Arundhati Roy's Amazing Family
BarcelonaAt 36, she burst onto the world stage with the beautiful novel The god of small things, which won the Booker Prize. This happened in 1997. How did he reach the literary heights? that daughter of an eccentric teacher Without a husband and a member of a Christian minority in a small provincial town, Kottayam, in the state of Kerala? What has happened to her since then, what has she done with her life, what has she done with the baskets of money she never imagined earning and that make her so uncomfortable? This is what he tells us in his memoir. My refuge and my storm (Now Llibres, translated by Imma Falcó). A hypnotic, devastating text about a strong woman straddling dreams and nightmares, in constant struggle against her family ghosts, who has built herself up through writing—fiction and essays—and has become a scourge of Hindu ultranationalism—placing President Modi at its peak—and an eco-activist. She has had to spend time in prison (a single, symbolic day) and frequently receives death threats. And yet, in her wandering labyrinth, she has found inner peace.
When she was 3 years old, in the midst of the war between India and China, her mother separated from her husband, a hopeless alcoholic, a cheerful drunk, Micky Roy. A single woman was an exceptional occurrence in India in 1962. Far from devoting herself to little Arundhati and her brother Lalith Kumar Christopher (LKC), a year and a half older, "Mrs. Roy"—as she is always referred to in the book—treated them as a refuted nuisance: a gangster, an insulting, irascible, merciless, cruel attitude. Unpredictable and wild, she could also be generous and kind, but always with a final blow. The book's title reflects this: "She Was My Refuge and My Storm." The father had disappeared; he was "the Man of Nothingness," as Mrs. Roy referred to him, who undoubtedly had a phobia of any kind of love. She didn't need to win anyone's sympathy. She was enough on her own.
Giving wings to girls so they could be free
With just one shoe and one sandal, and with incredible determination, that brilliant bad mother, that empowered and indomitable woman, founded a co-educational school (something exceptional) within the small Syriac Christian community, which went from rejecting her to admiring her. She became a pillar of that social microcosm. She gave girls wings to be free and raised boys to be respectful of the opposite sex in a country where traditional machismo persists. All the love and passion she dedicated to her students, she withheld from her own children. With them, she was stricter than with anyone else. Arundhati and LKC saw her more as the fearsome headmistress "of the sect" than as a mother. The three of them lived at the school itself.
"Mrs. Roy told me many times how badly she suffered when she found out she was expecting her second child. I." And when she was old enough to understand, she detailed "how many different ways she had tried to induce an abortion. The least horrible was by stuffing herself with green papaya." Having already run away from home—at 16 she went to Delhi to study architecture, with a knife in her bag just in case—at 21, it was Arundhati who had an abortion without telling anyone. She led a bohemian, anarchic, and unhealthy student life, penniless, smoking leeks, and associating with Maoist militants. Eventually, by chance, she got her start in film as a screenwriter and actress.
Her mother hadn't held back with her brother either. In the throes of adolescence, she told him one day: "You're ugly and stupid. If I were you, I'd kill myself." Incredibly, both children have succeeded in life and have continued to love their poisonous mother (he's a businessman and owns a BMW, plays solos, and sings rock 'n' roll). "Perhaps it's better not to understand certain things," Arundathi writes to explain this mystery of her family situation. It's clear that she inherited her fierce capacity to go against the grain on her own from her mother. "Mrs. Roy taught me to think and then unleashed her fury on my ideas. She taught me to be free and then unleashed her fury on my freedom. She taught me to write and then despised the writer I had become."
In a country with 22 regional languages and 200 dialects, she grew up speaking Malayalam, spoken by 36 million people. She hasn't quite mastered Hindi yet. English is her literary language. The man of her life was Pradip, the husband of her boss at the National Institute of Town Planning, where she landed a temporary job right after graduating at 21. From a good family, he had studied at Oxford and worked in film. A historian and botanist (and Beatles expert), he has become a leading authority on trees. She made the film with him. Annie, with which he won the national award for best screenplay.
Before Pradip, he had fallen in love with a young man who looked like Jesus Christ and with a college friend, JC, with whom he faked a wedding so they could live together without problems. Back then, to finish his final year project, he used speed. Miraculously, he didn't fall into drug addiction or crime, which "would have been the natural thing for someone like me."
Over the years, he has used his fame to get involved and give voice to the causes of Kashmir (India's only Muslim-majority state, a territory in endemic dispute with Pakistan), those who wanted to stop the mega-dams in the Narmanda Valley, the Nach guerrilla movement with as many women as men (despite not sharing their methods or ideology, he lived there for weeks, "the most intense and extraordinary of my life"), and the pacifist movement against his country's nuclear tests. And he created a foundation (which doesn't bear his name) to help journalists, lawyers, teachers, artists, and activists who dare to go against the grain.
He has received threats from famous journalists and dangerous anonymous individuals, has had to face lawsuits, has seen many friends imprisoned and killed, and little by little has been reconnecting with his eccentric and feuding family: more or less, they have all goneThe god of small thingsNot Christian enough, not Hindu enough, not communist enough, not Gandhian enough, not family-oriented enough, not anything enough, Arundhati Roy has become a free and unclassifiable voice that now, in this book, opens the doors of her personal and literary universe a little more for us.
