Profile of Arundhati Roy
In 1997 Indian novelist Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, for her first novel, The God of Small Things. Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, interviewed Roy for this July 1998 Encarta Yearbook article.
Indian Novelist and Booker Prize Winner Arundhati Roy
By Michael Dirda
“Don't emphasize any of the syllables: Air-Un-Dah-Tee,” she says precisely in a lilting, musical voice, just faintly inflected with what must be an Indian accent. Author of The God of Small Things, the 1997 winner of the prestigious Booker Prize, Arundhati Roy is 38 years old but could pass for a college student. Slender and short, she typically wears a denim jacket and jeans and carries a knapsack. For readings she may put on a long skirt and white silk blouse, which sets off her black hair, luminous eyes, and dark good looks. At such times she could be Ammu or the grown-up Rahel, the beautiful mother and daughter heroines of her acclaimed first novel.
It has been quite a ride for Roy since her book was published in 1997. The God of Small Things became a bestseller in more than 25 countries, from India to Germany, from Portugal to the United States. Writing in the New Yorker, novelist and critic John Updike praised the novel as a stunning debut, while the New York Times called Roy's book “Faulknerian in its ambitious tackling of family and race and class, Dickensian in its sharp-eyed observation of society and character.” Despite such head-swelling plaudits, Roy seems quite unaffected by her achievement and good fortune. Compared to the great scope of history and time, she says, “I believe strongly in my insignificance.”
Human Drama
Like the best fiction, The God of Small Things—by turns a gothic mystery, social comedy, three-generation saga, and tragic love story—is, most of all, an intensely human drama. It is the tale of how the drowning of a little girl and the police murder of an illicit lover utterly destroy a well-to-do Indian family, especially two children, whose lives are emotionally blasted and withered.
But the novel is also a portrait of Kerala, the densely populated Indian state on the subcontinent's southern tip that has a Communist government. “I wanted,” says Roy, “to drive my stake in here [in Kerala]. I wanted to say that this is my place, that it deserves literature. It was very important to me that it be real, these stars, these leaves.” Most of the action takes place in 1969, a time of political and social ferment. “Kerala is a place where big religions meet and rub against each other: Hinduism, Christianity—and Marxism.” She smiles.
“The novel had its origins in the vision of a sky blue Plymouth with sun in its chrome tail fins and a sign on its roof advertising pickles stopped at a traffic-crossing while a political demonstration flowed around it,” she says with another smile. Roy's family did not own a Plymouth, but such events were surprisingly commonplace. “One of my classmates at school was asked what were the most popular festivals in Kerala, and he replied, ‘Strikes!’”
Intricate Structure
This improbable-seeming vision ultimately became the second chapter of a book as tightly fitting and interwoven as a piece of embroidery. Like the classic novel Ulysses (1922) by Irish writer James Joyce, which revolves around the developments of a single day, most of the action in The God of Small Things radiates out from the events of the 24 hours following that traffic delay. In fact, the reader learns virtually everything that happens in the novel within the first 25 or 30 pages but is drawn on, obsessively, to find out the why and how of the story's tragic events. How did the little girl Sophie Mol die? What exactly happened to the handyman Velutha? Why were the twins Rahel and her brother Estha separated at the age of seven?
“The structure of the book,” observes Roy, “is something I worked very hard on. To me the way a story reveals itself is as important as the story. One day, after working for two-and-a-half years, I did some drawings and the graphics made it all clear to me. There is mathematics in the novel's architecture. Everything takes place over a period of one day and once you fix that, you are free to roam.”
In fact, Roy deftly alternates between the melodramatic events of 1969 and the somber aftereffects that still haunt the surviving characters in 1992. That year Rahel returns to India, after many years in the United States, to her hometown of Ayemenem to visit her brother. He has withdrawn into himself, neither speaking nor acknowledging anyone's existence. The reader wonders what will become of these sad twins—one quiet, the other emotionally empty—as much as we wonder about what happened to them when they were children.
This type of broken-up chronology is found in some of the other popular Booker Prize winners of the 1990s, such as A. S. Byatt's Possession (1990) and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992). This style irritates some readers, particularly those looking for the more straightforward action of commercial fiction. But such disjointing allows Roy to zip backward and forward in time—to discuss traditional Indian dance or Uncle Chacko's adventures at Oxford University, to joke about the 82-year-old “Baby” Kochamma's fondness for TV personality Phil Donahue or show us a little boy's tearful separation from his beloved mother—and still keep building the tension toward the final wrenching chapters, scenes of sorrow, brutality, heartbreak and, finally, ecstatic lovemaking.
