There’s a character in Anuradha Roy’s novel ‘Sleeping on Jupiter’. He’s mad, has no money, sleeps wherever he can find shelter. He cultivates a twig, plants it in the sand by the ocean, waters it with seawater, moves it to higher ground when the tide comes in and waves threaten his ‘plant’.
And then there’s another of her characters, the stallholder Johnny Topo.
The other day he had been gazing at the madman watering his dry twig and then making his day-long sorties into the water when he had abandoned his stall and printed off in daft pursuit. He wasn’t thinking, he hadn’t planned it, it was the end of a tiring stint, almost night, and there he was, racing the lunatic into the froth and back again, shouting nonsense, and then the two of them had laughed like hyenas and pissed into the sea side by side.
She’s a special talent, Anuradha….