.”

On the other hand, when you see what’s going on in a place like Kashmir and the assault on people, there it looks as though the family unit is the last thing standing—the last module that has not been smashed by the Indian state and its army of occupation. I always find myself a little lost when I go there, because I’m bewildered by these seemingly loyal, unquestioning family ties. But of course, inside that module there are all sorts of things going on, too . . . but when a people have to face what they face, I’m sure there’s a huge pressure not to let on, not to let their side down.

Revolution in graveyards, not metaphorically but literally, is the theme of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. The graveyards of Kashmir are where, as Musa writes to his dead daughter Miss Jebeen, the dead are alive and the living are only dead people pretending. And a graveyard in Delhi is where Anjum builds her Jannat Guest House—Paradise Guest House—in which every room encloses a tomb. Where separation between the living and the dead is very porous. If you pay close attention to who lives there, who dies there, who is buried there, and what prayers are said . . . it’s actually a revolution.

So, here’s a warning—don’t come to my novels expecting graveyards to be full of the dead and family homes to be inhabited by the living. Or, for that matter, expecting cinema halls to be screening films.

INTERVIEWER

If you were to baldly describe the plots of your novels, they’re both rather bleak. But they are also both very beautiful, with a lot of joy and richness, and both books end at a place of joy. That’s another kind of tension I was hoping you could talk about.

ROY

That tension is a part of what we were talking of earlier, changing lanes, messing around with metaphoric traffic regulations, not just in the public realm, but inside the human psyche, too . . . intensely private things, feelings, darkness and light, yearning, love, and loss. In The God of Small Things, there’s a section where I speak of kathakali, a dance form in Kerala—an exquisite, balladic form of storytelling, which I think is perhaps what has influenced me most of all as a storyteller. There I describe how the kathakali dancer can show you the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains, the hidden fish of shame in the sea of glory. Also in “The End of Imagination” there is a sort of writer’s manifesto—“To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair.” I sometimes feel that for women in India, happiness is a weapon. Because we’re not expected to be happy. We are expected to sacrifice, to suffer, to serve. When I was growing up in Kerala—my mother was very bitter, about men and about many things. But her school is such an exuberant place. The women, the girls in the school, are never made to feel unequal to the boys in any way. And you can see it in the way they walk, the way they conduct themselves, in their easy confidence.

INTERVIEWER

It’s a coed school, right?

ROY

It’s a coed school, yes. Unthinkable, utterly scandalous at the time she started it, in that conservative little town. I studied there, initially, and then went to another coed school, and then I left home for college when I was sixteen or seventeen and I didn’t go back. I could feel that this idea of the woman as a needy victim was—I just couldn’t survive that. There was always this thing in me, this almost militant search for happiness. I’m not going to voluntarily suffer. I mean if I have to suffer, I will, but it’ll not be an offer. The place I came from in Kerala—I don’t know how to describe the burden of conventionality. I mean, there’s nobody, nobody that I knew like myself in that place I was growing up in. Not even close. And given my parents’ background, it was made clear to me that a conventional marriage was nowhere on the horizon for me. “No self-respecting Syrian Christian boy will marry her” was a whispered refrain. So, a fair amount of unhappiness and bitterness was written into the script that was being readied for me. But I thought otherwise . . . No, I’m not going to be unhappy. I’m actually going to be really happy. And that was a militant aspiration for me. To pursue that. It requires you to slough off a lot of conditioning that you pick up from people around you. But I started young. Even then, I had to work at it. For years, I felt somewhat guilty, somewhat apologetic and embarrassed about where my work has got me—too much fame, too much money, too much nice flat—too much by my standards, not by rock star or movie star standards. Guilt is a debilitating emotion. I literally had to shake it out of me like a wet dog shakes water out of its fur.

The real question is, What do you do with what you have? What stories do you tell? How do you tell them? What do you do with money? How do you deploy it? How do you share it?

Joy is ephemeral. Of course it is. For me, happiness—and I’m not talking about the externalized Facebook-type of faux happiness—is a feeling and a state of mind, but sometimes it’s also a posture. Because they don’t want that. They want you to look beaten up. That’s why laughter is as much a part of my writing as anything else.

INTERVIEWER

That kind of happiness, that posture, can also be reflected in seeing humor and absurdity in the world, even in dark places. This comes up repeatedly in your work. How consciously do you think about this?

