anuradha roy

(This was first published in The Main Point on 26 December 2012.) I came back to Delhi from travels elsewhere on Christmas eve. The roads were windswept and foggy and, unusually for any Indian city, almost deserted. Through a drive of about 20 kilometres, there was not a single pedestrian for long stretches. There were fewer than usual cars, hardly any auto rickshaws. Enormous state transport buses sailed past with no occupants other than the driver and conductor. In response to the brutal gang rape in Delhi on 16th December of a young student, the state had taken several steps, the results of which I was witnessing from the window of my taxi from the airport: the Delhi metro, by which an average of about 1.8 million people travel every day, had been shut down; the state had cordoned off the entire central vista of Delhi where the protesters had been attacked the day before by the police, with water cannon (in freezing December weather), tear gas and batons. It had a...

The year-end lists of best books are starting off early and two books published by Permanent Black ( an independent press based in India ) featured in in The Guardian. These are Partha Chatterjee's The Black Hole of Empire and Arvind K. Mehrotra's Partial Recall .  One of my secret pleasures about Partial Recall is that I actually drew its cover. My second secret pleasure is that I managed to insert my dog, Biscoot, into the picture. She's sleeping on that cushion at the reader's feet. Then I felt really enthusiastic and drew endpapers for it as well. It shows the little owl that is also on the spine of the book -- you can see it in the picture below. And now I think it's the most beautiful book we've ever made at Permanent Black.... I design all of the covers for our books but it's not often that I get to draw one, either because that wouldn't be appropriate for the book or because authors would not put up with my artistic efforts.  Ar...

There was an interesting email recently, on The Folded Earth , from a reader who introduced himself as Ashirbad Raha. He included a poem he had written, in Hindi, which picks up themes and threads from the novel. Inter-language intertextuality!   "...I penned this small piece of poetry (below) this morning dreaming of where Maya lives and with a dream that some day I too would go back to my parents, hills and my small town and write a book... This small poem is dedicated to your writing in The Folded Earth . "  ASHIRBAD RAHA [THE HINDI ORIGINAL FOLLOWS. A ROUGH ENGLISH TRANSLATION IS FURTHER DOWN.] पडोसी के बरामदे में वो पीली बल्ब.. शाम को पहाड़ी हवा में ऐसे झूमती है.. जैसे, मानो मदहोश हो शाम के इश्क में... ठीक जब सुबह  के 6 बजते हैं तो आकाशवाणी की आवाज़ खिड़की से झांकती है.... हल वाले पूरण चाचा भी खेत जाते है उस वक़्त...   अंग्रेजो के ज़माने का होगा वो गेस्ट हाउस... फर्श की दरारों में अपनी उम्र छुपाये... द...

" How does a writer compete against the media's invasion of public discourse in all its chattering, hectoring, commercially packaged format?" This is a challenging, but by the same token, very exciting time for the Indian novelist – certainly the Indian novelist who writes in English. In an obvious and easily accessible sense, this has to do with the opening up of the global market. However, there are certain other aspects of this development that have a more direct bearing on the creative situation. The problems of belonging and identity that played such a preponderant role in the first decades – the terrain that was memorably identified by Meenakshi Mukherjee as “ the anxiety of Indianness ” - seem to have lost some of their fascination. It is remarkable, therefore, that two (and arguably, three) of the five novels on our shortlist are set outside India, set as far afield as Guyana and Morocco. This is, unquestionably, a welcome development – Indianness is ...

The results of the Economist Crossword Prize were announced yesterday.   The Folded Earth won the prize for fiction.  The other books on the shortlist were River of Smoke - Amitav Ghosh Narcopolis - Jeet Thayil The Storyteller of Marrakesh - Joydeep Roy Bhattacharya The Sly Company of People Who Care - Rahul Bhattacharya

Just back from the Ubud Festival for Readers and Writers (which is a nice way to name a literary festival)-- came back to find that my piece on moments of wonderment that steal upon you at times when travelling is just out in the NatGeo Traveller. There were a few such moments in Bali -- here is the piece. __________________________ It was rush hour for bats, burglars, owls and party animals: about 2 a.m. I was climbing uphill in deep forest, feeling my way over unfamiliar slopes and rocks. Trees took away most of the sky and from somewhere in the distance came the roar of rushing water. It was the dead of night, yet it wasn’t dark. The light was penumbral, as if it was dawn or dusk—for this was a walk through Norwegian woods in the improbable thing that is a Scandinavian summer. The rushing sound intensified into a roar. It turned out to be a fierce little river crashing over rocks and boulders, throwing up high clouds of spray. A frail, two-foot-wide bridge plunged brave...

Someone rang up yesterday as I was cooking dinner to tell me that The Folded Earth is on the Crossword shortlist. I've a powerful sense of deja vu because An Atlas of Impossible Longing was on the same shortlist in 2009, and Amitav Ghosh was on that shortlist too (with Sea of Poppies ), as he is here. That year he shared the prize with Neel Mukherjee's Past Continuous , but what I remember most about going to Bombay for the award ceremony is the rain that lashed the beaches, the high winds that turned umbrellas inside out, and the crisp fried Bombay Duck at Mahesh Food Home. Here's the complete list for fiction in English: River of Smoke - Amitav Ghosh Narcopolis - Jeet Thayil The Storyteller of Marrakesh - Joydeep Roy Bhattacharya The Folded Earth - Anuradha Roy The Sly Company of People Who Care - Rahul Bhattacharya