The Booker Prize awardee wants to save the Narmada Valley from the impending doom. Why dams? ``It's like Esthappan and Rahel fighting for a river. I grew up on a river. I know what it's like. That's the emotional explanation,'' she says.

But rationally, there is a ``private story'' not easy to explicate. ``You write something and suddenly it becomes a huge commercial success. I began to feel that every feeling in my book was being turned into a silver coin and I was being turned into a being with a hard silver heart. The only way to hold on to any humanity that one had, was to make an alliance with the world that The God of Small Things was about. I always knew that this struggle in the Valley was symbolical, that it was the fault line,'' sheadds.

Critics accuse Roy of being hysterical about her causes, but she doesn't see it that way. ``In India, people are so scared of being emotional because if you are emotional then you can't deal with what you see around you. I knew the facts before I went there, but the more you learn the more shocked you get. Columnist B G Verghese has responded to what I wrote and said I and the Narmada Bachao Andolan are trying to defend the `noble savage'. That's what the British said about us,'' she says.

Rebutting each and every point Roy made in her anti-SSP piece -- The Greater Common Good, Verghese says the realities of rehabilitation are being looked into. The Project Affected Persons are being given ``productive irrigable land'' and the tin sheds where the tribals are living are ``temporary,'' he says. On the accusation that the land won't be irrigated because there isn't enough water, he says, ``Why not wait and see ?''

``The greatest thing (the authorities) have up their sleeves, is their abilityto wait,'' remarks Roy.

There is no stopping the impassioned flow of words, more effective because Roy speaks softly and slowly. The teenage-looking, middle-aged woman exudes the magic of the flower child. ``I know I will always be alone. As a writer, that's the choice you make. I couldn't be an activist...To tell the story is one thing, to persuade people is another. I want to tell a story and I want people to understand it... one part of me wants to make this alliance with the world, the other part of me... as a writer has to be detached,'' she says.

Is crusading her latest avataar ? ``I think that this perception is a very Indian thing. This is the bloody writer's job, it's not at all a diversion. It'd be far more strange for me to be quiet,'' she says, adding, ``I don't see any scheme...The God of Small Things is a very political book. I'm also an architect and a fitness instructor. It would be different if I suddenly changed who I was.

Roy is not ``planning'' a new work of fiction. ``I neverplan.'' Asked how she lives by the day feeling as much as she does, she says, ``It's difficult; difficult to never look away.''