ROY

I don’t consciously think about it, because I live it. I see it all around me all the time. Uproarious laughter in the midst of the grinding guerrilla war in the Bastar forest, where people greet each other in the morning not knowing if they will see each other in the evening. Graveyard humor that is an essential part of the discourse in Kashmir. It’s only a question of having your ear tuned to it, being a part of it . . . people are incorrigible. And hilarious.

INTERVIEWER

What was the move like, from Kerala to Delhi? That seems like a big culture change and language change.

ROY

It was. But it was wonderful. It was very difficult between me and my mother in those days. I have an epic mother. She is my creator and my destroyer and I mean that in the epic sense of both of those words. She is very severely asthmatic, and that was a source of terror in my growing-up years. She kept saying, I’m going to die and what will you do? You’re going to have to live on the street. I felt like my breath in my lungs was hers. I was living on the thread of her faltering breath. I really thought that if she dies, I’ll die. I was very fearful as a child. And now she’s eighty-seven! But on the other hand, it is also she who put the steel into my spine. Who laid the groundwork for who I am now. It was she who made me turn our social isolation into defiance. It was she who made me comfortable in my skin—I was darker skinned than the rest of my family. A terrible crime. She made sure that the only doll I had—although I was never the doll type—was a black doll. But then, when the girl I was began to grow into the woman I am, my mother was infuriated. And there were years of terrible conflict.

I came to Delhi when I was sixteen, in 1976, to join the school of architecture, and I just loved Delhi for saving me. However polluted and terrible it is. However huge the cultural change was . . . To me it all smelled like freedom. Soon after my second year I stopped going home. I worked my way through college, as an architectural draftsman. I lived with a fellow student, my first boyfriend. I just became savage, stoned and reckless. Without any supervision because I was not taking money from home. I was living like a rat, on virtually nothing. But I was so happy.

INTERVIEWER

In one essay, writing about Delhi, you ask where else you could “be the hooligan that I am here, at home.”

ROY

Yes!

INTERVIEWER

In that same essay you write about finding the people whom you will love, and who will love you back. That idea comes up in Ministry as well, when Tilo talks about looking for her people and how, for a brief span of time, she and Musa are each other’s people. In addition to finding your place—how do you go about finding your people?

ROY

I found my people through my work. Through my writing, through the films I worked on. That was where my most enduring friendships and relationships were formed. But my first people I found when I joined the school of architecture. It was an absolutely amazing place. Those of us who stayed in the hostel came from all over the country, between us we spoke so many different languages. You find your people quickly, the ones that you smoke up with, go sketching with. The people who are so young and so free. You can decide that your community is this one, you know? [laughs] There were hardly any girls in the school at the time. We would arrive and there would be four or five of us in a class of thirty or forty. There was no girls’ hostel, so a little section of the boys’ hostel was cordoned off, but nobody paid that much attention to us. It was anarchy, wild liberation—by default. We were working all the time, night and day. And it was a completely fucked-up, broken-down, smoke-­ridden, filthy place. There was a coal plant next to us, so if you put a blank piece of paper on your drawing board, after five minutes it was gray . . .

INTERVIEWER

Oh God.

ROY

It was an awful place. But it was so wonderfully free for all that. Because people forgot about us. Even when I was a child, I think people forgot to indoctrinate me. It wasn’t that I was given some radical education, it was just that no one had the time to indoctrinate me with all the rules. And in the school of architecture it was a bit like that, too. I just kind of grew up in this rubble.

I have this memory of a relative of mine, a sort of grand-uncle, who was a senior government engineer, coming to visit me. Not out of love. It was just one of these rather creepy things—to gossip, to go home and tell people, This one’s gone wrong. By this time, I didn’t give a shit. So, he came to the hostel gate and I came down. He was one of those guys who would rub your back and be like . . . Oh, you’re not wearing a bra. He looked around and saw all these girls and boys sitting on the lawn together, chatting, smoking, he was scandalized. And he said, Aren’t you going out of bounds here? And I said, We have no bounds. I knew that every word spoken would be a nail in my coffin back home. Each sentence would be carried away like an indictment. Then he says, Where is your warden? I said, We have no warden. He said, By what time do you have to get back at night? I said, We don’t have to get back. He left, horrified.

