anuradha roy

Celebration time. Jyotsna, the girl who lives next door, has passed her Class Ten board exams (CBSE): and with a 92 percentile score. Her report card had no B grades at all, only As, and many of those A grades had double and triple plus signs alongside. So what's special? Jyotsna when she was eight. She is the taller one. What's special is that Jyotsna's father, a jawan in the army, died when she was four. Her mother, who works from morning to night tending cows and collecting fodder, is illiterate. She lives in a two-roomed house with a shifting population of relatives and sometimes there are fourteen people living in those two rooms, sometimes three or four fewer. There's no generator for the hours and hours when there is no power (every day). She has no quiet corner, let alone a room to study in, nor a desk of her own. She goes to Central School, about six kilometres away -- walking, whatever the weather. None of this is is unusual. What is remarkable is t...

Summertime, and the tourists have come, the water supply has dried up, garden plants have shrivelled, the forest is getting ready to go up in flames -- as every year. But the roadside bushes are loaded with  raspberries and purpling blackberries and our bird cherries have turned red. Our plum tree had to be propped up using a car jack and a forked log, it's so heavy with fruit and marauding monkeys. The good thing about the hills is that most people share their fruit. The other day a complete stranger offered me a handful of pine nuts -- she had been collecting them from under the trees -- and they take ages to find, so it was almost as noble of her as sharing ... water. Would she share water? Probably not. Water makes blood flow here. We've no apricot trees but an ancient carpenter, Kunwar Ram, who has been part of our life for years, came from his village with a couple of kilos; our nearby taxi driver friend Harish, whose house burnt down in last year's ...

The Folded Earth is travelling in other languages In Spanish this month ...    and Romanian (out now) It is also out now in paperback in Norwegian, where the hardback was published in 2011. And out later this year in French.

(The January 2013 issue of India Today Travel Plus is a special one, with contributions from many writers on most of India's states. My bit, on Uttarakhand, travels the valley of the dog...) Photograph by Anuradha Roy Our dog’s ears are oddly shaped. They resemble enormous lily petals, or bat wings. The world, viewed through the valley that those bat ears forms, looks different. Kumaon’s hills, where we travel and live, aren’t invitations to energetic climbs, for example. Instead they call for detailed olfactory explorations followed by wide-ranging squirts of pee. By dusk our legs are aching to walk — but we can’t be out much longer with BatEars as company since dusk is when our resident leopards step out for dinner. Their favourite food is freshly-caught dog. Before BatEars entered our lives we regarded most wildlife differently, perhaps indifferently. I never used to hear far-off foxes. Now, if there is the faintest call of a fox, BatEars, in a primal throwback to h...

Ravi Das Camp is about seven miles from the president’s palace in New Delhi. En route are the mansions where members of parliament live, guarded by armed soldiers in bunkers. The men who in December allegedly raped a young paramedic brutally enough to kill her lived in Ravi Das Camp, a slum reported to be as fetid and dehumanizing as the many others close to the homes and offices of Delhi’s political elite. RAVEENDRAN In a sense it is fitting that the alleged rapists and murderers lived within touching distance of our politicians. In the 2009 parliamentary elections, India’s political parties fielded 6 candidates charged with rape while 34 candidates were awaiting trial for crimes against women. In the state assemblies, 42 members had rape or associated charges against them at the time of their election. In all, according to a recent report published by the Association for Democratic Reforms, India has over 300 such politicians in power. Read the rest o...

(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...