Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) was one of the most successful Indian novels of recent decades, reaching a significant audience both in India and abroad. Its widespread reception in the Anglophone world also sparked considerable controversy, especially in regard to the political implications of the work. Predictably, hardline Communists were affronted by Roy's presentation of Comrade K. M. N. Pillai, the novel's local Party official, and doctrinaire leftists in general chided her for her lack of practical commitment to the struggle. Less simplistic analysts, however, recognised that Roy's fiction was not a programmatic roman engagé but a poetic and emotive evocation of memory, desire and loss, as well as an historically situated study of the social and psychological dynamics of racial, caste and gender power relations. For such analysts, the primary questions raised by the work concerned Roy's relative success in balancing aesthetic and thematic concerns; the extent to which she resisted or surrendered to the temptations of exoticism or sentimentality; the nature of the interconnections among the thematic strands of race, caste and gender; and the implications and validity of her analysis of the problems presented in the novel. If Roy is approached as a fabulist who engages the differential times of becoming-other and invents a people to come, all of these issues emerge in a configuration that suggests an integration of aesthetic, thematic, historical and social concerns. It is a story of the small-scale suffering of large-scale history, a tale of trauma, unhealed wounds and the faintest glimmer of hope.