Arundhati Roy: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

hello Chicago it is my great pleasure to introduce my friend Arundhati Roy about 20 years ago the god of small things came out and won the Booker award and so now we could say it was 20 years ago today Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play and she has now come back with a new book to ministry of utmost happiness her fiction is prophetic visionary dangerous insurrectionary haunting and beautiful her political writing is prophetic visionary dangerous beautiful haunting ecstatic fierce and she occupies a space in the world that I don't think too many people do maybe Noam Chomsky is sort of an intellectual rock star but as an artist world intellectual visionary thinker it's a short list and if you haven't read walking with the comrades listening to grasshoppers the end of imagination field notes on democracy the doctor and the saint capitalism a ghost story amongst others he got lucky because you're in for a treat give a rockin Chicago welcome to the one and only the great Arundhati Roy and Jennifer day of the Chicago Tribune [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] taxi thank you very much and thank you for being here today I'm going to just start with a very short reading from the Ministry of utmost happiness it's a little difficult to to pick out passages to read from this book because everything is so interconnected but I'm sure the connections will come out in the conversation the chapter I'm going to read from is called the tenant and it's just to give you a little context it's about it's about a woman called till autumn ah who who has just picked up a little baby that appeared on the pavement in the streets of New Delhi and made off with her before the police could come and take the baby and put it in a state orphanage so the chapter starts with a quote from Yan journey which goes then as she had already died four or five times the apartment had remained available for a drama more serious than her own death the spotted owl litter on the street light ducked and bobbed with the delicacy and immaculate manners of a Japanese businessman he had an unobstructed view through the window of the small bear room and the odd bear woman on the bed she had an unobstructed view of him to some nights she bobbed back and said Moshi Moshi which was all the Japanese she knew even indoors the walls radiated a bullying unyielding heat thus low ceiling fans stood the scorched air layering it with fine syndra dust the room showed signs of celebration the balloons types of the window grille bumped into each other Desalle truly soften and shriveled by the heat in the center on a low painted stool was a cake with bright strawberry icing and sugar flowers the candle with a child with a matchbox and a few used matchsticks on the cake it said happy birthday miss Rubin the cake had been cut a small piece eaten the icing had melted and dribbled onto the silver foil coloured cardboard cake base and for making off the crumbs larger than themselves black and pink crumbs the baby whose birthday and baptism ceremonies had been simultaneously celebrated and successfully concluded with fast asleep how kidnapper who went by the name of s pelota ma was awake and concentrating she could hear her hair growing it sounded like something crumbling a burnt thing crumbling cold toast Mott's crisped on a light bulb she remembered reading somewhere that even after people died the hair and nails kept growing like starlight traveling through the universe long after the starve themselves had died like cities fizzy effortless and simulating the illusion of life while the planet C has plundered died around them she thought of the city at night of cities at night discarded constellations of old stars falling from the sky rearranged on earth in patterns and pathways and towers invaded by weevils that have learned to walk upright we will philosopher with a grave manner and a sharp mustache was teaching a class reading aloud from a book admiring young we will strained to catch each word that spills from his wife we will live Nietzsche believed that if pity were to become the core of ethics misery would become contagious and Happiness an object of suspicion the Astor's scratched away on their little notepad shufen howl on the other hand believed that pity is and ought to be the supreme we will virtually but long before them Socrates asked the key question why should we be moral he lost a leg in we will world war for this professor and carry the cane his remaining five legs were an excellent condition airbrush graffiti sprayed on the back wall of his craft classroom said evil we will always make the cut other creatures crowded into the already crowded classroom an alligator with a human skin purse a grasshopper with good intentions a fish on a fast a fox with a flag a maggot through the manifesto a neocon newt and icon iguana a communist cow an owl with an alternative a lizard on TV hello and welcome you are watching lizard news at nine there's been a blizzard on Lizard Island the baby was the beginning of something this much the kidnapper knew her bones had whispered this to her that night the sad night the concerned night the aforementioned night the night hereinafter referred to as the night when she made her move on the pavement and her bones were nothing if not reliable informant the baby was Miss G being returned returned that is not to her mr. bean the first was never heard back to the world mr. bean the second when she was grown to be a lady would settle accounts and square the books mr. bean would turn the tide there was hope yet for the evil evil world Nagas are still o for one good reason why she was leaving him did he not love her had he not been caring considerate generous understanding