“The smallest things connect to the biggest things, every detail of childhood, even the light on water, connects to history and politics and geological time,” she notes. “In a way, I'm trying to write about everything.” And to keep everything on track, she adds, “You have to keep reassuring the reader that he or she is in good hands. That's why there are all those repetitions, echoes, and reminders.” One key phrase, “Things can change in a day,” continually rings like an alarm bell through these pages.
Vivid Language
Along with its depiction of Indian life and its free-floating structure, The God of Small Things is most remarkable for its style, in particular its similes. “It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire.” “Rahel drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts toward an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge.” Chacko “took a seat by the window and sat down with an elbow on the table and his face cupped in the palm of his hand, smiling around the empty cafe as though he was considering striking up a conversation with the furniture.” “Rahel was like an excited mosquito on a leash.”
There is at least one startling simile per page, but Roy claims she hardly noticed them while writing. “No, I thought my writing was quite straightforward and was surprised when people mentioned the style. That's just the way I see the world.” She pauses, and then goes on. “The book took four-and-a-half years to write. I would work on it five hours a day, consciously using every bit of myself.”
Why did it take so long? “I needed to live with the book—while I was writing it I felt completely alive. Even blessed. I'm not interested in (writing) a book that I finish in a week, because for me, if I finish it in a week, I probably wouldn't be able to live with it for more than a week. I needed to really know it. In some ways, it was a literary puzzle to solve. I didn't realize how many years it would take to get out of it. Sometimes I'd spend five months writing and the cow was still on the level crossing, and I'd say to myself, ‘You're going to be a very old lady when it's over.’ The book just had its own pace.”
She thinks for a moment. “Do you know about laying down a music track? It was like continuously adding more instruments, making it richer. A computer was quite necessary to me, just because there's so much going back and forth in time, thinking of different things. I'd tell myself that I should just take this thread and use it back there. I didn't even write the book in sequence. For instance, after I wrote about Pappachi's moth, with its ‘unusually dense, dorsal tufts,’ I used the same moth imagery to describe Rahel's worry about her mother's love.”
Comic Tone
Although the novel is often sorrowful in its events—the women fall in love with the wrong men, there is child abuse, death, anguish of every sort—its tone is surprisingly jaunty, sunlit, sometimes downright comic. Father Mulligan “was studying Hindu scriptures, in order to be able to denounce them intelligently.” Pappachi's “light-brown eyes were polite yet maleficent, as though he was making an effort to be civil to the photographer while plotting to murder his wife.” The wicked grand-aunt Baby Kochamma, now the proud inheritor of a house of decaying possessions, “was frightened by the BBC [British Broadcasting Company] famines and television wars that she encountered while she channel-surfed. Her old fears of the Revolution and the Marxist-Leninist menace had been rekindled by new television worries about the growing numbers of desperate and dispossessed people. She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine, and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.”
Roy is particularly good in evoking the childish world of the seven-year-old twins—their antsiness and mutual teasing, their Winnie-the-Pooh-like spelling of words (“the Bar Nowl”), their complete devotion to the doomed carpenter Velutha. In one paragraph she renders the childhood of Velutha, a member of Hinduism's lowest class, the Untouchables. The last detail is quite heartbreaking:
“It was Mammachi … who first noticed little Velutha's remarkable facility with his hands. Velutha was eleven then, about three years younger than Ammu. He was like a little magician. He could make intricate toys—tiny windmills, rattles, minute jewel boxes out of dried palm reed; he could carve boats out of tapioca stems and figurines on cashew nuts. He would bring them for Ammu, holding them out in his palm (as he had been taught) so she would not have to touch him to take them.”
The Proper Light Brigade
Even with a Booker Prize and glowing reviews, some readers have reservations about The God of Small Things. Opinions are surprisingly varied, some calling the book a masterpiece while others dismiss it as pretentious and artsy. Such critics point to Roy's gratuitous use of capitals (“The Love Laws,” “The History House”), broken-up words (“Lay Ter”), baby talk and rhyme (“Stoppited,” “a viable, die-able age”), as well as some extravagant descriptions as signs of over-writing. Do such comments bother her? Would she change anything in her novel now? “No,” she answers, “but it's not because I think my book is perfect. I used all my powers when I wrote it and I'm just not the sort of writer who goes back.” A pause. “Such criticism is really like saying ‘I don't like the shape of your gall bladder.’”
