It’s been fifteen years since we first met—I came to Delhi
in 2002 to write about Roy’s fearless political activism for
this magazine—and at 57, she seems virtually unchanged.
Her curly hair may be grayer (“Gray pride,” she likes to
joke), but her wide eyes, lined lightly in kohl, remain merry,
and her easy laugh is the same. She’s in a fine mood, having
been up much of the night overseeing “the comma wars”
between her American and British copy editors at Knopf
and Penguin UK over the proofs of her second novel, The
Ministry of Utmost Happiness, her first since 1997, when
The God of Small Things was publishe