Short Story Writers From India

"The world is called upon to condemn suicide bombers. But can we ignore the long road they have journeyed on before they have arrived at this destination? September 11, 1922 to September 11, 2002 – eighty years is a long time to have been waging war."

"In 1988, Saddam Hussein razed hundreds of villages in northern Iraq, used chemical weapons and machine guns to kill thousands of Kurdish people... that same year the U.S. government provided him with $500 million in subsidies... The next year, after... his genocidal campaign, the U.S. government doubled its subsidy to $1 billion... provided him with high quality germ seed for anthrax...helicopters and dual-use material... to manufacture chemical and biological weapons."

"So what changed? In 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. His sin was not so much that he had committed an act of war, but that he had acted independently, without orders from his master."

"The first Allied attack on Iraq took place on January ’91. The world watched the prime-time war as it was played out on T.V. (In India in those days you had to go to a five-star hotel lobby to watch CNN.)... Over the last decade American and British forces have fired thousands of missiles and bombs on Iraq. In the decade of economic sanctions that followed the war, Iraqi civilians have been denied food, medicine, hospital equipment, ambulances, clean water – the basic essentials...about half a million Iraqi children have died as a result of the sanctions. Of them, Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, famously said, “It’s a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.”"

"The U.S., which George Bush has called “the most peaceful nation on earth”, has been at war with one country or another every year for the last fifty [years]."

"Wars are...usually fought for hegemony, for business. And then of course there’s the business of war..."

"Protecting its control of the world’s oil is fundamental to U.S. foreign policy."

"In the last ten years of unbridled Corporate Globalization...the numbers of poor in the world has increased by 100 million."

"“The American Way of Life” is simply not sustainable. Because it doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America."

"Fortunately, power has a shelf life. When the time comes, maybe this mighty empire will, like others before it, overreach itself and implode from within. It looks as though structural cracks have already appeared... America’s corporate heart is hemorrhaging."

"For all the endless, empty chatter about democracy, today the world is run by three of the most secretive institutions in the world: The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, all three of which, in turn, are dominated by the U.S. Their decisions are made in secret. The people who head them are appointed behind closed doors. Nobody really knows anything about them, their politics, their beliefs, their intentions. Nobody elected them. Nobody said they could make decisions on our behalf. A world run by a handful of greedy bankers and C.E.O.’s whom nobody elected can’t possibly last."

"Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil but because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power. Twenty-first century market-capitalism, American style, will fail for the same reasons. Both are edifices constructed by the human intelligence, undone by human nature."

"Perhaps things will become worse and then better. Perhaps there’s a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing."

"Arunadhati Roy is a 'one-book wonder', as a woman who has shot her literary bolt and now keeps herself in the news by making increasingly outrageous anti-Indian statements for the benefit of the foreign media. Her caricature of India as some sort of neo-Nazi state where minorities are routinely persecuted and the poor cheerfully exploited offers foreign journos a useful counterpoint to the 'Indian success story' headlines and gives them a lazy way of adding dissenting notes to the usual India pieces."

"But nothing beats the mischief and arrogance of Arundhati Roy's blood and gore reporting of the same story on the basis of hearsay.... Disturbed by this account, Balbir Punj, BJP Rajya Sabha MP personally contacted the Gujarat police and asked them to verify the story. Clearly, no such case had been reported to the Gujarat police. Therefore, they asked Roy to provide leads that could help them reach the victim's family and book those who were guilty of the crime. She responded through her lawyer, Prashant Bhushan, to say that the police had no right to issue summons to her. In the same lengthy article in Outlook, Roy had reported that the daughters of Ehsan Jafri, the ex-MP from the Congress Party who was done to death in Gulberg Society, were also raped and killed along with him. In this case, Roy got caught spinning gory tales by none other than Jafri's son who issued a clarification that his sisters were not in the city at the time of the riots. In fact, one of them was living in the United States. Unfazed, Roy replied that she had got the information from two other sources, one a report in Time magazine and another, a supposedly independent fact-finding mission. Incidentally, this “fact finding” team had actually been organised by Teesta Setalvad and Shabnam Hashmi with one of the most corrupt and compromised retired IG of Police as a lead member of the pack. The much-venerated Retired Supreme Court Judge Justice Krishna Iyer was used as a figurehead but the report was put together by professional BJP baiters.... Since the then Outlook Editor Vinod Mehta is a die-hard fan of Roy's writings, she got away with her bloody fantasies without having to offer a half-decent apology."

