NEW DELHI: Author Arundhati Roy on Thursday said that “almost all the people who we call ‘antinationals’ are the ones who care” while those who project themselves as nationalists often work only to protect their 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 news agency PTI. She was speaking at the launch of her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. The book is centred on her relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a women’s rights activist who fought the landmark inheritance case for Syrian Christian women in Kerala. Roy said she wrote the memoir after Mary’s death in 2022, describing it as “born out of the onrush of memories and feelings provoked” by her mother’s passing. “I wrote this book because I feel that my mother is someone who deserves to be shared with the world,” she said, as quoted by PTI. The 63-year-old, who won the Booker Prize in 1997 for The God of Small Things, said her writing has always come from “a place of love and caring about something”.“I write when it becomes harder to keep quiet than to write,” Roy told 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 said she does not see herself as both a writer and activist. “It’s a label I find absurd, something like the clunky term sofa-bed,” she remarked. Roy described writing itself as a risky 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 said. The memoir details her difficult relationship with her mother, who, she recalls, insisted her children address her as “Mrs Roy” like other students at her school 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 faced cases, protests, and even a day in jail for supporting the Narmada Bachao Andolan. Her book Azadi was banned in Jammu and Kashmir this August along with 24 other titles for allegedly promoting “false narrative and secessionism”.
