Bathroom

Dear friend,

I wrote about Arundhati Roy for Himal Southasian. The review became about something else, so I didn’t end up writing about the first couple of things that occurred to me as soon as I closed the covers of Mother Mary Comes To Me on the evening of its publication. Its last pages are devastating, the more so to me because I had, just hours before, read Jeet Thayil’s miraculous auto-ish fiction-ish novel The Elsewhereans, whose own closing creates a haunting echo and mirror image with Mother Mary’s. I’m sure someone has written or is writing about the mingling affect of these two books, and the unlikely resonances between Roy and Thayil’s writing lives more broadly. I’m sure they are doing it in Malayalam. (When you’ve been too long in the rooms of English, to quote the Thayil poem.)

The other book I’d been thinking about before Mother Mary came out was Amrita Mahale’s second novel Real Life. Mid-novel, an LLM, responding to its hallucinating maker, parrots the words: “Not old. Not young. A viable, die-able age.” The character interacting with the machine doesn’t catch the reference. It’s not there for him. He knows not why the stochastic parrot sings. Amrita is writing from the last generation of writers who can separate reference from quotation, for a last generation of readers who will care to separate influence from theft. “A viable, die-able age,” from The God of Small Things, is there for us – readers of Arundhati Roy, who have grown up to become readers of Amrita Mahale. Roy’s work is at the back of the mind of every novelist I know who was a schoolgirl in or around 1997, the year of the publication of The God of Small Things. Others from the same time and place became journalists, for whom Roy’s essays were an early introduction to adversarial writing about social injustices. I have no doubt that still others became memoirists before Roy became one.

On the everything apps, people were asking each other if Mother Mary was “like Jeanette McCurdy’s memoir.” Someone posted a line from the book, about the jealousy Roy feels when she crosses a man on a lonely rural road, lying on his buffalo’s back and looking up at the stars, and someone else said Roy was nothing more than an Andrew Tate for privileged women. I said we should title the review She Came In Through The Bathroom Window because I wanted to make my editors laugh. In the years of media fragmentation every micro-population has its points of reference, illegible to others. It’s no one’s fault that people think they know Roy’s work because they’ve read tweets that quote it. There are many writers whose whole work can be contained in a carousel post. There are many writers whose success in publishing depends on this. If a girl’s girl on the algorithms had said she wished she had a man’s freedom to roam alone under the night sky she would have gone viral and become Meta’s head of gender in India, before being fired two to three weeks after the manosphere found out about her.

There are writers whose work is impervious to the vulnerabilities of influencerism. If you stopped reading Roy, you can forget that she is one of them. Publishing is a forgetting machine. In the years before the years of media fragmentation, the papers were full of accusatory commentary about how and whether Roy was a media creation. Some of that receded as the nature of publication changed and kept changing. In the excitement of Mother Mary’s release there was a lot of supposing and believing that Arundhati Roy has always been That Girl. But a strain of refusal has imbued her work with the complexity and thorniness of larger corpora. It cannot be contained in that-girlism (or not-that-girlism), except by booksellers and publicists. Its influence goes beyond influencerism. If Roy had written about collecting rain in the basin of her collarbones, as someone who moved to Goa wrote during the Covid lockdown at the beginning of the decade, she would have found a way to do it without being laughed off the internet. (In fact, she has. Re-reading everything she has published at a go, it was impossible not to notice how often collarbones - d’une certaine qualité, naturally - crop up in her writing, in reference to her own or those of the sylphs in her fiction.)

By the time I arrived this far it was many hours past my bedtime and my tears had dried. I realised that I wanted to read about Roy and the question of influence, but not write about it. So the review took another route, and my editors graciously let me keep my preferred title in the spirit of the article, if not in the letter. It’s here, and you can read it, for free, on registration. I feel privileged to have contributed to Himal, an independent internationalist publication based in the Indian subcontinent, made by minds I admire.

I’ve only written about Roy once before, in the inaugural number of Bodice Ripper, a fortnightly column about clothes and appearance in literature that I had the pleasure of writing for The Voice of Fashion.

In July this year I had the privilege of speaking with Nikhil Krishnan and Raph Cormack on their wonderful show, The Minor Books Podcast, about Daniyal Mueenuddin. You can listen to the episode here, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Last of all, a warm welcome to everyone who’s followed Supriya by Supriya Nair in the last few weeks. I assume it’s because of this tweet. Congratulations and best wishes to Mayor Mamdani and his constituents in New York City. In April 2019, I wrote about his rap song “Nani” for BPB.

Thanks and best wishes,

Supriya