why now after all these years he said 14 years was enough time for anyone to get over anything provided they wanted to get people had been through much worse oh that she said I got over all that long ago I'm happy and well-adjusted now like the people of Kashmir I've learned to love my countries I may even vote in the next election he let that pass he said she should think about seeing a psychiatrist thinking made her throat ache that was a good reason not to think about seeing a psychiatrist Naga has started wearing tweed coats and smoking cigars like his father did and talking to servants in the imperious way that his mother did tell mites on toast cardi loincloths and the Rolling Stones were a forgotten fever dream from a past life Nagas mother who lived alone on the ground floor of the big house his father ambassador Shiva Shankar haathi Haran had died advised him to let pillow go she won't be able to manage on her own she'll beg you to take her back but Naga knew otherwise tiller would manage and even if she didn't there would be no begging he sensed she was drifting on a tide that neither he nor she could do much about he couldn't tell whether her restlessness her compulsive and increasingly unsafe wandering through the city marked the onset of an unsoundness of mind or an acute perilous kind of sanity or were they both the same thing the only thing he could attribute her newfound restiveness to was her mother's bizarre parting which he thought odd given that it was a relationship that had barely existed tutino had been at her bedside during the last two weeks in hospital but other than that she had seen her mother only a few times in the past several years Naga was right in one sense but wrong in another her mother's death had released below from an internment that nobody including she herself had been aware of because it had passed itself off as something quite the opposite a peculiar insular independence for all of her adult life hello had defined and shaped herself by marking off and maintaining a distance between herself and her mother when that was no longer necessary something frozen began to thaw and something unfamiliar began to take its place now that pursuit of pillow had not turned out as planned she was meant to be just another easy conquest yet another woman who succumbed to his irreverent brilliance and edgy charm and had her heart broken but tillow had crept up on him and become some kind of compulsion and addiction almost addiction has this own demonic skin smells the lengths of the loved ones fingers Nintendo's case it was the slant of her eyes the shape of her mouth the almost invisible scar that slightly altered the symmetry of her lips and made her look defiant even when she did not mean to the way her nostrils fare fled announcing her displeasure even before her eyes did the way she held her shoulders the way she sat on the pot stark naked and smoked cigarettes so many years of marriage the fact that she was not young anymore and did nothing to pretend otherwise didn't change the way he felt because it had to do with more than all that it was the haughtiness despite the question mark over her stock as his mother had not hesitated to put it it had to do with the way she lived in the country of her own skin a country that issued no visas and seemed to have no confidence - it had never been a particularly friendly country even at the best of times but its borders were sealed and the regime of more or less complete isolationism began only after the train wreck at the Shiraz cinema Naga Mary still oh because he was never really able to reach her and because he couldn't reach her he couldn't let her go of course that raises another question why they still owe Mary nagas a generous person would say it was because she needed shelter a less generous view would be that it was because she needed cover although haze was only a small part in the story in others mind before and after Sharad sometimes to calm the overtones of BC and AD thank you thank you very much for the reading and for being here with us the light I just was still too heavy so let's start with the fact that this book is your first novel in 20 years so can he's been writing quite a bit of nonfiction in the meantime but why did you decide to return to fiction now the decision wasn't mine fiction returned to me you know the I I had I've never been the kind of person who who felt that it's you know because I had written a book it was my duty to write another book at a given interval of time or many other books you know and for me section is fiction is something far too profound and far too beautiful to turn into a career you know and so all I did was wait and then the characters in this book came knocking at the door and they dropped in and they visited and then they stayed longer and then they just wouldn't move out I I was just there with the gang you know of people who people this book and truly they were not going to let me go until I finished it but I would never under any pressure you know I never felt under any pressure to write something just because I had written something of you did you feel any pressure given the amazing success that your debut novel had received in the god of small things you know to be honest no because it's too internal process you know the conversations are too too private between me and the characters for pressure out from the outside account of anything you know and to me the idea of living up to people's expectations is is not a very nice one you know most of the time in my life I'm like confounding people's expectations and especially the last 20 years you know I mean certainly it hasn't been a life where every time I wrote something people stood up and applauded it quite the opposite we didn't so it was like to me [Music] perhaps