Years later Arundhati was overjoyed when I gifted her a Baby Remington typewriter. "Just the right thing for a writer," I remember her saying. Soon she exchanged it for a desk-top computer on which she wrote The God of Small Things.

There was much trauma for me in the '60s as Kottayam did not accept me as I was a woman separated from my husband. We are not divorced, though. I tried to hide the pain from my children. It is only when I read her book that I realised that even at five she was conscious that we were unwelcome in the native home and that I expected her to be able to stand on her own feet, so that she would never be in such a weak position as I was.

Later when she grew up she always stood beside me in my struggles. In the book Arundhati lampoons almost all the people who surrounded her at that time. Some of them might take offence. But she never meant to hurt anybody. Remember, it is a work of fiction. She had drawn the bare bones of the characters from the family. But it is not wise of me to say that I am 'Ammu'.

I am delighted to know that she has won the Booker. Today I am a proud mother receiving congratulations from all over India. The prime minister and President called to congratulate Arundhati.

Arundhati lived with us in a small and rather modern house. Next door was the ancestral house. Spooky, huge, too large to maintain, but to my daughter it must have been an exciting place full of whispering ancestors. I wasn't surprised that it forms the backdrop to her tale. One of my favourite characters in the book is the cigar-smoking, gay planter. He reminds me of our cigar-smoking grand uncle, a chemistry professor, a lover of boys by nature. His wife lived with him and so did a series of young boys. As Diana, Princess of Wales, might have said, the marriage had become a bit crowded.

I remember hearing that one day a young lover of his was thrown out of the house. The old man was devastated. We heard he left home and headed for a hotel where he committed suicide -- cyanide poisoning. The next year on the same day and in the same hotel his lover was found dead -- cyanide again. Tongues wagged in Ayemenem, but no one dared to whisper the word "homosexual". There is a legend about our grand uncle. That he haunted the family estates, his presence forewarned by the scent of cigar smoke. In fact, many claim to have seen him. Eventually, so one hears, a Paravan's (outcaste) wife Parathi, while cutting grass with her sickle, smelled cigar smoke and she shivered. Sure enough, the thampuran (master) appeared. She nailed him to a coconut palm with her sickle. Parathi claims that he never appeared again. But others say the ghost still walks the house.

We did consider this house with its spacious lawns as a setting for the release of the book. But the cloying ambience of the past and whispering ancestors made my lovely school with its exuberant youngsters and its "aliveness" a happier venue.

(As told to M.G. Radhakrishnan)