"Arundhati Roy... was expected to produce some titillating atrocity literature about how unspeakably evil Hinduism is; and she did. She made the story more colourful by claiming that Ehsan Jafri's two daughters had also been raped and killed. However, their brother issued a clarification that his sisters had not been in town at the time, one even being in the US. Being so diametrically contradicted after such a high-profile claim would have shamed a lesser mortal, and certainly been reprimanded and disowned by the editor formally responsible for a statement that turned out to be slanderous in the extreme. (...) The same acclaimed fiction writer related how a pregnant woman had her stomach ripped open by the Hindu rioters. Tehelka, Harsh Mander in Times of India, even the BBC ran with it: “But nothing beats the mischief and arrogance of Arundhati Roy’s blood and gore reporting on the same story on the basis of hearsay.” In Roy's version, after the woman died, “someone carved OM on her forehead”. What a gruesome illustration of Hindu inhumanity, almost too good to be true. And indeed, BJP MP Balbir Punj contacted the police, who had no such case booked. They contacted Roy, who, through her lawyer, refused to cooperate."

"Arundhati Roy goes lyrical about the torture of a Muslim politician's two daughters by Hindus during the Gujarat riots of 2002, even when the man had only one daughter, who came forward to clarify that she happened to be in the US at the time of the "facts"."

"When I learned that I had been awarded the Sydney Peace Price for my climate work, I was incredibly honored. This is a prize that has gone to some of my personal heroes-Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky, Vandana Shiva, Desmond Tutu, among so many others. It's a very nice tribe to be a part of."

"Arundhati Roy risked the international fame she so clearly cherishes by going public with blatant lies about atrocities against named Gujarati Muslim women who turned out to be either non-existent or abroad at the time of the riots. Perhaps a fiction writer can afford this, but the news media with their deontology of accuracy and objectivity made themselves guilty of similar howlers."

"The writer Arundhati Roy asserted that a pregnant Muslim woman had been murdered and then her foetus ripped from her womb by rioters. When it became clear that nobody knew of the incident and Roy was asked to come and help the police inquiry to find the unfortunate victim, she replied through her lawyers that there was no power which could compel her to attend. She claimed in addition that Ehsan Jafri's daughters had been murdered alongside him at Gulbarg Society. This prompted Jafri's son to write from the United States that there was only one daughter and she was in the US with him."

"As Arundhati Roy writes: "There is beauty yet in this brutal, damaged world of ours. Hidden, fierce, immense. Beauty that is uniquely ours and beauty that we have received with grace from others, enhanced, reinvented and made our own. We have to seek it out, nurture it, love it." Yes, there is beauty to uncover still. It won't disappear the despair, or grief, or heartbreak, but it can, perhaps, prevent us from sinking into them."

"(I read in one sitting, it was that good:) The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. After I finished my first reading, I immediately turned it over and began reading it again. I still read it, in whole or in part, almost every year."

"There are already communities actively experimenting and developing solutions… What I work on is not how we find solutions but how we scale to transform our society...there’s the writing by Arundhati Roy, which is that another world is not only possible, but it is already here. And finding the pockets where this world has arrived, is what gives me hope."

"I have always criticised violence in my speeches but the way the trouble in just two per cent of the area is blown up and used against us should be countered. Arundhati Roy paints Gujaratis as rapists and then goes scot-free by apologising. Isn't it an insult to Gujarat?"

"Roy combines brilliant reportage with a passionate, no-holds-barred commentary. I salute both her courage and her skill."

"And concomitantly, Roy has put her brilliant linguistic skills to the service of "truth". Read her graphic details—"The mob broke into the house. They stripped his daughters and burnt them alive"... Anyway, it reads heart-rendingly honest. Heart-rending, yes, but honest, no. Jaffri was killed in the riots but his daughters were neither "stripped" nor "burnt alive". T.A. Jafri, his son, in a front-page interview titled 'Nobody knew my father's house was the target', says, "Among my brothers and sisters, I am the only one living in India. And I am the eldest in the family. My sister and brother live in the US. I am 40 years old and I have been born and brought up in Ahmedabad." So, Roy is lying—for surely Jafri is not. But what about the hundreds of media lies that haven't been exhumed as yet? Her seven-page long (approx: 6,000 words) hate charter against India and the Sangh parivar is woven around just two specific cases of human tragedy, one of which—by now, we know for sure—is a piece of fiction. The rest is hyperbole, punctuated with venom and vitriol to demonise the parivar. Precisely this type of demonisation had resulted in the macabre incident at Godhra. The vicious propaganda unleashed by the secularists for over a decade had made ordinary and gullible Muslims see the innocent Ram sevaks as demons who deserved to be burnt alive."

