Like the first listen to a Beatles album, every serious reader of Indian fiction in English has their story of how they came to Arundhati Roy​’s The God of Small Things. For me it was in school, when the entire country was applauding her Booker Prize win in 1997. A bored substitute teacher held a poll for my class which included the question, ​“Who will be the next Arundhati Roy?” (It wasn’t me.) At sixteen, I tried reading the book only to come away utterly baffled by its profusion of difficult (to me) Syrian Christian names. The little snot that I was, I told myself the book was ​“exotic”. It was only when I read it again in college in the US that I saw that what I had deemed ​“exotic” was actually Roy’s lyrical evocation of the natural world — something that felt foreign (and perhaps even threatening) to me as an urban reader who had never stopped to think about birds, spiders, ants, fish, and how they, in turn, think of us.

If most novels treat nature as mere backdrop, The God of Small Things is one of the few books that is not only enveloped by its setting — the ​“slushgreen” hamlet of Ayemenem in Kerala — but one in which the author lavishes enormous attention on small, living things. Towards the end of the book, two lovers laugh sympathetically at the machinations of a spider on a wall who ​“camouflage[s] himself by covering his body with bits of rubbish”. This itself would be a bravura piece of noticing but Roy telescopes down even further, describing the rubbish, which includes ​“a sliver of wasp wing. Part of a cobweb. Dust. Leaf rot. The empty thorax of a dead bee”. The discarded husks of the natural world we never see. But the best part of this scene is how the spider, who the lovers dub ​“Lord Rubbish”, responds to the presence of humans. When the lovers playfully offer the spider ​“a flake of garlic skin” to add to his camouflage, the spider, Roy writes, not only rejects the offering, but, as if in a fit of pique, sheds his entire armour, remaining in ​“this suicidal state of disdainful undress” for a few days. 

I have no idea if spiders react this way, but the more important thing is that Roy perceives ​“Lord Rubbish” on the same plane as her human characters — as a being with its own personality and capable of rejecting humans. How refreshing a view this is in a human-centric society! We know now from Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, that she herself spent countless hours as a child running amok in the jungly greenery of Ayemenem; nature was her escape from a violent family life. The God of Small Things is perhaps an act of veneration for the small creatures that gave her great solace in a time of need.