Arundhati Roy: the literary canary in India's coalmine She may have returned to publishing fiction after a two decade hiatus, but Indian writer Arundhati Roy says she has no plans to sheath her polemical sword anytime soon in a world where the vulnerable are still being "smashed". Sitting in a cafe in the bowels of Old Delhi's labyrinthine streets on a chilly winter's afternoon, the 56-year-old still simmers with the kind of fiery political rhetoric that has made her one of her homeland's harshest modern day critics.