By slowly becoming everything.” Clearly, Roy’s scattershot narrative is deliberate it reflects the fragmentation of the world around us. “How to tell a shattered story?” one of the characters reads in his lover’s notebook towards the end, in a statement that also appears on the cover. What links the baby and the woman is left behind, to be continued much later in the novel. After a couple of pages, the scene cuts off and we switch point of view again, this time to the woman’s ex-husband. The woman’s interior monologue descends further and further into the surreal, as alligators, lizards and a “neocon newt” crowd into the classroom. “Evil Weevils always make the cut,” says some graffiti on the weevil’s classroom wall. But the woman is dreaming about a weevil teaching ethics and quoting a contemporary philosopher on why we should never rely on pity. The reader is eager to leave the owl’s point of view and move into the woman’s mind we’ve heard about her and this baby already, and we want to understand what is going to happen to them. This scene seemed to me to sum up the unique flavour of the novel: an owl is looking through a window inside the room, a woman is lying with a sleeping baby she has kidnapped. Indeed, from time to time the birds and the beetles become as important as the people in this narrative. Here is a trans woman from Delhi, here is a man from an untouchable background passing himself off as a Muslim, here is a government official retired from a post in Kabul, here is a resistance fighter in Kashmir, here is a woman in the Maoist rebellion in Bastar, here is a rebellious woman who kidnaps an abandoned baby, and more. A rundhati Roy’s second novel is not just one story, but many.
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