Mother complex

The noise surrounding Booker Prize winning author Arundhati Roy’s new book Mother Mary Comes To Me —the title comes from the hit song “Let It Be” by The Beatles —is quietening down.

- CHINTAN GIRISH MODI

What a relief! One can now turn the pages and meet the words on their own terms instead of being swept away by the marketing blitzkrieg that positioned the book as a publishing event rather than a literary document. Turning an iconoclast into an icon is the ultimate disservice but that’s the template that seems to work in an industry that struggles to sell.

Ms Roy is fortunate to have a problem that most Indian authors cannot even dream of. “As I travelled in the Narmada Valley, meeting people whose lives, lands and histories had been or were going to be submerged, desperately poor people facing complete erasure, I felt a little guilty and embarrassed that my book (The God of Small Things) was selling in millions around the world and my bank account was burgeoning,” she confesses. However, she was unwilling to become “a saintly benefactress”, so she started a trust to share her “crazy royalties” with people “who don’t know how to or don’t want to make smooth proposals that massage the NGO machine”. Winners of big literary prizes rarely talk with such openness about their wealth.