Arundhati Roy on her fugitive childhood: ‘My knees were full of scars and cuts – a sign of my wild, imperfect, fatherless life’

When war broke out between India and China, the author and her brother were taken by their mother on a chaotic journey from hill station squat to an eccentric household in Kerala. Would they ever find a safe space?A teacher was what my mother had always wanted to be, what she was qualified to be. During the years she was married and living with our father, who had a job as an assistant manager on a remote tea estate in Assam, the dream of pursuing a career of any kind atrophied and fell away. It was rekindled (as nightmare more than dream) when she realised that her husband, like many young men who worked on lonely tea estates, was hopelessly addicted to alcohol.When war broke out between India and China in October 1962, women and children were evacuated from border districts. We moved to Calcutta. Once we got there, my mother decided that she would not return to Assam. From Calcutta we travelled across the country, all the way south to Ootacamund – Ooty – a small hill station in the state of Tamil Nadu. My brother, LKC – Lalith Kumar Christopher Roy – was four and a half years old, and I was a month away from my third birthday. We did not see or hear from our father again until we were in our 20s. Continue reading...

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