Author Arundhati Roy on Talk Easy

Summary

Podcast Summary: Your Next Listen — Author Arundhati Roy on Talk Easy

Host: Stan Fragoso
Guest: Arundhati Roy
Date: October 27, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode features acclaimed author and activist Arundhati Roy in a deeply personal and political conversation, centered around her new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. Roy and host Stan Fragoso discuss the complexities of her relationship with her late mother, Mary Roy—a pioneering feminist and educator—and explore how personal history intertwines with public struggles. The conversation also delves into Roy’s literary career, her political activism, and her reflections on resistance in the face of rising authoritarianism in both India and the United States.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Writing the Memoir: Structure, Motivation, and Grief

• Memoir’s Motivation & Structure
  • Roy describes Mother Mary Comes to Me as her most linear book, but one that still journeys creatively through memory and history ([05:18]).
  • The genesis was a vivid image of her elderly mother, “like this feudal queen,” being bathed—a symbol of drama, power, spectacle, and their complicated intimacy ([05:52]).
• Processing Grief
  • Roy felt compelled to write the memoir following her mother’s death in 2022, shocked by the “intensity of my grief” despite a lifelong effort to maintain distance for self-preservation.

    “I was shocked at my own grief because I had spent so much of my life trying to create a sort of safe distance from her in order to be able to love her without allowing her to destroy me.” —Arundhati Roy ([06:41])

2. Mary Roy: A Complex Parental Legacy

• A Formidable Matriarch and Feminist
  • Mary Roy is depicted as charismatic and fierce, yet unpredictable and difficult—a woman who challenged India’s discriminatory inheritance laws, started her own school, and deeply influenced feminist education ([03:10], [10:09]).
• Trauma and Impact on Roy and Her Brother
  • Family life, marked by Mary’s humiliation and rage, often translated to unpredictably harsh parenting, particularly toward Roy’s brother ([11:02]).
  • Roy reflects on childhood moments of witnessing her brother’s abuse:

    “That made me hate myself. Because I just felt that when you're applauded, someone quiet is being beaten in the other room. And that became a very political thing for me.” —Arundhati Roy ([14:36])

3. The Politics of Childhood and Family Memory

• Literary Motifs of Unwanted and Unprotected Children
  • Roy sees parallels in her fiction and memoir—children immersed in chaos and resistance, symbolic of broader social and political marginalization ([17:05]).
  • She reads a seminal passage from The God of Small Things about being pushed between parents, blurring fiction and memory ([18:59]).

4. Cost of Revolution and the Public/Private Split

• The Price Paid by the Family
  • Roy and her brother bore the hidden costs of their mother’s public activism, living with extra scrutiny and sometimes punitive treatment at her school ([20:12]).
  • The discussion addresses the dangers of equating public heroism with personal virtue ([21:27]).
  • On holding complexity:

    “Both things are true… I learned from the darkness as well as from the light.” —Arundhati Roy ([22:46])

5. Feminism, Legacy, and Ambivalence

• Reconciling Public Feminism and Private Pain
  • Roy reflects on the contradiction between her mother’s revolutionary work and her personal failures as a parent ([21:34]).

    “That doesn’t give you the right to call a four-year-old boy who’s your son a male chauvinist pig and hold him responsible for what men have done in the world.” —Arundhati Roy ([22:18])

6. Artistry: The Role of Architecture, Cinema, and Audio in Roy’s Writing

• Evolution as a Writer
  • Roy discusses how her background in architecture and film shapes her writing—she “hears” her books as audio before writing them ([32:13], [36:03]).

    “For me, writing is an audio track. It's like remembering a song from a long time ago. I hear what I write.” —Arundhati Roy ([36:03])

7. From Literary Darling to Political Dissident

• Political Awakening and Consequences
  • Roy describes the shift after The God of Small Things, when she became a public critic of nuclear nationalism and state violence in India ([37:22]).
  • Consequences included prosecution under anti-terror laws, constant court cases, and public vilification ([37:50]).

    “National critic of India is a polite way of putting it. Normally: anti national, traitor, sedition, terrorist and all that stuff.” —Arundhati Roy ([37:07])

• Speaking Truth Despite Threats
  • Roy writes from a place where danger is real, describing each essay as potentially her last ([41:49], [41:56]).

8. Global Rise of Authoritarianism and Lessons from India

• Striking Parallels Between India and the US

  • Roy observes the alarming similarity in right-wing ascendance and strategies in both countries ([44:09]):

    “…the similarities are so unnerving that you want to know, is there an actual physical playbook? I mean, does it have pages that you can turn?” —Arundhati Roy ([44:09])

  • She warns that the normalization of violence and majoritarianism can erode democratic values, with media functioning as enablers ([45:27], [45:53]).

• Solidarity and the Need for Imperfect Allies

  • Roy emphasizes the urgent need for solidarity on the left, warning against the pursuit of perfect political alignments:

    “If we don't have solidarity, you're going to lose. ... Solidarity can never be perfect. It's imperfect. But … everybody has to somehow join forces.” —Arundhati Roy ([47:09])

9. Culture, Politics, and Protest

• The Role of Imagination and Civil Disobedience
  • Roy questions whether civil disobedience alone can work under unyielding regimes without real solidarity from the world ([50:42]).

    “Civil disobedience works when you have an audience, when that audience is sympathetic.” —Arundhati Roy ([50:42])

• Psychic Toll of Witnessing Atrocity
  • Roy describes the current moment as one of collective psychosis, forced to witness genocide in Gaza on our phones while feeling powerless ([54:03]).
  • She still believes in the necessity of action, protest, and telling the truth, regardless of winning or losing ([56:26]).

10. Love, Failure, and the Complexity of Closure

• Love Despite Everything

  • The book’s conclusion is an act of sharing her mother with the world, “all of her, the darkness and the light” ([61:43]).
  • Roy shares a poignant exchange—her mother’s late message:

    “There’s no one in the world whom I have loved more than you... it was a savage, thorny, violent sort of love. But it was love.” —Arundhati Roy ([61:33])

• On Failure and Hope

  • Roy reframes failure as not capitulating:

    “It means you may be defeated, but you'll never be on their side. You may go down, but you'll never be on their side.” —Arundhati Roy ([56:26])

• Manifesto for Life

  • Closing with her 1998 essay The End of Imagination, Roy reads her personal creed—a meditation on empathy, humility, and resistance:

    “Above all, to watch, to try and understand. To never look away and never, never to forget.” —Arundhati Roy ([63:44])

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “I just left home because I wanted to continue to love her. And she was an impossible person to be around for me as her child.” —Arundhati Roy ([06:41])
• “My mother… grew so angry at what had happened to her. … All her rage against men, she took out on my brother.” ([11:32])
• “For me, the redeeming thing was that at least the public battles she fought for women, you know, were for me too. Not as a daughter, but as a woman.” ([11:32])
• "I learned to read the darkness, to stare at it until it gave up its secrets." ([24:51])
• “I'm celebrating as a successful writer, but actually I'm a deep failure. But fortunately, as you would read in Mother Mary, being friends with failure does not mean accepting it.” ([55:50])
• “A million times yes.” —Arundhati Roy, on whether she would choose being a writer again ([64:22])
• Manifesto ([63:44]):

  “To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. ... Above all, to watch, to try and understand. To never look away and never, never to forget.”

