anuradha roy

One bright day in June, I stood in the dim-lit living room of Vanessa Bell’s farmhouse in Charleston, Sussex and wondered at the route that had led me there. Not the journey, which was no more than about two hours driving from London through English countryside covered in wildflowers. But the far-flung combination of reasons that had made it an imperative for me to stand in that room and breathe in air permeated with old books and threadbare rugs. One of the reasons was Virginia Woolf’s book, a A Room of One’s Own . Which girl struggling to write would not be thrilled by Virginia Woolf’s essay on the impossible odds against women writing? It spoke in a voice that was true, witty and clear, despite the decades between the author’s time and ours. My friends read it, I read it, and then we worked our way through much of Woolf’s fiction, idolizing her as other teenagers might a rock star. For years the same postcard of young Virginia sketched in wistful charcoal was thumbtack...

At first, you think it's rainwater that's soaked your feet. Take your shoes off and you see your socks are bright red. A black slug is writhing on your ankle. Your skin crawls, your blood flows, but however hard you try, you can't shake the thing off. 'Mountain Rain', Watercolour by Sheela Roy A leech, the season's first. Other people rely on the met office and the newspaper for formal announcements of the monsoon. In the hills, the job's done by leeches. They are called "joke" in Hindi — somehow they never make you laugh. It is a mystery where leeches come from in the monsoon and where they go to once it's over. There must be people who know this. I don't. About a week or so after the rains set in, the leeches begin to emerge. Out of air, dropping much as the gentle rain from heaven does upon the earth beneath, leeches fall quietly off leaves and trees, they pour out of the grass and pine needles and they march with star...

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...