{"id":379875,"date":"2025-08-28T08:39:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T08:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/379875\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T08:39:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T08:39:10","slug":"arundhati-roy-writes-intimately-of-life-with-and-without-her-mother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/379875\/","title":{"rendered":"Arundhati Roy writes intimately of life with, and without, her mother"},"content":{"rendered":"

While reading Arundhati Roy\u2019s Mother Mary Comes To Me,<\/a> it is best to be armed with the author\u2019s own statutory warnings in title case:<\/p>\n

Estha and Rahel, the seven-year-old twins from Arundhati Roy\u2019s Booker-winning first novel The God of Small Things (GOST), had tried to protect themselves with these simple rules. Reading GOST, you knew, somehow, that Roy was inextricably tied to the siblings. Mother Mary Comes To Me is an affirmation of this, as well as of the dangers that shadowed her and her brother Lalith Kumar Christopher Roy (LKC), growing up under their mother Mary Roy\u2019s watch.<\/p>\n

In her dedication, Arundhati writes that their mother never said \u201cLet It Be<\/a>\u201d as Mother Mary did in The Beatles anthem. It is not clear how she addressed her in person, but in this book, Arundhati refers to her mother as Mrs Roy \u2013 and as \u201cMart\u201d Roy only at the end, as an insider joke \u2013 throughout, putting a safe distance between them.<\/p>\n

Mary Roy was a force of nature \u2013 brilliant, accomplished and efficient, she had a nasty, often unpredictable, temper, and was capable of immense generosity and cruelty. We learn early on that Mary Roy\u2019s father too was a violent family man. \u201cHe whipped his children, turned them out of the house regularly, and split my grandmother\u2019s scalp open with a brass vase,\u201d writes Arundhati. Mary had inherited this violent streak from her father. As a single mother, she was constantly engaged in conflicts with her family and frequent doses of indignity were forced upon her by them, which she proceeded to unburden on her children immediately.<\/p>\n

While Arundhati\u2019s love (somewhat irrational under the circumstances) and attachment for the only parent she knew as a child hug her narrative like a warm blanket, the sudden and unprovoked verbal assaults from her mother would leave her shaken:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWhen she got angry with me, she would mimic my way of speaking. She was a good mimic and made me sound ridiculous to myself. I clearly remember everything about every instance she did that. Even what I was wearing. It felt as though she had cut me out \u2013 cut my shape out \u2013 of a picture book with a sharp pair of scissors and then torn me up.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

These \u201cdiverse iterations of hell\u201d in the first half of Mother Mary Comes To Me knock you back with a visceral punch every few pages. And while you ricochet, a knot of pain settles inside you. This has often been the impact of Arundhati\u2019s prose on her readers, and her memoir is no exception. Reading it you begin to see where her power springs from, not to mention all those title case emphases in her early writing. You must, therefore, look out for lurking dangers around every corner just as the Roy siblings had to, growing up. There are sentences that jump out of the text, tearing into you with brute force. Brace for it, but also look forward to the humour and heart in her text throughout. Arundhati\u2019s memoir is a dangerous ride, with sharp bends and steep inclines, which makes you suppress either a scream or a loud laugh. The sometimes-unintentional comic relief is very welcome.<\/p>\n

There are brief moments when Mary Roy betrayed a heart \u2013 but she quickly reverted to her default state of being angry and righteous, and continued with her bullying and rampaging. Very early on, she had firmly drilled into Arundhati the need to be proper and do the right thing always. Arundhati\u2019s life seems to have been spent showing the middle finger at the former and embracing the latter, a gift for her readers and admirers.<\/p>\n

Mary Roy\u2019s ruthlessness and \u201cwrath against motherhood\u201d are as fascinating to her daughter as it is to her readers. However, what is extraordinary is Arundhati\u2019s deadpan act of putting down the bare facts, steering clear of judgment or victimhood, and never losing empathy for her aggressor, though she is no Gandhian. Roy lovingly calls her mother a gangster, never a monster.<\/p>\n

Mary Roy confessed to loving her children \u201cdouble\u201d in the absence of their father and Arundhati obviously tried to believe her. Yet she was left baffled and scarred by the force of her mothering. You can feel Arundhati\u2019s own struggle to fathom her mother\u2019s behaviour, dangling helplessly in her pincer grip. You sense the powerful bond between them throughout, but also feel her desperate desire to make a break for it. The lifelong admiration she felt for the extraordinary Mary Roy mingles with her unshakeable fear for her protector. For Arundhati, Mary Roy ultimately becomes her \u201cshelter and her storm\u201d \u2013 and she remains caught in this duality for far too long. This turbulent past is funny, sad, heartbreaking and moving in equal measure, as is her memoir.<\/p>\n