I had burned my bridges. It wasn’t too hard, because I had found my people. I think in India the interesting thing is that if you’re a person like me, who is seen as being completely off the rails, you earn for yourself a kind of freedom. An accommodation is made.

INTERVIEWER

“There’s no hope for this one . . . ”

ROY

Yes. But not in a bad way. The rules that apply to others, the suffocating, debilitating rules, sometimes one escapes a little bit. Because of the visible eccentricities, maybe. But of course, you have to be economically independent. Otherwise you’ll be crushed. Finished.

INTERVIEWER

You brought a lot of that to life—visible eccentricities and all—in one of your earliest pieces of writing, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones.

ROY

Actually, the first thing I ever wrote that was published, was . . . [laughs] . . . there were some friends of ours—mine and my husband Pradip’s—who were wildlife filmmakers, and they were making a film about rhinoceroses that were being transferred from two national parks, one in Nepal and the other in Assam, to Delhi, to a national park called Dudhwa to hopefully start a new gene pool. The first batch of five arrived in Delhi in a Russian aircraft. They were in massive crates, which were loaded into five trucks, and this convoy of rhinoceros was going to drive from Delhi through these dusty little towns. I wrote the commentary for this documentary film, it was called How the Rhinoceros Returned. It was something though, driving with these convoy of rhinos, stopping by streams to water them, to make sure they weren’t getting too hot. Villagers looking through the cracks, seeing different parts, joining them up to make a phantom beast. Arriving at the park, where the rhinos were released into stockades, in which they were held for some weeks. And then finally, watching them being released into the wild.

INTERVIEWER

I have to ask—are the rhinoceros still there?

ROY

Yeah, they are. Some of them. A few, I was told, walked through the grasslands all the way back to Nepal.

INTERVIEWER

How did you go from that to working on Annie? It’s a movie, but the screenplay is quite unorthodox when you read it. There is a lot more description of setting—that cow walking as though it’s going to go file its taxes.

ROY

Ha! Well, we’ve skipped a whole chapter of my life in which I met and fell in love with Pradip Krishen—we live separately now. He saw me somewhere and asked me to act in a film he was making, Massey Sahib. I agreed to, more because I was dead curious about how films are made than due to any interest in acting. That was soon after I had graduated. After that I began to write screenplays. We worked on our first project, a twenty-six-part series for television, for two years. Midway through the shoot the production company collapsed. We were left broke and devastated. By the mid-’80s, in India, there was something new happening on the TV front. Doordarshan, that’s Indian state TV, was beginning to change. Every Saturday, Doordarshan would show one film, and the whole country would watch that one film. Because there was only one TV channel. State-owned TV, we thought at the time, was the worst thing in the world. Who could have anticipated the nightmare we live in now, when we have something like four hundred corporate news channels, many of them spewing religious hatred and fake news.

Anyway . . . back to Doordarshan, the new chief was a pretty open, broad-minded bureaucrat. We managed to get an appointment to meet him and made a proposal for a film, quite radically different from what Doordarshan would normally even dream of doing. He said, Write it. Show me. So I just sat down and wrote the script for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. It’s about students in architecture school. Annie is a male student, Anand Grover, repeating his fifth year for the fourth time. The language of the film was a particular Delhi University patois—in which “giving it those ones” means doing your usual shit. It was language that had never been used in either cinema or literature before. It was remarkable that Doordarshan gave us whatever little money we asked for to make that film. It was impossible, you know, to imagine that it would happen, but it did. It was made with literally nothing—a few thousand dollars. I was hand-drawing the titles on pieces of paper. But its raggedness as a film somehow complemented the raggedness of the people in it and all together it made a sort of ragged sense. Pradip directed it. I wrote, designed, and acted in it. Millions of people watched it on a Saturday night—because they had no choice! That was it . . . just that one single screening and it was gone. But what a massive audience. Even today people come up to me and tell me how they remember gathering with their families in front of a TV set to watch it. At the National Awards it won my favorite award of all time: Best Film in Other Languages Than Those Specified in Schedule VIII of the Constitution, i.e., English.

INTERVIEWER

I think there was another movie after that, as well.

