INDIAN
SUMMER
Her first novel, The God of Small Things, was
an instant best seller. Twenty years later, Delhi-based
author and firebrand Arundhati Roy delivers the
follow-up we’ve been longing for. By Daphne Beal.
Photographed by Rena Effendi.
n the top floor of a
small building on a quiet lane in central Delhi, the writer Arun-
dhati 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 democ-
racy), 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.”
IN THE PINK
Arundhati Roy, photographed in a quiet corner of
Delhi, to which she retreated often while writing her new novel,
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.