ATTENDING Arundhati Roy's press conference and reading at the British Council in Mumbai was quite an entertaining experience. The god of small and big things is clearly unjust. The least he can do is ensure that writers of extraordinary books are ugly in appearance and clumsy in public. Mostly so that others can gain solace (see above item: this week's theme-son). But no, Roy was a picture of prettiness and poise as she addressed a battery of media persons that would have done a prime minister proud. Some remarkably stupid questions were posed but she had the grace and generosity to not mock them. Only one man had her goggling. His question, "Does the title of this book have anything to do with Children of a Lesser God?" At the end of the reading, which she signed off with a heartstoppingly powerful passage, there was a flurry of questions, the answers to two of which really stuck in my memory. One asked: "You say you never re-write a single sentence--are you lying?" Roy answered: "Even if I am, I'm not going to tell you." And the second answer, making that effortless glide from the witty to the sublime, something that characterises her book, was about the passage she'd just read, which had to do with the family's journey in a "skyblue Plymouth, with the sun in its tailfins" to the town for a movie, and their brief bivouac at a level crossing. The question, sound academic question, was: "Where were you really when you wrote this particular passage?" Roy's answer: "In a skyblue Plymouth, with the sun in its tailfins, speeding past young rice-fields and old rubber trees.