Prer NUN sea ayshun.Rej-Oice in the Lo-Ord Or-OrlwaysAnd again I say rej-Oice,RejOiceRejOiceAnd again I say rej-Oice.Estha's full name was Esthappan Yako Rahel's was Rahel. For the time being they had no surname because Ammu was considering reverting to her maiden name, though she said that choosing between her husband's name and her father's name didn't give a woman much of a choice.Estha was wearing his beige and pointy shoes and his Elvis puff His Special Outing Puff. His favourite Elvis song was "Party"."Some people like to rock, some people like to roll," he would croon, when nobody was watching, strumming a badminton racquet, curling his lip like Elvis, "But moonin' and a-groonin' gonna satisfy mah soul, less have a pardy ..."Estha had slanting, sleepy eyes and his new front teeth were still uneven at the ends. Rahel's new teeth were waiting inside her gums, like words in a pen. It puzzled everybody that an 18-minute age difference could cause such a discrepancy in front-tooth timing.. Arundhati Roy's victory at last night's Booker Prize ceremony rounds off one of the most amazing stories in modern publishing.

At the start of the decade, Roy - an architecture graduate born in 1960 in the Syrian Christian community of Kerala in India's deep south - gave up her work as a screenwriter and designer in the Indian film business to concentrate on her first novel. At that stage, she had no agent, no publisher and no advance. Last year, the completed manuscript reached Pankaj Mishra in Delhi, now a dynamic agent but then an editor with the local branch of HarperCollins. Indian rights to The God of Small Things were sold for pounds 2500, a sum that sounds pitiable by Western standards, but set a record for a subcontinental novel. Delhi newspapers developed an obsessive interest in Roy's looks, her background, her attitudes. The sometimes scary self-belief of this slight but formidable woman was quickly tested. The British agent, David Godwin, had read the manuscript at last year's Frankfurt book fair Immediately, he flew out to Delhi to find Roy.

Soon he had secured a British advance of pounds 150,000 from Harper Collins's Flamingo imprint. Before long, overseas deals had trebled that sum.Soon after the Booker shortlist was announced, Roy the newcomer emerged as favourite ahead of three distinguished mid-career novelists: Bernard MacLaverty, Jim Crace and Tim Parks. Last night (for once) the ante-post tip did come out in front.Does The God of Small Things deserve all the fuss? Certainly, although fans of the conventionally picturesque Indian novel in English have not always found it it to their Raj-trained taste. Yes, it deals with the tragic upshot of a cross-cultural liaison between a Christian woman, Ammu, and a low-caste Hindu man in the lush, watery - and Communist-run - state of Kerala. But the sharp and shrewd wit and wordplay of Ammu's twins Rahel and Estha - with their doomed half-English cousin, Sophie Mol - drag this landscape into an unsettling new world of pop songs, radio jingles and advertising slogans.