The Earthspinner by Anuradha Roy

First published in the UK in 2021; published by HarperVia on July 5, 2022

The Earthspinner is in part a story of forbidden love. More fundamentally, it is a story of creative obsession and prejudice against art that crosses implied boundaries. Elango is a potter, carrying on the tradition of his caste. To make ends meet, he also drives an autorickshaw. His favorite passenger is Zohra, a girl who walks with a limp. Elango falls in love with Zohra but “they belong to tribes that hated each other and he knew they could never be together.” Elango “could not utter what she was, a Muslim. The space between the two was a charnel house of burnt and bloodied human flesh, a giant crack through the earth that was like an open mouth waiting to swallow him.”

Elango dreams of an earthen horse and comes to believe that if he shapes the horse from clay, Zohra will be his. The novel follows Elango as he devotes his free time to creating the horse of his dreams. Zohra’s grandfather, a blind calligrapher, carves into the horse a beautiful poem about riding the freedom of imagination. But Anuradha Roy wants the reader to understand that freedom in India only lives in the imagination. Elango is not free to marry Zohra. Nor is he free to express himself with a horse that does not suit the arbiters of his religion.

Elango’s grandfather once made horses for temples. People who see the horse believe a temple is where it belongs. They do not realize that the poem decorating the horse is written in Urdu, “the language of mullahs,” a desecration of a temple horse — at least in the view of Hindu temple priests.

Elango’s story is narrated by Sara, whose mother is a journalist. As a young girl, Sara learned the craft of pottery from Elango — to the chagrin of neighbors who thought she had no business learning such things.

The story begins and ends in the present. Five years have passed since Elango’s story ended. Everything has changed; the villagers have made new lives; the village has melted into the earth, taking with it the memories of the horrific event that is the novel’s defining moment. Sara remembers her father telling her that “change was the work of the earth spinning, spinning as it always had.”

Sara is studying English literature in England and making pots to relieve her stress. She notes the difference between rural India, where neighbors are nosy, and England, where “curiosity is bad manners.” One of Sara’s friends is experiencing, like Elango, a form of love that is forbidden by her culture.

The collegiate Sara catches up with Elango and becomes an audience to whom he can unburden himself, “a girl who shared his language as well as momentous bits of his past.” She decides to tell his story. Sara emphasizes how he has changed, how life has taken him on an unexpected path. She also assesses how she has changed, solidifying change as one of the novel’s themes, embodied in Sara’s understanding that the cosmos is “hell-bent on doing things we can neither anticipate nor prevent.”

A dog is central to the story, adding further evidence to my conviction that every work of fiction is improved by the addition of a dog. The dog is lost when its owners suffer a carjacking. Elango adopts the dog and it becomes beloved by the village. The dog creates tension for a character who knows that its former owners are searching for him, but the character is convinced that the dog is happy and should not be uprooted again. Uprooting and rebirth are among the novel’s themes. Sara explains that where she comes from, “we have always known that ordinary days can explode without warning, leaving us broken, collecting the scattered pieces of our lives, no clear idea how to start again.”

Religious fanaticism is the story’s darkest theme. Yet Roy makes clear that religion is not necessarily to blame for the fanatics that turn religion into a vehicle for hate. Sara’s father helps her realize that the war between Hindu and Muslim is not about religion at all, but it more like the blood feud that underlies Romeo and Juliet. The story’s most hopeful theme is the possibility of repair and restoration, of fixing what’s broken or learning that we don’t need the broken thing after all.

The Earthspinner might be viewed as an allegory of the teacher and student. It might be viewed as a love story or the story of a young woman’s unrequited (and perhaps unrecognized) love. It might be viewed as an indictment of prejudice in India and the larger world. It might be viewed as a commentary on the challenges and costs of artistic creation. It might be viewed as a reflection on tests of character, how we pass or fail them or fail to recognize them. The Earthspinner is a deceptively simple novel that works on many levels, giving the reader a trove of possibilities to unpack. Like all of Roy’s work, The Earthspinner is worthy of a careful unpacking.

