The Syntax of Everyday Injustice A Conversation with Arundhati Roy

Whenever I hear complaints that Arundhati Roy hasn’t written enough novels, I invoke the case of an Argentinean writer – Jorge Louis Borges – who wrote about half a novel, but is regarded as a towering figure not just in Spanish but in world letters. Arundhati Roy’s two full novels, written twenty years apart, are enough for us to call her great because of their piercing beauty, penetrating vision, wealth of detail, and their impeccable, almost musical, prose. She creates, amidst our homes and street corners, allegorical worlds as haunting as the history house and the Kabristan, and metaphors as raw as open wounds. She has described herself as a ‘mobile republic’ and her readers as borderless citizens; she planted the unusually ‘deft dorsal tufts of the cold moths’ on human hearts; she likened Hijra’s clap to ‘a gunshot’, defined the Indian mainstream Left as ‘a heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy’, and described, through the mouths of her characters, India as a ‘democracy zoo’, a ‘bazaar raj’, a collection of ‘ancient people’ trying to ‘live in a modern nation’, and renamed Bharat Matha’s chosen sons – the Gandhis, the Ambanis, the Adanis – as ‘history’s henchmen’. […]