Twelve minutes into an interview with Allen Ginsberg for the BBC\u2019s Face to Face, Jeremy Isaacs asks him about the extraordinary long poem he wrote about his mother: \u201cIn Kaddish, you mourn your mother. What was the effect on you of living with a mother who was mad?\u201d Ginsberg\u2019s answer, mildly inflected by a laugh, is: \u201cIt gave me a great sort of \u2026 tolerance for eccentric behaviour.\u201d<\/p>\n
Arundhati Roy<\/a>, whose memoir is partly an account of her life with her mother Mary Roy, might recognise this insight. Arguably, all mothers appear to their children as mad: madness here meaning an unbounded force, at odds with what society imagines normal parenting to consist of. The manifestations of this madness are as disparate as those of love, and these two aspects \u2013 the abnormal, the overbearing, and the protective, the nurturing \u2013 can be, in our mothers, intimately intertwined (\u201cShe was my shelter and my\u00a0storm,\u201d writes Roy). It is through loving and depending on the mysterious and incomprehensible that we come to \u201ctolerate\u201d, even embrace, the strangest thing of all: life itself.<\/p>\n Mary Roy was a kind of visionary, but she seemed to drive people around her mad, as well as being frequently driven mad by them. A Christian from Kerala, she escaped her parents by marrying a member of the Bengali bourgeoisie, known to his friends as Micky Roy, before leaving him when he became an alcoholic, \u201ca Nothing Man\u201d. She took her children, Arundhati and her brother Lalith, to a \u201ccottage that belonged to our maternal grandfather\u201d in Tamil Nadu, but came up against her family\u2019s invocation of a law governing inheritance in her community: \u201cdaughters had no right to their father\u2019s property and we were to leave the house immediately\u201d. Finally they came to Aymanam, a village in Kerala (spelled \u201cAyemenem\u201d by Roy, recognisable as the village in The God of Small Things<\/a>), staying first with their family, \u201cextraordinary, eccentric, cosmopolitan people, defeated by life\u201d, before once more falling out with them. Mary then set up her own home and, eventually, a school that developed a national reputation.<\/p>\n Mary seemed to be perpetually at war, often for no clear reason, with her children, especially her daughter<\/p>\n Mary Roy\u2019s years of doing battle allowed her to leave two remarkable legacies: her school, but also the case she eventually fought against her family, which went all the way to the supreme court, and resulted in the annulment of the discriminatory inheritance law. In the meantime, she seemed to be perpetually at war, often for no clear reason, with her children, especially her daughter: \u201cIn my effort to fathom my mother, to see things from her perspective \u2026 to understand what hurt her, what made her do the things she did \u2026 I turned into a maze \u2026 hoping to gain a vantage point for a perspective other than my own.\u201d<\/p>\n This attempt to understand the compulsion to love what seems hostile transforms Roy\u2019s writing, lending her prose, especially in the first 130 or so pages, an unprecedented freedom. An astringent conscience-keeper in the political sphere, she finds herself, with her mother as the subject, on terrain that tests her in quite a different way. We discover, in these sections, an ability to transition between contraries, a fluency that is less \u201cempathy\u201d than something unpredictable and alchemical. Note, for example, the paradoxically liberating role the word \u201cfortunately\u201d plays in this sentence about her mother, brother, and herself: \u201cHe remembered being loved. Fortunately, I didn\u2019t.\u201d Or the defiantly jubilant assertion, \u201cI loved killing them\u201d, about the lice the family help would comb out of her hair.<\/p>\n The world described in the first part of the book provides much of the material for The God of Small Things. But these pages aren\u2019t significant for giving us access to Roy\u2019s inspiration, or as a preamble to her life as a bestselling writer who would go on to become an oppositional political voice. Even if she were none of these things or had never written her novel, they would be utterly absorbing. They have a wonderful, self-assured self-sufficiency.<\/p>\n In the late 1970s, Roy escaped her mother, arriving in Delhi and enrolling in the School of Planning and Architecture there. At this point the memoir also bears witness to a world-historical shift: the receding of a kind of modernity and politics which had given rise to experimental lives and ways of thinking. Both Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, despite the great gulf between their backgrounds and world views, embodied the open-endedness made possible by such experimentation. So did Mary Roy and her brother George Isaac in their various projects and vicissitudes. I\u2019d also situate Micky Roy in this context: one of the funniest, most moving sections in this book has to do with Arundhati\u2019s reunion with her father in a hotel in Delhi: \u201cHe was lying on his stomach with his knees bent, his feet waving at the ceiling.\u201d<\/p>\n This shift ultimately created the world we inhabit today. Even before the precipitous slide towards the far right now evident almost everywhere, there was the feverish globalisation that engendered a liberal elite just as bizarre as any of its political opponents. These changes are \u2013 explicitly and implicitly \u2013 the subject of the second half of the book. They are woven into Roy\u2019s continual, courageous confrontations with the nation-state, including her criticism of its nuclear policies and opposition to Sardar Sarovar dam. Roy loves India<\/a> deeply, but the nation-state isn\u2019t India, and it doesn\u2019t love her back. The conflict is comparable to, albeit profoundly different from, her relationship with Mary Roy.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Globalisation is also woven into Roy\u2019s overnight success: it becomes a kind of co-author of her first novel. That success was akin to an inheritance left to a writer in the 18th century by an obscure uncle: something Roy benefits from but whose meaning she must also grapple with. In the midst of this, Mary Roy re-enters her daughter\u2019s life, the mother delighted by Arundhati\u2019s celebrity, but also puncturing it occasionally with Dadaist zeal. Throughout the book, but with especial force in the second half, Mrs Roy\u2019s resistance and recalcitrance are an invigorating antidote to whatever our new world preaches is most rewarding about life.<\/p>\n