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Introduction & Legacy of Mary Roy [01:20 – 04:43]
• Writing Process & Grief [04:45 – 08:04]
• Mary Roy’s Story, Family Trauma [08:08 – 15:05]
• Literary Reflections: Fiction and Memory [17:05 – 21:27]
• Public vs. Private Feminism [21:27 – 24:51]
• Artistry & Early Life [30:40 – 36:03]
• Literary Success to Political Dissident [36:59 – 41:49]
• Threats, Courage, and Authoritarianism [41:50 – 48:39]
• Solidarity & The Limits of Civil Disobedience [47:09 – 50:42]
• Gaza and Global Witness [54:03 – 56:26]
• Failure, Legacy, and Closure [61:33 – 64:25]
• Roy’s Manifesto for Life [62:33 – 63:44]

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Memorable Moments

• Roy reading from her own novels and noting that for her, language is “an audio track” ([36:03]).
• Describing the difference in her voice from early to late chapters in the audiobook, revealing rawness & vulnerability ([59:05]).
• Her brother’s take on her original dedication as the “only real fiction” in The God of Small Things ([60:39]).
• Roy’s “valiant organ child” metaphor, describing the emotional intensity of her bond with her mother ([27:21]).
• Host’s reflection on whether Roy’s childhood prepared her for a life as a writer, and her unhesitating affirmation ([64:22]).

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Conclusion

This insightful episode interweaves the intensely personal with the fiercely political, painting a portrait of Arundhati Roy as both witness and chronicler of her times. Roy’s candor about her mother, her own formation, and her activism provides listeners with a window into how the private and public are never truly separate. The episode closes with Roy’s commitment to bearing witness—never looking away, never forgetting—even in the face of defeat. Her artistic and ethical manifesto is a call to resist, to remember, and to find solidarity in imperfection.

Transcript

[Andy Patinkin]

It's morning in New York. Hey, everybody, I'm Andy Patinkin.

[Arundhati Roy]

And I'm Kathryn Grody.

[Andy Patinkin]

And we have a new podcast.

[Stan Fragoso]

It's called Don't Listen to Us.

[Andy Patinkin]

Many of you have asked for our advice. Tell me, what is wrong with you people.

[Stan Fragoso]

Don't Listen to us. Our Take it or leave it advice.

[Andy Patinkin]

Show is out every Wednesday, premiering October 15th. A Lemonada Media Original.

[Stan Fragoso]

Lemonade.

[Andy Patinkin]

This is Talk Easy.

[Stan Fragoso]

I'm Stan Fragoso. Welcome to the show Today, author Arundhati Roy. For nearly three decades, Roy has been a singular voice in literature and political life. It all began with her debut novel.

[Andy Patinkin]

The God of Small Things, which went.

[Stan Fragoso]

On to become an international sensation and the winner of the Booker Prize in 1997. But the life of a literary star was not one Roy ever imagined or frankly desired growing up in the southwest coast of India. And so, within less than a year of accepting the Booker Prize and returning home, Roy decided that the marginalized and oppressed communities that marked her Kerala childhood would not simply be source material for her next novel. They were to be instead, a galvanizing political force. Through essays, reportage, and various public interventions, Roy got to work. In essays like the End of Imagination, her searing response to India's 1998 nuclear tests, she denounced nuclear nationalism as a profound moral failure. Her books, such as Field Notes on Democracy and the Algebra of Infinite justice, offer incisive and at times incendiary critiques of neoliberalism, nationalism, and state violence. But the path of dissent has not been without consequence. Roy has been repeatedly targeted by the populous Indian government, with authorities as recently as 2024 moving to prosecute her under anti terror laws, not to mention the widespread censorship of her work and the looming threat of arrest. Roy describes these pressures not as isolated attacks, but as part of a broader culture of fear where speech itself is being contested and censured. And yet, for all of Roy's willingness to speak truth to power, there's one story she's always been a little reluctant.

[Andy Patinkin]

To tell her own.

[Stan Fragoso]

Or more specifically, her complicated, thorny relationship to her late mother, Mary Roy. In the fittingly titled debut memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, she traces the early years with her challenging mother, who also happened to be a pioneering feminist educator and activist who changed India's divorce law through a landmark Supreme Court case. The book oscillates between personal memory and public history, between the intimacy of a mother and daughter and the legacy of a woman whose defiance altered the lives of countless Indian women. In telling that story Arundhati is forced to confront her own formation as a writer, a political being, and most importantly, as a daughter shaped by the force and ferocity of Mary Roy. We begin today's episode with her excellent new memoir. We also talk about how the personal and political often intersect in Roy's life. And then finally, on the back half. In a time of rising authoritarianism, Roy reflects on what it means to bear witness both on the page and off. This is Arundhati Roy.

[Andy Patinkin]

Arundhati Roy, thank you so much for being here.

[Arundhati Roy]

It's my pleasure. Thank you.

[Andy Patinkin]

This new book is called Mother Mary Comes to Me. And it's mostly about your mother and not that much about the Beatles. Just so everyone knows this, when you were writing your first book, the God of Small Things, it took years and years and years until you found the structure of the novel.

[Arundhati Roy]

Yes.

[Andy Patinkin]

You said the story came to me as a sort of rhythm, a phantom drum beat that I was trying to get the measure of. So tell me, did this memoir come to you in similar ways?

[Arundhati Roy]

I think in terms of structure, maybe it's the most linear book I've written, although it still does do odd journeys. But it came to me in strange ways in that somehow I am a person who, even though I'm a writer, because I studied architecture and because I work in cinema, things often come to me as images, but not necessarily as filmic images. You know, somehow they are literary images.

[Andy Patinkin]

And what was the image, the still image that came to mind?

[Arundhati Roy]

The still image was my very impressive 89 year old woman mother being bathed by four helpers, you know, like this feudal queen and in the steamy bathroom. And she always sort of invited me in as a spectacle, you know, and she would say, okay, would you like to, would you like to take a picture of your mother being bathed? And I'd be like, okay, but I won't show it to anyone. And she said, but then what's the point? You know?

[Andy Patinkin]

So your mother, she passed away almost three years ago now, right?

[Arundhati Roy]

She passed away September 2022.

[Andy Patinkin]

And when she did, you said, I couldn't write anything else until I wrote this. I was shocked by the quality of my grief.

