If Ayemenem were really as lush, magical, and dreamlike as some reviewers of The God of Small Things would have us believe, it would have to give up its name.
Because Ayemenem, unlike Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Macondo or William Faulkner's Yoknapa-tawpha County, is a real place. The peculiarities of life there that inspired Arundhati Roy will continue well after the clamour around her novel dies down – witness the obscenity charges pending in another tiny Kerala town.
It would be easy to dismiss the lawsuit as another plot twist in Ms Roy's Cinderella story. But this complaint does accomplish one thing: it brings The God of Small Things back to the place that lives in its pages, and in doing so, forces readers to look beyond the tired categories they have been using to think about South Asian English literature.
The lawyer who brought the suit may be extreme in condemning the book as obscene, but he is not alone in judging it according to a different set of standards from those used in the drawing rooms of Delhi and New York. For millions of Malayalis, it doesn't matter that The God of Small Things is the hottest new South Asian novel. What does matter is that it smashes a large hole in the wall protecting their culture from the rest of the world.