Arundhati Roy "I'm On The A-List Of Anti-Nationals "

You know her politics, you know her fiction, but who is the woman behind the controversy? In an ELLE exclusive, Arundhati Roy talks to Aishwarya Subramanyam about writing, fighting and...aerobics?

- Aishwarya Subramanyam

I have often wondered whether we should never meet the writers whose books we love. Never watch them give lectures, never listen to them read, never talk to them except to spell our names for an autograph in a controlled environment where conversation may not serendipitously ensue. If we keep our heroes at a safe distance, they cannot disappoint us with the banal business of being people.

But part of growing up is accepting that everybody is people. And the thing with people is that they can be awkward and selfconscious, insecure and fragile, set in their immovable ways. Arundhati Roy is some of these things, but she is also funny and kind, affectionate and warm, with a furious brain and a laugh that makes her eyes all shiny. She calls me Nicey Mol, which gives me the giggles.

There is something of the childwoman about 54-year-old Roy: the sing-song voice and wilful curls of a precocious little girl, the way her tiny hands fly up to her face, playing with her hair, pulling out one coil and then another, messing it up some more. I know this tic because I do it too, as if a chaos of curls atop my head will cushion expectations of too much sensibility. Her eyes are heavily lined with kohl, and she watches me carefully.

She has 20 years on me, to the month, and a mind that’s only a few light years ahead. She’d won the Booker Prize when she was my age, a fact that annoys me no end. What have I done with my life? (This is the sort of thinking that leads absolutely nowhere, but I can’t help myself.) I read The God Of Small Things when I was a teenager, and it inspired me, like it did many of my generation, especially, to write; or rather, it gave me permission to write in an intensely emotional way that I didn’t know was allowed. It also let me use the word vomity in many sentences.