Chapter - 17
The God of Small Things

- Arundhati Roy

Question- Write life and works of Arundhati Roy.

Answer - 

Suzanna Arundhati Roy was born on the 24th November, 1961, the child of a marriage between a christion women from Kerala and a Bengali Hindu tea planter. It was not a happy marriage and she is unable to speak of her father without difficulty. "I don't want to discuss my father. I don't know him at all I've only seen him a couple of times," she told Sunday plus with much difficulty.

Arundhati spent her crucial childhood years in Ayemenem. There her mother mary roy (later a will known social activist) ran an informal school named corpus Christi where Arundhati developed her literary and intellectual abilities unconstrained by the set rules of formal education. A yemenem is no longer the odd fashioned village of the sixties in which the novel is set. It is now a bustling extension of Kottayam town with 1,000 houses and a rash of dish antennae. Paradise Pickles still exist. Social prejudices have dissolved to great extent though an affair between a low caste man and an upper caste women can still cause quite a flutter.

Arundhati Roy spent major part of her time at her grandmother's pickle factory, packing curry powders over there and sticking the labels of the pickels. Despite all these oddities she was a genius and extraordinary who gave her heart and mind to studies. As Mary Roy says.

Arundhati is a born talker and a born writer. While she was studying in our school it was a problem to find a teacher who could cope with her varacious appetite for reading and writing. Most of the time she educated herself. I can remember our vice principal Sneha Zakaria resorting to Shakespeare's Tempest as a text for this little fourth grader.

Arundhati Roy's brother Lalit Kumar Christopher Roy, portrayed Estha in the novel also says that Arundhati was a very good student, athlete and an orator.

At the age of eighteen, she left to New Delhi for higher education. There she joined the Delhi school of architecture. There too she lived a life of scarcity and destitution. In the second year, she was requested by her family (for the obvious reasons) not to return to Kerala. This gave a great jolt to her very sensitive, young mind. She took a tin shaded room at Firoz Shah Katla. She had to make her living by selling empty beer bottles.

The other most important period of my life was when she was in the Delhi school of architecture, she was not given a hostel near to the school of architecture, there was refugee colony, where the mess manager of the canteen had a shake which he rented to Roy and her boy friend. After sometimes Roy topped in her class in her thesis and got her degree, but she didn't practice.

It can be said that Roy from the age of seventeen to twenty-five had no guidance from anybody, no anchorage at a juncture whereby she was asked to leave the home by her family she vividly remembers: So he were living in this short of bubble of complete anarchy. There was nobody to tell me what to do and what not to do. At that age god what gives you courage is complete short sightedness. You don't think about the next day. I think of another kid of my age doing that I would just be complete pasanoid. I would think there was something very wrong with them because. I had a very difficult time.

Arundhati worked as a research assistant at the national institute of Urban affairs after getting the degree of architecture. She worked with such a great perservance over that she was awarded scholarship to go to florence to study the restoration of monuments and Historical Urban Centers. She returaned from Italy grimly determined to restore neither monuements nor Historical Urban Culture.

Her Struggle and the Prize: In some ways her Cinderalla story still surprises Roy.

After a stint living on the beach as a fruit juice seller, Roy left her husband, returned to Delhi without a place to stay, she was so poor she hocked a ring for 300 rupees and a banana shake. In 1996, after working as an aerobics instructor and then as a screen writer, the bank closed her account.

During this time however, She started to work on the manuscript that became The God of Small Things' writing for herself in a regimen from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. everyday for 5 years.

Mostly she plumbed her past, growing up as the dauthter of a Syrian Christian in the lush topical state of Kerala on South India's west coast. It is a partly tragic story told through the innocent but shrewd eyes of a young girl, a twin and culminates in a "forbidden' theme, a love affair between a upper caste woman and a dahti.

When Roy allowed the manuscrip to an editor from Harper Collins in Delhi, Pankaj Mishra, expressed that Indian writing was being "discovered" in the west. Mr. Mishra was so excited by the unusual syntax and rhythm of the novel that he told Roy that she had written in blockbuster. She got a $1 million advance and fueled frenzy over Indian writing that has yet to end.

By unanimous vote, the novel won Britain's 'Booker Prize'. In India the Booker is treated as the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes but together, Salman Rushdie was the last Indian to win, in 1982, for "Midnight Children", itself a seminal novel. The Prize gave Roy star status.

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