Arundhati Roy, the Goddess of Greater Causes

She has the charm of a blessing, sparkling eyes, and moves like a teenager with a smile to dispel the haze of pessimism, thus lightening the mood.

I came across Arundhati Roy by pure chance in Milan, where I was working as a scientist, a postdoc, in a cancer research institute, and had taken an American girl's room in an apartment shared with a Neapolitan. This was one of the first weekends I was far from my known surroundings. To escape boredom, I went in search of a book. There, in the living room, on a bookshelf, "God of Small Things" caught my eye. Arundhati Roy's smile on the back of the book helped me flip through the pages and start reading the first few lines.

The content was darker than what had the author's smile announced. Ammu is a single mom raising her two children. Rahel, a girl, and Estha, a boy, never parted since they shared the womb as fraternal twins. The reader is immersed in the drama from the first pages. In the tragedy of the untouchables, the gods, crushed in all their splendor, are deaf to the prayers.

In the intricate weaving of the author's stitches, the story carries us along its vertiginous falls and soars. One of the many scenes that moved me most is when, after a traumatic experience central to the narrative, the young Estha is sitting alone on the train, off for a destination he neither chose nor wanted. He's going to find his father. The story touched me probably also because it brought me back to my own forgotten past. I saw myself alone in the airport, on my way to the unknown world. I was suspended in the present moment, without a past or any future, alone, facing the unknown. I was about to be born into another world. I wondered whether Estha, as I was the day before my departure, had fallen asleep clinging to his mother's hand, which he would have held as an unconscious pleading to stay, in order not to lose her, in order not to fall into the precipice of the unknown and by way of farewell. Such relentless torment and anguish of life persist, haunting an individual until their final breath.

That's how I first encountered Arundhati Roy through "God of Small Things" nearly two decades ago. Beyond the narrative, what lingers are the sensations more than the words. Amidst aches and pains, joy and sorrows, ease and discomfort, colors and scents, Roy unveils fundamental aspects of our humanity. Empathy emerges as the foundational key to understanding rather than rushing to judge, condemn, and execute. Reading Arundhati becomes a sensory journey into the core of our shared humanity.

Roy crossed my road again, this time on a screen, defending causes far more noble than promoting a novel. She addressed the bankruptcy of democracy, highlighting how elites worldwide flout common rules, freely traversing borders, and essentially crafting a realm beyond nations; a world that, in essence, belongs to them.

Roy disrupts our idyllic visions of unshakeable democracy, sounding the alarm on its inherent fragility. Her clarion call resonates with the urgent truth that democracy is not a static state but a continual battleground—requiring vigilant and constant defense. It is Sisyphus's eternal struggle rather than Perseus decapitating Medusa once and for all. Roy inquires what we have done with democracy. How have we transformed it? What will happen when democracy is worn out and abused, hollowed out and meaningless? What will happen when each of its institutions has "metastasized" into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy, by merging with the free market, has become a predatory organism with a narrow vision, restricted solely to the idea of maximizing profit? Is it possible to reverse this process?

Looking back over the last ten years, from Moody in India to Trump in the US, from Brexit to war in Ukraine and endless tragedies in the Middle East, her calls echo. She is the little Colibri trying to save the forest, setting an example for each and every one of us to do our part.

With unwavering optimism, she asserts, "another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day we can hear her breathing".