Arundhati Roy sketched her Booker-winning novel like a building before writing it
Arundhati Roy bought a computer in New Delhi in 1992, wanting work she could do alone, and did not realise at first she was writing a novel. Four years later she had The God of Small Things, which brought a £500,000 advance, sold in 21 countries and took the 1997 Booker Prize.
Before fiction, Roy had worked in film, writing screenplays such as Electric Moon. Tired of collaboration, she taught herself the new machine and spent the first months just playing before the book took hold. She kept it secret from friends and from her husband, Pradip Krishen, worried that talking about it would drain the story. She wrote out of sequence, never starting at chapter one, and has said she did not rewrite a single sentence, although arranging the plot took time.
Her architecture training shaped the result. One morning she drew the plot as a series of sketches and suddenly saw what she was building. She told Salon in 1997 that buildings repeat motifs, curves and patterns that make people feel at home, and that words, punctuation and the look of a paragraph on the page could work the same way. The title arrived only as the manuscript was going to press, borrowed from one of its chapters.
The story jumps between 1969 and 1993. Fraternal twins Estha and Rahel live with their divorced mother, Ammu, in her family's house in Ayemenem, Kerala, alongside a proud Oxford-educated uncle who runs the family pickle factory. A visit from their half-English cousin Sophie ends in tragedy, and a false accusation against Velutha, a kind carpenter from an untouchable caste, tears the family apart. Caste, colonial legacy and politics in 1960s Kerala sit at its centre, and it is now a standard text of postcolonial literature.
Roy has called the book semi-autobiographical, drawing on her own childhood in the Kerala village of Aymanam. Ammu was modelled partly on her mother, Mary Roy, and Pappachi on her grandfather. The HarperCollins editor Pankaj Mishra was so excited by the manuscript that he broke off a train journey to phone her. Her agent, David Godwin, flew to India on impulse, signed her, and auctioned the rights for $250,000 in Britain and $160,000 to Random House in New York.
Source: The God of Small Things