a small story would explain this attitude when I was wished when I was very small living in a village in Kerala my uncle who was choco and we got a small thing through the road scholar who gave up his his academic life to become a filmmaker in a small village in Kerala where he spent most of his time organising a labor union against himself I think I might have been five years old or something and you know everyone was giving me advice about work hard comfort run faster jump higher whatever and he showed me a some kind of a cheap bauble and said you want this and of course my greedy heart coveted it and I said yes if I'll give it you if you feel and and it really made me stop in my tracks I still remember as a very young fourteen and think about the idea of failure which you know which which goes hand in hand with the idea of risk and the idea of some kind of obstinacy obstinacy know that I so so to me there was nothing in writing I'd written to God of small things the way I wanted to light it I didn't want to write the son of the god of small things and God I wanted to roll the dice and try to explore fiction in another way he said the characters sort of came to live with you these characters all sort of live in between worlds there are references to people falling between cracks in the world and I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about why are attracted to characters who live in these sort of in-between spaces and particularly when society in India is so regimented and trickly yeah I think because of that you know I mean in India of course we have inherited a system of social hierarchy institutionalized social hierarchy in every society in the world is unjust maybe there are societies that work toward justice but here you're talking about I'm talking about the caste system the Hindu caste system which has institutionalized high a social hierarchy in such a cruel way and it's the engine that runs modern India - and it's not just that there are four cops you know there are 4,000 or more and each lives in this little grid this little mesh that is pressed down on society very few people less than less than five percent of Indians will marry outside la carte or across religion so it's a society to the outside the world that looks anarchic and you know the touchy-feely teddy bear Bollywood e democracy but actually is not anarchic it's a very rigid grid that is pressed upon us and and so within that and it's an incredible system of administration because every person who accepts to be part of that grid then accept the idea of oppression the idea of of accepting oppression from the from above and executing oppression to do wonders below so it's a very it's a way of creating a very obedient society and there are very few who are I mean I for example am some belong to a small percentage not a lot that I come from an oppressed cause but I don't have a car because my mother married outside and then divorced and then came back to the village and she was you know she and I am all of us were told you just don't belong here no one will marry me of course that was a great relief for me to hear the other thing is that you know so so I think when you when you're living or outside of that grid you naturally your your your antennae are naturally coming to commune with others who are outside so I mean it isn't as though I planned you know but now I mean when I was writing the book it took me a long time to you know how to talk about it because I hadn't talked about it for the ten years that I was writing it but now when I look at it almost every time feminist has a kind of incendiary border running through them you know the book opens with the character called onion who was born after in the ancient city of Shahjahanabad and you know she she was born I mean her mother thought she was a boy but then she turned out to be a hermaphrodite and then becomes onion and end up living initially she lives in in a place called the club gar which is the house of dreams which is inside the walls of the old city with the community of what of course now people call trance gender but then in in Urdu they are called digital and the column cell Fiddler's and they are a variety of genders except women who want to be men and then she end up living in a graveyard so she has the incendiary border of gender running through her but then one of the people who starts living with her and then helps her to run this guest house such a building the graveyard is a he's a man with a Dulles who you know dull HR caste which were formerly called untouchable who watches his father being beaten to death by a mobile people I mean happening every day now but of kaol protectors you know because of his father was transporting the carcass of a cow and so he converts to Islam and he calls himself Saddam Hussein because because he he watches this video of Saddam's execution and is very impressed by the big day in Saddam shows with executions and so he says he is going to be Saddam Hussein so he has in January border of religious conversion and cast to low tomorrow I read about also has a border of cops running to a mother Syrian Christian from the south of father's Dulles and then the story moves on to Kashmir which is of course the national border burning through everybody and show you and and much of the story in certain graveyards in a graveyard in Delhi in graveyards in Kashmir where the border between the living and the dead is also with porous I can cash me they say that the dead are alive and the living are just dead people pretending and and and in the graveyard onion begins to enclose the graves of her and we'll just rules over them you know there's a constant coefficient the dead tell us there's a porous border between human beings and animals and birds too even though it's