anuradha roy

Every now and then, I am seized by the desire to have a small shop on Mall Road. “Small” is a tautology when you know Ranikhet’s Mall Road, because the road is only a few feet wide and the shops along it are no bigger than half a garage. My shop would be a room about 6x10ft, with tall, hinged shutters that I would fold close and lock up every evening before I walked home. Mall Road’s eastern flank has about seven shops: the paanwaala , Gullu Dhobi, the atta chakki (flour mill), the omelette-paratha place, a couple of tailors, and so on. Presiding over the middle is the glass-fronted eating room of Hotel Meghdoot, where all Mall Road’s fringe-tailed dogs take care to position themselves. Finally, there is Raju Taxi and Tour Service, which operates from an Alto. And then the market ends. What will my shop sell? I am not sure. But in my head it is a warm, happy place where glass jars with freshly baked biscuits sit on shelves of sweet-smelling pinewood. In the cor...

On a dewy morning in early May, a man named Jogi finished his taxi round dropping off children to schools in Ranikhet. He came home at about eight and resumed a quarrel he had been having with his parents. In minutes, the fight became uglier and louder. Nobody is clear when it took a disastrous turn, but all at once, Jogi dashed into the house, pulled out a sari belonging to his wife, and declared that he would hang himself from the nearby deodar tree. Go ahead, his parents said sarcastically, what are you waiting for. Deodars, a variety of cedar, are massive. Their branches start high up on pillar-like trunks and grow parallel to the earth. They are extremely difficult to climb, but most people in the hills are used to cutting fodder from the upper reaches of trees. Jogi was thirty years old, a tall, athletic man. He clambered up the tree, fashioned a noose from the sari, and hanged himself even as neighbours and parents stared on. It was over in minutes. His parents swore to th...

A tranquil beach town named Jarmuli is the setting of Anuradha Roy’s third novel, Sleeping on Jupiter, which won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and made the longlist for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Four older women travel as friends in search of a bucolic vacation, and a young woman, contending with the trauma of her past, finds her stay in Jarmuli tied with theirs. Roy braids the narrative threads of these and other characters together to create a butterfly stitch that examines personal trauma, a national epidemic of violence, and the ways in which power is used to injure. The prose is deft and powerful, the resort town beautifully rendered, the turmoil bubbling underneath terrifyingly realized. Roy and I corresponded over email to discuss the book, the nature of violence, and the craft of storytelling. (Read it here in The Rumpus) *** The Rumpus: Could you talk about your choice of s...

I was born in Calcutta (as it was called then) yet by some quirk of fate, I've never done a book event there, not even a bookshop reading. So this is very exciting. The complete programme of the festival is here . It runs from 25th to 29th January. All the events are at the Victoria Memorial, a spectacular setting. It will be balmy and sunny and festive at this time of year.  No passes are required, all the events are free.

A Year in Reading: Anuradha Roy By Anuradha Roy posted at 11:00 am on December 16, 2016 One of my treasured discoveries this year was Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life . Originally published in German in 2014, and translated by Charlotte Collins , this is a short novel told with apparent artlessness, but from the very first page you know it’s about to rearrange your mental universe. It is a breathtaking, heartbreaking story that encapsulates a universe of change, loss, resilience — in about 24,000 words. A Whole Life is, quite literally, the whole life of taciturn, hard-working Andreas Egger, from the day he comes to the mountain village as an orphan with a leather pouch of money around his neck, to his death many decades later. He is by turn a laborer, a soldier, a guide to the mountains, and through the course of his life modernity comes to his village in the form of electricity, machine guns, and tourists. He is crushed by forces of both nature and man t...

Before I could read, I was read to, and there was only one book that was read aloud in our house.   I am four years old. Then five, then six, seven. Even when I’ve learned how to read, the routine doesn’t change. The book comes out from its place on the shelf in the evening after my father is home from work. He lies back on propped up pillows, my brother and I lolling next to him. Even though my mother can read the book for herself, she wants to listen in as well; when my father reads from the book, it becomes funnier, hysterically funny. We know all the poems backward, but he only has to start reading and we laugh till our stomachs hurt. It is a book of nonsense verse in Bengali, populated by a collection of violent oddballs—our favourite is a poem about a head clerk who leaps up from his gentle afternoon snooze convinced his moustache has been stolen. Everyone around him is flummoxed. He is shown his face in a mirror. Your moustache is intact, look! But ...

By the Missisippi river in Minneapolis Loud-voiced Woman:  "This is a purebred dog, Ah paid 2,500 dollars for that dog." Mumbling Man:  "I'd -a given ya a baby. I'd-a given ya a baby ." Loud-voiced Woman:  "Fuck you, Doug, I don' want  yer baby. I wanted Jim's baby." Wall, Chicago Public Library photo by anuradha roy Gangsta Hip hop dog, SF "I'm just living the life, trying to make it on my own" photo by anuradha roy Ray Ban dogs, San Francisco. photo by anuradha roy About to board. Minneapolis airport. photo by anuradha roy Wayside man, Chicago:  "You want to know where Trump Towers is? You don't want to go there. It's an evil place." Taxi Driver, Chicago:  "You going to Trump Towers? I'll take you. Though you shouldn't go there. But what difference does it make? Hillary. Trump. None of them gonna do nuthin." Dustbi...