anuradha roy

Sometime in August last year, Manisha and I went through a series of one-line messages to each other to find a date when we were both free to meet for lunch. Two days before we were to meet though, I had to cancel. I had dislocated my elbow. My right arm, I wailed to her. What if it never worked normally again? How would I make pots? “I am paranoid about my hands & legs,” she wrote back “…jodi kichu hoye jaaye taholey kaaj ki kore korbo!!! [How will I work if something happens to them?]   That December, we were sitting in the sun outside her barsaati studio, and I was gazing with distaste at my hands, which were rough and knobbly with being constantly in cold water and clay. She noticed and said, “We don’t have beautiful hands, but they make beautiful things.” She knew the place of beauty in art is a tricky one. It is easy to be dismissive of works that are beautiful as being not sufficiently deep . In the world of high art, if a work did not come with an incompreh...

At nine-thirty on a week day morning in the monsoon, Delhi’s Defence Colony flyover is a noisy, semi-immobile caterpillar . The rain always makes the traffic inexplicably denser. N othing’ s moving, ther e is no likelihood that it will any time soon . Through car windows you can see men and women in corporate uniforms glaring into mobiles. If their fingers stop tapping the keypad, they begin tapping the steering wheel, a steady drumbeat of rage: delayed meetings, lost opportunities, money down the drain. Underneath the flyover, a young man with a single silver earring and an improbable beret on his head is murmuring to a bird on his wrist. The bird is large, and it has a hooked beak. For a moment I think it’s a falcon, because I’ve heard of trained falcons. When I ask the man , he says with an adoring smile: “She’s a kite. She is mine. I love her.” The Frendicoes animal shelter and clinic has the Defence Colony flyover as its ceiling. The flyover is made of joine...

Yesterday Suman, a friend who lives down the stairs, handed me a mango. It was one of the few she in turn had been gifted by her brother who in turn had been gifted by…. Well, this was no ordinary mango: it was an Alphonso, and therefore it was an act of real generosity for her to part with one. I had never tasted the fabled Alphonso, could hardly believe I had one in my hand. She shrugged that she thought it overrated, but ok, an Alphonso, is an Alphonso, she said, why not taste it and decide. I realised,  going up the stairs holding my precious Alphonso, that I had actually tasted one, not a month ago, in London. Only, I had clean forgotten it. To those of us used to the Benishaan, the Chausa, the Langra and the Sindoori,   the vital thing is that lovely tangy twist that gives mangoes character. Their tastes unroll on the tongue layer by layer. I had forgotten eating the Alphonso because it was merely nice: sweet, pleasant, uncomplicated. photo courtesy: enj...

"The themes of innocence stolen, the refuge of the imagination, and the inclination to look away are handled with sensitivity and subtlety in some of the best prose of recent years encountered by this reader. Roy brings a painterly eye, her choice of detail bringing scenes to sensual life, while eschewing floridness: a masterclass rather in the art of restraint, the pared-back style enabling violence close to the surface to glint of its own accord."   Rebecca K. Morrison, The Independent "Anuradha Roy’s brilliant new novel, Sleeping on Jupiter , is a riveting and poignant read...There’s a whole tapestry out there: lost innocence, displacement, violence, friendship, survival, unconventional love, rejection, and pain...all penned with excellent craft. The opening chapters are violent but etched in delicate, detached prose." Suneetha Balakrishnana, The Hindu "Both incredibly timely and extremely brave." Lucy Scholes, The National "P...

Sleeping on Jupiter was released in April in India (published by Hachette India) and in Britain (published by Maclehose Press). The formal "launch" was at Asia House London. A complete account, including an audio link here , from the Asia House site. Spunky, feisty older Indian women are central characters in new book Indian author Anuradha Roy, left, the Guardian and Observer books  editor Claire Armitstead, right, at the launch of 'Sleeping on Jupiter', which was held at Asia House 01/05/15 By Naomi Canton A book portraying older Indian women – not the typical centres of Indian fiction – as spunky, strong, rebellious and flirtatious and no longer simply living their lives for others, was launched at Asia House. Sleeping on Jupiter by Indian author Anuradha Roy, was launched as part of the Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival  2015 and was the first pre-Festival event. In the same way that The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel  (2011)...

On the second page of highly acclaimed Indian novelist Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter , a 7-year-old child witnesses the murder of her father by axe-wielding masked men who have invaded their home. Like much of Roy’s writing, it’s a scene described in visceral detail: the smell of a ripe grapefruit fresh from their garden is contrasted with the sight of the whitewashed wall inside their hut “streamed red” with the father’s blood, and the echoes of his haunting screams as he’s beaten then butchered like an animal. “When the pigs were slaughtered for their meat they shrieked with a sound that made my teeth fall off and this was the sound I heard,” the daughter recalls. It’s a brutal and jarring beginning, but in the context of the novel – which takes place over five days in the coastal temple town of Jarmuli in contemporary India – it’s the next chapter, less savage but no less disturbing, that unsettles the most. A young woman, all braided hair, tattoos and ...

Published in Scroll.in, April 2015 The other day, my father-in-law was in a reflective mood brought on by looking at his accounts ledgers at the end of the financial year. He concluded with a sigh that he had not made much money from selling books. But he had no regrets, books had brought him riches of a different kind: a full life and good friends. At 93, Ram Advani has been running his own bookshop, Ram Advani Booksellers, for over sixty years. His is the old kind of bookshop where authors from all over the world write to him asking what is new, where customers come back to him to ask what they should read, where friendships begin as conversations about books and then blossom and grow.  Ram Advani (left) in his bookshop   I may be biased of course – but working in the world of books is the best kind of work. It’s certainly one where you get to know interesting people, and do the kind of work together that encourages long friendships (or enmities).  ...