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"When
I think back on all the things I have done I think from a very early age,
I was determined to negotiate with the world on my own. There were no parents,
no uncles, no aunts; I was completely responsible for myself."
Arundhati Roy left home at 16 and then lived in a squatters' camp, in a
small hut with a tin roof, within the walls of Delhi's Ferozshah Kotla.
She made a living selling empty beer bottles. It was six years before she
saw her mother again.
Arundhati
Roy,
was trained as an architect and became a screenwriter. She lives in New
Delhi & this is her 1st book. –
Hey
Mr Monkey man
Why’s your bum so red?
I went for a shit to Madras
And scraped it till it bled !
Chako,
where do old birds go to die? Why don’t dead ones fall like stones
from the sky?
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"My
mother says that some of the incidents in the book are based on things that
happened when I was two years old. I have no recollection of them. But obviously,
they were trapped in some part of my brain."
Suzanna Arundhati Roy was born on the 24th November 1961, the
child of a marriage between a Christian woman from Kerala and a Bengali
Hindu tea planter. It was not a happy
marriage and she is unable to speak of her father without difficulty.
"I don't want to discuss my father. I don't know him at all. I've only
seen him a couple of times, that's it," she told Sunday Plus when pressed.
Arundhati spent
her crucial childhood years in Aymanam. There, her mother Mary Roy (later a
well-known social activist) ran an informal school named Corpus Christi where
Arundhati developed her literary and intellectual abilities unconstrained by
the set rules of formal education. Aymanam is no longer the old-fashioned village
of the sixties in which the novel is set. It is now a bustling extension of
Kottayam town, with 7,000 houses and a rash of dish antennae. Paradise Pickles
still exists. Social prejudices have dissolved to great extent, though
an affair between a low caste man and an upper caste woman can still cause quite
a flutter.
"A
lot of the atmosphere of A God of Small Things is based on my experiences of
what it was like to grow up in Kerala. Most interestingly, it was the
only place in the world where religions coincide, there's Christianity, Hinduism,
Marxism and Islam and they all live together and rub each other down. When I
grew up it was the Marxism that was very strong, it was like the revolution
was coming next week. I was aware of the different cultures when I was growing
up and I'm still aware of them now. When you see all the competing beliefs against
the same background you realise how they all wear each other down. To me, I
couldn't think of a better location for a book about human beings."
The rural environment
was also important. "I think the kind of landscape that you grew up in,
it lives in you. I don't think it's true of people who've grown up in cities
so much, you may love building but I don't think you can love it in the way
that you love a tree or a river or the colour of the earth, it's a different
kind of love. I'm not a very well read person but I don't imagine that that
kind of gut love for the earth can be replaced by the open landscape. It's a
much cleverer person who grows up in the city, savvy and much smarter in many
ways. If you spent your very early childhood catching fish and just learning
to be quiet, the landscape just seeps into you. Even now I go back to Kerala
and it makes me want to cry if something happens to that place."
She says that she
was never "part of this safe world where
you grow up and then are married and sent off. You know it's actually terrifying
for people and in many ways I escaped that. Having an arranged life and being
sent off to some stranger's house. But on the other hand escaping that meant
watching it from the outside and not knowing exactly what would happen to you."
"I grew up
in very similar circumstances to the children in the book. My mother was divorced.
I lived on the edge of the community in a very vulnerable fashion. Then when
I was 16 I left home and lived on my own, sort of... you know it wasn't awful,
it was just sort of precarious... living in a squatter's colony in Delhi."
"I
think fiction for me has always been a way of trying to make sense of the world
as I know it."
Arundhati Roy has been described as: charming, humorous, strong-willed, independent,
energetic, creative, with a great sense of fun, 1.55m of doe-eyed delicateness,
a down-to-earth 'girl next door', a towering intellect with a poetic fluency
with words delivered in a soft modulated voice, a dog-lover. She is 40 years
old and describes her two favourite pastimes as 'writing and running'.
Her novel, The
God of Small Things, has been described as 'remarkable for its quality of innocence
and originality'. It is a playful book, full of poetry and wisdom.
Arundhati Roy says herself that "it isn't a book about India... It is a
book about human nature."
Set in Kerala in
the 1960s, The God of Small Things is about two children, the two-egg twins
Estha and Rahel, and the shocking consequences of a pivotal event in their young
lives, the accidental death-by-drowning of a visiting English cousin. In magical
and poetic language, the novel paints a vivid picture of life in a small rural
Indian town, the thoughts and feelings of the two small children, and the complexity
and hypocrisy of the adults in their world. It
is also a poignant lesson in the destructive power of the caste system, and
moral and political bigotry in general. The novel has become an international
best-seller, and in October 1997 won the coveted Booker Prize.
"I have to say that my book is not about history but biology and
transgression. And, the fact is that you can never understand the nature of
brutality until you see what has been loved being smashed. And so the book deals
with both things - it deals with our ability to be brutal as well as our ability
to be so deeply intimate and so deeply loving."
Arundhati Roy has been no stranger to controversy, from her mother's campaigning
through to her own article on Shekar Kapur's celebrated film 'Bandit Queen',
about Phoolan Devi, in which Roy charged Kapur with exploiting Devi and misrepresenting
both her life and its meaning. That ended with a court case, and her giving
up the world of film.
The
God of Small Things was also the cause of some debate:
In
England, Channel 4's coverage of the Booker included a round-table debate by
literary 'stars' Melvyn Bragg, A. S. Byatt, Will Self, and Carmen Callil. Callil
(the previous year's chair of the Booker judges) pronounced The God of Small
Things "an execrable book" which should never have reached the shortlist.
The
English response reveals more about the damaging insularity and racism of the
English literary scene than it does about the novel.
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