[Arundhati Roy]

I think I said in the book I was a little ashamed at the intensity of my grief because, you know, first of all, she was 89 and it to come as a shock, but it did for a whole host of reasons. But I left home when I was 16 to study architecture and by 18 I stopped going home because I had a very difficult but interesting relationship with her. I Didn't leave home because I hated her or anything. I just left home because I wanted to continue to love her. And she was an impossible person to be around for me as her child. So I was shocked at my own grief because I had spent so much of my life trying to create a sort of safe distance from her in order to be able to love her without allowing her to destroy me. And when she died, I was shocked at how destroyed I was by that. You know, it's almost like you make yourself into this strange shape to accommodate a very difficult person who takes up a lot of the oxygen in your life, and yet, you know, she's an important person in your life. So you. You make yourself this strange shape, and when that person goes away, you don't understand or there's no reason for you to be that shape, but you are.

[Andy Patinkin]

Now, how would you describe the mother that you need a distance from?

[Arundhati Roy]

Well, it took me a whole book to do that, you know, and I've described her as an airport with no runways, where you have to keep this aircraft in the air all the time. And she's somebody who you cannot come to a conclusion about because you form an opinion, and then it gets overturned the next minute. For me, it was a writing challenge, you know, because I believe that this woman deserves to be in the pages of literature and history. And can I communicate that inability to come to conclusions about a person in a book? Can I present her in all her aspects without, you know, tying a ribbon around her and handing her to a reader in a neat package?

[Andy Patinkin]

Before you had to write about her, you had to live with her.

[Arundhati Roy]

Yes, I certainly did.

[Andy Patinkin]

Tell me about that.

[Arundhati Roy]

Well, she comes from a very traditional, conservative community, tiny minority community in Kerala, South India, called the Syrian Christians. And she. I mean, she had a very, very, very cruel father. So she used to tell me that she married the first man she could just to get away from her father, and that was my father. And she moved to Assam, which is in the northeast of India, where she lived with him, had two children. And then very soon, she discovered he was addicted to alcohol, so she left him. And so she. She was on her own with two very young children.

[Andy Patinkin]

You and your brother?

[Arundhati Roy]

Me and my brother with only a degree, a bachelor's degree in education, but no money, nothing. And then she eventually returned to this community where she was sort of humiliated. And, you know, she kind of communicated that humiliation or downloaded that humiliation onto the only two people who she had power over.

[Andy Patinkin]

Humiliated how?

[Arundhati Roy]

You know, being a divorce, a woman who was divorced. A woman who had married outside the community, a woman who didn't have money at that point, and therefore was living in the house, a sort of family house. So even the people, you know, the cook or the persons who used to work in this house, which was my grandmother's sister's house in village, would tell us, you know, it's so shameless. You don't have a father. And there was that sense of her being somebody who. Who had broken and transgressed all the rules and then was helpless until she started her own school and then grew to become the empress of that place.

[Andy Patinkin]

So when you say that she took out her humiliation on the only two people she could, what did that look like?

[Arundhati Roy]

That looked like unpredictable rage against my brother and me. I mean, both of us have arguments over whether she was worse with him or worse with me. But I think my brother was more vulnerable than me because he remembered my father and he remembered a better life. He's a little bit older than me, so he was quieter. And she terrified him. And me, I didn't remember that good life at all.

[Andy Patinkin]

You don't remember him.

[Arundhati Roy]

But also, the thing is that my mother, she grew so angry at what had happened to her. And one of the things that happened was that when she left her husband, my father, she moved into a little cottage that belonged to her father, who was dead. And then her brother and her mother came to evict us and say that, you know, as a daughter, you don't have the right to this. All her rage against men, she took out on my brother. You know, she used to call him a male chauvinist pig, and she called him all sorts of things. And as we grew up and as she became a woman who challenged the inheritance laws and she started the school and she did so much for her girl students. So for me, the redeeming thing was that at least the public battles she fought for women, you know, were for me too. Not as a daughter, but as a woman. But for him, it was just pretty unredeeming, you know, so he's a little puzzled at why I have this ambiguous and sometimes deep love for her, which he doesn't feel as a kid.

[Andy Patinkin]

You write in the book that you looked through the keyhole and you saw him get hit. Did he remember that?

[Arundhati Roy]

I think he remembered, but he. I think it was hard for him because the book brings a lot of memories, you know, that it's not that you forget, but you try to put them in another chamber.

[Andy Patinkin]

Is that what you had done? Before writing this book?

[Arundhati Roy]

No, I had lived with everything. You know, I had taken notes about everything in my head, and I had. And the thing is that I ran, you know, I left, and I tried to make another world for myself outside. Not just outside her home, but outside Kerala. I was in the north. I was in Delhi. I was a vagabond and a vagrant, but he was there. And his. His daughter studied in her school, and his wife now looks after the school. So, you know, he never said that.

[Andy Patinkin]

There was no distance.

[Arundhati Roy]

Yeah, there was no distance. So the wounds were constantly being revisited, although the really early memories were blocked out.

[Andy Patinkin]

The image of you looking through the keyhole and seeing him being hit by your mother when you were a young girl. And you saw that, did you wonder why that was happening? Did it make sense to you?

[Arundhati Roy]

No. I mean, I knew why it was happening. We didn't have a home. Like, she had started the school, and then she started a little hostel like a boarding school. So there were other children in this little house. And so the hitting and the stuff was happening in a whisper at night. And I watched that and watched that beating. And then I came back to bed and he came back and we both pretended that, you know, we were asleep and we both knew we weren't. And in the morning, she woke me up and hugged me and said, you have a brilliant report. And that made me hate myself.

[Andy Patinkin]

Why did that make you hate yourself?

[Arundhati Roy]

Because I just felt that when you're applauded, someone quiet is being beaten in the other room. And that became a very political thing for me. And it remains so. I feel, even now, if I'm speaking or if I've written a book and if people love it or I say something and I feel like, yeah, but the people in Gaza are getting beaten, killed, exterminated in some way. So there's always that sense that someone quiet is suffering to you.

[Andy Patinkin]

Your success is inextricably linked to the people you're writing about.

[Arundhati Roy]

See, I. I don't know what success means. You know, is it success when everything you write about, every battle that you have fought has been lost? You know, the dam that you wrote so much about that you walked with, the people that fought against it has been built, the. The forests have been cut. So what is success? What is success? Is that success? It's a very shallow understanding of success, really. So I don't know what we mean by these things unless you look at it in some individual way. I don't look at it like that.

[Andy Patinkin]

It's almost like with each shallow success, it is a reminder of a deeper.

[Arundhati Roy]

Pain, and not a personal one necessarily, but a loss, a part of battles for a world, for a worldview, for another kind of world that we will all continue to fight for whether we win or we don't win. But we certainly can't call ourselves successful.

