The truth is that she does occupy a unique place internationally, as popular in the Western press, as she is at home, valued as "an authentic third world voice", yet one that carries all the glamour of the Booker. Roy, we feel, as we read her essays, knows at first hand the impact of corporate globalisation. She is coming from grassroots, a village girl (if a wealthy one) who knows what it's like to wash bottles for a living.
"There is no other place in India like Kerala," Roy says of the place where she grew up, and in which she set "The God of Small Things". "It's just completely different from everywhere else. It's very Marxist and has 100 percent literacy; it also has a lot of terrible things about it: it's very parochial, very class-based, very claustrophobic. When I grew up I only ever dreamt of escaping, of just getting out. It was a nightmare, so anybody who accuses me of romanticising villages, doesn't know where I grew up."
Hers was a turbulent childhood. Her mother, a Syrian Christian, an activist in her own right, divorced her father, a Bengali tea-plantation owner, taking the case all the way to the supreme court, in order to win the right for a divorced woman to share in the proceeds of her husband's estate. "I think that the first few years of my life were so unconventional because of her. She used to tell me from the time I was three, that, 'You have to leave when you're 18 years old, get out, I'm not looking after you'. Every other Indian woman is told, you'll get married, but it just didn't happen to me. She told me no one was going to marry me. That I would have to look after myself, and even if I did get married, not to think I could depend on a man to look after me. I was terrorised by it, actually. I really thought I'd be on the street and all that."
"There is no other place in India like Kerala," Roy says of the place where she grew up, and in which she set "The God of Small Things". "It's just completely different from everywhere else. It's very Marxist and has 100 percent literacy; it also has a lot of terrible things about it: it's very parochial, very class-based, very claustrophobic. When I grew up I only ever dreamt of escaping, of just getting out. It was a nightmare, so anybody who accuses me of romanticising villages, doesn't know where I grew up."
Hers was a turbulent childhood. Her mother, a Syrian Christian, an activist in her own right, divorced her father, a Bengali tea-plantation owner, taking the case all the way to the supreme court, in order to win the right for a divorced woman to share in the proceeds of her husband's estate. "I think that the first few years of my life were so unconventional because of her. She used to tell me from the time I was three, that, 'You have to leave when you're 18 years old, get out, I'm not looking after you'. Every other Indian woman is told, you'll get married, but it just didn't happen to me. She told me no one was going to marry me. That I would have to look after myself, and even if I did get married, not to think I could depend on a man to look after me. I was terrorised by it, actually. I really thought I'd be on the street and all that."