"She taught me to think and then got angry with my thoughts. She taught me to be free and got angry with my way of being free. She taught me to write and was offended by the writer I became." When Arundhati Roy published her first novel, The God of Small Things, in 1997, her mother was admitted to the hospital preventively. She was afraid of how she might have been portrayed in those pages. Inspiring and terrifying, visionary and despotic, the ambivalence of Mary Roy, a great activist for women's rights in public but cruel and ruthless with her children in private, is the cornerstone of the memoirs of the Indian Booker Prize winner.
My Sorrow and My Storm (Alfaguara) is a book born from the surprise that her own devastation caused her after the death of her mother in 2022. "She should have hated her, her brother did so unequivocally, but she did not. She admired her." "The great challenge, more than as a daughter, has been as a writer: how to write about this character without judging her, without pigeonholing her," Roy says in a meeting with journalists in Madrid. "Our relationship affected everything I am, also the writer I am today. I couldn't hate her because there is so much of her in me that I would have to hate myself."
Mary Roy, a Syrian Christian in a tiny and privileged community, like an oasis amidst Indian poverty, married outside the community and then divorced. Disinherited by her own family, she turned her personal struggle into the driving force of her life and managed to change the succession law. She also founded a school to promote girls' access to education. And yet, she directed all her fury towards her son, even hitting him with violence for being "mediocre," while embracing her daughter for getting good grades.
"Being a feminist does not make you a good person," writes Arundhati. "We have oversimplified feminism," she adds in person, with her soft voice, an intense gaze outlined with kohl, and a sweet but ironic smile that occasionally appears at the corner of her lips. "It is not only about women's rights, but about a way of seeing the world. In India, there are nationalist fascist women ready to kill." For her, the women's struggle in her country became in the late 60s a "tiger on a leash" after the major capitalist foundations became its main funders through NGOs, a metaphor that reflects the general state of a movement weakened by its own contradictions: "While we argue about trivial matters, the most important issues remain unaddressed."
Arundhati Roy is an uncomfortable woman in a world where discomfort is paid for. The latest of her countless legal issues sounds almost ridiculous: she has been sued for appearing smoking on the cover of her memoirs. "We tend to label women as angry too easily. Journalists keep asking me about my rebelliousness. I am an adult woman, I stopped rebelling a long time ago. My writing does not stem from anger but from nonconformity, from refusing to accept the unacceptable. It is the rest of the world that is angry with me, especially right-wing men. I receive their anger with a shrug," she says. And smiles.
This summer, a book by the Indian writer was censored in Kashmir for "promoting a culture of grievance, victimhood, and terrorist heroism." She does not give it much importance in a state where surveillance extends to private messages or social media posts. "After all that Bollywood noise, India lives in a great silence. They have made sure to keep the population quiet and have succeeded in having the people themselves silence any opposition to the system. We have a long history of lynchings and murders. It's terrifying. When I speak somewhere, they come and destroy the platform. How does a country recover from that?" she wonders, issuing a warning: "What is happening in the US today already happened in India in 2014. I have many friends in jail, or dead."
Arundhati dedicated her first book, the one that catapulted her to worldwide fame, to the same mother she now portrays with almost journalistic zeal: "To Mary Roy, who raised me, taught me to say 'sorry' before interrupting her in public, and loved me enough to let me go." It was a lie. The writer left her mother's home at 16 for pure survival and became an adult too soon. She ventured into the world unprotected, and what she found plunged her into constant worry, so that with any praise she can only think that at that moment someone is being beaten somewhere in the world. Like her brother was while she was being embraced. "If I had simple feelings, I wouldn't be a writer," she apologizes. And smiles again.
"After the Bollywood noise, India lives in a forced great silence. What is happening today in the US already happened there in 2014."
As she chats with a group of journalists in a five-star hotel in the center of Madrid, in Egypt, Donald Trump is leading the signing of the ceasefire in Gaza, a conflict she has been writing about for over 20 years. Like everything in life, she is guided by skepticism. "The same US State Department that funded the genocide with 40 billion dollars now presents itself as a peacemaker. Would it have happened without that money? Who is ultimately responsible for the genocide then?" she throws out to the room without expecting an answer. "They have forced the whole world to witness the fall of democracy, surrender, and negotiation with war criminals without doing anything. It's psychotic."
Writer, activist, and vice versa, it is impossible to separate the different facets that make up Arundhati Roy. Does a literary militant believe in the necessary militancy of literature? "Well, you'll be surprised by the answer, but no. I respect the beauty of literature too much to reduce it to a manifesto. A writer cannot escape their political ideas, even if they write fairy tales, but I have seen so many left-wing activists write such bad books... There is no excuse for making bad art," she concludes, the woman who wrote to save herself from her own story and now writes that story without sugarcoating, but without resentment.
"Sometimes I feel like my mother is still alive and arguing with me," she says. "In India, mothers with children are deified, but in the Western world, on the other hand, I observe a tendency to blame the mother for everything that happens to us as adults. It seems to me a mere excuse not to grow." Arundhati Roy always saw words as a wild animal she had to hunt and from which she had to drink blood if she wanted to become a writer. Today, satisfied with linguistic flow, she asserts: "Now I really don't need my mother anymore."