In her autobiography, Arundhati Roy describes the painful relationship she - and her brother - had with her mother, a dominant, demanding, ruthless person who at the same time managed against all odds to build a local school, in a very inclusive way for all children in the village to get an education. Her two children are treated worse by her than the other children, because she wants to avoid the criticism of favouring her own. Roy hates and loves her mother at the same time.
She also describes her departure from home, her penniless life in Delhi, her contacts with friends, artists, moviemakers and other characters of interest. A lot happens, and her life is as good as the plot of any novel: with hardship and luck, with love and loss, with a regained connection with her father after he abandoned them decades earlier, the success of her novel, the damaging of her reputation and accusation of communism and terrorism.
There's a lot of therapeutic literature dealing with mother-daughter relationships, but this book is of a totally different level, not only because of its scope - the recent history of India - but also because of its literary value. Roy is an absolutely excellent writer, someone who masters her language to deliver something exquisite.
"All through school I did consistently badly in English language and literature. I never understood the rules. Mrs Roy would slash through my little essays and compositions, mark me three out of ten, and write comments like Horrible. Nonsense. She was right - they were complete and utter rubbish. Even then I knew that the language I wrote in was not mine. By mine' I don't mean mother tongue, and by 'language' I don't mean English, Hindi or Malayalam, I mean a writer's language. Language that I used, not language that used me. A language in which I could describe my multilingual world to myself. I knew even then that that language was outside me, not inside me. I knew it would not come to me on its own. I needed to hunt it down like prey. Disembowel it, eat it.And when I did, I knew that language, my language, would ease the way blood flowed through my body. It was out there somewhere, a live language-animal, a striped and spotted thing, grazing, waiting for me-the-predator. That was the law of my jungle. It wasn't a non-violent, vegetarian dream." (p.145)
Enjoy!