[Andy Patinkin]

I think the germinating images in both the God of Small Things and the Ministry of Utmost Happiness are children born into resistance and chaos. In Small Things, it's a pair of seven year old twins in a sky blue Plymouth stuck at a railway crossing while a communist demonstration unfurls around them. In Ministry, it's a abandoned girl that appears at midnight on a sidewalk in Delhi at a place where many, many protests occurred. These read and feel like the nerve centers of each novel. And I wondered, is there a passage in this memoir that we could read that you see in similar terms? Like what is the nerve center of Mother Mary Comes to Me?

[Arundhati Roy]

I think it was interesting for me in the Ministry of Utmost Happiness or in the Goddess Small Things, or maybe in Mother Mary Comes to Me that there's a. The huge things that are happening in the world that are addressed, you know, whether it's nuclear weapons or whether it's what's happening in Kashmir in India, or whether it's 9 11, today's 9 11. But then there are children who are there inside that political moment. Those children are unprotected in some way. And in the case of the Ministry, you have these huge political movements surging around them, you know, hunger strikes, speeches, conversations, and yet all these great ideologies just don't know what to do with the baby that's appeared suddenly on the pavement. What do you do with that baby? When the God of Small Things came out, my mother checked herself into hospital because she was worried about what secrets the book might reveal. And then when she realized it didn't, she called me and she wanted to ask me about a particular part in the book where I said, you know, the. Esther and Rahel remembered their parents when they fought and how they grew huge like giants. And the parents pushed them from one to the other, saying, you take them, I don't want them. And my mother called me to her bedside and she said, how do you remember this? And I said, I don't remember it, it's just fiction. And she said, no, it's not. So there again you had this recurring theme of unwanted children.

[Andy Patinkin]

I guess instead of reading from the memoir, why don't we read from the end of chapter two of the God of small things. The passage that your mother wanted to ask you about. Okay, I have it pulled here.

[Arundhati Roy]

Yeah. When they were alone, Esther and Rahel sometimes pretended they were clocks. They would blow spit bubbles and shiver their legs and gobble like turkeys. They remember their father, who they had known between wars. He once gave them puffs from his cigarette and got annoyed because they had sucked it and wet the filter with spit. They remembered his anger and amu's. They remembered being pushed around a room once from Ammu to Baba to AMU to Baba, like billiard balls. AMU pushing Esther away. Here, you keep one of them. I can't look after them both. Later, when Esther asked AMU about that, she hugged him and said he mustn't imagine things. And it's just the opposite of what is in. Mother Mary comes to me.

[Andy Patinkin]

Yes, I want to know. Your mother created this school, right? And you called the school revolutionary.

[Stan Fragoso]

That what she did for her girl.

[Andy Patinkin]

Students, the spirit she instilled in them was nothing short of revolutionary. She gave them spines, she gave them wings. She set them free. That revolution, like all revolutions, came at a cost. So who paid?

[Arundhati Roy]

My brother and I, I mean, we argue about this, but I think he more than me, and he thinks me more than him. But. So there was a way in which she made this beautiful school. And then we, he and I, were expected to call her Mrs. Roy in public, but there was no private, because home and school and everything was one thing. And she, I think, was very worried that the other little children should not think that we were in any way special. So she sometimes was extra punitive with us. I always say that, you know, there are people who have a calling, whether they are scientists or poets or singers, you know, people who. Whose lives are so full of their art or the thing that they do that sometimes the space for children is far more restricted than for other people. You know, they don't prioritize their children or they can be even cruel to their children. It's nothing special or new. It was just that our mother's calling was other people's children. So it was a little difficult.

[Andy Patinkin]

How then, her treatment of your brother affect your understanding of feminism?

[Arundhati Roy]

Feminism is such a broad word, but I. In fact, recently, when I was in Delhi, somebody stood up and asked me a question, a little hostile. She said, do you know that your mother was revered in feminist circles and that all of us were so devastated when she died? And we all signed these condolence letters. And I said, yes, I know. It was asked as If I didn't know, know what a iconic person she was, I said, of course I know. But that doesn't give you the right to call a four year old boy who's your son a male chauvinist pig and sort of hold him responsible for what men have done in the world.

[Andy Patinkin]

Or to say to you, you're a millstone around my neck. I should have dumped you in an orphanage the day you were born.

[Arundhati Roy]

Yeah, that was one of the themes.

[Andy Patinkin]

Yes, that was a recurring theme.

[Arundhati Roy]

That was a recurring theme.

[Andy Patinkin]

So how do you hold those two? Because I saw when your mother passed, I went on Facebook and there were hundreds of people, former students of hers, who wrote these lovely, loving things about your mother. And then I, of course, read your.

[Arundhati Roy]

Book, and it's hard, but both things are true. And the point is that I'm a grown woman now, you know, I'm not an infant and I'm not a child that doesn't understand that both things are true. Both things are important. And those generations of students she brought up and the battles she fought are important. I'm aware that it's not only that those other children receive gifts from her. I did too. I did too. I mean, there's a lot I learned from the darkness as well as from the light. It wasn't just unmitigated horror from her, even towards me. She taught me things, she read me things. She opened my world to literature. And the enterprise in this book was to talk about it all without judging or, I mean, almost like reporting it and saying, okay, this is what happened. And fortunately, I'm all right, you know, So I can tell you that this is what is so unresolvable about her.

[Andy Patinkin]

Tell me the good things that you still hold, the things that she taught you.

[Arundhati Roy]

The first thing is that she was aware that I was not gonna, quote, unquote, marry someone or get a. I was not considered a proper Syrian Christian. So from the time I was very young, there was the sense that you're gonna be bigger and better or, you know, you're gonna escape. She also was the person who would order these. Even when we were living in this little village, Imanam, she would order these books from another city. She introduced me to literature. She read me Shakespeare. She read. She used to tell me, okay, what happened at school today, Write it down. So there's a part in Mother Mary comes to me where I say, she taught me to write. And then she raged against the writer I became. She taught me to think. And then she raged against my Thoughts. She taught me to be free. And then she raged against my freedom. But she did teach me all those things.

[Andy Patinkin]

She gave you the A side and you had to take the B side.

[Arundhati Roy]

Yeah, and even the B side. I learned to read the darkness, to stare at it until it gave up its secrets. And she was a severe asthmatic. Severe. I mean, in a way, this book is all the conversations I could not have with her because you could not say anything otherwise she was going to get asthma and go to hospital and die. So I learned to just keep quiet and just think about things. So from a very young age, of course you passed through these moments of terror when you knew that you couldn't survive if she didn't. But then as a teenager, I began to think of survival very early on. How am I going to manage? How am I going to manage? And that built a sort of resilience in me, I think.

[Andy Patinkin]

Did you feel like you couldn't write this book, let alone publish this book until she passed?

[Arundhati Roy]

Obviously. Obviously. Because like I say in the book, it's not that I couldn't write a book. I could not ask her, why did you shoot my dog? Or why did. I never could say anything because of the asthma. So you could not say anything ever? Ever. It also even that helps me, you know, to right now keep my cool. I'm on stage and someone is. Some right wing goon is smashing it up and I'm just sitting there because I've learned to just watch things.