"Last night a friend from Baroda called. Weeping. It took her fifteen minutes to tell me what the matter was. It wasn't very complicated. Only that Sayeeda, a friend of hers, had been caught by a mob. Only that her stomach had been ripped open and stuffed with burning rags. Only that after she died, someone carved 'OM' on her forehead.... "A mob surrounded the house of former Congress MP Iqbal Ehsan Jaffri. His phone calls to the Director-General of Police, the Police Commissioner, the Chief Secretary, the Additional Chief Secretary (Home) were ignored. The mobile police vans around his house did not intervene. The mob broke into the house. They stripped his daughters and burned them alive. Then they beheaded Ehsan Jaffri and dismembered him. Of course it's only a coincidence that Jaffri was a trenchant critic of Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, during his campaign for the Rajkot Assembly by-election in February.""

"In a situation like the one that prevails in Gujarat, when the police are reluctant to register firs, when the administration is openly hostile to those trying to gather facts, and when the killings go on unabated—then panic, fear and rumour play a pivotal role. People who have disappeared are presumed dead, people who have been dismembered and burnt cannot be identified, and people who are distraught and traumatised are incoherent.... This and other genuine errors in recounting the details of the violence in Gujarat in no way alters the substance of what journalists, fact-finding missions, or writers like myself are saying."

"The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place."

"Here is a list of the countries that America has been at war with - and bombed - since the second world war: China (1945-46, 1950-53), Korea (1950-53), Guatemala (1954, 1967-69), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959-60), the Belgian Congo (1964), Peru (1965), Laos (1964-73), Vietnam (1961-73), Cambodia (1969-70), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), El Salvador (1980s), Nicaragua (1980s), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998), Yugoslavia (1999). And now Afghanistan."

"People rarely win wars, governments rarely (completely) lose them. People (do completely) get killed."

"I remember sitting in a lecture hall in a college in Hyderabad in front of an audience of five or six hundred students. On my left, chairing the event, was the vice-chancellor of the university. On my right, a professor of poetry. The vice-chancellor whispered in my ear, “You shouldn’t spend any more time on fiction. Your political writing is the thing to concentrate on.” The professor of poetry whispered, “When will you get back to writing fiction? That is your true calling. This other stuff you do is just ephemeral.”... Sitting between the two professors, I enjoyed their contradictory advice."

"The God of Small Things, published in the summer of 1997, was the result of a search for a language and a form to describe the world I had grown up in, to myself and to people I loved, some of whom were entirely unfamiliar with Kerala... Back home in Kerala, I was quickly labeled anti-communist, a crying-talking-sleeping-walking Imperialist Plot. I had been critical, it is true, and the sharp end of my critique was that the Left, by which I mean the various communist parties in India, has been not just opaque to caste, but, more often than not, overtly casteist... The consternation had as much to do with the novel's politics of caste as it did with gender... was not received with applause and hallelujahs. Five male lawyers got together and filed a criminal case against me, accusing me of obscenity and “corrupting public morality.”"

"As the essays kept appearing, so did the five male lawyers (not the same ones, different ones, but they seemed to hunt in packs). And so did the criminal cases, mostly for contempt of court. One of them ended in a very short jail sentence, another is still pending. The debates were often acrimonious. Sometimes violent. But always important. Almost every essay got me into enough trouble to make me promise myself that I wouldn’t write another. But inevitably, situations arose in which the effort of keeping quiet set up such a noise in my head, such an ache in my blood, that I succumbed, and wrote."

"Capitalism’s gratuitous wars and sanctioned greed have jeopardized the planet and filled it with refugees. Much of the blame for this rests squarely on the shoulders of the government of the United States. Seventeen years after invading Afghanistan, after bombing it into the ‘stone age’ with the sole aim of toppling the Taliban, the US government is back in talks with the very same Taliban. In the interim it has destroyed Iraq, Libya and Syria. Hundreds of thousands have lost their lives to war and sanctions, a whole region has descended into chaos, ancient cities—pounded into dust. Amidst the desolation and the rubble, a monstrosity called Daesh (ISIS) has been spawned. It has spread across the world, indiscriminately murdering ordinary people who had absolutely nothing to do with America's wars. Over these last few years, given the wars it has waged, and the international treaties it has arbitrarily reneged on, the US Government perfectly fits its own definition of a rogue state."

"May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dust green trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun. The nights are clear, but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation. But by early June the southwest monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn moss green. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads. (first lines)"

"The story of the tragic decline of an Indian family whose members suffer the terrible consequences of forbidden love, The God of Small Things is set in the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India."

"In those early amorphous years of life, when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and everything was Forever"

"The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen.. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic. ..."

"Her own grief grieved her. His devastated her. (On Sophie Mol's death, describing Mamachi's grief, and Chacko's)."

"Ammu explained to Estha and Rahel that people always loved best what they Identified most with."

"They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much."

"Kochu Maria watched with her cake-crumbs. The Fond Smiles watched Fondly. Little Girls Playing. Sweet. One beach-coloured. One brown. One Loved. One Loved a Little Less."

