Arundhati Roy recalls the silent hours spent as a child catching fish on the hot, grey-green rivers of her native Kerala. She grew up in India's lush and sweltering deep south, among the palm-fringed backwaters that feed into the Arabian sea. "So many hours of silence were a great lesson to a young child, four or five years old. You were alone with the sky and the trees and the fish and the insects - not just doing baby things. There was a huge wisdom to be learned from that."
She may need to draw deeply on that wisdom to cope with the clamour sparked by her first novel, The God Of Small Things, which has turned this one-time architecture student, screenwriter and aerobics instructor into the talk of literary salons the world over, not least since she won the Booker Prize this week.
It has been proclaimed a masterpiece by prominent voices in the publishing world. Within six weeks of its completion last year, the novel unleashed a fierce bidding war between nine British publishers - HarperCollins finally won the race with a $240,000 deal (Random House in New York secured US rights with $160,000) - and was sold to 17 other countries. Global advances, including the translation rights into more than a dozen languages, total a staggering one million dollars.
The hype lavished on the novel quickly marked Roy down as "A Suitable Girl", after Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, which earned its $400,000 advance many times over within a year of its publication in 1993. Roy, a 37year-old woman, was muscling in on what was, until now, largely a fraternity of younger, internationally-known and prize-winning Indian authors writing in English: Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, Upamanyu Chatterjee, I Allan Sealy, Shashi Tharoor.
Yet The God Of Small Things is distinguished not only by its author's sex, but by its rural, southern backdrop and only oblique engagement with history or with India as a theme.
Before the novel's publication in New Delhi in April (the first print-run of 5,000 copies sold out within six days; A Suitable Boy's initial run, by comparison, took six months to sell), Roy went into hiding from the "extremes of adoration or hostility" that had little to do with a book few people had yet read and everything to do with the unheard-of sums of money being lavished on it.
She refused social invitations ("I'm not going to perform like some flea") and retreated to the apartment in New Delhi she shares with her husband, the filmmaker and environmentalist Pradip Krishen, his two teenage daughters from a previous marriage, Pia and Mithva, and their two dachshunds.
Roy has something of a reputation for sticking her neck out - notably when she crossed swords with British Channel 4's influential commissioning editor Farrukh Dhondy over the 1994 film Bandit Queen, after the film's subject, the onetime outlaw Phoolan Devi, tried to block its release through the courts. Roy argued for Devi:
"You don't have the right to reconstruct the rape of a living woman without her consent. It's not something a woman wants to have restaged, which people buy a ticket to come and watch."
Her habit of speaking her mind and swearing openly, not to mention her sartorial waywardness (she has been known to dress down for formal occasions), have led the Indian media to label her independent, arrogant, a rebel and a poseur. "There's a great suspicion in India of success," she says, "though it's not entirely a bad thing." Roy hints that she might even feel the same way about other people's successes, "but I'm not happy about being the butt of it. Some people think you must be pandering to Western tastes, that you've manipulated something."
The novel was first championed by a young editor in New Delhi, Pankaj Mishra, then with HarperCollins India, who had been told about Roy's manuscript by a mutual friend. Mishra secured her an offer of the largest Indian advance for fiction to date - 125,000 rupees, about $3,400 (publishers' advances are still a rarity in India, hence the relatively low fee by Western standards). "It was big for India, but considering the time it took to write the book, it is a joke," says Roy. "It's less than a sweeper's wage."
Mishra - who regards The God Of Small Things as the "biggest novel since Midnight's Children" - says: "Arundhati had little notion of what the market required. She created something original, with prose too lively and technically experimental to have been geared to fit a niche." He sent a manuscript to the London literary agent David Godwin, who caught a plane to Delhi within the week. His precipitate enthusiasm helped stoke the auction fever.
Roy found it "a bit fishy, this guy turning up", but she soon came round. "I trusted someone who flies to a place he's never been to, just on the strength of reading something he liked. After that, it was just magic."
The novel is set in Ayemenem, Kerala, the Marxist-controlled state where Roy grew up (the party came to power in 1957). Roy describes it as a "strange place where all the world's great religions coincide: Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Marxism, which is another religion. It's a peculiar mix of extreme progressiveness and extreme parochialism. That's what's fascinating. You boil it all down, and what's left is human nature. What's left is the need to make human distinctions, and then go to war over them."