Arundhati\u2019s story is ultimately incomplete without her mother\u2019s large, often grotesque, presence and her shadow remains cast on her whole life. What the Booker Prize-winning author is today for millions of readers \u2013 with her \u201cseditious heart\u201d, her enormous empathy for the wronged, her clear-eyed vision and fearless voice \u2013 was obviously shaped by the remarkable Mary Roy. No part of her adult life would have been the way it turned out, if it was not for her mother. Including Arundhati\u2019s aversion to a predictable status quoist life.<\/p>\n

Memories from childhood<\/strong><\/p>\n

Roy begins her book with her landing in Cochin after her mother\u2019s passing and then, with a long backward reach of her memory, returns to her infancy. Her maternal grandfather \u2013 an imperial entomologist and wife beater \u2013 owned a holiday cottage in Ooty. He had been estranged from his wife and had died the year Arundhati was born. Young Mary Roy took shelter with her small children in one half of it. Mary had walked out of her marriage with Rajib Michael Roy, a planter at an Assam tea estate.<\/p>\n

Micky Roy, as he was widely known, came from a well-known Bengali family in Calcutta. He was addicted to alcohol and Mary considered him a \u201cNothing Man\u201d \u2013 she had later confirmed to her children that she \u201cmarried the first man who proposed to her\u201d to get away from her abusive father. Unhappy in her marriage, Mary grabbed her children \u2013 the boy of four-and-a-half and the girl of three \u2013 and reached her late father\u2019s cottage. Obviously, their home in Kottayam district, where her brother and elderly mother lived was ruled out, given their acutely conflict-prone relations. In Ooty, Mary relied on the kindness of their old staff and a teaching job she had found.<\/p>\n

Among Arundhati\u2019s earliest memories is her mother\u2019s persistent asthma (aggravated by Ooty\u2019s cold, damp climate), which planted in her heart the fear of her losing her (she would agonise over Mary Roy\u2019s fragile health until her passing, sixty years later). But soon the trauma of another incident overtook this \u2013 her uncle G Isaac and her grandmother turned up to evict them from squatting on her grandfather\u2019s property. This probably triggered Arundhati\u2019s lifelong fight or flight mode \u2013 she describes vivid memories of accompanying Mary Roy, along with LKC, running through their town to find a lawyer.<\/p>\n

The word fugitive is deployed by Roy when writing about her unsettled childhood. Turns out that the twins\u2019 memory of their parents fighting in GOST to get rid of their children \u2013 \u201cYou take them, I don\u2019t want them\u201d \u2013 was not fiction after all. Arundhati and her brother were mostly left to fend for themselves after Mary Roy was saddled with them. Though it\u2019s hard to feel her pain, there was no end to Mary Roy\u2019s hardships at this stage: bedridden with asthma, she was out of a job and soon ran out of money. The children were left \u201cundernourished and developed primary tuberculosis\u201d.<\/p>\n

Mary Roy eventually swallowed her pride and moved to the gorgeous Kottayam countryside, the village Ayemenem, with her children, where they started living with her sister, not far from her mother\u2019s house. She went on to start a school in a makeshift Rotary Club space on top of a motor workshop. As the school grew in size and reputation, she moved the institution to the top of an abandoned hill, after the legendary architect Laurie Baker helped her build a permanent school building. It gained the status of a glorious institution over the years, and Mary Roy stood tall over it as a fierce and committed educationist.<\/p>\n

Somewhere between her role as a tough loving mother, a quarrelsome daughter\/sister and a formidable educationist, she was also a bona fide troublemaker locked in a property dispute with her family; this ultimately turned her into a minor legend. The humiliation and injustice of being nearly evicted from her father\u2019s house led her to move the Supreme Court to strike down the Travancore Succession Act of 1916.<\/p>\n

With the ultimate scrapping, in 1986, of this discriminatory law, she had won herself and the women of the Syrian Christian community equal rights to their father\u2019s property. This, obviously, was a crucial step in the fight for women\u2019s rights in India, particularly in the context of property and inheritance. Arundhati\u2019s frank admiration and pride for the exceptional woman that her mother was, is evident in the passages where she recounts this episode.<\/p>\n

Earlier, as she grew into her teenage years, Arundhati had begun to understand her mother, her frustrations and fury more and more, but that could not inure her to them. Young Noonie (her nickname) bore it until she no longer could and decided to run away at the age of 16. Meeting Laurie Baker earlier, she was drawn to architecture and joined Delhi\u2019s School of Planning and Architecture (SPA). She arrived in the city with a knife in her bag but very little money. Life continued to be hard, but removing herself from her mother\u2019s vicinity had become a necessity \u2013 the only way she could continue loving her, she confesses. The distance she had created allowed her to both understand her mother better and build defences against her for the rest of her life.<\/p>\n

