NEW DELHI: Author Arundhati Roy on Thursday mentioned that “almost all the people who we call ‘antinationals’ are the ones who care” whereas those that venture themselves as nationalists typically work solely to guard their very own wealth.“Almost all the people who we call ‘antinationals’ are the ones who care. And then the people who call themselves great nationalists, I can bet you that 99 per cent of them are dodging taxes, have sent their kids to America, or are doing everything to make sure that what goes on in this country doesn’t affect their personal wealth or their whatever bullshit,” Roy was quoted as saying by the information company PTI. She was talking on the launch of her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. The ebook is centred on her relationship with her mom, Mary Roy, a ladies’s rights activist who fought the landmark inheritance case for Syrian Christian ladies in Kerala. Roy mentioned she wrote the memoir after Mary’s loss of life in 2022, describing it as “born out of the onrush of memories and feelings provoked” by her mom’s passing. “I wrote this book because I feel that my mother is someone who deserves to be shared with the world,” she mentioned, as quoted by PTI. The 63-year-old, who received the Booker Prize in 1997 for The God of Small Things, mentioned her writing has at all times come from “a place of love and caring about something”.“I write when it becomes harder to keep quiet than to write,” Roy advised PTI in an interview. She added, “People don’t understand why one gets so upset? Why do I write? Because it comes from a place of love. It comes from caring about something. Otherwise, why should I bother? Like, why shouldn’t I enjoy my Booker Prize or whatever it was.” She mentioned she doesn’t see herself as each a author and activist. “It’s a label I find absurd, something like the clunky term sofa-bed,” she remarked. Roy described writing itself as a dangerous pursuit. “The most dangerous place in the history of time has been writing. I’ve never been under any illusion that it was a safe place. So I’m okay here. Because it’s the safety that suffocates me,” she mentioned. The memoir particulars her tough relationship with her mom, who, she recollects, insisted her kids tackle her as “Mrs Roy” like different college students at her college in Kerala. “It was almost as though for her (Mary) to shine her light on her students and give them all she had, we — he (the brother) and I (Roy) — had to absorb the darkness,” Roy writes. She added, “She was rough, and that roughness was what put some steel into my spine… So when all those people were around me — protesting and calling me names — I’d just be going like, ‘Do you know whose daughter I am?’ Like, my needle isn’t moving at all.” Over the years, Arundhati Roy has confronted circumstances, protests, and even a day in jail for supporting the Narmada Bachao Andolan. Her ebook Azadi was banned in Jammu and Kashmir this August together with 24 different titles for allegedly selling “false narrative and secessionism”.
