Arundhati Roy talks about why it took her 20 years to write a new book and its connection with the old one. By Saimi Sattar
Is this an interrogationIJ” she asked with a nervous laugh as a spotlight from above put her in focus. The voice was soft but steely, as if a clutch of intangible wires — taut, strung and almost palpable — was running through it. Arundhati Roy, the goddess of literary and non-literary fiction and author of the Booker winner, The God of Small Things (GOST) made her first appearance after the release of her second fictional novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, at the opening day of the Penguin Spring Fever. And she owned the space like she always has. On her own terms.
The novel, which has sold 90,000 copies in India and is up for translation in many foreign and Indian languages, was written after a gap of 20 years. The Ministry, with its sprawling landscape of vibrant characters moving across times and locations, has both human and animal characters spread over its 438 pages, birthed by her closeness with nature in her days at the village. As she had a chat with Shohini Ghosh, Sajjad Zaheer Professor of media at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre as well as an essayist on popular culture and a documentary filmmaker, she began with why her second novel took so long in the coming. “When GOST happened and all that happened with it, it blew my life apart. I regret having written a book, that in crass terms, was so successful,” said Roy, dressed in white top and grey trousers, which seemed to be the perfect match for her salt and pepper hair. She went on to add, “One of the great risks of success and fame in arts is that you could get domesticated or you could domesticate yourself. One replicates or sort of rewards people’s expectations by writing the Son of God of Small Things and for me even when I wrote the original, I was very clear that I was not setting out to be a professional writer. I had the option of signing up for a huge amount and have people manage me and tell me what to do. I didn’t want that.”
But then that’s Roy, refusing to be boxed into any particular category. While there are writers who love the commerce around the book or the fact that it can be made into a movie, Roy is categorical. “When GOST was published, somewhere in my mind it was a stubbornly visual but un-filmable book. I don’t think it would be a great film reduced to verbs and adjectives,” she emphasised. Despite that film offers poured in. “When I was in los Angles, filmmakers tried to buy the rights to the movie. My literary agent, David Godwin, called up and told me ‘look they are ready to give you anything. What do you wantIJ’ And I replied, ‘I want them to grovel and then I want to refuse.’ ” This may sound haughty but Roy was so matter-of-fact about it that you believed the truth behind the sentiment. She emphasised, “GOST was a novel which does not want to be an essay or a film but wants to be a novel.”
Just like the author, her works too defy description. The fiction in Ministry overlaps non-fiction where the contours of Kashmir, caste and gender come knocking. “People want to categorise a book in three sentences and six adjectives. I want to write something which I can’t describe. I want to write about the air we breathe and the air is replete with caste and gender, Kashmir, love and cities, jokes and everything. Can we write when we are not afraid of intimacy and politicsIJ Can we write when we are not afraid that the background becomes the foregroundIJ” she asked.
The word Ministry in the title has religious connotations of the Trinity of the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost and Roy feels that in translation this meaning is lost. But at another level it signifies what the characters are about. “To me the book is about people who find slender, unusual ways of recognising and celebrating happiness in the most unexpected places — a graveyard. Anjum starts Jannat Guest House where her relatives are buried, stealing electricity from the morgue where corpses of city’s vagrants lie in air-conditioned splendour which they never knew in their life.” She further elaborated on the idea and said, “The greatest gift of human beings is that they can recognise their happiness. The characters have their moments, they go through terrible things and the reason that they can never be defeated is because they are already broken but they know how to be happy. Happiness is not an institution.”
The second book has a resonance with GOST in several places. “The very first chapter, Where do old birds go to dieIJ is the question that Sophie Mol asks in GOST and that sentence grew wings and flew into Ministry. There are some connections which were deliberate and then there were some others, which I keep finding, often while working on the Urdu translation of the book. There are some naughty references for no other reason than naughtiness. The main connection is the character of Tilottama. In my mind she is the daughter that Amu and Velutha had in GOST. She is the younger sibling of the twins. There are other connections too. There is a long chapter in cinema which plays a very significant role in the Ministry too, though in a very different way. There are cement kangaroos which hopped across both books,” said Roy thoughtfully.
Another thing that stands out in the Ministry is the plethora of animal and human characters. Explained Roy, “I grew up in a village where there were no shops, nothing absolutely... so my playground was a river bank. I knew every creature, plant and fish. I have always been that person whose world does not just consist of human beings and one of the joys of writing fiction for me is the joy of being able to describe that landscape.” She also added that when you think of a description of a war in Syria or Afghanistan, you talk about people but then there are other things which get incinerated — things that are not even mentioned in the passing.
Not just her childhood but her growing up years and choice of subject, too, have had an influence on Roy. She studied architecture and wrote a dissertation on urban planning, topping her batch. While she studied, she had “no aspiration and no money” but somewhere architecture continues to greatly influence her writing in her structuring as well as the descriptions. Her identification with people who live on the margins of a society is strong. “People are expected to live in a crack and even the sewage system does not belong to them,” she said.
Not surprisingly Roy, whose stance is often not in consonance with the establishment, felt she was walking on the edge of insanity when she wrote the character of Garson Hobart aka Biplab Dasgupta, an intelligence agent, who audaciously has the authorial voice in the book. “He shocked me when he appeared and started speaking in first person in the middle of the book. He is the rule of law type of guy who is breaking all rules of literary fiction. I tried to thwart that and he didn’t listen.” And she realised the reason was because, “He is a trans-person. Half of him is a lost alcoholic and the other is the voice of state but not the voice of the current state — the rabid, less intelligent state of today but rather the sort of upper class, Brahmanical Nehruvian state of days gone by. His is the voice of a state which wants to have the authority to speak for all of us. “
Each of the characters has borders running through them. “Anjum (a transgender) has the border of gender, Tilottama (daughter of a lower caste) has that of caste, Saddam Hussain, a young Dalit man who watched his father beaten to death and became a Muslim, has the border of conversion. Musa (a Kashmiri) has the national border. They are not dissidents but they are off-grid by birth or by who they are or where they belong to. Through their off gridness, they illuminate the grid,” said Roy, who was also the scriptwriter for two movies, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989) and Electric Moon and (1992).
Roy has often been accused of being an activist. Her take —“We live in places where politics kicks in the door at 3 in the morning. I never think of these things as issues. To me it is a way of seeing. I write about the air we breathe. These are not issues. This is us. It is not external to what is going on.” So her fans can look forward to being dazzled by her literary brilliance where fiction continues to surface in non-fiction and the boundaries between the two get blurred.