ROY

Electric Moon. It was commissioned by Channel 4 TV in England. It’s set in a jungle lodge in a forest in Central India—Kipling country—where a spurious Indian royal family sells a spurious Indian experience to foreign tourists. You know that stuff, the Tigers and Temples India Tour. We used to jokingly call it the Fuck a Maharaja Tour. We shot it in a place called Pachmarhi. Pradip directed it. I wrote and designed it. At the time, there were a lot of those “Raj films” being made. On those units the big guys, producers, directors, DOPs were white, the minions were Indian. The old colonial power equation was firmly in place. In our film, suddenly it was reversed. It turned into a very peculiar experience because my film script sort of came true in real life—there was a complete breakdown of communication between, to put it crudely, the Indians and the white folks.

It was all very difficult and unpleasant. Just to understand what had happened, to explain it to myself, I started to write about it. It became an essay called “In a Proper Light.” That was, and still is, a common accusation, “You are not showing India in a proper light”—as though the purpose of all art is direct or indirect publicity for the ministry of tourism. I had just printed it out and it was lying around when Vir Sanghvi, the editor of a magazine called Sunday, happened to visit us. I didn’t know him, but one of my friends who had worked on Annie was a friend of his, and she was at our place. The two of them were going out for dinner and he came by to pick her up. While he was waiting for her to get ready, he read this thing lying on the table and he said, Who’s written this? Can I publish it? And I said, Sure, you can, but you can’t edit it. He said he wouldn’t touch it. So, he was really my first publisher. That was the first essay I wrote. After that I wrote “The Great Indian Rape Trick”—a series of essays on the film called Bandit Queen that were also published in Sunday. By then I was already working on The God of Small Things, in a leisurely, experimental way.

INTERVIEWER

So, we’re talking about ninety . . . four? How was the switch into prose fiction?

ROY

Beautiful, for me. Screenplays taught me a lot of things. They taught me pace. They taught me economy and dialogue. But by the time I was starting to write The God of Small Things, I didn’t just want to write “Exterior: Day, River.” I wanted to write about this river, I wanted to describe it. I want to tell you what it’s thinking, what the moon looks like in it.

It was like breaking out of the bonds of writing a screenplay, but also breaking free of the negotiations that take place when you work in cinema. All the artistic stuff that happens in cinema has to flow via contracts and money and producers breathing down your neck. Fabulous as the medium of cinema is, I found it very stressful that you have to continuously explain yourself. For me, novels exist as a negotiation between myself and myself before anyone else gets to look at it. After working in cinema, I liked the solitude of making my own decisions and being amorphous about things. If you have a cow walk past, you don’t have to have a budget for the cow! Also, as you pointed out—a cow at a traffic light looking as though she’s going to file her income tax returns, that is unnecessary nonsense—a naughty insertion—in a screenplay. It belongs more to a novel. But, shh! These days in India we have to be very careful about what we say about cows . . . I don’t know whether suggesting that cows file income tax returns is unholy or antinational. It probably is. Cows are at the center of the story of scores of people, mostly Muslim, sometimes Dalit, who have been lynched over the past few years.

INTERVIEWER

What was the writing process like, for the book?

ROY

When I started writing The God of Small Things, I thought that if a film like Annie was a fringe thing, then the novel was going to be even more fringe. There’s a sort of freedom in that. I had some money from the screenplay of Electric Moon, because after we signed the contract, which was in pounds, there was a huge devaluation of the rupee, and suddenly it became double the amount for us in India. We were just like . . . wow. It’s a party here now. So, I had a little bit of money to buy time and just work on the book. And the idea that one was so irrelevant to everything is a form of liberation, you know?

Writing it was a kind of secret activity. We lived out of two rooms on the roof of Pradip’s parents’ house. My deal with him was that from the morning until about two I would be allowed to lock one room. I didn’t tell anyone what I was writing. I hardly knew myself. I was searching for something. I began writing the chapter where the sky-blue Plymouth is stopped at the level crossing. It went on forever. I wondered whether when I was eighty years old, it would still be stuck at that fucking level crossing and I would still be writing about it.

I think the architect in me was always searching for a structure, for a form. I was searching and I didn’t know what it was. And then suddenly, like two years into the writing, it came to me almost like a graphic. In fact, I drew a graphic of how the story spanned across a period of a single day while other threads wove across several years. It came to me as a sort of rhythm, a phantom drumbeat that I was trying to get the measure of. Then one day I saw it. The structure. I drew it . . . just on the back of an envelope, and stuck it up on a tack board. It was a huge relief. The level crossing opened and the car went through.

