'Arundhati did not write for money'
Chindu Sreedharan
When the phone rang, Mary Roy heard it almost immediately.
What else could it be at
3 am in the morning?
It must be about Arundhati.
It was.
"I was fast asleep. Arundhati just
told
me she was the Booker choice," the proud
mother told Rediff On
The NeT in a telephone interview from Kottayam, Kerala.
"It was a brief conversation. She
had her husband (Pradeep Kishen) with her and was talking
from a crowded pressroom."
How, we ask that cliched question, did it feel to hear
the news?
"How else but happy?" Mary Roy answered, "And very, very proud! I love her
very much. I love her the same -- not more, not less because of it!"
The news, in reality, was not much of
a surprise to the winner's mother.
"In the past few weeks, India was
being impeded by bookie ratings -- Star News was showing it every
day," she said. (Prannoy Roy, the Star Newscaster, incidentally, is Arundhati's first cousin.)
"Frankly," she continued, "I did not take
it (the bookie business) seriously.
I think of it as a lot of nonsense. They are
equating writing with horse racing. I don't like it at all.
Arundhati is serious
about her book -- she did not write for money."
EARLIER INTERVIEW:
'Ammu may have some similarities to me, but she is not Mary Roy'
|