Arundhati Roy

You say when you write something you have to spend a few days filtering out the fury and that you don't do things to be deliberately provocative. So how do you filter out your fury?

Well, first I write it in, and then it's like this cliff of anger, and I put in the pegs like a mountaineer would, and I climb up, and then I take the pegs out. But I still don't manage to filter out enough of it for most people, but why should I? Uh you have to use all your skills. In my non fiction I do use the arsenal of a fiction writer. I mean, I believe fiction is truth, you know, so fiction is not made up.

The gap between rich and poor in India is enormous. You yourself have described it as an obscenity. What is the starkest representation of it that you see within your city?

I studied architecture and from then to now I've spoken about how there's a city and a non-city and the city has institutions, it has housing, it has markets, it has transport, and then the non-citizens live in the cracks between these institutions. They have no foothold in the city, they have no homes, they have nothing. Even the sewage system isn't theirs. So that's how it is. And of course, outside the city, the devastation, as you know, two hundred and fifty thousand farmers have killed themselves 'cause they're in debt. So for me as a writer, it's impossible to just pursue a glittering career as a fiction writer and just ignore all this. But for me, the fiction too must be informed by this. By caste. I mean, which country in the world has more than a million people who make a living carrying other people's shit on their heads? This is what the caste system is in India.

What was your mother like as a mother when you were very young?

She was raging because she firstly was the child of a very abusive father and a pretty weak mother with failing eyesight who played the violin beautifully… her husband broke her violin because how can she be allowed to do that? And then she married my dad who I never met until I was very much older in my twenties… she was very ill all the time. She had asthma and she didn't have anywhere to go, so she was living in my grandmother's house. And everybody used to just tell us, Why don't you get out? This is not your house. You have no right to be here. And so I'd spend all my time just on the river and with people who used to fish. And, you know, I just grew up wild. I knew every beetle and insect and blade of grass. So she was harsh and she was bitter and she was beautiful and she was tender… when somebody upset her, the only people she could take it out on was me and my brother. So there was a lot of anger against us. And she would say… 'you're like millstones around my neck' and all that. And yet, then she would embrace us too and love us. So it was difficult because you never knew what was coming at you, which is very unsettling, I suppose. But maybe that's what made me a writer… my mother broke me and made me and broke me and made me, and she still does. I think she's a fundamental force in me in all kinds of ways.

You have said previously that to have seen a woman who never needed a man is a wonderful thing.

Yeah, I don't mean it as never needed a man, but like I grew up without the presence of the father who's going to look after you. I just didn't have that. So in a way, I love men because I don't accept bullshit from them. And so I once in Kerala had a very funny occasion where my mother and I were at some meeting where they were talking about dowry and my mother was yelling about why you shouldn't accept dowry. And I said, why don't you just give your daughters whatever you want to give them? Why do you link it to marriage? So a woman with lots of diamond earrings said, you know, but that will make our daughters very bold and bold girls can never have a happy marriage. So I said, why I was brought up to be bold and I've had several happy marriages.