“There is a group in India I call the Proper Light Brigade. They complain whenever India isn't shown in the ‘proper light.’ If you write about Brahmans or kathakali dancers, you're writing for the West. If you mention The Sound of Music, you have betrayed traditional Indian culture. India is a country that lives in several centuries, and some of the centuries have not been all that pleased with my book. But I say replace ethnic purity and ‘authenticity’ with honesty.”
Background in Architecture, Film
Roy has long been something of a loner and a rebel. Like the character Ammu, Roy's own mother was divorced, a Syrian Christian, and subject to societal pressures. “It's hard,” admits Roy, “when your protector is, in some ways, more vulnerable than you are. It makes for a very adult child and”—she hesitates and almost grins—“a very childish adult.” Still, Mary Roy clearly instilled a strong sense of independence in her daughter. “I am an escapee,” says Roy, savoring the word. “Sometimes I think that I'm the only woman in India whose mother told her not to get married. Too many girls in my country are broken before they are grown.”
Instead, Roy moved out of the house when she reached 18, took a degree in architecture (her professors, she says, later told reporters that “she was never normal”), and lived a kind of footloose, hippie life. For a while she associated with a group she calls “the lunatic fringe.” “We made movies that no one wanted to see,” she says. Roy herself wrote two screenplays—In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones and Electric Moon. These, she explains, “were exercises in limitations. The first was about students in an architecture school, the other about the marketing of Asian culture to the West.” Her first marriage, to a man from Goa, did not last. She is now married to one-time movie director, but now environmentalist, Pradip Krishen. They met when he noticed this beautiful young woman riding her bicycle and asked her to be in his film.
Despite these various associations with what Indians sometimes call the talkies, Roy has been resisting offers to make a movie of The God of Small Things. “A work expands into every crevice of its medium. I don't want my characters to belong to an actor or director. I want them to belong to the reader.” True to her sense of easy-going independence, she remains uncertain about her future. “I'll never take an advance for a book and really have no idea what I'll be doing next. I'm not a bureaucrat with a typical day. If you were to visit my house in Kerala, you might find a bunch of us lying on the floor looking at the ceiling fan and murmuring, ‘The rest of the world is working.’ Being a writer is the closest thing to not having a profession.” Of course, Roy is now a millionaire, which helps make it easier to do whatever she wants.
Literary Sensation
Her path to fame and riches is in itself quite romantic and incredible. “After I'd finished the novel, I didn't know what to do with it. I thought it was just this idiosyncratic, obscure book.” A friend of a friend showed it to the English agent David Godwin. Godwin read half the manuscript and called Roy in Kerala, “Don't sign anything. I'm coming to India.” She replied, “You'd better read the second half. You might decide it sucks.”
Meanwhile, the novel was being shopped to other publishers, and Roy was deluged with calls. She felt increasingly confused and uncertain. Then Godwin showed up at her house and, in Roy's words, told her, “I had this flat brown package by someone named Arundhati Roy. I didn't know whether it was a man or a woman. But once I started reading, it was like a shot of heroin up my arm.” “Well,” says Roy, “I thought that anybody who feels that way about my book can represent me.” She quickly adds, with a laugh, “Not that I'm pro-heroin or anything.” Godwin got Roy an astounding $1.6-million advance for the book, the highest ever paid for an Indian novel.
And then came the Booker Prize, an honor about which Roy has her usual mixed emotions. “First you get short-listed and then you get treated like a horse. It's humiliating. People bet on you. It's also humiliating that you start to really want the prize. I had written this novel for myself and never thought about prizes. But then.… On the night the winner is announced you first have to eat, or rather pretend to eat, while these hot lights and cameras are pointed at you. And after you've won you're bustled from one BBC van to the next. It's really quite humiliating. But after a while,” she smiles, “things get better.”
Writing in English
When The God of Small Things came out in the United States, Roy was asked to provide a glossary or rework some of the Malayalam, the Indian state language she occasionally uses in the text. She refused. “‘Why,’ I asked myself, ‘should I be the only one who's working here?’” Although Roy speaks Malayalam and Hindi, English is her primary language. “It's the common language of India,” she says, a legacy of India's colonization by the British. “Parents know their children won't get a good job without it. I may dip into my other languages, but I couldn't write a story in them.”
