Comment: Arundhati...

Arundhati then moves her biography to the story of herself; her romantic loves, her various interests and undertakings, her marriage and her writing of The God of Small Things (1997) and two decades later her second novel — The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017).

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All is enthrallingly interesting, but me, I stodgily waded through her protests and the inherent police and judicial danger and threats. She was in police remand for one night: contempt of Court. In these periods of time she wrote extensively on the cause she, with others, was espousing, like protesting the building of the Sarda Sarova Dam across the Narmada River in Gujerat, the merciless killing of thousands of Muslims by rioting Hindus in the same state in 2002, and the Kashmir issue. But the novelist in her could not be restrained forever.

“Nothing made me forget the world like reading did. Nothing made me think about the word like reading did. Nothing else filled me up. Nothing else emptied me out...Kipling, Shakespeare, the opening passage of Lolita, G Isaac’s sentences purloined from Joyce’s Ulysses, streaked like comets across my reading sky.”

“Once I started running, once I joined Architecture School, I thought that a writer was the last thing I could ever do. I gave up. And then years later came that letter. Have you ever considered becoming a writer? I knew that I hadn’t found the grazing language-animal. But the bloodhound in me caught the faint, faraway scent of it on the breeze.”