I WAS 10 YEARS OLD when Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things. It had a special significance for me because I studied in the school founded by her mother, and where she herself had studied. In a way, I felt like I had a claim over her. She was mine before she was the world’s. As a kid, Roy was my idol. If I couldn’t be her, I wanted to be like her. I wanted to dress like her, walk like her, talk like her…. Most of all I wanted to write like her. I tried to make my words pirouette on the page like she did and to mine profundity out of them. Her words were like shards of glass that reflected the world in new and wondrous ways. Mine, however, creaked and groaned like an unoiled door hinge.
Still, I had been Arundhati-ed, once and for all. She had bent my life out of shape, and now, like a faulty safety pin, it could not be straightened back. I wonder if she ever guessed at how she inspired a small-town girl from the back of beyond to become a writer. How, without knowing, she had cast a stone whose ripples would be felt far and wide in my life. In my childhood, wanting to follow in her footsteps was not a desire; it was a cold, hard ache. Today, however, if I were to follow her, I might very well be walking into jail.
Years after The God of Small Things, when childhood fancies seemed a mere rite of passage, my fascination with Roy started fading. I had become agnostic to Roy’s God, especially as her identity got hyphenated: from writer to writer-activist. In my mind, an activist was a screechy do-gooder who wore dowdy clothes and seemed to interfere in matters where no interference had been sought. That hyphen had speared my adoration of Roy. Not that her writing did not sparkle anymore. But, for me, it had lost its sheen. She did, of course, make infrequent guest appearances in my life, in the form of an award here, an article there, a mention in an international publication. But, for the most part, she shrank to a mere symbol―a has-been memory, a vague longing, a bottled desire that had found no outlet….
Even when I read of the sanction to prosecute her under the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act), I only half-registered it in my mind. The quenching of dissent had become common in my country, and I had become numb to it. Until someone on my father’s WhatsApp school group posted: “Anjuly Mathai is a no controversy journalist. She has not taken up cudgels to support her elder sister, Arundhati Roy.”
Roy would probably baulk at being called my elder sister, but still the post made me think. Years ago, I had banished her to the hinterlands of my existence. But why really? Wasn’t that hyphen that ruined my admiration of her nothing but an artificial construct of my mind? She had never had a dual identity. Even in her early fiction, her penchant for telling the truth or “taking up cudgels” for others had been there, albeit camouflaged in literary flourishes. Her prose was powerful precisely because of that―an ability to see beyond herself. She could not just perceive people, but she could also perceive the impulses that drove them. Her life blood had flowed through her writing; I had just been blind to it. In my narrow conception that she was only doing what she was doing “to draw attention to herself”, I had missed a vital cog in the machinery that made her work: She cared. It was not her selfishness; it was mine that made me so narrow-minded.
Most of us who are not “activists” are serial self-lovers. Our lives are scrunched into the claustrophobic breadth of a two-letter word: MY. My life, my friends, my job, my marriage…. Do we really care about anything that does not affect us personally? Can I honestly say I am writing this to make a difference, or even as a form of self-expression, rather than for mere self-gratification and for ‘likes’ and ‘shares’? However much I am a “no controversy” journalist, I don’t want to be a dishonest one.
Replying to those who claimed that Roy was making hate speeches and wanted to break up the country, she said that what she said came from a place of love and pride. “It comes from not wanting people to be killed, raped, imprisoned or have their finger-nails pulled out in order to force them to say they are Indians,” she said. “It comes from wanting to live in a society that is striving to be a just one.” Love is a complex emotion. Often, in its purest form, it is not soft and Hallmark cuddly. It pierces, tears, rips apart. It breaks so that it can put back together, distilled of hatred and bigotry. Sometimes, wounds as deep as ours must be opened before they can be healed. If we silence the voice that speaks, cut off the hand that heals, how can we ever hope to stop the bloodshed?