[Andy Patinkin]

Do you think the conditions of your childhood, the absorption of her darkness, as you said, the energy directed toward decrypting and surviving your day to day, do you think that laid the foundation for you to become a writer?

[Arundhati Roy]

I mean, there's no empirical way I can say yes, but yes, I certainly think so, you know, because, you know, I think children, when they're young, they just react to stimulus, whereas I learned not to react to stimulus. You know, I learned to think about everything. I learned to keep quiet. I learned to sit at the river and work it out. I learned to watch the chemical reaction of how humiliation was passed on from the community or from her brother or from her father. The stories of her father to her and then how it was passed down to me. So there was a lot of contemplation at an age when you should not be contemplating.

[Andy Patinkin]

And yet you did. When did you know that you had to leave?

[Arundhati Roy]

When I sort of became a teenager, I think just my presence, my adolescence, my body used to enrage her in some ways. And I think the most important thing was when I was very young and she was having these asthma attacks, I would be, I'll breathe for you. And I referred to myself as her valiant organ child, like her external lung that wanted to breathe for her. And then as the anger and the conflict grew, when I entered the gates of the school of architecture and I saw these stone students and I realized that there was another world that was possible. I wanted to sort of bow down and kiss the ground of the filthy car park at the stone students. And my lungs returned to my body and started breathing for me. And she sensed that immediately that dependence was drifting away. The control was going. And that made her more and more angry. And it made me more and more, fuck you. You know, like the Beatles and the rock and roll and everything had started, the smoking, the stoning. So when I was just being attacked in my head, I would just be going like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, I'm, I'm out of here. Very, very soon.

[Stan Fragoso]

After the break. More from Arundhati Roy.

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[Steve Burns]

Hey, it's me, Steve Burns. And I'm so glad you're here because you and I go way back, right? Yeah. And look at us now, like we're all grown up. We've got this new podcast where we talk about all this grown up stuff and there's special guests like Jamie Lee Curtis and Bill Nye, but for the most part, it's about you. I mean, it's always been about you. From Lemonada Media Alive with Steve burns is coming September 17th. Wherever you get your podcasts or you can watch every episode on YouTube.

[Andy Patinkin]

Coming back, when you do leave home and you're studying architecture, what was it like to breathe for the first time?

[Arundhati Roy]

Oh, it was just fabulous. It was just fabulous. I mean, the school of architecture was, for me, it was like paradise full of cigarette stubs. You know, it was Just like a really anarchic place. And as I said, I was in the hostel, so there were people from everywhere, you know, completely different from the people I knew in Kerala, completely different from the people I'd studied in school with. We worked night and day. We worked really, really, really hard on what. On our drawings, on what were called submissions, you know, so you just didn't get time to sleep almost. But it was fantastic. The place was just decrepit and broken.

[Andy Patinkin]

Down, and it was dilapidated, it was downtrodden. It was perfect.

[Arundhati Roy]

Yeah, it was perfect. It was perfect. And if I had to do it all over again, I would study architecture all over again. Because for me, it taught me so much about how to look at things. And by the time I was in fourth or fifth year, I was very interested in cities and city planning and who's excluded, who's included. It's the foundation of the politics and also of the way I structure my writing. So architecture, to me, does not just mean building buildings. Apart from the fact that between that and what I do now, I worked in cinema, I worked as a production designer. All of those things inform my writing, you know.

[Andy Patinkin]

So that's what I want to hear. After you work in film and you start writing this novel, it's my understanding that you're living in a house and you made an arrangement that from the morning to 2pm I'm gonna lock the door and I'm gonna write one of.

[Arundhati Roy]

The two rooms and lock the door of one of our two rooms.

[Andy Patinkin]

No one can bother you what you were writing. You did not know where you were going. You did not know. And yet you found your way. So tell me how you began to do that.

[Arundhati Roy]

Well, I had written and worked on two feature films by then, and I just. I bought a computer. And it was the first time I was just experimenting, you know, writing on a computer. And I just wanted to think about what I would think about if I didn't have to negotiate with budgets and actors and schedules and all that stuff. Sometimes someone asks me, how's it going when I'm writing something? And I say, I don't write. I just wait, you know. So I just waited to see what I would think about who would come visiting and all the, you know, my river that I grew up on and the. The. The pickle factory and my grandmother and her violin and. And the violence and everything came to me and I just started to write. But obviously the first image was what you said, a pair of twins stuck in a Plymouth advertising pickles on the roof and a communist procession swirling around it.

[Andy Patinkin]

Do you want to read from it?

[Arundhati Roy]

Sure. In a purely practical sense, it would probably be correct to say that it all began when Sophie Mole came to Aimanam. Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day, that a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes, and that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house, the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture must be resurrected from the ruins and examined, preserved, accounted for, little events, ordinary things smashed and reconstituted, imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story. Still, to say that it all began when Sufimol came to Aymanam is only one way of looking at it, however, for practical purposes, in a hopelessly practical world. It was a sky blue day in December 1969, the 19 silent. It was the kind of time in the life of a family when something happens to nudge its hidden morality from its resting place and make it bubble to the surface, float for a while in clear view for everyone to see. A sky blue Plymouth with the sun in its tail fins sped past young rice fields and old rubber trees on its way to Cochin. Further east, in a small country with similar landscape, jungles, rivers, rice fields, communists. Enough bombs were being dropped to cover all of it in six inches of steel. Here, however, it was peacetime, and the family in the Plymouth traveled without fear or foreboding. Plymouth used to belong to Papachi, Rahel and Esther's grandfather. Now that he was dead, it belonged to Mamachi, their grandmother. And Rahel and Esther were on their way to Cochin to see the Sound of Music for the third time. They knew all the songs.

[Andy Patinkin]

You know, you're the first writer who looks up and at me while they're reading from the book.

[Arundhati Roy]

Oh, really?

[Andy Patinkin]

Mm.

[Arundhati Roy]

What do you think?

[Andy Patinkin]

Well, one part of it is that you seem to know the words. I do, which is shocking because it was so long ago. It's almost like an actor knowing their.

[Arundhati Roy]

Lines, you know, that's because for me, writing is an audio track. It's like remembering a song from a long time ago. I hear what I write. I don't know what it is, but I hear the rhythm of the words as an audio track. So, in fact, when I was reading Mother Mary Comes to Me, the audiobook, I finished reading it way before schedule because it was just like speaking. And I said, what do you think the people might think? It's a scam. I'm Just talking. And there's no book, you know, because I hear my writing in the aftermath.

[Andy Patinkin]

Of the pages you just read. You're catapulted into this literary world where you're celebrated. I was going to say success, but.

[Arundhati Roy]

As we talked about earlier, now you can't say success.

[Andy Patinkin]

A shallow kind of success.

[Arundhati Roy]

Yes.