Most of the novel's action takes place over two weeks in 1969, amid rising panic among the landlords at how communism and the spreading Naxalite rebellion in West Bengal are unsettling the ancient caste system. The book follows the experiences of a pair of seven-year-old "two-egg twins", the "Stick Insect" Rahel and her brother Estha with his "Elvis puff", who witness the death by drowning of their half-English cousin and become innocent accomplices in their divorced mother Ammu's doomed affair with an Untouchable man, Velutha.
Ammu belongs to Kerala's Syrian Christian community in which Roy grew up (along with 20 per cent of Kerala's vast population). Roy describes the community as "Caste Christians" for sharing their Hindu neighbours' revulsion at Untouchability. Velutha is a Paravan - the lowest of the Untouchables - expected to spend his days working as a toddy-tapper, taking the sap from palm and coconut trees for making alcohol, despite his skills as a wood-carver.
Ammu and Velutha's passion breaches what the novel describes as the "Love Laws", those manmade rules that constrain sexuality and lay down "who should be loved, and how. And how much. . . Both Ammu and Velutha are external to their communities, outcasts to their castes," explains Roy. "A Paravan who shouldn't have been a carpenter; a woman who shouldn't have married an outsider. The price they pay is a terrible one."
Her own parents divorced when she was one. Her mother had "married out" to a Bengali Hindu. "I didn't know my father - I met him only recently. My mother doesn't talk about him. He's never been part of my life. I don't have feelings of great loss or affection."
Aspects of her early life find echoes in the novel. Roy and her elder brother Lalith were, like the "doomed fatherless waifs, halfHindu hybrids" of the novel, looked down upon for having a Hindu father. Their mother, Mary Roy, was ostracised - like Ammu in the novel - for being the worst combination of three evils: "a divorced daughter from an intercommunity love marriage".
There is an overpowering feeling of foreboding in the novel, of the children's vulnerability in a capricious world. As Estha concludes after a chilling episode in which he is sexually abused by the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man at a screening of The Sound Of Music: "Anything could happen to anyone."
"The whole book is about that," says Roy. "You either have a closed family - ammu, baba (mother, father), baby, and everyone having picnics - or a family so broken up that the world comes in; there are so many holes in the armour."
She says she always hated anyone telling her what to do. "One lesson my mother taught me from age three was: you're on your own, there's no one to protect you or look after you. It was a lesson I learned quickly, and I'm very grateful for it. In the long run, it had a pretty good effect. When I look at people of my age, from my community, they've all got safe husbands and big tea estates. I wouldn't want to be them."
Roy left home ("I was chucked out") at 16 to attend the Delhi School of Architecture. Delhi was a shock. "In Kerala, Marxism is everywhere. When I first came north, it was like entering another country. It's a very savage society. Kerala is much more egalitarian. Marxism gave the poor man dignity, if nothing else. It did a lot of good - 40 years after voting in the Marxists, the state boasts almost 100 per cent literacy. It was very shocking, the way people behaved here in Delhi, the way they treated servants."
The book is full of ironic stabs at bigotry and hypocrisy.
It might be objected that so much wife-beating, paedophilia and childhood trauma in one novel is laying it on a bit thick. "Oh, but there's so much of it in life," says Roy. "I've seen so much of it, growing up unprotected, with a fear of the world, without this safe mummy-daddy bit. There's no safety in families, not even in privileged middle-class homes. Whenever you go to a small town, if you're open to hearing what happens to people, it's frightening. I'd say most of the stuff in my book's normal. It's very standard. It isn't to do with geography; it happens everywhere."
The novel's emotional power is matched by a sexual explicitness unusual in English-language Indian fiction. "People are very tentative when they write directly about sex. You're very vulnerable. But you shouldn't be frightened of feeling. It's not just sex. In the entire book, one addresses emotion, which is very risky - there's no safety net. You could fall flat on your face.
When Roy's editor, Mishra, quit HarperCollins India, Roy asked to be let out of her contract in India. "I felt a sense of loyalty - he'd flagged the whole thing." The publisher agreed, and The God Of Small Things became the launch title of a new publishing company, IndiaInk, run by two friends: journalist Tarun Tejpal and photographer Sanjeev Saith. She claims to have "no financial or legal links" with IndiaInk, but saw it as a "wonderful opportunity to have some fun" while keeping tight control of the design and the "small things".
"It's important to be published first here. It's not just great national pride - this is where I live." She also insists she had no reader in mind, and has no intention of glossing her novel for Western consumption. "American publishers said I should explain more, that I was introducing people to `alien territory'. I said, `alien for whom?' I wouldn't open an Updike and want him to explain some American gizmo."
The God Of Small Things is published by Flamingo (HarperCollins).