"Ammu had an elaborate Calcutta wedding. Later, looking back on the day, Ammu realized that the slightest feverish glitter in her bridegroom's eyes had not been love, or even excitement at the prospect of carnal bliss, but approximately eight large pegs of whiskey. Straight. Neat."

"Humbling was a nice word, Rahel thought. Humbling along without a care in the world."

"She wondered what had caused the bald pilgrims to vomit so uniformly, and whether they had vomited together in a single, well-orchestrated heave (to music perhaps, to the rhythm of a bus bhajan), or separately, one at a time."

"'Ammu,' Chacko said, his voice steady and deliberately casual, 'is it at all possible for you to prevent your washed-up cynicism from completely colouring everything?' Silence filled the car like a saturated sponge. Washed-up cut like a knife through a small thing. The sun shone with a shuddering sigh. This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt."

"It didn't matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secrets of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones that you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic."

"To the Kathakali Man these stories are his children and his childhood. He has grown up within them. They are the house he was raised in, the meadows he played in. They are his windows and his way of seeing. So when he tells a story, he handles it as he would a child of his own. He teases it. He punishes it. He sends it up like a bubble. He wrestles it to the ground and lets it go again. He laughs at it because he loves it. He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, he can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf. Or play with a sleeping monkey's tail. He can turn effortlessly from the carnage of war into the felicity of a woman washing her hair in a mountain stream. From the crafty ebullience of a rakshasa with a new idea into a gossipy Malayali with a scandal to spread. From the sensuousness of a woman with a baby at her breast into the seductive mischief of Krishna's smile. He can reveal the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains. The hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory. He tells stories of the gods, but his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart. The Kathakali Man is the most beautiful of men. Because his body is his soul. His only instrument. From the age of three he has been planed and polished, pared down, harnessed wholly to the task of story-telling. He has magic in him, this man within the painted mark and swirling skirts. But these days he has become unviable. Unfeasible. Condemned goods. His children deride him. They long to be everything that he is not. He has watched them grow up to become clerks and bus conductors. Class IV non-gazetted officers. With unions of their own. But he himself, left dangling somewhere between heaven and earth, cannot do what they do. He cannot slide down the aisles of buses, counting change and selling tickets. He cannot answer bells that summon him. He cannot stoop behind trays of tea and Marie biscuits. In despair he turns to tourism. He enters the market. He hawks the only thing he owns. The stories that his body can tell. He becomes a Regional Flavour."

"He is Karna, whom the world has abandoned. Karna Alone. Condemned goods. A prince raised in poverty. Born to die unfairly, unarmed and alone at the hands of his brother. Majestic in his complete despair. Praying on the banks of the Ganga. Stoned out of his skull. Then Kunti appeared. She too was a man, but a man grown soft and womanly, a man with breasts, from doing female parts for years. Her movements were fluid. Full of women. Kunti, too, was stoned. High on the same shared joints. She had come to tell Karna a story. Karna inclined his beautiful head and listened. Red-eyed, Kunti danced for him. She told him of a young woman who had been granted a boon. A secret mantra that she could use to choose a lover from among the gods. Of how, with the imprudence of youth, the woman decided to test it to see if it really worked. How she stood alone in an empty field, turned her face to the heavens and recited the mantra. The words had scarcely left her foolish lips, Kunti said, when Surya, the God of Day, appeared before her. The young woman, bewitched by the beauty of the shimmering young god, gave herself to him. Nine months later she bore him a son. The baby was born sheathed in light, with gold earrings in his ears and a gold breastplate on his chest, engraved with the emblem of the sun. The young mother loved her first-born son deeply, Kunti said, but she was unmarried and couldn't keep him. She put him in a reed basket and cast him away in a river. The child was found downriver by Adhirata, a charioteer. And named Karna. Karna looked up to Kunti. Who was she? Who was my mother? Tell me where she is. Take me to her. Kunti bowed her head. She's here, she said. Standing before you. Karna's elation and anger at the revelation. His dance of confusion and despair. Where were you, he asked her, when I needed you the most? Did you ever hold me in your arms? Did you feed me? Did you ever look for me? Did you wonder where I might be? In reply Kunti took the regal face in her hands, green the face, red the eyes, and kissed him on his brow. Karna shuddered in delight. A warrior reduced to infancy. The ecstasy of that kiss. He dispatched it to the ends of his body. To his toes. His fingertips. His lovely mother's kiss. Did you know how much I missed you? Rahel could see it coursing through his veins, as clearly as an egg travelling down an ostrich's neck. A travelling kiss whose journey was cut short by dismay when Karna realised that his mother had revealed herself to him only to secure the safety of her five other, more beloved sons - the Pandavas - poised on the brink of their epic battle with their one hundred cousins. It is them that Kunti sought to protect by announcing to Karna that she was his mother. She had a promise to extract. She invoked the Love Laws."