[Andy Patinkin]

And very quickly, as one newspaper described, you went from darling to dissident to national critic of India.

[Arundhati Roy]

National critic of India is a polite way of putting it. Normally. Anti national, traitor, sedition, terrorist and all that stuff.

[Andy Patinkin]

I did leave that part out, but I'm glad you're putting it on the tape. It's much better coming from you than me.

[Arundhati Roy]

True.

[Andy Patinkin]

Was there a moment that you remember having a kind of political awakening?

[Arundhati Roy]

What happened is that after the God of Small Things was published, and particularly after it won the Booker Prize, even as I was being dragged to court for corrupting public morality, the five lawyers, every few years, five male lawyers dragged me to court for some on some criminal charge.

[Andy Patinkin]

And how did you corrupt public morality?

[Arundhati Roy]

So they said I had corrupted public morality. And I asked my lawyer, can we not just say that there's a technical flaw here? Because was public morality pure till I came along? I mean, could it be like further corrupting public morality? I think they were just furious about a lot of things, especially the left at that point because of the politics of caste in the book. But anyway, the book came out and then it won the Booker Prize and I was on the COVID of every magazine and so on. And just around then the Hindu right came to power and the first thing it did was to do the series of nuclear tests. I was so shocked at the grotesqueness of the kind of public language that suddenly these tests gave permission for people to use. And I was shocked at the kinds of people that were celebrating this, these tests. And I realized that if I kept quiet, it would be assumed because I was so much in the public eye that I too was part of the cheering, the cheerleaders and the brigade of nationalism. So I wrote this essay called the End of Imagination where I talked about what does it do to a people? Not whether or not nuclear weapons are used. What does it do to your imagination? What is this making us? And when I wrote that, it took less than three seconds for me to be kicked off my like fairy princess, literary award winning, whatever it was, and you know, be told to like go to Pakistan and you're an anti national and you hate your country and so on. And it came as some kind of relief because given My background, I'm not used to adulation.

[Andy Patinkin]

And, you know, were you more comfortable with the threats than the adulation?

[Arundhati Roy]

Definitely, because it liberated me in some way, you know, because adulation and fame and prizes and all of that is also a kind of trap. You know, you walk into it, and then you're supposed to attempt to replicate that for the rest of your life. And I was just not in that game, you know?

[Andy Patinkin]

So on the front door of your house, you had little green, blue and yellow stickers that read, we have to be very careful these days.

[Arundhati Roy]

Because that's just a joke. I mean, I don't know how you know that, but that's just a joke. Actually, before that, I had a sticker which said, do I look like a motherfucking role model? And then my neighbor came to me and said, I really like the sticker about motherhood on your door. So I said, oh, no, I'll take this off.

[Andy Patinkin]

So, yeah, do I look like a motherfucking role model? Is really. I think that's good.

[Arundhati Roy]

It's good as long as people don't mistake it for some. Some platitude about motherhood.

[Andy Patinkin]

But these jokes, underneath most good jokes, a little bit of truth.

[Arundhati Roy]

Well, turns out to be, for sure, a little bit of truth. Because today in India, only a fool would think that you didn't have to be very careful. But only when you said a fool.

[Andy Patinkin]

You really looked at me in a very intense way.

[Arundhati Roy]

No, but you're not living in India. I was just thinking about the fools I'm thinking about.

[Andy Patinkin]

Okay. Do they have long hair like me?

[Arundhati Roy]

No, they don't. I wish they did. But you have to be careful. But at the same time, if that carefulness means that you keep quiet, that's even worse.

[Andy Patinkin]

Well, you have done anything but keep quiet. Your political essays have produced police cases, legal notices, court appearances, a short jail sentence. A reader recently told you, the reason I like your writing is because you write as though they've already killed you.

[Arundhati Roy]

Yes, that's true.

[Andy Patinkin]

You don't hold back. Do you write these essays as if it could be your last?

[Arundhati Roy]

Yeah, but not because I feel that I'm going to be killed, but because each time I write something, it leads to something else and something else. And it's not just jail sentences for me. But I have seen, you know, my friends being jailed, being dying, being killed, and it becomes harder to keep quiet than to write it. You know, every time I write something, it's because I can't not write it.

[Andy Patinkin]

Every single thing we're talking in the aftermath of a right wing commentator who wrote political essays on the far other end of the spectrum than you, was gunned down. Political violence in this country, just like everywhere else, is rising.

[Arundhati Roy]

Yes, I mean, a friend of mine was gunned down too. I mean, a couple of years ago, a few years ago, 2017, I think, called Gauri Lankesh. So it happens in India. Many people are gunned down, many people are in jail. But it's not like the US because everybody doesn't go around with guns.

[Andy Patinkin]

But how do you hold that? How do you continue onward when the threat is not theory but real?

[Arundhati Roy]

Again, I don't want to overstate this threat because when I say you have to be very careful, you have to consider it, you have to understand it. You can't just write the first draft of what you feel. You have to think about it. There are tripwires everywhere. And then you have to do it, because if you don't, you're also putting yourself into some prison of your own. Then you should stop writing and teach yoga or something.

[Andy Patinkin]

In 2002 you wrote that fighting fascism. I think it's quite timely, for this means putting your ear to the ground and listening to the whispering of the truly powerless, a group that comprises the majority. Is that the same prescription you would offer for fighting fascism in 2025?

[Arundhati Roy]

Well, you know, I'll tell you what's changed in India. Something that what happened in India in 2014 is what is what, what is so similar to what is happening in the US in 2025.

[Andy Patinkin]

How do you mean?

[Arundhati Roy]

The right wing BJP came to power and sometimes the similarities are so unnerving that you want to know, is there a actual physical playbook? I mean, does it have pages that you can turn? Because the attacks on universities, the attacks on the economy, the attacks on citizenship.

[Andy Patinkin]

The attacks on minorities, the recent militarization of the police and the national guard.

[Arundhati Roy]

Yes. And. Well, in India, the militarization of the police and the policeisation of the military, you know, because in places like Kashmir, the military acts like the police, and in places like central India, which I've written about, the police acts like the military and this kind of valorization of national pride and national security and everybody's brain is a national flag quickly losing iq. You know, all of that happened, as I often say. The only difference is that your coup of January 6 might have failed in our case. The guys with the antlers and furs rule us now because in some ways succeeded. And it's a much more organized enterprise over there because the organization called the RSS that has penetrated every institution, the mainstream media owned by corporates, have enabled this violent lynch mob mentality. I would say they're a criminal enterprise, the mainstream media in India. So that's a situation that we find ourselves in now, except that we are ten years into it. And the dangerous thing is that it has been normalized. So the powerless people have been brainwashed into feeling they are some sort of a majority, and they have been falsely empowered by the right to indulge in sort of paroxysms of violence against Muslims, for example, every now and then. And the frustration of not having work or not having money is sort of channeled into, okay, you can be a part of this mob with swords and call for the rape of Muslim women, or you can murder people in public and you can become a very important political person. If you've actually gone out and done some killing and some mass murder, you know, you can hold high office. So what I meant by Powerless in 2002 now has a different meaning.