Roy is the latest star in a constellation of great modern Indian writers, all of whom write entirely in English. Roy's style—exact, witty, verging on the magical (without being magical-realist)—recalls the esteemed Salman Rushdie in his epic novel The Moor's Last Sigh (1996). But she has an elegance and control that seem more classical than the sprawling fiction of many modern Indian writers. These include Rushdie, a world-class figure with myriad styles at his command; novelist G. V. Desani, who plays with language in an almost Joycean way; R. K. Narayan, a novelist whose gentle humor and subtle irony was admired by English writer Graham Greene; and novelist and poet Vikram Seth, who writes variously of Indian, American, and other societies and produced a gigantic, Victorian-style family saga in the acclaimed A Suitable Boy (1993).
Roy traces her own flair for prose back to early childhood—“writing is the only thing I ever wanted to do”—and to some favorite books and authors. She loves Joyce, English writers Rudyard Kipling (“how safe one felt in his hands”) and D. H. Lawrence, American F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Russian-American Vladimir Nabokov. “The opening of [Nabokov's] Lolita always gives me gooseflesh,” she relates. Reviewers have often compared her to William Faulkner, a powerful writer of the American South whom she's never read. “My publisher just bought me a copy of (Faulkner's 1929 classic) The Sound and the Fury. But I haven't started it yet.” In fact, she admits, “I'm not that much of a reader.” When people ask her for writing advice, she always tells them, “Never ask for advice.”
Inspired By Dance
A lot of her aesthetic sense, continues Roy, actually derives from watching kathakali dancers, who perform familiar Indian tales—the Great Stories—in the highly stylized dance-drama that is native to Kerala. The dancers can spend hours illustrating one second of action, she claims. “I used to ask myself, while watching them, ‘Why am I so mesmerized by this story I already know?’ That's why I tell so much in the opening pages of my book. You know almost everything in the first chapter.”
There is a paragraph in her novel about kathakali that sounds like a personal aesthetic statement. Roy nods at this. “Why don't I just read it?” She enunciates with a precise, musical voice, and savors each word as if it were a sip of wine:
“It didn't matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.”
Certainly, The God of Small Things possesses such mystery and magic. But what exactly does Roy mean by “the small things”? From one perspective, her novel reveals how seemingly inconsequential events can build to a terrible avalanche. If Estha hadn't gone into the lobby of the movie theater because he was singing along with The Sound of Music, he wouldn't have been sexually abused by the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man. If Rahel hadn't recognized Velutha in the Marxist parade, then Baby Kochamma might not have directed all her wrath at him. If Velutha hadn't stepped out of history and suddenly noticed that his childhood friend Ammu was a woman, their love affair might never have begun. But the small things did happen, and so the big things happened too.
In The God of Small Things, says Roy with finality, “I'm trying to understand the sources of happiness, the ordinary moments which we only recognize when they're snatched away. Moments of childhood wonder. The glint of light on water. Intimacy. The small things.… Yes, terrible things do happen, but within the sadness there is joy. A fit storyteller is one who can span this range from the sublime to the crude, from the tender to the ridiculous. You don't understand love unless you understand brutality. Fiction, you know, is a way of making sense of the world.”
About the author: Michael Dirda is a writer and editor for the Washington Post Book World. He received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
Further reading:
Cowley, Jason. “Goddess of Small Things.” The Times of London, October 18, 1997.
Hart, Jordana. “Arundhati Roy: A Forceful, Daring Debut.” Ms., November 1, 1997.
“India: Kerala Controversy Over the God of Small Things.” The Statesman, October 24, 1997.
Jaggi, Maya. “An Unsuitable Girl.” The Guardian, May 24, 1997.
Kaufman, Marc. “Small Things Seals India As Source of Great Writing.” Denver Post, August 10, 1997.
Kumar, Amitava. “The God of Small Things (book reviews).” The Nation, September 29, 1997.
Spaeth, Anthony. “No Small Thing.” Time International, April 14, 1997.
Updike, John. “Mother Tongues.” New Yorker, June 23, 1997.
Wood, James. “An Indelicate Balance: The Noisy Pluralism of Indian Fiction.” The New Republic, December 29, 1997.
Source: Encarta Yearbook, July 1998.
