Arundhati Roy’s memoir is about the mother who broke the author and made her.The Associated Press
Title: Mother Mary Comes to MeAuthor: Arundhati RoyGenre: MemoirPublisher: Scribner CanadaPages: 352
In May, 1998, not long after Arundhati Roy published her first novel, won the Booker Prize and took the literary establishment by storm, a close friend broached a delicate subject. “I’ve been thinking about you,” she said, “about The God of Small Things – what’s in it, what’s over it, under it, around it, above it …” She meant fame, critical adulation, criticism, contempt – the great peaks and valleys of the writer’s life, which had all descended on Roy within a year of writing that award-winning novel. The intensity, her friend feared, could subsume her.
Roy demurred. You assume, she replied, that success and fame are everybody’s aspirations. “There are other worlds. Other kinds of dreams,” she wrote, recounting the exchange in “The End of Imagination,” an essay published that year. “Dreams in which failure is feasible, honourable, sometimes even worth striving for.” She scrawled on a napkin a list of such dreams.
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In the ensuing years she did pursue this alternate path. While she never wrote the worst-seller she deemed good for the soul, she produced only one other novel, 2017’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Mostly she published fierce, uncompromising essays about rivers and dams, about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s moral failures and nuclear proliferation, about Kashmir and Sept. 11.
Her novels won acclaim; the essays irked and baffled critics. The Financial Times, unsurprisingly, called her views extreme, but friendly voices, too, took issue with the stridency of her activism and sometimes careless, even inaccurate, marshalling of facts. One critic said in 2007 he wished she’d go back to fiction.
Roy’s new, much-anticipated memoir, Mother Mary Come To Me, unbraids the twin strands of art and politics in her life while laying bare a unifying influence – what was always in, over, around and above her work. It’s right there in the title: Mother Mary. The Mary in question is Mary Roy, visionary educator, firebrand social activist and the mother who broke the author and made her – in that order.
When the senior Roy, born into Kerala’s Syrian Christian community, died in 2022 at the age of 89, India mourned her as an icon. She had built a celebrated school and challenged a local law all the way to the Supreme Court in 1986, winning property rights for Christian women in India.
Arundhati Roy writes about going from an almost feral childhood to wild international success.Mayank Austen Soofi/Supplied
For her children, it was the resolution of a decades-long cliffhanger. “We had sixty years to discuss her imminent death,” Roy writes wryly. She and her older brother, Lalith, grew up in a single-parent home, though in truth there was sometimes no parent. While their mother, melodramatic and ill, took to her bed, the kids, aged 3 and 5, would wander into town from their ramshackle cottage in the scenic hills of Ooty to fetch groceries.
By the age of 6, Roy was living with her family in Kerala’s Kottayam district. A child from an upper-caste family, she spent her “fatherless, pilotless” days around the Meenachil River, befriending the children of village Dalits, or untouchables, as they were then known.
It was a happier place than home. Asthmatic and choleric, Mary Roy hummed with both an irrepressible life force and unfiltered rage. She’d earned outcast status by leaving her alcoholic husband when Arundhati (born Susanna), was 3. There was a fight over who’d be stuck with the kids. “You take them, I don’t want them,” the parents in The God of Small Things squabble about their children. Arundhati learned only after her book came out that what she had written wasn’t fiction. “Who told you about this?” her mother asked. “You were too young to remember.”
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This most unmaternal Mary badgered, berated and sometimes beat her kids, her dark rages erupting at a moment’s notice. When she opened her school a generous side emerged, but it wasn’t aimed at her children. Once, she dumped her daughter at the side of a highway five hours from home. Arundhati, 14, sat on a milestone at dusk, perilously alone, waiting for a car that might not return. (It did, eventually.) At 18, while studying architecture in Delhi, Arundhati broke free of the parental yoke. Penniless, she moved with her boyfriend to a slum.
Roy writes a rollicking and revelatory account of this extraordinary trajectory, from an almost feral childhood to wild international success. The book is also a mordant and profound reflection on history, imagination and how both Roy and her country have ended up where they are.
Along the way we meet a theatrical cast: the Rhodes Scholar uncle who opened a pickle factory that he tried, in a fit of Marxist zeal, to give away to his employees; the blind Vienna-trained violinist grandmother; the delinquent father, “Micky” Roy.
Roy’s darkly funny portrait of her mother is unflinching, yet remarkably affectionate: Mary Roy is now shrewd entrepreneur, now fearless advocate. Always she is a woman who brooks no dissent, or idiotic social norms. That Supreme Court case is a battle against her own brother and mother for family property and her rights.
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The fearlessness infused Arundhati’s spirit; the damp, bleak imprint on her psyche remains too. Her mother, the “unaffectionate iron angel,” dealt only in conditional love, bestowing on her a loneliness and freedom from which a writer’s self could emerge.
Arundhati was given a terrible gift: a life without guardrails. Her early working years were precarious; she describes a stint selling cakes on a beach in Goa. Later, a career coalesced in acting and scriptwriting. Her art-house collaborations with filmmaker Pradip Krishen (they married, then split), including a Channel Four project she pronounces a disaster, brought critical success and awards. When Roy eventually found her voice as an author, in her 30s, she became a natural voice for those millions in her country, and the one where I grew up, who also live lives without guardrails.
Mother Mary presents a kaleidoscope of other Indias too: writers and filmmakers with lovers and open marriages; a campus populated with dope-smoking architecture students; a cheap hotel where a young Arundhati, alone and broke, fears the men banging on the door will beat it down; city streets with rooms for rent (she lived in one, on a roof) and tea stands where a future Booker winner takes breakfast with a gaggle of idlers and panhandlers.
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These other Indias sometimes clash with the new nation taking shape. Shooting for that Channel Four series is disrupted in 1990 by a “chariot pilgrimage” building support for the demolition of a mosque on a contested site in Ayodhya, to make way for a Hindu temple. (The shrine was unveiled to fanfare by Modi last year.)
One comes to understand that what aligns Roy with the urban poor, tribal peoples and various minorities denied a fair chance and fundamental rights in modern India isn’t noblesse oblige or fashionable academic progressivism. She sees them as her people. She always has.
The years after Roy’s Booker success saw an expansion of this lesser India, on the parched, lee side of Modi mountain. It’s the India Roy loves. Perhaps this is why she can’t sound more sober or reasonable in some of her writings. Many literary types have ventured into the wilderness of poverty or underclass existence to write about it. Only a few actually belonged to the wilderness themselves. Mother Mary unspools a life not many have lived, and only Arundhati Roy could have written.