{"id":50125,"date":"2025-09-08T02:46:22","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T02:46:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/50125\/"},"modified":"2025-09-08T02:46:22","modified_gmt":"2025-09-08T02:46:22","slug":"we-are-actually-swimming-in-a-sewer-of-moral-rot-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/50125\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We are actually swimming in a sewer of moral rot\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Booker Prize<\/a>-winning novelist Arundhati Roy is talking to me from her apartment in Delhi<\/a>. In her new book she relates how she bought this \u201cbeautiful\u201d apartment \u201cwith the proceeds of literature\u201d. She writes, \u201cEvery now and again I kiss the walls and raise a glass and a middle finger to my critics who seem to think that to write and say the things I do I must live a life of fake, self-inflicted poverty\u201d.<\/p>\n

The comment is characteristically Roy: combative, flippant, funny. And today, she is joined by her dog, who, she tells me, \u201cpeople refer to as a walking middle finger. No one is sure whether she learned from me or I learned from her!\u201d<\/p>\n

After studying architecture, then writing screenplays, Roy has written two novels, two decades apart. She was the first writer to win the Booker Prize with a debut novel, when The God of Small Things took the award in 1997. Not until 2017 did she publish her second, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness<\/a>. <\/p>\n

In between, her work \u2013 on the page and in life \u2013 had taken a political turn. She wrote about, and protested about, Indian democracy, nuclear weapons, environmentalism and economics. Her aptly titled collected essays, My Seditious Heart<\/a> (2019), weighs in at a wrist-straining 1,000 pages. <\/p>\n

And now Roy has written a memoir. Mother Mary Comes to Me, with its title from the Beatles song Let It Be, is a tribute to and a reckoning with her late mother, Mary Roy, who died in September 2022. When her mother died, she writes, \u201cI was wrecked, heart-smashed. I am puzzled … by the intensity of my response.\u201d<\/p>\n

Puzzled because, as her older brother said, \u201cShe treated nobody as badly as she treated you\u201d. The fact that Roy refers to her mother in the book as Mrs Roy gives some idea of the nature of their relationship. It was, as we see from the book, not always easy; not ever easy. <\/p>\n

\u201cFriends always told me, \u2018One day you\u2019re gonna write about Mrs Roy, and I\u2019m like, \u2018No, I don\u2019t think so!\u2019,\u201d she tells me. \u201cBut when she died, I was very puzzled by my response \u2013 grief, as well as a sort of shame and humiliation that I was so upset by the death of somebody that I hadn\u2019t had such an easy relationship with.\u201d<\/p>\n

For people who haven\u2019t read the book, can she describe her mother? \u201cI wouldn\u2019t dare to try. That\u2019s why I wrote the book. For me, she\u2019s a character who belongs in the pages of literature.\u201d But one description might be found on the gravestone Roy and her brother chose for their mother, which reads, \u201cDreamer Warrior Teacher\u201d. Another is in the description late in the memoir, where Mrs Roy is very sick, and failing, where Arundhati writes that \u201cto watch her, this powerful woman, our crazy, unpredictable, magical, free, fierce Mrs Roy reduced to abject helplessness, was its own form of suffering\u201d. <\/p>\n

\"ArundhatiArundhati Roy at a journalists protest in New Delhi, India, in 2023. Photograph: Harish Tyagi\/EP <\/p>\n

Mrs Roy, we learn, was larger than literature, larger than life. She brought up her two children mostly alone, after her alcoholic husband absconded. She took her children to different homes with different surrogate families \u2013 and she took out her frustration in life on her children. \u201cWe were the only safe harbour she had,\u201d writes Roy.<\/p>\n

Mrs Roy also started a school with another woman. It was a success, and it grew, with Mrs Roy finding new land and developing the project. She was extraordinarily driven. Where did her ambition come from?<\/p>\n

\u201cI think she also came out of a great deal of cruelty from her father. You can respond to that cruelty by caving in and breaking down and becoming a complete victim … or you can just become cussed, which is what she became.\u201d Roy laughs. \u201cShe just became this very stubborn person who was full of anger. I became so acclimatised to that stuff that I can say no without being furious. But for her it was a battle.\u201d<\/p>\n

What other effects did it have? \u201cVery quickly in life I dissociated myself, and there was one part of me which took the hits \u2013 and the love occasionally \u2013 but there was one part of me that was writing notes. I think I began to try to figure things out, outside the family, inside the family. <\/p>\n

\u201cAnd those are good tools for a writer to develop, especially in India. Because despite what everyone thinks, despite what the hippies say or the travellers say about this country of chaos and colour, it\u2019s not. It\u2019s a country of rigid social mores, rigidly divided into caste and community and language. If you don\u2019t fit in anywhere, someone like me, you learn to be on the outside very early.\u201d<\/p>\n

I ask what Roy learned about herself when writing the book. \u201cSomething that people struggle to understand more and more today. Why do people revere those who torment them? Why are people so obedient?\u201d She herself was obedient towards her mother because Mrs Roy suffered from asthma and she feared that she would have a fatal attack. \u201cAnd then I left and I became very disobedient in a lot of ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

Disobedience has become Roy\u2019s signature. She stands up for causes and for people, but rejects the term \u201cwriter-activist\u201d, which was, as she writes in her memoir, \u201ca term I found absurd because it suggested that writing about things that vitally affected people\u2019s lives was not the remit of a writer\u201d. <\/p>\n

