Small things big success

Arundhati ROY spent five years in solitude writing a novel

Arundhati ROY spent five years in solitude writing a novel. It was published, it sold millions, it won the Booker Prize for literature and for the past year she has spent most of her time travelling and promoting the book. The author of The God Of Small Things is hot property and she estimates she has been in "60 or 70 places" in the last year. If it's Wednesday, it must be Ireland and Roy is sitting in the Shelbourne Hotel on what she announces will be her last stop on the publicity merry-go-round. Even wearing chunky-soled trainers, Arundhati is tiny - when we shake hands, I feel I'm perilously close to breaking her hand - and a black cotton shirt and jeans conspire to make her look like a rather glamorous teenager. As soon as she opens her mouth, any idea of gaucheness is dispelled; Roy is obviously very intelligent and approaches interviews with an attitude that errs just on the right side of contrariness. She considers questions carefully, with her head to one side, and invariably completely disagrees with me, smiling slightly all the time and ending her answers in a manner that allows for no further probing.

Aware that I am probably the umpteenth journalist to have sat in front of her with a list of questions, I start by asking her whether interviews about her book have differed widely from country to country.

"It's unbelievable how similar the reaction has been worldwide. Everybody always asks me if the book is autobiographical." Chastened I cross that question off the list and instead ask her whether the huge response to her first novel has ever threatened to overwhelm her. "Well if you think about it I'm the only person in the world who really, really knows what this book is and has become. You may have seen the reaction in Ireland, and others in India and so on, but I've seen it everywhere. It makes it easier to deal with," she pauses and laughs before going on, "I don't take all this very seriously." It's a reassuring but at the same time slightly intimidating statement.

It's understandable why journalists worldwide ask Roy whether the book is autobiographical. The book is a hugely visual, almost visceral, tour around one event in a family history, a girl's death, and how everyone else lives, or dies, with the consequences. Much of the story is seen through the eyes of Rahel, a twin born of the broken marriage between beautiful Syrian Christian Ammu from Kerala and a Bengali Hindu, Baba. Roy herself comes from exactly the same ethnic mix, but wearily describes the setting of the book, the Marxist-controlled state of Kerala and the familial similarities as the "starting blocks for fiction". In fact, The God Of Small Things is so dense (some critics say too dense) with lush imagery and magic realist touches, that it is easy to believe the story of Rahel and her twin, Estha, is an act of the imagination. After her own childhood in Kerala, Roy, now 38-years-old, trained and worked as an architect and later wrote screenplays and did production design on a couple of movies. Would we know them here? Roy laughs out loud and says "No, oh no, not at all." She says with more honesty than modesty that she had no idea how important the book was to be; "I thought it was a highly un-important book - I had no perspective on it at all, as I had been within it for too long. I suppose in my biggest dreams I hoped to find a small publisher that would take it."

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FINDING a publisher proved to be no problem - when her friend, Pankaj Mishra sent the manuscript to English literary agent, David Godwin, he caught a plane to Delhi within a week. A bidding war between nine British publishers resulted in a $240,000 deal with HarperCollins, the book sold in huge amounts and the cherry on the pie was the Booker prize last October. The God Of Small Things has been translated into 38 languages but perhaps most interestingly it is extremely popular in India where it has sold more copies than any work of fiction in history. However, Roy describes with resignation how certain begrudgery has haunted the book. "India is a little like I believe Ireland is. People are upset about success outside the country and wonder how you got it. In my case it is all mixed up with the complexity of India itself, I mean, there is a criminal case against me for corrupting public morality and there are also people that come up and hug me in the street for having written this book.

"In fact, it is not really this book, it is the Booker prize. In newspapers my picture is beside some woman who has won the Miss World competition; we are mentioned in the same breath. It's just so stupid."

This does not seem to be a snobbery on Roy's part, more a clear-sighted perception that for some people in her own country, her only importance is that she has done well outside the country, that she is an ambassador for her people. This is one idea Roy has strong views on.

"One of the things I am not is a spokesperson for my country. I speak only for myself - I don't even have rules in my head about the role a writer should play. I am who I am, I'm not representing anything."

This is in answer to a question about the recent nuclear testing in India and Pakistan, a subject she has spoken about in British newspapers recently but doesn't want to comment further on. "It is important for people to speak about it but I want to do it my own way. I am writing something about it now myself and I suppose it will be published. These are such big issues, such complicated things that I don't want to give just a soundbite about it."

This combination of fervour and ethereal vagueness is typical of Roy - she looks genuinely astonished if I ask if this writing will take the form of a book or whether it's for a certain publication. "Not a book no, I'm just writing it. I suppose someone will publish it," she says, blankly. She looks similarly blank when I ask if she is now writing full time and what she is working on. "I don't know what I'm going to do next. People here seem to have a plan for their lives. I have never had a plan," she says, a little indignantly. Even her family life is slightly vague - she admits she lives in New Delhi with her husband, film-maker Pradip Krishen, his two daughters and their two dachshunds and makes frequent trips home, but then interrupts to say, "That makes me sound like a family person and I'm not really. I mean there's a lot of us and we more or less live together."

What she is definite about though, is the fact that the publicity whirl has ended for her, and on her own terms. "You know, you spend five years writing alone, so a year of travelling around and being gregarious is just fine but I was always very clear I would do it for a year and now it is at at an end. I've done as much as I want and I'm happy."

She shakes my hand and smiles as she's leaving and suddenly I know I've asked the same questions as everyone else in the past year. Still, it doesn't really matter, Roy isn't taking us too seriously anyway.

The God Of Small Things is published by Flamingo, price £8.05