So she left home at 16, lived in a tin-hut Delhi slum, foraging for beer bottles she could wash and sell on rubbish tips. From there, she studied architecture, but quickly decided it wasn't for her.
"By the time I was in my third year I knew that I would never be a practising architect. Building houses for people who already had them? And then I became quite interested in how Third World cities are planned and how 70 per cent of the people in the cities are made illegal by the laws of the city and land use. In the way you'll decide how land use works and what is legal and what is illegal and how a person who's selling cigarettes from a little box on the street is made illegal so he's at the mercy of the policeman at any time, how slums are illegal."
Both on the page and in life, Roy has a romantic's awareness of how to use image and poetry to point out hypocrisy. While the Gujarat region burned, while the mass murder of Muslims was taking place in another corner of India, she was being sentenced by the supreme court, this small, gamine woman in her pink sari, and the potency was not lost on her.
"The supreme court," she says, "acted against me suo moto, which means the court itself took on a case against me. It can do that to anyone it wants to ... but why me? For what reason? Am I the most dangerous criminal?"
"By the time I was in my third year I knew that I would never be a practising architect. Building houses for people who already had them? And then I became quite interested in how Third World cities are planned and how 70 per cent of the people in the cities are made illegal by the laws of the city and land use. In the way you'll decide how land use works and what is legal and what is illegal and how a person who's selling cigarettes from a little box on the street is made illegal so he's at the mercy of the policeman at any time, how slums are illegal."
Both on the page and in life, Roy has a romantic's awareness of how to use image and poetry to point out hypocrisy. While the Gujarat region burned, while the mass murder of Muslims was taking place in another corner of India, she was being sentenced by the supreme court, this small, gamine woman in her pink sari, and the potency was not lost on her.
"The supreme court," she says, "acted against me suo moto, which means the court itself took on a case against me. It can do that to anyone it wants to ... but why me? For what reason? Am I the most dangerous criminal?"