Meeting Annie, God and Mother Mary with Arundhati Roy
It looks like everyone is reading Arundhati Roy’s 'Mother Mary Comes to Me', widely acclaimed, and now on several award nomination lists. She does not return your look from the posters of the book on the London Underground, instead gazing towards the horizon with a smouldering cigarette between her lips. Difficult to pigeonhole, it is memoir, biography, or literary non-fiction, depending on the reader.
The God of Small Things acquired cult status when it won the Booker Prize in the 90s. I might not recall every detail of the story, but the miasma of desolation and melancholy still lingers.
She was in London last week for the release of her beautifully restored 1988 film, 'In Which Annie Gives Those Ones'.
Over our lunch, she reminds me how the term was part of the Delhi University lexicon. She laughs as she recounts how Derek Malcolm of The Daily Telegraph claimed it did not mean anything in English, to which she replied, “Obviously, Mr Malcolm, in England you don’t speak English anymore.”
We reminisce about Delhi - I relive my days at Miranda House and Delhi University, and she hers at the School of Planning and Architecture. Nothing has changed; she is still the quintessential Delhi girl. There is no artifice; she says what she believes and global fame has not altered the path she took as a student. She reminds me of student fervour in the Delhi University café, Gitane cigarettes, bell bottoms and fierce debates on Adam Smith, Herman Hesse, Nietzsche and Sartre that peppered our lectures in science and mathematics.
'In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones' at the London Indian Film Festival is the story of students from a not-so-fictional school of architecture where the monicker for the Headteacher is Yamdoot (the god of death). Annie is the nickname of the boy who falls foul of the system and is punished for it. Accommodation is basic, living conditions best described as ‘grimy’, and teaching staff mediocre.
“But then griminess was its own university”, she adds in her post film conversation. She plays Radha, who sees architects exploiting the system for their own ends and propagating capitalism to keep the disenfranchised at society’s margins. To this day, she continues to raise her voice against those she sees as oppressors.
"The study of architecture is fundamental to the kind of writer that I am. Even structurally and in the craft of writing, if I hadn't studied architecture in this particularly mediocre college, I would be a very different writer."
Long may Arundhati’s language walk us to lands where to dream and feel pain, sorrow, loss and love will help make sense of this world - this maayajaal - a web of illusion.