[Andy Patinkin]

So there are clear parallels between Hindu nationalists and the MAGA movement.

[Arundhati Roy]

Yes.

[Andy Patinkin]

Since India is 11 years in now and we are at the beginning of this new horrifying chapter, is there something that you could see in this country that would play out much like what played back home?

[Arundhati Roy]

I think that we should be very cognizant of the fact that the left and the divisiveness of the left, I mean, this loose word that we use where everybody a few years ago was encouraged to seal themselves into silos and to refuse all kinds of solidarity because solidarity can never be perfect. It's imperfect. But if you do not understand that solidarity is all that we have, people in Gaza cannot fight that battle alone. They need us. They need everybody possible on the streets of every country, all over the world. And if we don't have solidarity, you're going to lose. And you cannot regain what you have lost in a minute today. It's not the government, it's not government policies, it's not the police. That is is the danger. It is the popular imagination that is the danger. And once that happens, how do you unmake that? You know?

[Andy Patinkin]

So your call is for the acceptance of imperfect allies.

[Arundhati Roy]

Yes. Of understanding things as deeply as you can, of understanding that you cannot, nobody can fight this battle alone. Everybody has to somehow join forces and make space for each other and has to stand up. Because the minute you cede ground already a lot of ground has been seeded. You're not going to get that back.

[Andy Patinkin]

They often say that politics is downstream from culture. Is there a way when we talk about the public imagination, how do we go about expanding that? Because the stories we're telling, the stories we've been telling ourselves, they don't seem to be working anymore. I mean, trust in the Democratic Party is at an all time low. The support for the movements that you mentioned and you know, Black Lives Matter, diva on the police, even the Palestinian rights in Gaza has wavered in parts of this country.

[Arundhati Roy]

Well, politics is downstream of culture. And you know, the right wing both in India and here are so busy producing culture. And I mean, long ago I remember speaking in the US and saying that the Democrats and the Republicans were like two brands of washing powder, you know, Tide and Ivory Snow or whatever. All of them underwritten by the same corporates, the same weapons industry. You know, there was a time when weapons were made to fight wars. Now wars are manufactured to sell weapons and economies boom when there are wars and America is a war machine, you know, and whether it's Democrats or Republicans, you just look at the number of countries that they have destroyed between them, even since 9, 11. It's unbelievable. I mean, allied with Israel, of course.

[Andy Patinkin]

You know, I do want to offer some amount of clarity which I think can be found in history. And I just want to go back to a quote. This is from 2007, you said in the Guardian, I certainly do not volunteer to tell Iraqis or Palestinians that if they went on a mass hunger strike, they would get rid of military occupation. Civil disobedience doesn't seem to be paying dividends. This was in 2007 and I read that and I thought, oh my God, if civil disobedience won't pay dividends, what will?

[Arundhati Roy]

You know, civil disobedience works when you have an audience, when that audience is sympathetic. But I started thinking about it when I was deep inside the forest amongst indigenous people in India who were being pushed off their lands. The villages were being burnt, they were being raped, they were being moved out in their tens of thousands for mining companies. And so they were fighting back, not non violently. And people, I said, what do you want them to do? Like they live five days walk from any road, there's no television, they don't have any money to boycott any goods. They're already hungry. They can't go on a hunger strike. So what are you supposed to do when thousands of policemen arrive at night and burn down your village? And it isn't as if people have not tried all of that in Palestine. So I just feel that the world has to just stop being hypocritical. You know, of course civil disobedience will work, but then the rest of the world has to be in solidarity. It can't just leave them to their civil disobedience and then watch them being mowed down and watch them being burned down. I mean, the west bank, they didn't do anything, but they're being pushed out of their homes, they're being leveled, they're being taken.

[Andy Patinkin]

Over two years now, we've seen what's been happening. Has your understanding of the conflict changed or evolved in that time?

[Arundhati Roy]

It has not changed. I just see it as something that's gone beyond politics and entered some psychotic phase. I'm talking about starving children, killing journalists, bombing hospitals, putting out these videos of soldiers, you know, dressed in women's lingerie of the women they've massacred. Leaders Israeli Defense Force and government openly boasting about the fact that these are not. These are human animals and they need to be exterminated. And it didn't start here. I did a talk in 2002 where I quoted Churchill and all the various, you know, prime ministers of Israel saying the very same thing. So history did not begin on October 7th. And now what you're seeing, though, from a time when very few people in the United States were willing to talk about it, you're seeing a whole generation of young people coming out of Jewish people of all kinds of people speaking out. But what you're also seeing is all of us being forced to. To watch this genocide on our cell phones while we eat, while we drink, while we read, while you and I talk. We watch it. Our lives are infused with it, you know, and that also creates a kind of psychosis, I think, for us. And under the rubble of Gaza are not only the dead bodies of Palestinians, but the carcass of Western liberal democracy that today, America could today stop it, but it will not.

[Andy Patinkin]

And the psychosis, how do you work from that place? I mean, how do you continue on from that?

[Arundhati Roy]

I mean, we continue to protest, which is why all over the world, there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people on the streets. But what is our crisis? Our crisis is that we live in countries that we call, but there is no representation of the will of the people. But clearly the will of the people is that this war stops. But the will of the military industrial complex is that this war continues, that these people are exterminated, that those journalists are killed, that those children are starved and maimed and murdered, and we have to live with this. We will be the generation that watches, watched it and tried, I mean, many of us to talk about it, but didn't succeed. But what has happened is that the one thing that Israel had, which was this legacy of the history of what happened to the Jewish people, a terrible thing, but now they have squandered it and turned it upon themselves to become the perpetrators of something that they said they would never allow again. But now they themselves are the perpetrators. The state of Israel and those who support it.

[Andy Patinkin]

When you pause and it felt like you were thinking about something.

[Arundhati Roy]

No, I was just thinking about the fact that we have become people who have to keep doing what we do, writing what we write, creating the culture, even in these moments when we feel helpless with anger.

[Andy Patinkin]

Do you feel helpless?

[Arundhati Roy]

I do. I do. You know I do. As I said, I have written about so many things, and yet it isn't as though one succeeded. You know, stopping the dam or stopping the genocide or making people in India think what is being done in their name in Kashmir or whatever it is. You know, it is truly. I mean, I'm celebrating as a successful writer, but actually I'm a deep failure. But fortunately, as you would read in Mother Mary, being friends with failure does not mean accepting it.

[Andy Patinkin]

What does that mean?

[Arundhati Roy]

It means you may be defeated, but you'll never be on their side. You may go down, but you'll never be on their side.

[Andy Patinkin]

When you were talking about what's happening in the West Bank, I immediately thought to the beginning of this conversation, that I'm celebrated for all this work, and yet each celebration is ultimately a reminder of a battle not won.