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All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy

First published in Great Britain in 2018; published by Atria Books on November 20, 2018

Abhay Chan, known to most as Myshkin Rozario, finds trees and dogs to be better companions than humans. He is an old man who faces ridicule, yet the reader comes to understand him as eccentric in the best way, shaped by good intentions and disappointment with the human condition. Like everyone, has been shaped by his past. Unlike most, the details of his past have been concealed from him. Only later in life does he appreciate his need to fill in the missing pages.

Myshkin tells the story of his youth, but it is really the story of his mother, Gayatri, who (unlike most Indian women of her time) was raised not to catch a husband but to nurture her gifts for art and music. Gayatri’s father traveled abroad with her until, after his death, her brothers began the task of finding her a husband who was willing to tolerate a sharp-tongued woman who had wasted her youth by crossing oceans. Finding Gayatri a husband meant exhibiting her as livestock while suitors and their families drank tea in the drawing room and inspected her hair. The family’s choice boiled down to the only man who would have her, a Northern Indian twice her age whose scandalous contempt for caste and religion did not overcome the family’s desire to rid themselves of Gayatri.

It is in chapters like those narrating Gayatri’s arranged marriage that Anuradha Roy captures the India so familiar to readers of UK fiction and that so often wins (or is shortlisted for) Booker prizes. It is an India that awards only such freedom to women as self-congratulatory men choose to give them, that refuses to abandon a caste system even as it rebels from British colonizers with grand speeches about the importance of equality and self-determination.

Myshkin recalls a German writer/artist/musician named Walter Spies who appeared in search of Gayatri, having met her years earlier in Bali. Spies is accompanied by Beryl de Zoete, a scholar of dance who once rescued Jewish dancers from Germany and now sees Gayatri as worthy of rescue. Gayatri has felt stifled since Myshkin’s birth, as if the beginning of his life put a stop to the rest of the world, and it is knowledge of that fact that shapes Myshkin’s memories of his childhood.

Indian history is central to the novel in other respects, as well. While mostly hiding in the shadows, Myshkin’s father claims to follow the spiritual leader Mukti Devi in her nonviolent resistance to British rule. Myshkin’s father views Mukti Devi as an exemplar of women’s liberation. Gayatri can only wonder why his enlightened view of women’s role in society does not extend to his own home. Later, Myshkin can only wonder about the fated moment when his mother leaves home without him. From her perspective, Gayatri had no choice: obedience and propriety were the top entries on her personal list of deadly sins.

The novel’s first half sets up Myshkin’s life as a child abandoned by his mother. The story then moves through his father’s efforts to cope with his loss of Gayatri, the impact of World War II on India and on Myshkin’s father, the evil nature of governments that define protest as sedition or homosexuality as a crime, the different attitudes toward women in Indian and Balinese society, and Myshkin’s evolving understanding of his mother. The novel invites a sympathetic response both to Myshkin (who yearns for a lost mother) and Gayatri (who abandons a child to avoid going mad but must live with the maddening consequences of that decision).

A couple of lengthy sections comprised of Gayatri’s letters home create a lull that is the novel’s only misstep. The letters illustrate Gayatri’s growth and they add new insight into Gayatri’s decision to leave her husband, but Gayatri’s anxiety-filled travelogue lacks the immediacy of the narrative that precedes and follows the letters.

One letter accuses someone in Gayatri’s past of “feckless self-indulgence,” a criticism that might seem hypocritical given the choices that Gayatri made. The novel’s value is that it invites the reader to weigh Gayatri’s choice and to consider whether, on balance, it was the right choice to make. I appreciate Roy’s decision to allow the reader to judge Gayatri, or not, rather than insisting that only one judgment is possible.

In any event, judgment is not the point of All The Lives We Never Lived. As the title suggests, all lives involve choices. Each choice sends us on a path that forecloses other paths. With graceful prose and compelling characters, Roy reminds us how the same choices can be both liberating and confining as they lead to unknowable futures and cause unforeseeable consequences.

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