you know in a big metropolis that there are so many creatures that make their way into the story because the author doesn't accept that you should have human stories an animal story but they can all be in the same story so those borders are very real borders and you've explored a lot of that in your nonfiction as well so I'm wondering if you can speak to how your nonfiction influences your fiction and whether that also works for the other direction as well when Oh obviously you know for 20 years I have I have traveled to so many worlds in India and written about them but but you know there's a very big difference between the nonfiction and fiction and that is that when when I have written nonfiction essays they've always been very very urgent interventions very urgent arguments with a very pointed idea of blowing open a space that closing down quickly in India at that moment at that time so for instance just when in a huge swathe of the scented jungles of central India are signed over to mining companies and suddenly the government starts talking about the greatest internal security threat being armed indigenous people right and and they are they're sending paramilitary in that tens of thousands into the forest burning villages so I went in and wrote an essay called walking with the comrades trying to explain you know before that the papers would not even mentioned mining or mention the signing over of the rivers and the mountains and the building of Diaries It was as if that had nothing to do with this war that was being pushed on to the poorest people but but the thing is that for example in those journey as well as in particular when I started to travel to crush me where which is of course called the unfinished business of partition between India and Pakistan but it is the most densely militarized Zone in the world there are like five hundred thousand soldiers and in the early nineteenth an armed insurrection began and it became so militarized but now it's 2017 and what has happened is that the whole population has killed militants so you're seeing school girls throwing stones at military trucks but when I was traveling in Kashmir I realized that you know the only way you can do the only way you can tell this story is to friction because it's not just about cataloging the dead daughter disappeared or the graveyard but what what does it do to us as Indians even to to swallow that kind of injustice and be expected to celebrate it and wave the national flag in what does it do what does it do to Americans who have to watch their government destroy country what is it it's not about those people but what about us you know and and and to me this is not this novel is not about giving people information or making a political argument or about any kind of immediate utilitarian impulse if the nonfiction is is immediate and earlier than as an argument but this is creating a universe to which people can walk you know to me even even the idea or how do you write I mean I have increasingly felt that if you become very well-known after writing a particular book and generally because of the way the industry works now fiction one of the risk of becoming domesticated you know you have you have a subject heading you have to say or my book is about X or Y or we and I and to me the idea was how not I'm separate from the fact that the story is partly set in a big city but the idea of storytelling like a city plan you know like a story which has a form and a formlessness like a city done you know a story that can be ambushed by unauthorized structures and any good people but story in which you go down a blind alley and stop and smoke a cigarette with a with a guy and come back and in which you know you know how everything works and so is not just about a few people set against a backdrop but sometimes a backdrop is the for foreground and you're not shy of being extremely intimate or extremely you know zoomed out knowing and effortlessly moving between all of that so so that you it is like blowing opening the idea of what fiction can do and why should we be shy to big things so when you're writing then if I'm understanding what you're saying is the is the plot less important to you than the world that you're building them or what are you trying to do to if the goal to build empathy in your reader and what's what's your aim ultimately knowing knowing the the the Amos experiment you know I think and - you know - to try and see what friction can do that anything else that something else some other form of art simply cannot do so to push the boundaries of this particular medium to see what it can do and to also and to also trust that readers are not looking for baby food you know I like I'm not in the market for baby food like predigested so you know it's there's so many things for instance like in India in the north of India every day we live in so many languages so in the book they will do the Hindi the sastra best Telugu dead mother and how do you how do you create a sense of a universe in which all these languages are spoken without being gimmicky or without you know but how do you absorb the cadences of all of that and how do you actually not walk past anyone you know so say whether there's a there's a I mean one of the moments in this there's a man whose job it is to God Hero Honda poster a billboard which is on a public owner on a public toilet where people have to pay to use the toilet and no one has the money right so they're all people to look what is so his job is to guard the holding but you know now who is this man where is he come from who was him before he had this job and what's going to happen to him when he loses it and and even though he is not a major character I don't want to walk past him I want to stop and talk to me you know and that character