The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile

As a novelist, Arundhati Roy is known for her lush language and intricate structure. As a political essayist, her prose is searching and fierce. All of these qualities shine through in the interviews collected by David Barsamian for `The Chequebook & the Cruise Missile’, recorded between 2001 and 2003. Whether discussing her childhood or the problems of translation in a multilingual society, Roy and Barsamian, the producer and host of Alternative Radio, engage in a lively and accessible manner. Speaking candidly and casually, Roy describes her participation in a demonstration against the Indian dam program as ‘absolutely fantastic’. She jokes that her Supreme Court charge for ‘corrupting public morality’ – in the case of her novel `The God of Small Things’ – should have been changed to ‘further corrupting public morality’. She calls on her training as an architect to explain what she means by the ‘physics of power’. Like a house of cards, she argues that ‘unfettered power.cannot go berserk like this and expect to hold it all together.’