In 1997 Indian novelist Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, for her first novel, The God of Small Things. Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, interviewed Roy for this July 1998 Encarta Yearbook article.
Indian Novelist and Booker Prize Winner Arundhati Roy
By Michael Dirda
“Don't emphasize any of the syllables: Air-Un-Dah-Tee,” she says precisely in a lilting, musical voice, just faintly inflected with what must be an Indian accent. Author of The God of Small Things, the 1997 winner of the prestigious Booker Prize, Arundhati Roy is 38 years old but could pass for a college student. Slender and short, she typically wears a denim jacket and jeans and carries a knapsack. For readings she may put on a long skirt and white silk blouse, which sets off her black hair, luminous eyes, and dark good looks. At such times she could be Ammu or the grown-up Rahel, the beautiful mother and daughter heroines of her acclaimed first novel.
It has been quite a ride for Roy since her book was published in 1997. The God of Small Things became a bestseller in more than 25 countries, from India to Germany, from Portugal to the United States. Writing in the New Yorker, novelist and critic John Updike praised the novel as a stunning debut, while the New York Times called Roy's book “Faulknerian in its ambitious tackling of family and race and class, Dickensian in its sharp-eyed observation of society and character.” Despite such head-swelling plaudits, Roy seems quite unaffected by her achievement and good fortune. Compared to the great scope of history and time, she says, “I believe strongly in my insignificance.”
Human Drama
Like the best fiction, The God of Small Things—by turns a gothic mystery, social comedy, three-generation saga, and tragic love story—is, most of all, an intensely human drama. It is the tale of how the drowning of a little girl and the police murder of an illicit lover utterly destroy a well-to-do Indian family, especially two children, whose lives are emotionally blasted and withered.
But the novel is also a portrait of Kerala, the densely populated Indian state on the subcontinent's southern tip that has a Communist government. “I wanted,” says Roy, “to drive my stake in here [in Kerala]. I wanted to say that this is my place, that it deserves literature. It was very important to me that it be real, these stars, these leaves.” Most of the action takes place in 1969, a time of political and social ferment. “Kerala is a place where big religions meet and rub against each other: Hinduism, Christianity—and Marxism.” She smiles.
“The novel had its origins in the vision of a sky blue Plymouth with sun in its chrome tail fins and a sign on its roof advertising pickles stopped at a traffic-crossing while a political demonstration flowed around it,” she says with another smile. Roy's family did not own a Plymouth, but such events were surprisingly commonplace. “One of my classmates at school was asked what were the most popular festivals in Kerala, and he replied, ‘Strikes!’”
Intricate Structure
This improbable-seeming vision ultimately became the second chapter of a book as tightly fitting and interwoven as a piece of embroidery. Like the classic novel Ulysses (1922) by Irish writer James Joyce, which revolves around the developments of a single day, most of the action in The God of Small Things radiates out from the events of the 24 hours following that traffic delay. In fact, the reader learns virtually everything that happens in the novel within the first 25 or 30 pages but is drawn on, obsessively, to find out the why and how of the story's tragic events. How did the little girl Sophie Mol die? What exactly happened to the handyman Velutha? Why were the twins Rahel and her brother Estha separated at the age of seven?
“The structure of the book,” observes Roy, “is something I worked very hard on. To me the way a story reveals itself is as important as the story. One day, after working for two-and-a-half years, I did some drawings and the graphics made it all clear to me. There is mathematics in the novel's architecture. Everything takes place over a period of one day and once you fix that, you are free to roam.”
In fact, Roy deftly alternates between the melodramatic events of 1969 and the somber aftereffects that still haunt the surviving characters in 1992. That year Rahel returns to India, after many years in the United States, to her hometown of Ayemenem to visit her brother. He has withdrawn into himself, neither speaking nor acknowledging anyone's existence. The reader wonders what will become of these sad twins—one quiet, the other emotionally empty—as much as we wonder about what happened to them when they were children.
This type of broken-up chronology is found in some of the other popular Booker Prize winners of the 1990s, such as A. S. Byatt's Possession (1990) and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992). This style irritates some readers, particularly those looking for the more straightforward action of commercial fiction. But such disjointing allows Roy to zip backward and forward in time—to discuss traditional Indian dance or Uncle Chacko's adventures at Oxford University, to joke about the 82-year-old “Baby” Kochamma's fondness for TV personality Phil Donahue or show us a little boy's tearful separation from his beloved mother—and still keep building the tension toward the final wrenching chapters, scenes of sorrow, brutality, heartbreak and, finally, ecstatic lovemaking.
