The Question I Wish I Asked Ms Roy

Two weeks ago when Arundhati Roy floated into a room in London to enthusiastic applause, I sat and gaped like a star-struck schoolboy. There she was, the woman who wrote the book that I've loved more than almost every other book I've read. The woman who achieved Big Things with the God of Small Things. There she was, a vision in lime green, glowing with the sort of grace and charisma that turns nearly-thirty-year-old men into, well, star-struck schoolboys.

Over the next hour, words seemed to come dancing out of her mouth in sentences so delicious you could almost eat them. Sentences that weren't anywhere near as clumsy (and creepy) as that last one. But anyway... my point is, if I hadn't felt like I suddenly needed to learn the English language again (starting with the alphabet), and if I had gathered enough courage to ask for the microphone, and if I had managed to close my mouth and re-open it long enough to actually speak in a coherent manner, and if I could have decided in my head exactly how I was going to address her; if all these things actually happened (and is it any surprise that they didn't?) then this is what I would have asked:

Dear Arundhati/Ms Roy/Mrs Roy/Ma'am,

If you don't mind, I'd like to read a line from a book you might recognise (and at that point I would have held up my copy of The God of Small Things which I had taken along specially for the occasion).

'Ammu,’ Chacko said, his voice steady and deliberately casual, ‘is it at all possible for you to prevent your washed-up cynicism from completely colouring everything?'

I'm not suggesting, of course, that anything you said here today contained any cynicism, whether washed-up or of any other variety. I am worried, though, that cynicism may turn out to be the only natural response to the events taking place in that incredible country we call home. To the point where it becomes a sort of defense mechanism. I worry that our fierce love for India will somehow morph into an equally fierce disenchantment. And that we will, like Ammu, fail to see all that is still truly magical about it. I worry that we will reach a stage where we believe our Humpty Dumpty Broken Republic will never be put together again. That what we've lost will never be recovered.
That we will never again know Love, Hope, Infinite Joy.

Because is it even possible for a country to unsell its soul?

PS- I love you.