I had to pause reading after Anjum speaks about her experience in the Gujarat mob violence.
It is very easy to get bored at several points. But more importantly, it is deeply disturbing. Register Nowįrom a pure literary point of view, she does not do full justice to the narration, the coherence of story line and character building – all essential for a story to hold the reader’s attention and take them till the end. Never miss real stories from India's women. And I enjoyed her essays as much as her story. Throughout, her writing style, her choice of words only grew better and stronger. And had to be sugar coated or swept away under the carpet and forgotten. It was just that these were truths that would shake the very foundation of civilized societies. But nobody could prove what she wrote was untrue. Once known as the poster girl of Indian English writing, she was soon criticized for her views, taped with sedition charges and discarded as a maoist sympathizer. When you see the world around you burning and blowing apart, you are compelled to speak the truth – as naked as it is without having to clothe it with decorations and hide it behind the screen of fiction. It was only natural that she chose to write essays and not fiction. She did not distance herself from the people in fact she lived with them as she wrote about them. She took positions just as a good writer always should. She wrote passionately about issues, about injustice in society. Through the years, I grew with her, my thoughts matured by my new learnings and augmented by her bold essays. I would have liked to believe that Rahel was Arundhati (although she has denied it). It was as though I was with her, I felt like I knew Rahel.
I can read it all over again today and still feel the hair at the back of my neck stand up, feel my eyes become moist. It was the full force of the storm of a childhood pent up, lived and imagined. The words lingered on for days the characters Estha and Rahel stayed etched in my memory forever. When I read Arundhati Roy’s first fiction story The God Of Small Things, it blew me away.
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