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many sweethearts, including the one responsible for the tall orange lilies on her kitchen table.“ My harem,” she jokes, saying mysteriously,“ They are all in The
Ministry’ s acknowledgments.” When she was at architecture school, she says,
“ my name on the roster was S. A. Roy, so a lot of people called me that.”( Her given name is Suzanna.)“ My sweethearts call me Roy. Almost no one calls me Arundhati.” She laughs her easy laugh once more and adds,“ None of the simple things in my life are simple.”
That includes her relationship with her mother, Mary Roy. A Syrian Christian from Kerala, Mary scandalized her conservative community not only by marrying outside the faith but then by leaving her Hindu husband and returning home with two small children in tow. Atypically for her generation, she raised Roy and her older brother,
Lalith, on her own. Roy tries to return to Kerala( where The God of Small
Things is set) every couple of months to see her family. She says she feels“ delicious vengeful feelings toward that parochial community that excommunicates you before you’ re three years old because you don’ t have the right pedigree.... And yet the minute I see the rivers and the coconut trees, I know that this is my landscape, my geography. It’ s a very strange contradiction.”
A lot has changed since Roy was a child, but the old houses and the Meenachil River— where she would catch fish for lunch with a bamboo pole— remain much the same. Roy clearly developed a strong sense of self-reliance from her mother, who, 50 years ago, founded a school in two rooms rented from the local Rotary Club with just five students— two of them her own children.
After flying down to Kochi and driving two hours south to the town of
Kottayam, I find Mary Roy in a sunny office at the heart of the verdant hillside
Pallikoodam campus. With extensive grounds— including a swimming pool, playing fields, and gardens— Mary’ s school now serves some 470 students, from nursery to twelfth grade, some of whom have matriculated to Harvard or
Johns Hopkins.
With short salt-and-pepper hair,
Mary, at 83, is physically frail, yet regal in a charcoal salwar kameez and three strands of silver pearls.“ I didn’ t want to start a school. The inspiration was my children,” she tells me. Advised by two nuns, Mary decided her students wouldn’ t be burdened by excessive
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sports, and would learn about“ nuclear weapons and the pyramids,” she says. Teaching social awareness was a priority, and she herself took on the Supreme Court of India in the 1980s to successfully overturn an inheritance law that discriminated against women.
Armed with this unconventional education and example, Arundhati and her brother left when they were nine and ten to attend Lawrence, a prestigious private boarding school in Chennai, where Lalith says“ Suzie” excelled as student, orator, and athlete. At Lawrence,“ you had to fight for yourself,” says Lalith, who works in seafood export( Roy calls him a“ prawn broker”).“ She was very independent. My mum had groomed her to be tough.” It was a challenging relationship, and not long after arriving in Delhi, Roy had a falling out with her mother and cut off all contact for the next four years.
“ My mother’ s such a fabulous influence in my life, not motherly and nurturing in that way,” says Roy.“ She’ s the calcium in my bones, the steel in my spine, from warring with her.” Mother and daughter eventually reconciled.“ But there was no Bollywood moment,” Roy says.“ I was a writer when I was three years old. Even when she was raging at me I could see she was in pain. As a child, to be able to understand an adult is a terrible thing.”
On my last visit to Roy, I find her at home in a meeting with a young leader in the Dalit-rights movement. The Supreme Court has met to say it will discuss Roy’ s case in a month’ s time but later postpones it.(“ The process is the punishment,” she says wryly.) And she is about to go to the London Book Fair to give a reading from The Ministry to 1,000 Penguin UK employees at the Barbican Centre, to deliver 26 carefully marked proofs of the book cover to her publishers with all her notations, and to meet with her many translators to discuss the nuances of the prose.“ You end up thinking in so many languages and dialects,” she says.“ We are living in Babel now.” □
IN CONTROL
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 144 singer-songwriters at the moment,” he says,“ a master of relatable simplicity.” And yet SZA tends toward the cryptic when she discusses her music. She cites no particular influences, though the shadows of Billie Holiday, Björk, Lauryn Hill, Amy Winehouse, and
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amounts of homework, would play |
Rihanna pass |
CONTINUED ON PAGE 160 |