It didn't matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones that you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't decieve with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how the end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, and who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.

In 2002 Roy responded to a contempt notice issued against her by the Indian Supreme Court with an affidavit saying the court's decision to initiate the contempt proceedings based on an unsubstantiated and flawed petition while refusing to inquire into allegations of corruption in military contracting deals pleading an overload of cases indicated a "disquieting inclination" by the court to silence criticism and dissent using the power of contempt. Bush's visit to India calling him a "war criminal". Until made financially secure by the success of her novel The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy worked various jobs including running aerobics classes at five-star hotels in New Delhi.

Roy’s novel became the biggest-selling book by a nonexpatriate Indian author.