I want to write about the air we breathe and it has caste, gender, Kashmir: Arundhati Roy

(Source: Renuka Puri)

Though Anjum is the first person readers meet in the story, she had knocked on Roy’s door much later, the author said. For her, structuring of the novel is fundamental, something like city planning where language is the construction material. “You make a plan, it gets ambushed, you re-plan it, and there is migration. There are unauthorised colonies and all kinds of people who show up and your plans are ambushed again and you re-plan it.”

The first thing she wrote in the story, its nerve centre, came into the story much later – Jantar Mantar. “It is sadly being shut down and I shouldn’t think we should let that happen,” she said. One night, while she was amidst the resistance movements in the area, an abandoned baby appeared, and nobody knew what do to. “It made me think a lot about the wisdom, politics and energy and suddenly between all this confusion, we call the police. It was the first moment that fiction started to happen. Though the early years of the book were like generating smoke and the later years were like sculpting it, so it involves a tremendous amount of discipline to make it look right,” she said.

Twenty years apart, there are connections between the two books. “For me, the main connection between the two books is the character of Tilotama. She is to me, in my mind, the daughter of Ammu and Velutha had the God of Small Things ended differently. She is the younger sibling of Estha and Rahel, and the twins have own rooms in Anjum’s Jannat Guest House.”

“To those who say writers can’t be activists, I say we live in places where politics kicks the door at three in the morning. I want to write about the air we breathe, and it has caste, gender, Kashmir, love, animals, cities and jokes. Can we write where we are not afraid of intimacy, politics, and where the background becomes the foreground?” she asked. A border of gender runs through Anjum, caste through Tilotama, conversion through Saddam Hussain, and a national border through Musa.

(Source: Renuka Puri)

On bringing Kashmir to the foreground in her novel, Roy said, “I think Kashmir is fundamental to what our lives are today and I am not talking about that we have a place where hundreds of soldiers are administering civilian lives, or what does that do to people in Kashmir, but what does that do people in India? How do we as a people give ourselves the right to speak about all the various forms of violence and injustice perpetrated on us, if we are willing to swallow it when it comes to someone else?”

While her non-fiction essays had interventions, arguments in a situation that’s closing down, she said, a novel becomes a universe she constructs. “Anybody can walk through who is not frightened of it. They might get lost or find their way, they may not like what they see but that does not matter.”

She agreed to a review which said the story required readerly perseverance. “I look at it as a city, an underwater city. You can choose to swim with the fish on the surface, take a little dive to the middle or go deep down and swim with bottom feeders. Even when I read it I find things like a woman who has hidden money in various pockets of her clothes and suddenly discovers bits and things.”