“The smallest things connect to the biggest things, every detail of childhood, even the light on water, connects to history and politics and geological time,” she notes. “In a way, I'm trying to write about everything.” And to keep everything on track, she adds, “You have to keep reassuring the reader that he or she is in good hands. That's why there are all those repetitions, echoes, and reminders.” One key phrase, “Things can change in a day,” continually rings like an alarm bell through these pages.
Vivid Language
Along with its depiction of Indian life and its free-floating structure, The God of Small Things is most remarkable for its style, in particular its similes. “It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire.” “Rahel drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts toward an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge.” Chacko “took a seat by the window and sat down with an elbow on the table and his face cupped in the palm of his hand, smiling around the empty cafe as though he was considering striking up a conversation with the furniture.” “Rahel was like an excited mosquito on a leash.”
There is at least one startling simile per page, but Roy claims she hardly noticed them while writing. “No, I thought my writing was quite straightforward and was surprised when people mentioned the style. That's just the way I see the world.” She pauses, and then goes on. “The book took four-and-a-half years to write. I would work on it five hours a day, consciously using every bit of myself.”
Why did it take so long? “I needed to live with the book—while I was writing it I felt completely alive. Even blessed. I'm not interested in (writing) a book that I finish in a week, because for me, if I finish it in a week, I probably wouldn't be able to live with it for more than a week. I needed to really know it. In some ways, it was a literary puzzle to solve. I didn't realize how many years it would take to get out of it. Sometimes I'd spend five months writing and the cow was still on the level crossing, and I'd say to myself, ‘You're going to be a very old lady when it's over.’ The book just had its own pace.”
She thinks for a moment. “Do you know about laying down a music track? It was like continuously adding more instruments, making it richer. A computer was quite necessary to me, just because there's so much going back and forth in time, thinking of different things. I'd tell myself that I should just take this thread and use it back there. I didn't even write the book in sequence. For instance, after I wrote about Pappachi's moth, with its ‘unusually dense, dorsal tufts,’ I used the same moth imagery to describe Rahel's worry about her mother's love.”
Comic Tone
Although the novel is often sorrowful in its events—the women fall in love with the wrong men, there is child abuse, death, anguish of every sort—its tone is surprisingly jaunty, sunlit, sometimes downright comic. Father Mulligan “was studying Hindu scriptures, in order to be able to denounce them intelligently.” Pappachi's “light-brown eyes were polite yet maleficent, as though he was making an effort to be civil to the photographer while plotting to murder his wife.” The wicked grand-aunt Baby Kochamma, now the proud inheritor of a house of decaying possessions, “was frightened by the BBC [British Broadcasting Company] famines and television wars that she encountered while she channel-surfed. Her old fears of the Revolution and the Marxist-Leninist menace had been rekindled by new television worries about the growing numbers of desperate and dispossessed people. She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine, and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.”
Roy is particularly good in evoking the childish world of the seven-year-old twins—their antsiness and mutual teasing, their Winnie-the-Pooh-like spelling of words (“the Bar Nowl”), their complete devotion to the doomed carpenter Velutha. In one paragraph she renders the childhood of Velutha, a member of Hinduism's lowest class, the Untouchables. The last detail is quite heartbreaking:
“It was Mammachi … who first noticed little Velutha's remarkable facility with his hands. Velutha was eleven then, about three years younger than Ammu. He was like a little magician. He could make intricate toys—tiny windmills, rattles, minute jewel boxes out of dried palm reed; he could carve boats out of tapioca stems and figurines on cashew nuts. He would bring them for Ammu, holding them out in his palm (as he had been taught) so she would not have to touch him to take them.”
The Proper Light Brigade
Even with a Booker Prize and glowing reviews, some readers have reservations about The God of Small Things. Opinions are surprisingly varied, some calling the book a masterpiece while others dismiss it as pretentious and artsy. Such critics point to Roy's gratuitous use of capitals (“The Love Laws,” “The History House”), broken-up words (“Lay Ter”), baby talk and rhyme (“Stoppited,” “a viable, die-able age”), as well as some extravagant descriptions as signs of over-writing. Do such comments bother her? Would she change anything in her novel now? “No,” she answers, “but it's not because I think my book is perfect. I used all my powers when I wrote it and I'm just not the sort of writer who goes back.” A pause. “Such criticism is really like saying ‘I don't like the shape of your gall bladder.’”
