The God of Small Things: Arundhati Roy’s Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism

When interviewed about her best-selling novel The God of Small Things shortly after winning the Booker Prize in 1997, Arundhati Roy made the point that her work had been conceived as a single defining image, and subsequently written out of sequence: ‘‘I didn’t start with the first chapter or end with the last . . . . I actually started writing with a single image in my head: the sky blue Plymouth [car] with two twins inside it, a Marxist procession surrounding it. . . . [The story] just developed from there’’. And, true to Roy’s non-linear method, this ‘‘single image’’ is divided across the second chapter of the novel, forming the centre-piece of a larger episode which recounts a family outing to Cochin in the southern Indian state of Kerala, during which Roy’s protagonists, middle-class Syrian Christians who run a failing pickle-factory, find their car surrounded by a trade-union demonstration at a rural level-crossing: