anuradha roy

The year is in its last week and most of the annual Best Books lists are out. Sleeping on Jupiter is in several of them and in great company. THE NATIONAL, UAE: Top Ten International Titles of the Year "Not one of the easiest reads of the year, but it certainly felt like one of the most-important. The Indian novelist lifted the lid on the hypocrisies of her country against a backdrop of abuse, brutality and painful memories as a 25-year-old film-maker’s assistant returned to the temple town of Jarmuli to confront the demons of her past. Only a courageous and talented novelist is able to coalesce such weighty, unsettling and yet topical issues into a compulsively readable book"  http://www.thenational.ae/ arts-life/books/the-top-10- books-that-flew-off-the- shelves-in-2015---in-pictures# 8 THE ASIAN WRITER, UK "This is not a book I highlight because it shares the entertaining qualities of my previous choices, but because it signals a departure from the ster...

Image: Madhu Kapparath T he characters in  Sleeping on Jupiter  are like ghosts. They are persistent in their haunting and linger long after you read the final line of the novel. Even their creator Anuradha Roy does not quite know their future but, she tells  ForbesLife India , imagining their fate, the ‘what ifs’ of their lives, is a “pleasant private parlour game”. Longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize,  Sleeping on Jupiter  is Roy’s third novel. It is set in Jarmuli, a fictional temple town by the sea, where, over the span of five days, the lives of the protagonist Nomi, three elderly friends, a poetry-spouting tea vendor and his assistant, a temple guide and a fixer collide. The impact is not pretty, especially because Roy reveals how relationships can turn violent. In a narrative which, much like the sea, alternates from gentle to choppy, Roy writes about faith, religion, rape, abuse, old age and homosexuality. At the centre o...

The Train to Jarmuli Kate Webb " Roy does not adjudicate between these positions. She holds her story in a fine balance, scrupulously turning from one perspective to another in order to show the often yawning gap between how we imagine ourselves and how others see us...  Roy writes in a lucid, realist manner, contrasting her restraint with the violence of her subject (the colour red is everywhere, page after page has images of blood). But this not a conventional novel, because it is to freighted with ambiguity and impotence." The theme of child abuse is becoming ever more prevalent in fiction. In the recently Man Booker-shortlisted A Little Life , Hanya Yanagihara explores the subject as the ultimate experience of pain, and therefore the ultimate marker of uniqueness, among a group of contemporary New Yorkers much preoccupied with their individualism. In Sleeping on Jupiter , Anuradha Roy frames her story of a young girl’s abuse as part of a broader malaise in...

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...