SARAH FERGUSON, PRESENTER: Arundhati Roy, welcome to 7.30.
ARUNDHATI ROY, AUTHOR: Thank you. Thank you. It’s a pleasure.
SARAH FERGUSON: This book is about India, it is about you as a writer and at its centre is the epic and terrifying story of your mother. Who was Mary Roy?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, Mary Roy was maybe less my mother than somebody who did something amazing with her life that did not include motherhood, but it made me grow up fast and it made me realise that everybody, every mother doesn’t have to be perfect.
And there were things that about her that were perhaps more important than just being a good mother to me.
And I left home when I was very young, as I say in my book, in order to be able to continue to love her because I did recognise very early on that the battles that she fought, they may not have been for me as a daughter, but they did matter to me as a woman.
And I somehow never wanted to reduce her or defeat her in any way. Although obviously the book is really about that, the difficulty in arriving at that place but I did arrive at it.
SARAH FERGUSON: There was great cruelty in her. She called you terrible names, she even had your dog killed. You say that you had to go away from her in order to be able to go on loving her. Did you understand that then?
ARUNDHATI ROY: No, I think I understood it because we lived in a, I mean, obviously my mother left my father when I was just under three years old and she left without nothing, with no money, just a degree, a bachelor’s degree in education.
And eventually started this incredible school, which still runs in this little town called Kottayam where I grew up and because she belonged to this very conservative community called the Syrian Christians, and it was made very clear to her that she had transgressed in terrible ways and married outside the community, then divorced.
And then she did two extraordinary things. One was the school, and the other was that she challenged the Syrian Christian, the Travancore Christian Succession Act, which basically gave a girl one fourth of the son’s share of her father’s property of 5,000 rupees, which today is a price of a meal in an expensive restaurant, whichever is less.
So she challenged that and changed the law to make it equal inheritance. So she became an iconic figure and that legal battle took years and years and years.
But as a very young child, I somehow could see the chain reaction of the humiliation that she endured at the hands of her father, at the hands of her brother, at the hands of the community. And therefore, that was unloaded as a kind of rage against me and my brother.
So somehow, I could see what was happening. So I didn’t just somehow didn’t process it as cruelty to me. I could see the process.
SARAH FERGUSON: So you never asked her to stop being cruel to you.
ARUNDHATI ROY: So she was a very, very severe asthmatic. To me, the trauma was that she kept telling me I’m going to die, and I can’t breathe.
And so, a lot of my time was spent literally wanting to breathe for her, but you could not really say anything because it would bring on an attack of asthma, which was terrifying to watch.
So I just learned to not react and not say anything. This book is my conversation with her that I could not have while she was alive and it’s not an accusation or an indictment or anything, it’s just a conversation, a celebration of what was great about her and a reportage of what was not so great about her.
SARAH FERGUSON: You also say that between her fits of violence and rage she told you that you could be anything, so she did enable you to propel yourself into the world.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Absolutely. Absolutely. So I would not trade her in for any other mother. I mean, she gave me politics, she gave me poetry, literature, art.
All of it happened as I grew up along with the building of the school, meeting this incredible architect deciding to go to Delhi to study architecture. And so, there was one part of me which endured a lot of pain from her.
But on the other hand, she always told me, you can be anything you want to be. And also, I grew up on the edge of that conservative community, not at the bottom of the caste system, for instance, but on the edge.
And it was a community that made it very clear to me that its protections and reassurances and transactions were not for me. And she just told me, but you don’t need them. So, there was a steel in my spine that came from her.
And so, when I wrote this book, the challenge to me was can you write her? Can you communicate that it’s impossible to form an opinion of her. It’s impossible to package her neatly. She’s just this spectrum and you can’t have an opinion about her.
SARAH FERGUSON: So tell me, what happens when someone so large, so dominant in their environment, what happens when they are no longer there?
ARUNDHATI ROY: I was shocked at my response because as I said, was a little ashamed and humiliated at my response because it was as if I had grown into a particular shape to accommodate this wild person in my life, to accommodate her, to not defeat her, to not humiliate her in any way. And as I grew up and became the writer that I am, she knew that if there was a person who could challenge her, it was me. But I never did.
And so there was always this, one of the children in her school asked me, what was your relationship? And I said, the relationship between two nuclear powers.
So when she died, it was as though I had grown into this peculiar shape to accommodate her. And then she wasn’t there and so my shape didn’t make sense to me anymore.
I know that a lot of people who read the book come and tell me I had a difficult parent and so on. That’s one side of it. But the other side is look at the pressure that culture puts on motherhood. You have to be this perfect mother and especially Western culture and therapy sort of demonises the mother in a way, a backdoor towards, I think diffusing feminism.
So to me, it’s important for both the mother and the daughter to have some space to be grown up and to be things other than just mother and daughter to each other.
SARAH FERGUSON: Arundhati Roy, congratulations on the book and thank you very much for joining us.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure talking to you.