that that billboard is in the Jantar Mantar yeah can you describe that place and it is or was the real place that you visited as a reporter right no no decision for now just at the Riverview okay now gentlemen sir is a place in in New Delhi it's a sort of old observatory built by an old king in one of the old cities of Delhi Delhi has is an ancient city like more than a thousand years old so has many ruins built on human domain City but that's the place where all the resistance movements all the dreamers the nut jobs the hunger fast people everybody gathers in janitor mother and in fact even though it's not the opening of the book it's the nerve center of the book so you have all these people you know people from the Bhopal gas tragedy people who are displaced people who asking for compensation all kinds of people and also dreamers and artists and crazy and me who have spent many nights there you know just just hanging around people talking to them and that's where the baby that I read about that's where the baby appears and she she just appeared on the pavement obviously her mother has abandoned her and then all these movements is actually appears next to the group of the Kashmiri models for the disappeared who don't know what to do with the baby that appeared and all these why political people get into a total state about what to do with the baby and then they decide to call the police and actually onion who they want the baby and the police car pillow-fish kale but from that all the nerves of and all the stories lead out to the different places you know so gentlemen turn is in fact I was there one night at your ceremony often what would happen is like if I was let's say I'm asked to speak in a university to students in Delhi there's a sort of radical University College in you and I would often go you know late at night to speaking the students maps and they'd be like this crowds and keep standing on the tables and slower what are we shouting of everyone else and so I say why don't you come to gentlemen third you know you can speak to the folks you can learn more than you know some speaking to me so students would come I would be barely 2:00 in the morning Simoni and one such night this baby actually did appear and nobody knew what to do with it and I mean I think that the first moment that I started thinking of the Ministry of are those happy okay so the and that's an interesting point womanhood and motherhood is such a strong theme and in this book in your work can you talk a little bit about your own relationship to motherhood and your mother and whether that influence to the head was no I actually this book is interesting in that I think that so many different kinds of women for instance unzoom who lives in the gravy Archie she finds a little girl abandoned on this there are many children it's true in Delhi children disappear and appear and you know hundreds sometimes thousands of unidentified bodies are found every year you know on the streets until she finds a little girl who's abandoned on the steps of the jama masjid which is a big mosque in in the old city and she she basically takes her to the club car and all of them bring up this little girl together her name is Jane Ervin and young is just so so much in love with the idea of motherhood and longs to to bring this baby up like a normal model you know but things go wrong for her and whereas Tilottama on the other hand who could be a mother just doesn't want to be one you know and so there's a lot of questioning of why is this sort of stereotype of what the woman's trajectory should be pushed on women there's so many different women with different answers and different ways of thinking of motherhood I mean pillows mother is a difficult in crazy mother land pillows just doesn't want to you know she thinks should be an even worse one and so she's not that keen on getting involved but there's a lot of generosity though among them is not a cold I don't like children kind of thing it's like okay let's look after this one you look after her last Christmas is kind of anarchic generosity in the end between them all and this is this was a little bit of a shift but I do want you to speak a little bit about the violence in this book and the intensity of it and the way you write about it can you discuss how you approach violence and in some ways it's in some cases its approach sort of through a haze or through a secondhand letter so it's at arm's length but it's also deeply impactful and wondering if you could discuss how you decide to approach violence when you're writing about it it's enough the greatest contradiction about India you know that people who look upon it as a spiritual land where everybody lives in peace and in fact it's a it's an extremely violent place extremely violent so and and there is one particular form of violence which is the violence of the mob the violence of the majoritarian mom so it's it run to I mean so again you look at it from different in different ways like an Jim who who is who was born to a Shia family she gets caught up in the 2002 day like massacre of Muslims that took place in Gujarat in 2002 and the reason she gets caught up in it is because not because she's a Hindu girl but because she's a Muslim and the reason she survived with is because she did you and people think traditional people sometimes those murderers thought that it's bad luck to kill her so she survives and she thinks of herself as butchers luck and you know she returns to the Kaaba after having gone missing for a long time living in a refugee camp into which many Muslims hundred thousand Muslims were pushed at that point and she returns violated in many ways having watched the rape and the killing and the murder and she won't talk about it the murder of the old person she went with to