anuradha roy

On the second page of highly acclaimed Indian novelist Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter , a 7-year-old child witnesses the murder of her father by axe-wielding masked men who have invaded their home. Like much of Roy’s writing, it’s a scene described in visceral detail: the smell of a ripe grapefruit fresh from their garden is contrasted with the sight of the whitewashed wall inside their hut “streamed red” with the father’s blood, and the echoes of his haunting screams as he’s beaten then butchered like an animal. “When the pigs were slaughtered for their meat they shrieked with a sound that made my teeth fall off and this was the sound I heard,” the daughter recalls. It’s a brutal and jarring beginning, but in the context of the novel – which takes place over five days in the coastal temple town of Jarmuli in contemporary India – it’s the next chapter, less savage but no less disturbing, that unsettles the most. A young woman, all braided hair, tattoos and

Published in Scroll.in, April 2015 The other day, my father-in-law was in a reflective mood brought on by looking at his accounts ledgers at the end of the financial year. He concluded with a sigh that he had not made much money from selling books. But he had no regrets, books had brought him riches of a different kind: a full life and good friends. At 93, Ram Advani has been running his own bookshop, Ram Advani Booksellers, for over sixty years. His is the old kind of bookshop where authors from all over the world write to him asking what is new, where customers come back to him to ask what they should read, where friendships begin as conversations about books and then blossom and grow.  Ram Advani (left) in his bookshop   I may be biased of course – but working in the world of books is the best kind of work. It’s certainly one where you get to know interesting people, and do the kind of work together that encourages long friendships (or enmities).