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When I was writing my first book, we were in the early years of Permanent Black [the independent press she runs with her husband]. I used to set an alarm and wake up every day at 4am to write the book. Since I am not a morning person, this was punishment.
The best novels are those that hide well the stitches that hold them in place, when the blood and toil that went into them are tucked deep into the folds of the story, invisible even to the discerning reader. Anuradha Roy, 49, is the omniscient narrator of her books who lies camouflaged in the narrative. Somebody once told me that while creating a character, the novelist needs to ask one crucial question: what makes her tick? Here, we turn the spotlight on the novelist. What makes Roy tick?
Writing, she says, might be in her genes. “There were two writers in my family, both renowned and both women: Jyotirmoyee Devi on my mother’s side and Maitreyi Devi on my father’s,” she says. “Maybe this made it feel normal in my family for there to be a child who wrote—my mother gave me a blank notebook when I was very little, and this filled up with stories. My father gave me his typewriter and taught me how to use it when I was about thirteen so that I could type out whatever I was writing.”
That typewriter must have come in handy years later when she wrote her first novel— An Atlas of Impossible Longing. “When I was writing my first book, we were in the early years of Permanent Black [the independent press she runs with her husband],” she says. “With a first book, you don’t know for a long time whether it is for real, so it is hard to give it priority when there is other work to be done. I used to set an alarm and wake up every day at 4am to write the book. Since I am not a morning person, this was punishment. I was very glad when the writing was over. I always am.”
The book has been widely translated and was picked as one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and The Seattle Times. She won The Economist Crossword Prize for her second novel, The Folded Earth. Roy’s latest book, Sleeping on Jupiter, won the DSC Prize for Fiction 2016 and was nominated for the Man Booker prize 2015.
Sleeping on Jupiter tells the story of a young girl, Nomi, who is sexually abused in an ashram run by a renowned spiritual guru. Many years later, after she gets adopted and moves to Norway, she decides to return to the temple town of Jarmuli to make a documentary and revisit the past. Interwoven into this story is the friendship between three women who Nomi encounters on a train, the same-sex love of her tour guide for a young man and the checkered past of the photographer who assists her in making the film.
The plot shifts between narratives and the structure is jagged. The disjointed viewpoints allow her to explore various themes—religion, faith, violence and freedom. But the best part of the book is that Roy manages to balance the twin dichotomies of writing—chiselling her prose without shearing it of its lyricism. As a result, the writing is extremely evocative without being too descriptive. So midsummer nights are “more light than dark, more dark than light”, a train sways and moves faster, “as if lighter from shedding the girl”, and when a tree flowers, Nomi “swallows the scent”.
She has earlier talked about the pain of giving birth to her characters. Her involvement with them is “extremely intense” while the writing is in progress, but they don’t arrive easily or fully formed. “They come to be who they are as you discover in draft after draft what is ringing true or what is not alive on the page,” she has said. “They change as I write.”
Sleeping on Jupiter opens with memories of a childhood lost to the claws of violence. Roy’s own childhood was peripatetic; born in Kolkata, she spent the first few years of her life shifting from tent to tent, wherever her father, who was a field geologist, was sent. “What I enjoyed doing as a child is roughly what I like to do now,” she says. “I wrote, I painted and made things. I had a dog I loved. I was shy and awkward and tongue-tied as a child and that, too, has not changed, though I’m better at disguising it.”
After her family moved to Hyderabad, she went to a school run by a Muslim woman. “I think this was a vital phase for me in many ways, but especially because I made close Muslim friends who are still my friends,” she says. “I understood how important those childhood friendships were only later when I saw how insular many people can be.” She did her college at Presidency in Kolkata and then went to Cambridge to do her bachelor’s in English. She came back and got into publishing in Delhi. “I lived in what used to be called a servant’s quarter in Delhi, very spartan and hard-up,” she says. “But it was quite exhilarating to be on my own, earning.” Sixteen years ago, she moved to Ranikhet in Uttarakhand, where she currently lives with her husband.
Some experiences of her past have left a deep imprint on her mind, and in her books. “When my father died, I experienced first-hand how noxious our society is towards widows,” she says. “Overnight, at 49, my mother had to make herself scarce during relatives’ wedding rituals because she was considered a bad omen. To this day, I can’t look at the photos that flood the media every year during bijoya dashami in Bengal when women smear each other with sindoor. It feels like an orgy of smugness where married women rejoice at possessing a husband. It pointedly excludes every woman who does not have one. Until that time, I had questioned, but not actually felt in my bones, the cruelties of organised religion. I’m sure the rage I felt entered my first book, and my latest one.” Roy might hide herself skilfully in her books. But in the sway and tilt of the narrative, she’s giving us a glimpse, if not into her life, then into some visceral part of her mind.
