We are vessels of desire. We are conditioned to believe that who we are, the vessel that we are, is enough to hold all the desire that bubbles inside us, that we can live out this cosmic blink of a life by bottling it all up, by even refusing to acknowledge the existence of desire, only for the vessel to explode many times through out this short and long life, and to send us on a quest for more vessels to pour that desire. We turn to art. We pour it into colours, printed symbols, sounds. We turn to other sentient beings. We pour it into another human, a nonhuman animal, a tree. We are bottomless, and our desire keeps rising. Sometimes, we realise that we have a choice — our desire doesn’t have to be hidden; it can flow freely. Most times, we are robbed of our choices — our desire is crushed; it appears disgusting to an onlooker. It’s axed down. However, desire is like that heroic little plant that grows from concrete. So long as we exist, we continue to be vessels of desire, regardless of how many ever times it is snuffed. Even if it is put in a mare’s mouth and sent to the unimaginable depths of the ocean.

Murthy, gnarled with the weight of learning, wagging a futile finger at the lust-filled boys in the class and telling them how Lord Shiva’s passions had begun burning up the universe. To calm him and to save the earth, the gods placed his fires in a mare’s mouth, then took the mare to the ocean. Under the water the mare burns quietly still, Murthy had said, it shifts and moves with the waves, it turns on its side and drifts toward the ice caps slowly consuming the ocean, waiting for doomsday, when it will be released during the final deluge.

The characters — Chinna the dog, Elango the potter, Sarayu the chronicler, Usman Alam the blind calligrapher, Devika the reporter, Raghav the geologist, even Mrs Khambatta the neighbour who recites a poem to a dog — together, make a kaleidoscope of a story in Anuradha Roy’s The Earthspinner. They are so broken, so whole, always leaning toward light, lapping it all up with a reverence for life. As the story continues to spin, they come together to make heartbreaking designs and patterns, and show the price that humans pay to love, to create, and to live in peace. They have been touched by loss and grief, and their lives as her potter’s wheel, Anuradha Roy throws stories which travel from an almost village in Deccan Plateau to England, exploring myths, allegories, desire, communal hate (even in the 70’s, the expression ‘go back to Pakistan’ was in use), harmony, limitless longing, and answers the questions of why and how human spirit is indomitable.

The stories zoom out when Sarayu writes about her life in England, and it zooms in when it shifts to Kummarapet, showing fractals after fractals, of lives which are seemingly still on the surface, with bloodcurdling horror throbbing underneath. If the branches of stories are removed, layer after layer, they can still stand as complete stories — a lost dog, a Hindu man falls in love with a Muslim woman, a girl is uprooted from everything that defines her, a myth about a horse… Anuradha Roy deftly weaves their lives together and shows how they are all interconnected. A butterfly lands on a girl’s cheek, igniting a creative spark that can never be extinguished. Not chaos, but shared existence. Among other things which are common among them, displacement is pivotal. Displacement that is unique and universal. When they all lose perspective, when they all have zoomed in too much, a geologist talks about this ancient planet, about how the plates are always shifting, and about the very earth that Elango uses to make his terracotta horse.

My father would have said change was the work of the earth spinning, spinning as it always had.

Stories, in which only one character knows a life-changing truth and the reader is privy to that, make me weep. I bear witness to all the suffering that the characters endure, and I hold the power to change their lives, but I stay stripped of my agency, I watch them make irreversibly wrong decisions, pining for lost opportunities, and walking lost in the labyrinth laid by circumstances. It’s even more devastating when even after the end, it’s just the other character and me who are in possession of the truth that will break hearts for many and reinstate faith for some. Maybe that is why it’s hard to start reading the next book after reading some books. I need some space and time to grieve, to let go of the could-have-been.

I will remember this novel for the sense of wonder it stirred in me, and for Anuradha Roy’s breathtaking writing, storytelling, and imagination. A blurb on the cover reads, ‘This is why you read fiction at all.’ This is truly why you read fiction like The Earthspinner. To feel human. To feel alive. To share loss and desire and longing and grief. To be comforted by stories. To be reminded of life’s brevity. To learn about ways to live it. To choose to live it in our own ways.