Skip to main content

AMERICAN HOT POT



By the Missisippi river in Minneapolis

Loud-voiced Woman: 
"This is a purebred dog, Ah paid 2,500 dollars for that dog."

Mumbling Man: 
"I'd -a given ya a baby. I'd-a given ya a baby."

Loud-voiced Woman: 
"Fuck you, Doug, I don' want yer baby. I wanted Jim's baby."

Wall, Chicago Public Library
photo by anuradha roy




Gangsta Hip hop dog, SF
"I'm just living the life, trying to make it on my own"
photo by anuradha roy

Ray Ban dogs, San Francisco.
photo by anuradha roy
About to board. Minneapolis airport.
photo by anuradha roy


Wayside man, Chicago: 
"You want to know where Trump Towers is? You don't want to go there. It's an evil place."


Taxi Driver, Chicago: 
"You going to Trump Towers? I'll take you. Though you shouldn't go there. But what difference does it make? Hillary. Trump. None of them gonna do nuthin."

Dustbin. Trump Towers.
photo by anuradha roy


In New York
Acrobat luring an audience: 
"Where else you gonna see black men runnin' 
and no police chasin' 'em?"



In Minneapolis, at Guthrie Theatre
African American cook on a smoking break: 
"We'll miss Obama. Oh yes, we'll miss Obama."

On the door of breakfast room, hotel, California.
photo by anuradha roy

32 cans of soup, no takers.
photo by anuradha roy



Entrance to the Chicago Public Library. 
No Smoking. Also, no guns. 
photo by anuradha roy

Inside the Chicago Public Library, some home truths
photo by anuradha roy

Popular posts from this blog

All the Lives We Never Lived wins the Sahitya Akademi Award 2022

  Anuradha Roy bags coveted Sahitya Akademi Award, 22 others feted Anuradha Roy bagged the coveted Sahitya Akademi Award on Thursday. The author of 'All The Lives We Never Lived ' was felicitated along with 22 other authors for their exemplary contribution in the field of literature. This is the fourth book penned by the 40-something Roy. This book also won the prestigious Tata Book of the Year Award for Fiction in 2018. The book revolves around the life and times of a horticulturalist Myshkin, who narrates his life story, and his unending wait for letters from etters from the mother who abandoned him, for greener pastures in another country. Roy, who lives in Ranikhet, has previously written 'An Atlas of Impossible Longing', 'The Folded Earth' and 'Sleeping on Jupiter' which won the DSC Prize for Fiction 2016. It was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in the year 2015. Read more at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ma...
Read more
Ten years of Anuradha Roy’s ‘An Atlas of Impossible Longing’: What the writer and publisher remember ‘For three years, it was an alternative, secret universe in which I lived, awake or asleep.’  On serendipity and the difficult road to getting published: Anuradha Roy, writer  Read this in Scroll.in Christopher MacLehose and Anuradha Roy. Photograph by Rukun Advani An Atlas of Impossible Longing started in one of those “dummy books” – blank pages, hardbound – that binderies used to make to establish accurately the spine width of books that they would bind for a publisher. The publishing house was one my partner and I had recently set up. It had no capital but our savings, no office, and the only books as yet were dummies with blank pages. Because I still have that notebook, I know I wrote the first section of Atlas in pencil, in a non-stop scrawl that poured out without warning. It went on for a few pages and then came to a stop, after which the ...
Read more

Language, Lost and Found

In France for a long spell earlier this year, everyone around me speaking in a language I didn’t speak or read, I began to think about the many streams of language I've swum in. My mother tongue, Bengali, was the language of home and of intimacy. Yet somewhere along those years, with a sigh drowned out by babel, the language had left me. I tried to find my way back to it through writers like Leela Majumdar and Bibhutibhushan. In "Language, Lost and Found" out now in Noema Magazine, I write of how I found it again, and of language in alien contexts. I'm not sure if this essay is travelogue or memoir or a bunch of stories. But here it is, and I hope you will read it.  It was a red paperback with a green, winking cat spread across its large front. Just a few taps pulls it up on my screen now, and I wonder if my mental image of the day my father came with it as a gift for my brother and me is the work of memory or imagination. He walks in as if he has a happy secret and l...
Read more