As if she knows the dangers of ending up an unreliable narrator, Roy is hardest on herself, hunting down every last thing in her mother’s favor that she can. ‘She loved herself. Everything about herself. I loved that about her,’ she writes. A mother who ‘hovered over me like an unaffectionate iron angel. The metallic swoosh of her iron wings spurred me to pick the big fights, not the small ones’. Despite finding ‘it impossible to gauge what would anger my mother and what would please her’.
Roy owns the Kerala she knew. Laughing at husbands who throw down letters for wives to pick from the floor—you know, those affluent looking wives with diamonds ‘like tiny searchlights’ in their ears. Harking back to a parent in a sleeveless blouse, smoking a cigarette, when ‘she wasn’t Mrs Roy. She was someone else’. Remembering what her mother said about her father: ‘He was a Nothing Man.’ Being ‘alone, and unpregnant’ in Rome. Evolving into the Roy we read, who has ‘begun to prefer descriptions’. ‘In ruins’, as her mother lay in a coffin; on trial ‘for not behaving like a reasonable man’. With a heart that ‘began to take public things extremely personally’.
Nearly three decades after that novel comes this love poem from a daughter to her mother, which I, unsurprisingly, read in one go on September 1, exactly three years after Mrs Roy died. It is a literary delight despite the broken heart that comes from reading it (as perhaps writing it) when Roy holds up Small Things from her past against the light. She writes: ‘As soon as the shouting began, I would flee. The river was my refuge. It made up for everything that was wrong in my life.’ And the wistful reader wonders where Rahel ends and Roy begins. Because they ache the same.
I read it as a mother, like all guilty mothers out there who joke about not having a maternal bone in their body, but whose hearts are filled with guilt and panic for daughters they are doomed to love but not understand.