INTERVIEWER

That’s interesting to think about—the graphic way into writing. Do you still find yourself using that architectural training in thinking about the form and structure of your writing now? You always hear about writers outlining work, and so on, but this sounds different.

ROY

Yes, it’s more like designing than outlining. Architecture has always been central to my way of thinking.

INTERVIEWER

It sounds like writing The God of Small Things was a very private experience. Did you have an audience in mind at all? Or do you now?

ROY

Nobody. I don’t have one. All my writing, for me, is an experiment with itself. It’s got its own logic, its own impetus. Once I put down the first sentence it takes over. It has its own impetus, its own velocity, it becomes its own thing.

INTERVIEWER

Has that changed at all, from writing The God of Small Things in the nineties to writing Ministry some twenty years later? I wonder also if there is some difference here between the fiction and the nonfiction—your essays, you’ve said, are “wrenched” out of you in a way that feels much more quick than your fiction, which you’ve said “dances” out of you.

ROY

Actually, oddly enough, it hasn’t really changed. Because it’s a sort of instinct. Sometimes I feel there’s something shamanistic going on. A while ago my literary agent, David Godwin, called to ask how the writing was going. And I said, As you know, David, I don’t write. I just wait.

It’s true in a way. Someone, a spirit, a wraith, a naughty thing, just comes and whispers in my ear. Or creeps up and punches me in the gut. It’s usually the fiction that whispers and the nonfiction that violently intervenes. I am restless when I write nonfiction. And peaceful but crazy when I write fiction.

INTERVIEWER

I wanted to end by asking you a little more about kathakali, which has an important place in The God of Small Things when Estha and Rahel go to the temple. It’s another form of storytelling or presenting a story. How did you find that form?

ROY

In Ayemenem there was a whole community of kathakali dancers. The person who I was thinking about when I described the kathakali in The God of Small Things, I knew him from the time I was very young. He was just the most beautiful man you could imagine. He told me about how, when he was a child, he dreamed of being a dancer, but his family was poor. His mother took him to see the ustad, you know, the guru. It was raining that day and the tiny boy and his mother walked to the guru’s home, sheltering under a huge yam leaf because they didn’t even have an umbrella. They didn’t have any money to pay what was known as guru dakshina, the gift, the reward to a guru for the favor of taking his shishya, his student, into his care, and teaching him all that he knows. So the guru took his mother aside, gave her five rupees—that’s, I don’t know, a few cents—and said, Now give it back to me as guru dakshina. And with that sweet act of generosity, one of the most magnificent storytellers I have ever known began his education.

For me, everything I see and absorb, I harness it, I turn it to my purpose—­which is to tell stories. It’s odd to be a writer whose greatest influence has come from dance. But it’s true. Kathakali, katha is story and kali is play. The kathakali dancer, the body of the dancer manages to be the story, become the story, not just tell it. It can change in a minute from being the all-powerful king into becoming a tiny, intimate detail. It can be the sky, the chariot, the war, the lover, the deer, the monkey in the forest, the ferocious king, his conniving queen. I like that. Writing with my body. My skin, my eyes, my hair. I always feel that the fitness of a storyteller is the ability to be able to make those leaps without heavy breathing. Without showing the effort. The ability to move, not just from the epic to the intimate, but also from humor to poignancy to heartbreak to hardness to vulgarity—all these things, to me, are important. Sometimes you’ll see a piece of very beautiful, poignant writing but there’s no humor, there’s no vulgarity and, to me, that is very much part of what I do. It needs to be everything—in the language of Hindustani classical music, it needs to be a raag that includes all the notes in an octave. Sharps and flats, too.

INTERVIEWER

Fitness is a powerful word in this context. For a dancer, that involves physical fitness.

ROY

Yes, but to me that is a good word for writing too. Because you need to be athletic, metaphorically you need that ability that a dancer has—to glide. To lift that limb gracefully and effortlessly. Whereas sometimes you can hear the heavy breathing in writing. I always think that some great writers leave the reader with the memory of their brilliance, which overshadows the memory of the universe they wrote about. And others leave you with the memory not of their greatness but of the world they conjured up. That’s the writer I would like to be. I want to live in the world I write, the world I create. I want to inhabit my fiction. I want to live in a graveyard, in a room in Jannat Guest House. With a tomb of my own. Actually, I already do.

 


the paris review