For someone who studied architecture, who has a sense of design, who overcame her “determination” to have her first novel published in India first –

“I was determined that The God of Small Things should be published in India first.” (page 206)

for the sake of design “Most publishing houses in India at that time priced badly designed, shoddy looks.”

I’d have expected a less ghastly font for the title.

I can’t help wondering if the choice was deliberate. To disabuse us of a notion of the portrait of the artist as an artist. From someone whose daughter reported to the press that her favorite author was James Joyce, the identity of artist must have always been a precarious weight. I say “must have” and “always,” but I don’t mean those words in their sweeping definitive sense. Just as she may have hoped the cover image of her smoking a cigarette would make her appear more like those author photos of the times when smoking was fashionable, though for her, I think it may have less to do with wanting to appear fashionable and more to do with being a baddie, not letting anyone consider her a goodie. Her daughter also talks about how much she eats junk food. Some people revel in flouting rules of healthy, living, healthy, eating in particular. It is one thing to eat whatever you want but for them, it is also important to make known that they eat unhealthy food smoke, though it is unhealthy, etc. To put a picture of themselves smoking on the cover of their memoirs.

I just was not expecting the book to have moments that would have brought out the red pen of even a high school English teacher even a middle school teacher. Like on page 181 “it made me want to bark or cherub or bay or moo”

Did neither of her “brilliant editors” as she credits in the acknowledgments suggest that she pick one not four animal noises that she felt like emitting when she heard the phrase about “showing India in a proper light?”

I am also not sure why she put “foreign production” in quotation marks. If it is funded by channel for a British television company then what is the need for quotation marks? It is a foreign company. Now, whether that should justify any intervention by the Indian government, certainly at the level of script approval, and certainly on the basis of propriety – all that is questionable and I would certainly object to the heavy hand with which they seemed to have exercise their oversight.

I don’t actually think that the oversight/censorship should be any different for a foreign movie or an Indian one. Whatever permissions or regulations are required for filming – using location, etc. should be based on environment and labor protection. I guess there could be a legitimate fear that a foreign company , all its big money and power, could come in exploit local settings and people to tell a story that was somehow harmful, but exactly that is being done today with Indian money, so the source of the funds at least by country of origin does not seem to be the defining factor here.

Ultimately that animal sound-inducing phrase “in a proper light “appears to have launched her writing career – the essay of the same name as her first published article in a “real magazine.” In a way, just as the horrors of her childhood shaped her as a writer, it seems that the unpleasant experiences on set of Electric Moon fertilized the ground for her first published essay. And later it would again and again be the terrible things happening in India and in the world that would make her write every essay she did.

I was surprised to see a video of Arundhati Roy at her current age and stage of life reading or reciting from her “End of Imagination” essay and that too from the section most like a Hallmark card. The section that is most unlike what I expect from Arundhati Roy. That was the essay my friend Ali and I most often laughed about — the endless towels, especially and even the self-indulgent sophomore “sometimes I need to write in order to think. ” Yes that is a characteristic of most writers I think at least sometimes. To put that sentiment in writing to include in the final draft of the essay, one would expect something quite remarkable, quite profound, and eye-widening to follow from it. And yet what we get is schmaltz.

Please I do not want to be confused with one of her detractors. Au contraire, I devour her every word, cheer on her speeches and actions my goodness, it’s almost as if I feared someone thought I was not showing her in a proper light. As if I had to profess my love for her. 

These are merely opening thoughts. Clearing the way for the so much more I have to say. This and much more, much more than twice all this.