Google and you know also having been forced to live in the men's quarters having had a haircut being forced to wear men's clothes and she comes back and she she loses her her you know her happiness for a while and eventually quite broken she moves it into the graveyard and she says I'm not living here I'm dying here you know when the municipality asks her to leave and says no one can live in the grave she says I'm not aluminum Dyne you but then she's resurrection self but then there are other while of course that the violence of Kashmir which I will try and read a little bit off to at the at the end there was the massacre Sikhs are took place on the streets of Delhi in 1984 like three thousand people just beaten to death burnt you know had tiles put over them and so all of us are living with this constant you know that just below the surface there is this violence that erupted and in fact I'd like to just read a paragraph maybe if I can find it quickly the one of the voices or one of the characters in this book is a a character called his name is big club doc doctor but he's called Garson Hobart by everybody because that's a name of a character he plays in a play and he's a bureaucrat and works in the Intelligence Bureau and I'll just read you the part where he's watched his talk he's meditating on this violence as a boy in in college he he watches the sikh massacre you know and he says i saw a mob lynch an old cheap gentleman they pulled off his turban tore out his beard and necklace in south africa style the burning tire while people stood around paying their encouragement i hurried home and waited for the shock of what I had witnessed who hit me oddly it never did the only shock I felt was shocked as my own equanimity I was disgusted by the stupidity and futility of it all but somehow I was not shocked it could be that my familiarity with the gory history of the city I had grown up and had something to do with it it was as though the apparition whose presence we in India are all constantly and acutely aware Rose has suddenly surfaced snarling from the deep and had behaved exactly as we expected it to once its appetite was sated is sank back into its subterranean lair and normality closed over it maddened killers you attracted their fangs and returned to their daily chores as Clark's tailors plumbers carpenters shopkeepers life went on and before normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg it's humdrum surface confused at its heart a yoke of egregious violence it is our constant anxiety about that violence our memory of its parts Labor's and our dread of its future manifestations that lays down the rules for how people as complex and as diverse as we are continue to coexist continue to live together tolerate each other and from time to time murder one another as long as the center holds as long as the yolk doesn't run we'll be fine in moments of crisis it has to take the long view so this is the cold-hearted view of the bureaucrat another state who can take the long view and you can look at it from a historical perspective and who isn't blown over by it you know so he's a very sophisticated bureaucrat who speaks in the first person you know so I think we're going to take questions from the audience in just a moment but I I would hate to end our conversation on that note I'm wondering if you can tell me can you speak to the title because what we've just discussed has not done anything like it most happiness well you know truthfully the title is not a satirical one and it's hard in in in a you know single conversation to discuss the strands of the book because then there's a lot of love and poetry and music and happiness in it so sometimes I think it's an underwater city you know it's like you can either swim with the fish on the top for the fish in the middle or the bottom feeders depending on how you go about it and at the Ministry of artists happiness it eventually is constituted you know anything's constituted by with onion as the positive aura chief for what she calls the place of the falling people you know and people who who have somehow been not is not just I mean lies as obvious is not just a book about people who live on the edges it's it's even bureaucrats and it is even the middle class and estate all of them watching these wheels turn and then choosing a lot of them to to to live on the periphery and to understand that happiness is something so different from what is in the prescriptions so fragile and just the ability to recognize it even in its transient moments is a great human skill you know and so eventually I think you end up or at least a lot a lot of my friends who read the book now have all moved into the Janet gas house in the graveyard which is the Paradise gas house in the graveyard we just we just operate from there you know the park at the window and just marvel at how much we love our commuted fifty violent cities or country or whatever it is but just off how-how-how these fragile people are so full of humor and the ability to recognize and live inside the moment for a while you know with your sense of wanting to build institutions over it well thank you I think we're going to take some questions from the audience now there should be folks with microphones [Music] thank you so much for coming you're such an incredible source of inspiration particularly to those of us who are new to the craft of writing my question to you is who serves similarly in that role for you who do you read to inspire your work and to inform your work well I was just talking to someone the other day about the fact that I had I have read the audio of this book and while I read it I realized that I already have an audio track like when I write I write with the sound of the words not just the the words of the page and I am ashamed to