“There is a group in India I call the Proper Light Brigade. They complain whenever India isn't shown in the ‘proper light.’ If you write about Brahmans or kathakali dancers, you're writing for the West. If you mention The Sound of Music, you have betrayed traditional Indian culture. India is a country that lives in several centuries, and some of the centuries have not been all that pleased with my book. But I say replace ethnic purity and ‘authenticity’ with honesty.”
Background in Architecture, Film
Roy has long been something of a loner and a rebel. Like the character Ammu, Roy's own mother was divorced, a Syrian Christian, and subject to societal pressures. “It's hard,” admits Roy, “when your protector is, in some ways, more vulnerable than you are. It makes for a very adult child and”—she hesitates and almost grins—“a very childish adult.” Still, Mary Roy clearly instilled a strong sense of independence in her daughter. “I am an escapee,” says Roy, savoring the word. “Sometimes I think that I'm the only woman in India whose mother told her not to get married. Too many girls in my country are broken before they are grown.”
Instead, Roy moved out of the house when she reached 18, took a degree in architecture (her professors, she says, later told reporters that “she was never normal”), and lived a kind of footloose, hippie life. For a while she associated with a group she calls “the lunatic fringe.” “We made movies that no one wanted to see,” she says. Roy herself wrote two screenplays—In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones and Electric Moon. These, she explains, “were exercises in limitations. The first was about students in an architecture school, the other about the marketing of Asian culture to the West.” Her first marriage, to a man from Goa, did not last. She is now married to one-time movie director, but now environmentalist, Pradip Krishen. They met when he noticed this beautiful young woman riding her bicycle and asked her to be in his film.
Despite these various associations with what Indians sometimes call the talkies, Roy has been resisting offers to make a movie of The God of Small Things. “A work expands into every crevice of its medium. I don't want my characters to belong to an actor or director. I want them to belong to the reader.” True to her sense of easy-going independence, she remains uncertain about her future. “I'll never take an advance for a book and really have no idea what I'll be doing next. I'm not a bureaucrat with a typical day. If you were to visit my house in Kerala, you might find a bunch of us lying on the floor looking at the ceiling fan and murmuring, ‘The rest of the world is working.’ Being a writer is the closest thing to not having a profession.” Of course, Roy is now a millionaire, which helps make it easier to do whatever she wants.
Literary Sensation
Her path to fame and riches is in itself quite romantic and incredible. “After I'd finished the novel, I didn't know what to do with it. I thought it was just this idiosyncratic, obscure book.” A friend of a friend showed it to the English agent David Godwin. Godwin read half the manuscript and called Roy in Kerala, “Don't sign anything. I'm coming to India.” She replied, “You'd better read the second half. You might decide it sucks.”
Meanwhile, the novel was being shopped to other publishers, and Roy was deluged with calls. She felt increasingly confused and uncertain. Then Godwin showed up at her house and, in Roy's words, told her, “I had this flat brown package by someone named Arundhati Roy. I didn't know whether it was a man or a woman. But once I started reading, it was like a shot of heroin up my arm.” “Well,” says Roy, “I thought that anybody who feels that way about my book can represent me.” She quickly adds, with a laugh, “Not that I'm pro-heroin or anything.” Godwin got Roy an astounding $1.6-million advance for the book, the highest ever paid for an Indian novel.
And then came the Booker Prize, an honor about which Roy has her usual mixed emotions. “First you get short-listed and then you get treated like a horse. It's humiliating. People bet on you. It's also humiliating that you start to really want the prize. I had written this novel for myself and never thought about prizes. But then.… On the night the winner is announced you first have to eat, or rather pretend to eat, while these hot lights and cameras are pointed at you. And after you've won you're bustled from one BBC van to the next. It's really quite humiliating. But after a while,” she smiles, “things get better.”
Writing in English
When The God of Small Things came out in the United States, Roy was asked to provide a glossary or rework some of the Malayalam, the Indian state language she occasionally uses in the text. She refused. “‘Why,’ I asked myself, ‘should I be the only one who's working here?’” Although Roy speaks Malayalam and Hindi, English is her primary language. “It's the common language of India,” she says, a legacy of India's colonization by the British. “Parents know their children won't get a good job without it. I may dip into my other languages, but I couldn't write a story in them.”
