Arundhati Roy, the Not-So-Reluctant Renegade
“Much of the way I think is by default,” she said. “Nobody paid enough attention to me to indoctrinate me.” By the time she was sent to Lawrence, a boarding school founded by a British Army officer (motto: “Never Give In”), it was perhaps too late for indoctrination. Roy, who was 10, says the only thing she remembers about Lawrence was becoming obsessed with running. Her brother, who heads a seafood-export business in Kerala, recalls her time there differently. “When she was in middle school, she was quite popular among the senior boys,” he told me, laughing. “She was also a prefect and a tremendous debater.”
Roy concedes that boarding school had its uses. “It made it easier to light out when I did,” she said. The child of what was considered a disreputable marriage and an even more disgraceful divorce, Roy was expected to have suitably modest ambitions. Her future prospects were summed up by the first college she was placed in; it was run by nuns and offered secretarial training. At 16, Roy instead moved to Delhi to study at the School of Planning and Architecture.
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