ROY, REBELLION, RESISTANCE

Ekta Sinha speaks to India's literary icon on the politics of dissent, the legacy of activism & a refusal of easy narratives

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A conversation with Arundhati Roy expands, like a river finding its many bends: slow at first, then rushing to meet unexpected turns. Over Zoom, her voice on the other end of the screen carries a cadence that's part storyteller, part teacher, part rebel, refusing to dilute her truth. It's the kind of voice that fills the room, even across pixels; intimate, wry, and edged with a clarity so sharp it leaves you rearranging your own questions before you've even asked them. Sitting before the icon, I find myself anxious, not because she's unkind or unwelcoming, but because her presence demands precision. What do you ask someone whose words have, for decades, shaped the political and literary imagination of a nation? What do you ask someone whose first book altered the way the world read Indian fiction?

THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL

Roy's sentences often cut through the noise like surgical instruments. Her essays have a way of unsettling the reader out of complacency, and her novels hum with myth and memory in equal measure. Few writers command the reverence she does. 'The God of Small Things' (1997), her Booker Prize-winning debut, announced her as a voice unlike any other: lyrical, searing, unafraid. Her political essays have cemented her reputation as a lightning rod of controversy and admiration alike. And now, she steps into a space more treacherous than polemics or fiction: memory. 'Mother Mary Comes to Me', published by Penguin Random House India, is not just about her mother, Mary Roy. It is also, inevitably, about Arundhati Roy, herself, and the tangled thread that ran between them, characterised by knots of love and defiance, distance and proximity, grievance and gratitude.