admit that one of my great inspirations is a racist and imperialist writer called Rudyard Kipling but I have the sound of hero when chill the kite brings home the night that mang the bat sets free the heart is locked in Byron heart for free - Donna wing this is the hour of Pride and power of kalanor - and claw o hear the call good hunting all that keeps the jungle law [Music] [Applause] I mean my influences also at a very young age a person you may not have heard well called Shakespeare but also also truly as a form of storytelling real way I grew up in in a village in Kerala and there is a dance form they're called cutter Kali which means storytelling right and always the the the it's only performer men and they take the Deaf first Caitlyn stone and they take about five hours to be made up you know and by the time they're made up they are who they play and it is a dance form in which the body of the dancer turns into everything so so the back of this book it sells you know how to tell a shattered story by slowly becoming everybody know by slowly becoming everything and I've seen those dancers becoming everything you know they they can they can they can function on the epic they can become a woman looking at herself in the mirror they came to come the fish in the river they can become the river they can become the monkey with still lazily on the road blocking the pot you know so that kind of fitness and flexibility is so beautiful and it's free view so yeah something you just said about realizing that happiness is a transient thing very different from prescriptions of happiness and do you find when you travel away from that macrocosm that you know so well and come to world here where happiness has a very clear prescription do you compartmentalize your view of the world do you in your yourself from what happiness means or how you reconcile the two different or is more than two different ideas of what life is and experiences experiences of what life is and therefore what happiness is do you consider well you know I I mean honestly I I've never lived anywhere except in India like I've never studied outside or so I don't have much experience of of spending any amount of time anywhere else but so the only thing I do like I do find difficult when I come out of India is that I really miss the the fact that you you know the chaos like I said I find it frightening when there's no chaos you know I can need it so it is like wherever I go there there are animals and they're bored when there are mad people and you know nothing is insulated and and so here I suppose it was taking a bit of time to to to adjust like I have found myself thinking that if I had a choice between being in prison in India and living out outside which would actually you know I mean I don't think I would want to be in prison with no it's difficult for me to to know to answer your question because I have lived outside I was assured I guess but to be me I guess my question had to do with sort of um if you're writing from a post-colonial perspective if you're writing from these countries that are the having very fraught histories right and in your fiction you're trying to witness them right but at the same time you know it's a struggle to not have your characters become stereotypes for the larger struggles that they're going through so it's like how do you human your characters at the same time not having them become poster boys for larger structural issues thank you well first of all let's let's wonder whether we are actually post-colonial you know not just that imperialism on a global scale continues but also that within India since 1947 there's not been one single day in which the Indian Army has not been deployed within its own borders against quote-unquote its own people and tens of thousands have been killed so many people who live within the borders of the of the country that has been defined as India do feel colonize still so that having having said that look if you if you if you're not starting I mean the the worst trap that I could have fallen into if if I were writing fiction would have been to have some ideological agenda and then place his puppet characters and then animate them to play out my story that I wanted to tell but that's just something that my DNA would revolt against I just could not do that you know so that's why I said when you're thinking about the planning of a city I actually have studied architecture and urban design and I do think about how when you plan a city you can't plan it it ambushes you all the time and you deal with those and so for example the character of Garson Hobart he ambushed me you know and and I could so easily have made him some straw man some easy means and bad guy but no he no he's an extremely sophisticated thinker and someone who who challenges his choice me everyday as a writer and I enjoyed it so I mean on no account with any writer work anything be creating stereotypes or even thinking that anything that colonialism has gone anywhere she's gone to the workshop and come out undaunted you know the way you have been talking and the way you write your essay especially nonfiction essays you speak out against your government and you speak out against the issues that really matter in India now against Kashmir and against all the other things that the government does I don't think your government takes it too too well so how did your how does your country view you as a fiction writer do they embrace you and do they think oh well this is this is one of the greatest writers that ever came around like the rest of the of the world does they we wrote morning at you you know but but just your country will believe you to be that writer like the way we do there is no such thing as a country honestly there's no such thing you know it's a country