Figures like these are common in the battle of words over the Narmada river. The NBA and its allies have amassed a formidable array of facts and statistics that highlight just how weak the case for the dam project has become. Activists say the dams will displace more than 320,000 people and affect the lives of at least a million. They will submerge more than 988,000 acres of forest. Ten thousand fishing families who depend on the Narmada estuary for a living are likely to lose their livelihood when the dams are raised—though in the project’s 20-year history, the government has conducted no study of how the dams will affect the environment downstream.

The arguments for and against the dams are complex, but Roy insists that the issue cannot be left to the experts. That, she says, was one of the reasons she got involved in the first place. She came back from her first visit to the Narmada region 'convinced that the valley needed a writer.' Meaning a novelist, a fiction writer, not a journalist.

'As a writer, I have the license and the ability to move between feelings and numbers and technical stuff and to tell the whole story in a way which an expert doesn’t seem to have the right to do,' she explains. Roy sees the connections between the economics, the politics, the ecology, and the human story of the Narmada as crucial. 'When I went to the valley,' she says, 'I realized that what has happened is that all these experts had come in and hijacked various aspects of it, and taken it off to their lairs. They didn’t want people to understand.' Roy did want them to understand, and believed her role, the writer’s role, was to tell the whole story.

'The Greater Common Good' was later published along with 'The End of Imagination' in The Cost of Living (Modern Library, 1999), a slender volume that brought the Narmada valley story to the wider world.

Later in 1999, Roy traveled abroad again, speaking out against the dams at England’s Cambridge University and at the World Water Forum in The Hague in the Netherlands. In India, her visits to the Narmada valley often ended in media scrums and, once, her own arrest, as she struggled to highlight the plight of the villagers and activists—who are still promising to drown themselves in the rising waters if the dam walls are built any higher. Meanwhile, in Gujarat, some government supporters and 'patriotic' citizens furiously burned copies of The God of Small Things for what they took to be Roy’s anti-Indian insolence.

When she first spoke out against the dams, other writers and even readers seemed surprised. Roy wrote fiction. What did she think she was doing playing around with fact? These sentiments may linger, but she doesn’t care. 'There’s no division on my bookshelf between fiction and nonfiction,' she says. 'As far as I’m concerned, fiction is about the truth.'