In Delhi, she began a new life, making friends, finding love, dreaming about being free. Here we encounter a diverse cast of charming characters who shape her wanderer\u2019s life: Golak, her first friend, Jesus Christ, the now famous architect with whom she later entered into a not entirely legal marriage, Carlo, the enigmatic older Italian man, the watchman with the gold tooth at SPA, some of whom reappeared in the film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Although she would stay away from Mary Roy for seven years, her mother remained an abiding presence in her life. Arundhati describes living with a \u201cbrown moth\u201d as her constant companion since her childhood days. Hundreds of miles away from Ayemenem, she would pause \u2013 she felt the moth crawl all over her heart every time she found herself shackled by human bonds. Her safe place became \u201cdangerous\u201d, and she would escape. She returned to the trenches, cutting loose bonds of love, escaping the safety and warmth of homes, to embrace her \u201cfugitive\u201d life.<\/p>\n

The making of Arundhati<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the second half of Mother Mary Comes To Me, we see the making of Arundhati Roy, the actor, scriptwriter and author. Her personal hell recedes when she finds love and purpose, which eventually give way to her grief and horror at the unravelling of India. The political becomes personal.<\/p>\n

Her hilarious run-ins with dull, humourless bureaucrats, her battle for \u201cconsent\u201d alongside Phoolan Devi during the making of a Channel 4 feature film, her brave reportage from the Narmada Valley, the precarious days and nights spent walking the forests of Dantewada are narrated with the gaze of a hand-held camera. Unwilling to say sorry for a crime she had not committed, she ends up in Tihar Jail for one surreal night, and then finally her Kashmir journey that formed the core of her novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness begins.<\/p>\n

Some of the passages in this section are just as unsparing and relentless as her childhood trauma. The rampant, outrageously brutal punishment handed out to several \u201cenemies of the state\u201d is chronicled with blinding force in her prose. Arundhati ends the chapter \u201cWalking with the Comrades\u201d with these lines: \u201cOne of the women had been dragged [by the paramilitary] over the rough, stony roads by her hair until her scalp came off her skull. I couldn\u2019t tell whether she was Comrade Niti or someone else. Comrade Niti did have long, beautiful hair.\u201d She had come to know Comrade Niti earlier.<\/p>\n

The funny, bizarre and sometimes dangerous bits of her writerly life feel like an action movie script in this pacy, dramatic half. Her own gangster-like romp through life \u2013 leaving in its wake a bunch of dazed and confused people \u2013 is both funny and heartbreaking. There are vivid glimpses of her private life, interspersed within this, told with courage and conviction. Her father, Micky Roy, a supremely lovable drifter whom she encounters later and loses, makes a cameo appearance.<\/p>\n

The wonderful men whom she made her own are vivid characters revealed with tenderness. She writes about them with an aching warmth, her memories of Pradip Krishen and his daughters being hauntingly beautiful. And then of course, her creepy old friend, the brown moth, turns up, and she must rupture every bond and leave. There are inconvenient parts of her story, sections she could easily have erased, that are told with Arundhati\u2019s trademark honesty. Not only does she choose to retain them, she owns them unflinchingly.<\/p>\n

Arundhati Roy is as unafraid to bring judgment upon herself as well as her mother throughout her memoir. Despite everything \u2013 her often ruinous escapes and attempts for self-protection, backed by imperfect logic \u2013 she endears herself and her decidedly unconventional family throughout, making you travel with her. I fought back tears as I read the passages of sibling love with LKC, his Esther to her Rahel. Your heart will ache at the kindness and love they are capable of, and how both ultimately retained their sanity and found themselves. How they loved back Uncle Isaac, their Rhodes Scholar uncle, locked lifelong in battle with Mary Roy, later rendered bankrupt by his litigious sister (their clashes are genuinely funny).<\/p>\n

And then you will think about that person who birthed the siblings, gave them wings, and showed them how not to live an unremarkable life. The one who ultimately unleashed Arundhati Roy, her guerrilla heart, mind and all, upon us.<\/p>\n

Sanghamitra Chakraborty is the author of Soumitra Chatterjee and His World.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Mother Mary Comes To Me, Arundhati Roy, Penguin Hamish Hamilton.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While reading Arundhati Roy\u2019s Mother Mary Comes To Me, it is best to be armed with the author\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379876,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[128547,132279,132281,132278,132280,3444,12004,77,132282,132283,132164,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-379875","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-arundhati-roy","9":"tag-arundhati-roy-autobiography","10":"tag-arundhati-roy-autobiography-review","11":"tag-arundhati-roy-memoir","12":"tag-arundhati-roy-memoir-review","13":"tag-books","14":"tag-books-and-ideas","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-god-of-small-things","17":"tag-ministry-of-utmost-happiness","18":"tag-mother-mary-comes-to-me","19":"tag-uk","20":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115105494831187012","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}