First lines of 'God of Small Things' - May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees.

(It took her 20 years to write a second.) Published in 1997, it centres on a family living in Ayemenem, a village in Kerala, a southern state. Its timeline zigzags between the 1960s and 1990s.

But everything that happens in the novel actually did not happen in real life. Ayemenem is not a fictional place. It is an actual village where we all lived in the 1960s. The house we lived in is ...

Determined not to get trapped in a miserable marriage, Roy left her home village of Ayemenem (the same village where The God of Small Things is set) at the age of 16 to study architecture in Delhi.

The collusion of the mainstream media with this regime has drawn a screen over the real situation our country is in.