Roy is the latest star in a constellation of great modern Indian writers, all of whom write entirely in English. Roy's style—exact, witty, verging on the magical (without being magical-realist)—recalls the esteemed Salman Rushdie in his epic novel The Moor's Last Sigh (1996). But she has an elegance and control that seem more classical than the sprawling fiction of many modern Indian writers. These include Rushdie, a world-class figure with myriad styles at his command; novelist G. V. Desani, who plays with language in an almost Joycean way; R. K. Narayan, a novelist whose gentle humor and subtle irony was admired by English writer Graham Greene; and novelist and poet Vikram Seth, who writes variously of Indian, American, and other societies and produced a gigantic, Victorian-style family saga in the acclaimed A Suitable Boy (1993).
Roy traces her own flair for prose back to early childhood—“writing is the only thing I ever wanted to do”—and to some favorite books and authors. She loves Joyce, English writers Rudyard Kipling (“how safe one felt in his hands”) and D. H. Lawrence, American F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Russian-American Vladimir Nabokov. “The opening of [Nabokov's] Lolita always gives me gooseflesh,” she relates. Reviewers have often compared her to William Faulkner, a powerful writer of the American South whom she's never read. “My publisher just bought me a copy of (Faulkner's 1929 classic) The Sound and the Fury. But I haven't started it yet.” In fact, she admits, “I'm not that much of a reader.” When people ask her for writing advice, she always tells them, “Never ask for advice.”
Inspired By Dance
A lot of her aesthetic sense, continues Roy, actually derives from watching kathakali dancers, who perform familiar Indian tales—the Great Stories—in the highly stylized dance-drama that is native to Kerala. The dancers can spend hours illustrating one second of action, she claims. “I used to ask myself, while watching them, ‘Why am I so mesmerized by this story I already know?’ That's why I tell so much in the opening pages of my book. You know almost everything in the first chapter.”
There is a paragraph in her novel about kathakali that sounds like a personal aesthetic statement. Roy nods at this. “Why don't I just read it?” She enunciates with a precise, musical voice, and savors each word as if it were a sip of wine:
“It didn't matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.”
Certainly, The God of Small Things possesses such mystery and magic. But what exactly does Roy mean by “the small things”? From one perspective, her novel reveals how seemingly inconsequential events can build to a terrible avalanche. If Estha hadn't gone into the lobby of the movie theater because he was singing along with The Sound of Music, he wouldn't have been sexually abused by the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man. If Rahel hadn't recognized Velutha in the Marxist parade, then Baby Kochamma might not have directed all her wrath at him. If Velutha hadn't stepped out of history and suddenly noticed that his childhood friend Ammu was a woman, their love affair might never have begun. But the small things did happen, and so the big things happened too.
In The God of Small Things, says Roy with finality, “I'm trying to understand the sources of happiness, the ordinary moments which we only recognize when they're snatched away. Moments of childhood wonder. The glint of light on water. Intimacy. The small things.… Yes, terrible things do happen, but within the sadness there is joy. A fit storyteller is one who can span this range from the sublime to the crude, from the tender to the ridiculous. You don't understand love unless you understand brutality. Fiction, you know, is a way of making sense of the world.”
About the author: Michael Dirda is a writer and editor for the Washington Post Book World. He received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
Further reading:
Cowley, Jason. “Goddess of Small Things.” The Times of London, October 18, 1997.
Hart, Jordana. “Arundhati Roy: A Forceful, Daring Debut.” Ms., November 1, 1997.
“India: Kerala Controversy Over the God of Small Things.” The Statesman, October 24, 1997.
Jaggi, Maya. “An Unsuitable Girl.” The Guardian, May 24, 1997.
Kaufman, Marc. “Small Things Seals India As Source of Great Writing.” Denver Post, August 10, 1997.
Kumar, Amitava. “The God of Small Things (book reviews).” The Nation, September 29, 1997.
Spaeth, Anthony. “No Small Thing.” Time International, April 14, 1997.
Updike, John. “Mother Tongues.” New Yorker, June 23, 1997.
Wood, James. “An Indelicate Balance: The Noisy Pluralism of Indian Fiction.” The New Republic, December 29, 1997.
Source: Encarta Yearbook, July 1998.
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