Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is the winner of the 1997 Man Booker prize and is looking to be one of the best books I’ve read this year. The novel cuts through notions of religion and caste to explore the very essence of human love, with compelling illustrations thrown in along the way. In the following excerpt, twins Estha and Rahel are listening to a lecture from their uncle, Chacko. I personally found it a powerful reminder on the incomprehensible vastness of the universe and the shortness of life.

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 “We belong nowhere”, Chacko said. Then, to give Estha and Rahel a sense of historical perspective, he told them about the Earth Woman. He made them imagine that the earth – four thousand six hundred million years old – was a forty-six-year-old woman – as old, say, as Aleyamma Teacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old, Chacko said, when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty-five – just eight months ago – when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

“The whole of human civilization as we know it,” Chacko told the twins, “began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman’s life. As long as it takes to drive from Ayemenem to Cochin.”

It was an awe-inspiring and humbling thought, Chacko said, that the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge – was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye.

“And we, my dears, everything we are and ever will be – are just a twinkle in her eye…”