{"id":20843,"date":"2025-09-13T22:54:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-13T22:54:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/20843\/"},"modified":"2025-09-13T22:54:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T22:54:06","slug":"mary-quite-contrary-a-review-of-arundhati-roys-memoir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/20843\/","title":{"rendered":"Mary, quite contrary | A review of Arundhati Roy\u2019s memoir"},"content":{"rendered":"

All books have covers that seek to convey or augment the content in some manner. Few do it as artfully as the Indian edition of\u00a0Mother Mary Comes To Me. The book comes with half a dust jacket, with an arresting photo of the author in her youth, dreamy-eyed and dense-browed, drawing thoughtfully on a burning cigarette. Her wild curls are cut short but there\u2019s no hiding the fact that they have a life of their own. On the back cover, her mop of curls is noticeably grey, the look in her eyes more speculative, the exquisite bone structure somewhat more rounded. When the dust jacket slips off inadvertently though, it reveals perhaps something even more significant than the passage of time between the photos: There, against the red, is a moth, evoking the formaldehyded insects mounted and framed by hobbyists and scholars back in the day.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This moth is symbolic not of her Imperial Entomologist grandfather, who died the year Roy was born and whose Ooty house homed her family when they had nowhere to go. It represents the child Arundhati\u2019s \u201cfrightened heart\u2026 (her) constant companion\u201d. Of all the lush imagery in\u00a0Mother Mary, the pitch-perfect articulation, the impeccable use of language and punctuation \u2013 all hallmarks of Roy\u2019s writing, so much so you can almost hear her speaking through the book \u2013 the moth is the one that flies out of the pages and settles somewhere in the reader\u2019s own heart, evoking the terror, perhaps, of losing sight of one\u2019s parent as a five-year-old, or of witnessing an event a seven-year-old is unable to process. It is in these all-too-identifiable themes of abandonment, of feeling, of sensing, of un-understanding that Roy makes her story universal.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Objectively speaking, of course, Mary Roy deserved her own biography the day she opened her first classroom in Kottayam. To introduce non-conventional methods of school education in a sleepy Kerala town in the 1970s was not the act of an ordinary person. To make it a success, to take parents along and produce generations of well-rounded students, is an achievement by itself. Add to that her triumph in overturning the Travancore Christian Succession Act of 1916, ensuring no other Christian woman in Kerala would be denied their share of parental property, and her immortality was assured.<\/p>\n

\"\u2018No<\/p>\n

\n

\u2018No ordinary woman\u2019: Mary Roy opened a non-conventional school in Kerala and fought for property rights for women.
\n | Photo Credit:
\n SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT\n <\/p>\n

No ordinary mother<\/p>\n

But because Mary Roy was no ordinary person, she begat Susanna Arundhati. And there ceased to be any question of who the biographer would be. As a result,\u00a0Mother Mary\u00a0\u2014 an ironical title, if there was one \u2014 is the story of two brilliant women, sharp and multi-faceted like diamonds, each creative, prickly, proud and bound together by something stronger and more elemental than an umbilical cord, something less amorphous than what they call love.<\/p>\n

All stories of parents and children are underlined, of course, by a power imbalance. It is a while before we recognise it and, if we\u2019re lucky, the balance evens itself out; frequently, it is the other parent who provides the counter-weight. But Mary Roy was no ordinary mother: She left her drunken husband (dismissed in the book as \u201cthe Nothing Man\u201d) with little more than a degree in education, two small children and chronic asthma, and started out on her own at the other end of the country. She was also manipulative, abusive, cruel, hateful, often a downright monster. (Dido is particularly hard to forgive.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe few gruff acknowledgements that come Roy\u2019s way \u2014 \u201cWell done, baby girl\u201d after she\u2019d won the Booker \u2014 recall the spare praise millions of Gen-Xers grew up with. Roy\u2019s tender generosity, this attempt to understand a parent without judgment, is perhaps the healing we all need in an India that thinks love is a sin, and loving bravely foolish.\u201d<\/p>\n

Short of silence and space, children have few defences against their parents. And so Roy fled claustrophobic Kottayam as soon as she finished high school, having discovered a love for architecture while following the legendary Laurie Baker around as he was building her mother\u2019s school. Two years later, she stopped returning home for the holidays; the stasis continued for seven years before there was some kind of reconciliation. Not once though, during or after these seven years, according to\u00a0Mother Mary, did the mother ever enquire about the daughter\u2019s whereabouts or well-being.<\/p>\n

\"Arundhati<\/p>\n

\n

Arundhati Roy and her brother Lalit Kumar Christopher Roy (LKC) at the book launch in Kochi.
\n | Photo Credit:
\n THULASI KAKKAT\n <\/p>\n

When Roy wrote her exceptionally sophisticated, phenomenally successful debut novel\u00a0The God of Small Things\u00a0at the age of 36, she dedicated it to \u201cMary Roy\u2026 who loved me enough to let me go\u201d. In\u00a0Mother Mary, she admits it was \u201ca lie. A good one. She quoted it often, as though it were God\u2019s truth. My brother jokes that it\u2019s the only real piece of fiction in the book\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"\"Tenderness, a constant<\/p>\n

And yet, and yet. The tenderness that lines the pages of the book \u2013 possibly the most constant of emotions in\u00a0Mother Mary\u00a0\u2013 is as real as the unnameable panic symbolised by the moth. The few gruff acknowledgements that come Roy\u2019s way \u2014 \u201cWell done, baby girl\u201d after she\u2019d won the Booker \u2014 recall the spare praise millions of Gen-Xers grew up with. Roy\u2019s tender generosity, this attempt to understand a parent without judgment, is perhaps the healing we all need in an India that thinks love is a sin, and loving bravely foolish.<\/p>\n

\"Arundhati<\/p>\n

\n

Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel The God of Small Things.
\n | Photo Credit:
\n PTI\n <\/p>\n

For ultimately,\u00a0Mother Mary\u00a0is as much a study of Indian society as it is an unravelling of the tangled web of a mother-daughter relationship. If her childhood marks the birth of a freethinking feminist, Roy\u2019s later experiences in Delhi \u2014 relationships, drift, work, fame, wealth, politics, activism, aloneness \u2014 depict a womanhood that is ahead of its country. And yet, it\u2019s undeniable that just as Mary Roy walked so that Arundhati could run, Arundhati ran so a Purulia-born Anuparna Roy could make movies and win international awards (as happened within days of the release of\u00a0Mother Mary). If you need only one takeaway from this remarkable work of memory and love, it\u2019s this: India needs to grow up for its women.<\/p>\n

\nMother Mary Comes to Me
\nArundhati RoyHamish Hamilton\u20b9899<\/p>\n

The reviewer is a Bengaluru-based writer and editor.<\/p>\n

Published – September 13, 2025 04:16 pm IST<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"All books have covers that seek to convey or augment the content in some manner. Few do it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20844,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[21955,21951,489,156,21953,21954,21952,21956,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-20843","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-arundhati-roy-family-story","9":"tag-arundhati-roy-mother-mary-review","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-god-of-small-things-connection","13":"tag-indian-feminist-biography-2025","14":"tag-mary-roy-biography-book-india","15":"tag-mother-daughter-relationship-memoir-india","16":"tag-new-zealand","17":"tag-newzealand","18":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}