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Arundhati Roy







winds, rivers & rain











THE AUTHOR OF "THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS"

TALKS ABOUT INDIA, THE OBSCENITY CHARGE SHE FACES
AND HOW WRITING IS LIKE ARCHITECTURE.




BY REENA JANA | she claims she never rewrites or revises. Her first novel, "The God of Small Things," has just won the
English-speaking world's most premier honor, the Booker Prize, is published
in more than 20 nations, has hit No. 1 on the Sunday Times of London's
bestseller list and is climbing the New York Times list. It has earned her in excess of $1 million so far and international media attention as she faces obscenity charges in her native India for a sensual description of inter-caste lovemaking that serves as the novel's coda. And beyond all this, she's good. Real good. Butt-kicking good. So good, in fact, that John Updike, when reviewing "The God of Small Things" for the New Yorker, compares her mind-boggling debut to that of Tiger Woods.


She's Arundhati Roy, and she's remarkably tiny -- hovering around 5-foot-2 -- despite the black platform shoes she's wearing and new literary lioness persona. An explosion of curly black hair frames her face, which showcases nearly childlike, saucer eyes and cheekbones that erupt the moment she talks or smiles. Now in her mid-30s, Roy grew up in Kerala, the Marxist Indian state in which "The God of Small Things" is set. The novel is a vertiginously poetic tale of Indian boy-and-girl twins, Estha and Rahel, and their family's tragedies; the story's fulcrum is the death of their 9-year-old half-British cousin, Sophie Mol, visiting them on holiday.


The daughter of a Syrian Christian mother, a divorcee who managed a tea plantation (just like the character of Ammu in Roy's novel), Roy didn't attend school until she was 10. "I was my mother's guinea pig," she explains. "She started her own school, and I was her first student." As a teenager, Roy went on to attend boarding school in southern India and wound up at Delhi's School of Planning and Architecture. And now, after years of supporting herself as an aerobics instructor in New Delhi, she's one of the world's most celebrated novelists. We forgive her for not rewriting or revising "The God of Small Things." Thank God she didn't. Where would the world be without such a display of raw gifts for simile and metaphor, rhythm and lyric? Without Roy's dizzying microcosm of modern India? Without such an honest and wildly creative (her word plays would drive William Safire and any self-respecting dictionary reader mad) expression of human yearning and joy? Let's not think about a world without "The God of Small Things." Let's ask Roy about the world with it.


Next page: There is no India.