[Arundhati Roy]

Yeah, it's true. It's true. We must win. And I want to. I want these battles to be won. But if we don't win it, we cannot be broken by the fact that we haven't won in one's lifetime. Because what I do think we have achieved is a certain political understanding, which is very, very important. I think that people understand the damage of big dams. I think people understand what they do to the environment. I think people understand what nuclear weapons mean. I think people understand the absolute wickedness that is the occupation and the apartheid perpetrated on the people of Gaza by the Israeli state. I think everybody understands it. And for a writer to. To help to provide that understanding is in some small way not a defeat. And I'm just saying, you know, that we are a part of history, and there have been other writers and other battles and other sufferings. And so these stories that we tell sometimes are not necessarily that unique, but they are a part of creating the texture of a world that we live in right now and a world that is not unchanging. And yet we cannot ignore the battles that our elders have fought for us. You know, other women have fought for the freedoms that I have, and I can't ever think that it's some enterprise all of my own.

[Andy Patinkin]

Other women, including your mother, My mother.

[Arundhati Roy]

My grandmother in some weak way, and so many others.

[Andy Patinkin]

You know, you mentioned earlier the audiobook which you read yourself, and I couldn't help but notice that there's a difference in your voice from the early chapters to the later ones.

[Arundhati Roy]

Oh, you heard it.

[Andy Patinkin]

And I wondered, because you have such vivid note, perfect recall of your own words, did you see the story, your story, your mother's story? Did you see it differently or hear it differently upon having to perform it?

[Arundhati Roy]

No, because like I said, you know, my books are always already an audio track to me. But having to read it out aloud. I mean, when I say an audio track, it's a track inside my head. But when you actually read it aloud and there's someone else sitting there with. With headphones on, it comes out. And it came out a little cracked and broken because it was a performance. That sounds bad. What I meant was because I had to actually speak it out loud. And I wasn't good enough at keeping my control because I felt upset when I was reading that.

[Andy Patinkin]

Can you read the dedication of your first book and then the dedication of your latest book?

[Arundhati Roy]

The dedication, the God of Small Things for Mary Roy, who grew me up, who taught me to say excuse me before interrupting her in public, who loved me enough to let me go for lkc. That's my brother, who, like me, survived. And in this, the dedication is to lkc, my brother. Together we made it to the shore and to Mary Roy, who never said, let it be. And of course, my brother. In this book, my brother says that she loved me enough to let me go was the only piece of real fiction in the God of Small Things.

[Andy Patinkin]

Was he right?

[Arundhati Roy]

Partially, but not wholly, I think, because if you remember, at the end of Mother, Mary comes to me, the last chapter, it's called a declaration of love. She sent me a message just a few months before she died in which she said, there's no one in the world whom I have loved more than you. And I said, despite everything that happened between us, somehow I knew that to be true. And I responded, saying that you are the most unusual, wonderful woman I have known. And I adore you. And actually, I made a little screenshot of that and laminated it. And it's my bookmark for this book. Because it was a savage, thorny, violent sort of love. But it was love, you know. I know it was love by a person who didn't know how to love.

[Andy Patinkin]

And now, having written the book, now having brought it around the world, does that grief that you first felt, does it no longer shock you?

[Arundhati Roy]

It shocks me still. I still find it very difficult to look at a photograph of her. You know, I still feel that there's a difference in my face for before and after her death. But I just feel that I wanted to share her with the world, all of her. The darkness and the light.

[Andy Patinkin]

You're not one for manifestos, no mantras, et cetera. But I think the closest you've ever come to writing one for yourself. About why you do what you do and how you do what you do. Came from that essay you mentioned earlier, the End of Imagination. This is back in 1998. And I have a passage here from it, which I thought we could close on.

[Arundhati Roy]

It's from the End of Imagination. And as I said, it was about failure and loss and, you know, this kind of strutting that comes into public imagination when you become a nuclear power. So it's a conversation between me and a friend who lived in New York. And I told her the only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead. Which means exactly what she asked me. And I tried to explain, but I didn't do a very good job of it. Sometimes I need to write, to think. So I wrote it down for her on a paper napkin. And this is what I wrote. To love to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence. And the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch, to try and understand. To never look away and never, never.

[Andy Patinkin]

To forget the last lines you have here. Above all, to watch, to try and understand. To never look away and never, never to forget. And it just reminded me of the description you wrote for yourself as a kid in the new book. The one that watched, one that took notes, the one that did not speak up but remembered everything. That saw the smallest of details through the keyhole on the riverbank. And I guess what I wanted to ask is if you had another go at it, would you choose being a writer?

[Arundhati Roy]

A million times yes.

[Andy Patinkin]

Thank you.

[Arundhati Roy]

Thank you. It was supremely lovely conversation.

[Andy Patinkin]

Thank you for the time.

[Arundhati Roy]

Thank you. Sam.

[Chelsea Clinton]

Is it just me or are things actually really scary right now? In the world of public health, every day brings another confusing headline or yet again, a far fetched claim. Vaccines are somehow up for debate and parents are scrolling TikTok for medical advice. I'm Chelsea Clinton, an advocate, author, investor, teacher and mom navigating this insane time right alongside you. I hope you'll join me on my new podcast, that Can't Be True, a show that sorts fact from fiction, especially on issues impacting our health. From Limonada Media and the Clinton Foundation. That Can't Be True is out October 2nd.

[Stan Fragoso]

And that's our show. Special thanks this week to Kate Lloyd, Anthony Arnov, Kathy Belden, the team at Simon and Schuster, and our guest, Arundhati Roy. Her debut memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me is available wherever you do your reading. For more episodes with other great writers, I'd recommend Ocean Bong, Jhumpa Lahiri and George Saunders. To hear those and more Lemonada podcasts, listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. You can also subscribe subscribe to Lemonada Premium for exclusive bonus content and ad free listening. Just hit the subscribe button on Apple or head to lemonadapremium.com Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Chinik Sabravo. Today's episode was edited by Matt Sasaki and Corey Attad. It was mixed by Andrew Vastola. It was engineered by David Herrmann out of Good Studio in New York York City. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Krisha Shanoi. Photographs today are from Sarah Schneider with research assistants from Kiki Giorgio. This episode was made in partnership with the good people at lemanada Media and I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next Sunday with a brand new episode. Until then, stay safe and solo.

[Caregiving Podcast Host]

Every caregiving journey is unique, but the isolation, guilt and exhaustion we all feel, that's universal. It's reality. It's life.

[Arundhati Roy]

You know, I wish it could all.

[Caregiving Podcast Host]

Be happy and joyous, but sometimes it's full of rage. And that is is what it is.

[Arundhati Roy]

That's why this show exists, to be.

[Caregiving Podcast Host]

A safe place for caregivers to land. Listen to Squeezed Wherever you get your podcasts.