\n

Fiction to me is freedom. Fiction is prayer in some ways. Whereas the nonfiction I write has usually an argument<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Her memoir goes into detail on her protests and arrests, including a stay in jail, but it is also a book that is lively, entertaining and full of love. Where else could one read of a writer going on a bra-shopping trip \u2013 for Mrs Roy \u2013 in Ferrara with the author John Berger? \u201cI hung back to experience the sheer delight of watching this extremely handsome eightysomething man say in his British-accented Italian, \u2018Excuse me, could you show us what you have in a size 44DD?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

One element of Roy\u2019s nature that comes across repeatedly in the book is her need to get away \u2013 she flees in order to write. Is she one of those writers who is most alive when alone? \u201cDefinitely, definitely, definitely. I remember watching, what\u2019s that actor\u2019s name in The Singing Detective?\u201d Michael Gambon. \u201cHe says, writers \u2013 they eat their own young. It\u2019s true. There\u2019s a danger to having someone like me around.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Arundhati Roy: ‘In India if a woman says anything against the central national order, the first thing is: rape her’Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

But as we talk, I\u2019m reminded that we haven\u2019t discussed the other thread that runs through the book, starting with the title. Roy\u2019s love for The Beatles comes through regularly, from her response to John Lennon\u2019s assassination, to someone giving her a gift of still frames from the film Yellow Submarine. What do the band mean to her?<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, I grew up in this tiny little place. Everything in my life was so closed in, it was just taking away all the oxygen, and The Beatles just put it back for me. I mean I love all sorts of Indian music but none of it puts steel in your spine, or a giggle when something terrible is happening and you\u2019re trying to see the funny side of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

I wonder what it is that fiction provides for her that nonfiction doesn\u2019t. What itch does it scratch? \u201cOh, fiction to me is freedom. Fiction is prayer in some ways. Whereas the nonfiction I write has usually an argument, when I see the mainstream media closing down on someone, and I know it\u2019s possible for me to make a dent in that.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the subjects that comes up in Mother Mary Comes to Me is the treatment of women in India. Roy refers to \u201cDelhi\u2019s male commuters who thought of women as snacks they could help themselves to whenever they felt like it.\u201d Have things improved since the time she was writing about?<\/p>\n

\"ArundhatiArundhati Roy addresses an audience at the launch of the People’s Action for Employment Guarantee in New Delhi, 2005. Photograph: Raveendran\/AFP via Getty <\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019ve improved greatly in certain ways. Now there\u2019s vast armies of young women working and living on their own. Restaurants are full of women; that wasn\u2019t so when I was young. Women have somehow broken out of the homes they were locked into, not just because they\u2019ve got jobs, but also because of the internet. There are ways of earning a living from fashion and music and being YouTube influencers, even if you\u2019re in some rural area. The empowerment that way has improved.<\/p>\n

\u201cYet there\u2019s the whole thing still going on, the female feticide, the violence and the humiliation and the rape. And in places like Kerala it\u2019s so sexist still.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roy\u2019s willingness to stand up and be counted has won her many enemies. In her memoir she writes of one Indian actor-turned-MP who objected to her writings on Kashmir and \u201csuggested I be tied to a Jeep and used as a human shield by the Indian army\u201d. In the book Roy is dismissive of such attacks, but do they ever affect her personally?<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not just me it happens to,\u201d she says. \u201cThey do it to a lot of women, especially Muslim women. It\u2019s just so obnoxious, [talking about] putting them up for auction, and threatening them with rape.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s actually what\u2019s happening in India now because of this Hindu right-wing regime,\u201d referring to the government of prime minister Narendra Modi<\/a>. He and what she ironically calls \u201chis glorious political career\u201d get short shrift in her memoir.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, everything that Trump is doing now, it already happened here in 2014. In fact, the people in the fur and the antlers [referring to the QAnon, Trump-supporting rioters who attacked the US Capitol Building in January 2021 and attempted to overturn the election of Joe Biden] are ruling us now. [In India] they succeeded in carrying out the coup and we are now 10 years on.<\/p>\n

\n

The difference between the US and here is that [here] the mainstream media\u2019s entirely controlled<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s frightening, because people are used to the horror, but we are actually swimming in a sewer of moral rot. You know, thousands of people with swords calling for the death of Muslims, we have Dalit [India\u2019s lowest caste] being flogged and raped and killed. Of course that is something that has gone on forever, but it\u2019s almost like it\u2019s the new normal. <\/p>\n

\u201cSo many students are in jail, so many activists in jail, people who talk about murder and lynching are in jail, and the lynchers are [government] ministers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is India, traditionally the largest democracy in the world, still a democracy? \u201cIt\u2019s a very twisted democracy,\u201d says Roy. \u201cThe difference between the US and here is that [here] the mainstream media\u2019s entirely controlled. We have the charade of elections, but the intelligence services, the police, the army, all these have been infiltrated by this ultra right-wing organisation that Modi belongs to, the [volunteer paramilitary organisation] RSS.<\/p>\n

\u201cBack in 2008, I wrote a piece which began with a paragraph, about what have we done to democracy. What happens when it\u2019s been used up and emptied of meaning, and every institution has been turned against you?<\/p>\n

\u201cBut,\u201d she concludes, \u201cyou have the most incredible people fighting back too, so that one cannot forget.\u201d She will be in the front rank.<\/p>\n

Mother Mary Comes to Me is published by Hamish Hamilton<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Booker Prize-winning novelist Arundhati Roy is talking to me from her apartment in Delhi. In her new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":50126,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[14765,18,117,19,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-50125","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-arundhati-roy","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50125\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}