I believe I became a writer when, at the age of fifteen, after staying up all night reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, I glanced at the acknowledgements page and saw that she’d thanked somebody who had the same unusual name as mine. I saw myself in a writer for the first time through Roy: a young, brown woman whose life experiences mirrored my own. An unsettled childhood; an unconventional mother. To find my name in her book felt like some kind of augury. I grew up in a small town in India with no library, with one bookstore that only sold Archie comics, Mills & Boon romance paperbacks, and thriller novels by Fredrick Forsyth, Jeffrey Archer, and Sidney Sheldon. Where the only books displayed in people’s drawing rooms were encyclopedias and religious tomes. All the years that I lived at home, until I finally left for good, I clung to Roy’s novel like a safety blanket—I clung to her voice, her characters, to the last page with my name on it. Now, every June or July, I reread The God of Small Things, whose opening lines evoke the monsoon rain with startling, jaw-dropping lyricism. While I find new riches with each read, like a diver searching for pearls, reading the text has become a talismanic ritual. When I feel imposter syndrome creeping up on me, when too many rejections flood my inbox, I turn to the last page of Roy’s novel, place a finger on my name, and keep going.
—Naheed Phiroze Patel, author of Mirror Made of Rain (Unnamed Press, 2022)