anuradha roy

Cylinders are to ceramics what the alphabet is to writing, and the first thing all potters have to learn is to throw a cylinder. This sounds much, much easier than it is. I’ve been at potters’ wheels in various places for years but am still a wobbly, faltering potter wonderstruck if I manage to pull something off. I began at university, in the Round Church at Cambridge. Below the Church, like a secret in the basement, was a little pottery, kiln included, for any student who wanted to come and throw a pot or two. There were no teachers, nobody to tell you a thing. At that time there was no Youtube either, to learn from a vast world of potters out there. You were given a key to enter the ancient grotto -- any time of night or day -- and then, mostly in solitude, you stared at the wheel that was spinning, and tried to figure it out. I have a pot I made then, and wonder how I made it at all. My first real teacher, Bani de Roy , was a student of the illustrious Shoji Hamada ...

Photograph by Anuradha Roy Is This Us? A bus with ‘La Perle de la Savanne’ painted down its back and sides trundles down the road and we crawl in its wake. Behind us, many others as patient. There’s no honking nor any attempts to overtake the bus. This wouldn’t be so mystifying if about 63 per cent of the population in Mauritius were not Indian-origin. Where’s their Indianness gone? Why isn’t anyone shooting jets of scarlet spittle or peeing into roadside walls? I travel across the island, see no garbage heaps. And oh—nobody’s groping women. I feel safe enough to take taxis alone across the country, safe enough to sail to another island on a motorboat where the only other passengers are the Creole boatman and his buddy. Jade, celadon, sapphire and turquoise melt and mingle in the sea under a sky as blue as a kingfisher’s wing. We make our crossing. The water’s clear enough to see fish flitting past corals. No hint of floating rubbish. No Sweet Deal Indian-origin...

 I learnt many new things on my first visit to Australia. That water drains anticlockwise Down Under. That Victorian refers not to nineteenth-century England but to the state of Victoria, of which Melbourne is the capital. Also that Australia has llamas—and two days into my travels, I was standing face to face with one on a green meadow high above the ocean. Llama at Otway Farm. Photograph by Anuradha Roy The llama had a serene, supercilious face and her elegance was undiminished by the fact that sprigs of hay stuck out from her mouth. Early training from Tintin comics gave me the cosmopolitan ease with which to handle the situation: step back as if admiring the view before she can spray you with spittle. When I wondered at his choice of exotic pets, Steve Earle of Otway Farm told me the llama was a sheepdog in disguise. It chased away foxes, protected new-born lambs. It was a working member of his farm. My learning curve was going to get steeper: next I was ...

THE MISSING SLATE 's latest issue ("The Po litics of Art") features an extract from The Folded Earth as well as fiction from Anjum Hasan, Anjali Joseph, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kuzhali Manickavel, and Sidin Vadukut. And poetry from Tishani Doshi, Minal Hajratwala, Aditi Machado, Shikha Malaviya, Tabish Khair, Prabhat, Sudeep Sen, Ravi Shankar, Kedarnath Singh, Arundhathi Subramaniam, and Jeet Thayil. Prabhat and Kedarnath Singh are translated from Hindi by Rahul Soni. The Missing Slate is an arts and literary journal with roots in several countries . Its website says " the story behind our name (a question we’re often asked) arose from the current literary landscape in Pakistan, a country with a rich history but a low tolerance for it". Salt by Anastasia Inspiderwiht I'm very pleased that the extract from The Folded Earth is set alongside a poem by Kedarnath Singh. Years ago as literature editor at the OUP in Delhi, I looked after A. K. Ramanujan a...

Colours, colours. The Sennelier on the Left Bank, an art shop where anything seems possible At a little square near St Sulpice a white-bearded man in a printed shirt in dappled autumn colours strolled over. He had a genial twinkle in his eyes and all the time in the world on that sunny morning. He paused to chat about the colour of the light, the quality of the breeze, how wonderful Paris felt on such a day -- a day of a kind when it might even appear a pleasant city were it not for the fact that there were so many French people in it....and why was I wearing black? You must never wear black, he said as he waved au revoir , black sucks the life out. Another day, another stranger: she paused to give me directions -- I was walking away, quite definitely away from where I needed to be, she told me, then walked with me half the way in the dark evening despite her heavy bags, to set me straight. Two days later she turned up at the launch of the French edition o f The Folded Earth ...

Fear takes physical form in our neighbourhood in Hyderabad: it is embodied in a man who seems a hundred years old. When he is sighted round the corner, bent and frowning, heading with rapid steps for our cul de sac, we stop playing on the latest mountain of sand or rubble and scoot out of sight behind the houses. The houses are his, the sand and rubble are his. He is universally known as Tataiyya, or grandfather. The local laws give him the right to evict tenants overnight. If the tenant refuses to leave, he sends thugs who ransack homes and fling belongings into the street. You didn’t want to be on Tataiyya’s wrong side, not if you wanted a roof over you: this has been dinned into us by our parents. We were never to risk his displeasure. My father has been a field geologist and our early life was lived in tents. He says that felt more secure: the tent and the patch of sky above were your own. There are five houses in the cul de sac. The one we occupy overlooks the ...

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...