It is not a Sisyphean smile. It’s satirical and singularly bitchy, but it’s not a spoof. Nor is it cold-blooded, like some dictators smile these days in their narcissistic selfies. The sardonic smile on writer Arundhati Roy’s face these days is a sign of our times.
I saw her last in the JNU, FTII and Rohith Vemula struggle, last year. She was dead serious. And, yet, when she smiles, it’s as if she has already anticipated the truth, the bitter truth, the other side of the moon of a night full of tides and long knives, and she knows that even barbarism must arrive to stay but it will end one day. As it did in Germany and Europe. However, leaving a trail of mass dying and death, which stays like concentration camps, and terrible sadness, inside our political unconscious. And, inside our ‘collective conscience’, camouflaged by pseudo patriotism
Like the machines of mining and the mining mafia, in a pristine, primordial, ecological hot spot in the Eastern Ghats of India, where little girls with flowers in their hair, and their ancient tribal communities, unarmed, fight gigantic multinationals and big business, backed by the entire might and thuggery of the armed Indian State. Even in struggle, the little girls, dark and sublime, they smile. With flowers in their hair.
Since then Roy has been writing her book, her friends would tell us. Nevertheless, she was certainly not hiding. She told me not so long ago, across a table in her house before a public discussion;writing is like crossing a railway crossing again and again, not sure if the train is coming or not, with the signals dead. I remember it metaphorically, as imperfectly as I can.
And, yet, for Roy, it has been no exile. Nor, an escape, though, there should be no guilt in retreat sometimes. Why should there be guilt in retreat, when the barricades have been there all the while? On the face? Face to face?
Truly, this not the retreat of Albert Camus’s Outsider, or the guilty protagonist in Jean Paul Sartre’s famous trilogy during the Spanish civil war and the world war, nor is it a stream of consciousness like James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ or Virginia Woolf’s ‘Waves’. Not even, surely, like Salman Rushdie or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s mad magic, pushing all thresholds of literary realism to pages filled with years of endless rain, as in Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Between fiction and fact, her satirical smile at the hard, bitter world remains, etched like a scaffolding, drawing in uneven lines the big picture, neither vulnerable nor cold, neither detached nor alienated from the history we live in and have inherited. The world of a thousand terrible suns, and a thousand terrible nights.
Indeed, a writer can internalize all the pain of the world. All its infinite sufferings and relentless bestiality. Even its surprising and sudden beauties; like ‘small is beautiful’. The world can be ravaged outside and the writer has already been ravaged inside, ravaged and savaged; like Muktibodh or Mahashweta Devi’s writings, or Bhisham Sahni’s tragic epic ‘Tamas’ on the Partition in our subcontinent, or filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky ‘Mirror’ and ‘Sacrifice’; even a flamboyant celebrity of masterpiece violence and revenge in retrospect, like Quentin Tarantino
There is so much violence in India, she said recently, that we have sucked it up in our bowels. And, it seems, inside our intestines, arteries and veins. Inside our eyelashes and brain cells. Inside the flowers which rot between the pages of our books. And we don’t seem to even know about it.
She would touch the hand of Irom Sharmila or Soni Sori or Medha Patkar: fasting, in the struggle, across the police barbed wires with guns positioned to shoot; on a river shore in the Narmada valley which will soon be destroyed and submerged, compelled to disappear from the nationalism of our geography. She would walk with ‘demos’, speak and write haltingly, with brave assurance, on Dalits who are resurrecting their age-old humiliations and annihilations in the entrenched Indian caste society only to rejuvenate their originality, beauty, power and collective self-identity
She can dare to ‘walk with the comrades’ – whom she famously called ‘Gandhians with guns’ across the dense zigzag and incomprehensibility of Dandakaryana in Chhattisgarh, and she can build a huge banner uniting the Narmada Bachao Andolan and the Bhopal gas victims struggle across two footpaths of Jantar Mantar in Delhi; but the writer, also an architect, remains steadfast, like a rainbow coalition and a scaffolding which no establishment can buy off or coerce into submission
There are just a few like Roy in the history of the world, who have walked the pages of both the ‘God of Small Things’ and the hard political text and sub-text of contemporary contradictions, and taken sides across this twilight zone or that, where few artists would dare to ever enter. She is at once exiled and engaged, playing with the dialectic of both metaphysics and history, unafraid. Fear is not the key here. The key here is stoic resilience. And, dark humour. Sometimes, bitchy humour. Sometimes, just hard below-the-belt spoof. Not simple wordplay, surely. But, words, like weapons; like a cliché which comes back with a new shape of the beast: in the beginning was the word.
I have done a few interviews with the writer over the years, including a live discussion with her amidst a perceptive audience in Delhi on questions ranging for the pause of Sisyphus, to Maoism, to the peaceful social movements across the country in the time of globalization. In a conversation with her in November 2005 (published in ‘The Shape of the Beast’, Penguin), this was my last question:
Last question. There is a conflict within oneself. There is a consistency also, of positions, commitments, knowledge. And there are twilight zones you are grappling with. So why can’t you jump from this realm to another; there is no contradiction in saying, what is that, ‘Mujhe izzat…” (Rani Mukherjee’s famous dialogue in ‘Bunty aur Babli’)… (Mujhe is izzat ki zindagi se bachao…)
She replied: “I think we all are just messing our way through this life. People, ideologues who believe in a kind of redemption, a perfect and ultimate society, are terrifying. Hitler and Stalin believed that with a little social engineering, with the mass murder of a few million people, they could create a new and perfect world. The idea of perfection has often been a precursor to genocide. John Gray writes about it at some length. But, then, on the other hand, we have the placid acceptance of karma which certainly suits the privileged classes and castes very well. Some of us oscillate in the space between these two ugly juggernauts trying to at least occasionally locate some pinpoints of light.”
Twenty years later, her new literary landmark is already an international bestseller, written after her first book of fiction was published in 1997, followed by several non-fiction essays and books, all political classics of our time. Not only her Booker Prize money, but she gave away almost all the money she got from several awards later, huge sums all of them, to movements, small publishers in regional language, activists. Which writer does that? Once, when she was yet again giving away a huge sum to various little groups and magazines, I said, give it to me, I will start a newspaper. She laughed and said, no, I don’t want a newspaper. I still wish she would change her mind.
One of the latest moments of her book launch, perhaps somewhere in America was shared by Nishrin Jafri, daughter of Ehsan and Zakiya Jafri. Ehsan Jafri, eminent scholar, trade unionist and former Congress MP was hacked to death and burnt alive along with 69 others by bloodthirsty Hindutva mobs during the state-sponsored Gujarat genocide in 2002 at Gulbarg Society in Ahmedabad. Nishrin shared the picture of the book on her Facebook wall with Roy signing it: To Zakiya Jafri, with all my love.
That is the intrinsic, historic, tangible connect between ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ and the narrative of a massacre, almost forgotten and buried by the manufactured consent of the media and the ruling regime. Surely, if there is a god, he is not only of ‘small things’, but also presiding over the unfinished memory of a genocide. Like an unfinished sentence, wanting to become a book.