her as a polemicist who should get back to novel-writing.
Others held her up as a much-needed agent of change. I asked
Roy then if she thought she would write more fiction, and
she said, “I hope so. It’s difficult living in a time like this. . . .
Whatever I write next, all that will go into it.”
Her platform continued to broaden. She was invited to sit
on a war-crimes tribunal in Istanbul in 2005 after the U.S.
invasion of Iraq, and when the German chancellor, Angela
Merkel, paid a state visit to India in 2015, she requested a
meeting with Roy. “Sister Roy really is an internationalist
connecting what’s going on in one corner of the globe with
what’s going on in another,” says the philosopher and activist
Cornel West. “She is bearing intense moral witness.”
It comes at a cost. Roy has been brought before the Su-
preme Court of India on charges of crimi-
nal contempt of court (for the second time)
for protesting a friend’s brutal arrest. And
while people regularly stop to take selfies
with her, she has also been burned in effigy.
Another friend, the Pulitzer Prize–win-
ning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, com-
pares her to George Orwell. “Goons have
smashed chairs on the stage where she is
speaking,” he says, “and spies stand at the
edges of the room taking notes on what
she says.” But Roy has no desire to leave
India. “As a writer,” she says, “I’m just in
the paws of this place, and this place is in
the paws of me.”
It’s hard to imagine Roy’s new novel ex-
isting without her nonfiction. “I’m pretty
sure that I’m fundamentally a fiction writer.
Nonfiction is the fretwork,” she says. “Po-
litically, whatever positions I’ve taken, I’ve
taken. That was a march. This is something
else. This is a dance.”
goats,” she says, as we pass one dressed in a burlap sack
eating from the gutter.
Walking under a tangled web of electrical lines, we pass
storefronts straight out of her novel, selling saris, jewelry, cell
phones, glasses, hardware, and legumes. At dusk, we climb
the stairs to her landlady’s apartment and flat roof, where
we are served butter cookies and tea from white china cups
as the landlady’s family gathers around. Clearly at ease, Roy
says, “You don’t find this in the First World—where you walk
through shit and into love.”
Across the way, Roy’s “refuge” is a clean and simple room
of plain white walls with blue trim around the windows, a
desk, and a single bed with a dark-red coverlet. The kitchen
is a floor above, along with a wall-to-wall bookshelf crammed
with everything from The Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire to Alice Munro.
On our way down, Roy walks out onto
the narrow balcony overlooking the busy al-
leyways and rests her forearms on the wood-
en railing. This, she tells me, is where she
dreamed up the novel. “I was disciplined,
writing during the weeks at home, and com-
ing here only on the weekends,” to think and
plan. I ask, “So no country house for you?”
She laughs. “People offer me all sorts of nice
places to work, but pristine places scare me.”
As we leave, weaving through the noisy
traffic, she asks, “Isn’t it a good sound track
to write a novel to?”
“Why?” I ask. “Because it drowns out all
the doubting voices?”
She looks back, surprised. “No, because
it reminds you that no matter how much
you think things should be put in order, all
is actually chaos.”
Though her
life there comes
at a cost, Roy
has no desire to
leave India. “I’m in
the paws of this
place,” she says,
“and this place is in
the paws of me”
Roy’s social world in Delhi is interwoven
with friendships from the 30-plus years she
has lived in the city since she arrived here to
study architecture. Her writing has brought
her into contact with authors far and wide,
including John Berger, with whom she was
very close before he died; Naomi Klein; Eve
Ensler; and Wallace Shawn. One night as we part she tells me
she is headed out with a group of friends from her days teach-
ing aerobics in her early 20s. “I never let go of anyone,” she
says. “We can speak in shorthand, a kind of code, in movie
dialogue.” She is strongly connected to those who share her
sense of mission. “I’m a person who’s been very much a part
of concentric rings of solidarity.”
Despite her numerous circles, Roy sees herself as a crea-
ture of solitude. “The most un-Indian thing about me is
how alone I am,” she says. She keeps a place to write in
the winding alleys of Old Delhi, about a half-hour’s drive
from her apartment. “Don’t call it a writing studio,” she
says as we head there one afternoon. “That sounds so
New York. Call it a refuge.” Leaving the car at Turkman
Gate, one of the original portals to the old city, she pulls
me deftly through an oncoming barrage of auto-rickshaws,
motorbikes, and cars. “These streets are in me, and these
She may have an affinity for chaos, but Roy
nonetheless finds ways to step back from it.
A few days later she takes me to the birth-
place of the thirteenth-century Sufi saint
Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, which adjoins
a Muslim cemetery. It’s not the invented
graveyard of the novel, she says, but a peace-
ful place she returned to over and over in the
course of writing. From there we go to the nearby Old Delhi
neighborhood where she lived in her 20s while working at
the National Institute of Urban Affairs. “Each day, I would
rent a bicycle for a rupee and cycle to work,” she recalls. “At
the end of the day I would cycle home, and all the beggars
sitting out in the street would greet me: ‘So you survived
another day, too?’ ”
It was at this job that she met Pradip Krishen, a film
director who cast her as a tribal girl in his film Massey
Sahib, and with whom she would go on to collaborate on
two movies. One, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, is a
cult classic about “stoned architecture students” that she
wrote and he directed. They eventually married. When a
third film project fell through, Roy, who had started writing
GOST, turned to the novel full-time.
These days Krishen and Roy are friendly. (Though not
officially divorced, they keep C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 5 9
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