is a construct the country does not have a single mind or a single heart or a single brain America who is going to say what America thinks who would have that community you know to homogenize all these views all these politics all these people similarly in India there's no such thing as India there is no such thing as they you know of course that is a huge majoritarian tendency going on now and there is because of the way in which the ownership of the media is structured the media being forced to toe the line cowardice is not an uncommon thing among intelligentsia historically so yeah sure there's lots of hostility but there's also a huge and grace you know then like people asked me in India how do you get feedback for your work I say a good kind of a traffic line you know so if - I go to turn at the traffic light I mean I I speak are speaking to you now I can mix monthly speaking to 5000 sheep farmers in the Punjab you know and then some Indians got such a great deal of wisdom amongst people who have stood up who have seen oh I mean the poorest people in India have seen of the richest corporations you know so it is then by no means just one view of anything and although you're absolutely right that there is a very frightening tunnel that we are passing through now and many of us have our backs to the wall including me but I don't feel at all I mean they would like me to say that oh I am this brave lone voice of the voiceless all alone turning up that not true I speak from the heart of a crowd there's so many brave people doing so much brilliant stuff you know so I do not feel alone I do not feel frightened I I wear the slurs that come my way as a badge of honor and as close mother could Shakespeare to her you know then will I trip my sleeves and show my scars and Sadie wound and I on crystal day so [Applause] [Music] so before we wrap up we're going to be treated to one more reading and then there will be a book signing following muezzin I love I can't make up my mind but should I read the ayahs easier why not okay I read from the shoot so this is this is a chapter called the untimely deaths of mischief in the first and it begins with a quote of James Baldwin which says and they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true everything she was old enough to insist she had insisted on being called miss you beam it was the only name she would answer to everyone had to call her that her parents her grandparents the neighbors too she was a precocious devotee of the midst fetish that gripped the Kashmir Valley in the early years of the insurrection all of a sudden fashionable young ladies especially in the town insisted on being addressed as Miss niche moment mitzvahs ala Miss Farhana it was only one of the many fetishes of the times in those blood-dimmed years for reasons nobody fully understood people became what can only be described as fetish prone other than the mid fetish there was a nurse fetish a PT instructor fetish and a rollerskating fetish so in addition to check post bunkers weapons grenades landmines cavities concertina wire soldiers insurgents counter insurgency spies special operatives double agents triple agents and suitcases of cash from the agencies on both sides of the border the valley was also a wash with nurses peaking instructors and the skaters and of course mrs. among them miss Chi beam who didn't live long enough to become a nurse nor even a roller skater in the Mossad a Shahada the martyrs graveyard where she was was buried the cast iron signboard that arch to the main gate said in two languages we gave our today's for your tomorrows it's corroded now the green paint faded the delicate calligraphy flecked with pinholes is like still there it is after all these years silhouetted like a swatch of stiffness against the Sapphire sky and a snowy saw tuesd mountain there it still is mr. bean was not a member of the committee that decided what should be written on the signboard but she was in no position to argue with its decision also mr. bean hadn't launched up very many today's to trade in for tomorrow's but then the algebra of infinite justice was never so rude in this way without being consulted on the matter she became one of the movements youngest mottos she was varied right next to her mother Begum Arafah yes we mother and daughter died by the same bullet it entered mr. Bean's head through her left temple and came to rest in her mother's heart in the last photograph of her the bullet wound looked like a cheerful summer roads arranged just above her left ear a few petals had fallen onto her scarf on the white shroud she was wrapped in before she was laid to rest mr. bean and her mother were buried along with 15 others taking the toll of their Massacre 217 at the time of their funeral the mazurka Shahada was still fairly new but was already getting crowded however the interns are mia committee the organising committee had adhere to the ground from the very beginning of the insurrection and had a real setec idea of things to come it planned the layout of the graves carefully making ordered efficient use of the available space everyone understood how important it was to bury martyrs bodies in collective burial grounds and not leave them scattered in their thousands like bird feed up in the mountains or in the forests around the army camps and torture centers that had mushroomed across the valley when the fighting began and the occupation tightened its grip for ordinary people the consolidation of their dead became in itself an act of defiance thank [Music] you

Channel: Chicago Humanities Festival

Views: 29,740

Keywords: chicago humanities festival, chf, humanities, chicago, festival, Arundhati Roy, The Mi

Id: JTXC0HYLPrs

Length: 65min 13sec (3913 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 19 2017