This exquisite memoir gives an insight into the making of India’s best-known dissenter and public intellectual
From her quiver of assorted writings, essays, commentary and novels, Arundhati Roy has dished out an extraordinary memoir that is poignant, profound and inspires you to think and feel in the way only good literature can. Mother Mary is being marketed as non-fiction, but it is difficult to typecast this work, like most of Roy’s other writing from very early on, in their dialectical, polemical and yet lyrical nature. What was The Great Indian Rape Trick in 1994? Was it a film review, an essay, a rant or a searing response to India’s most infamous woman dacoit being cinematically reduced to just a rape victim in Shekhar Kapoor’s much-celebrated film Bandit Queen? Is she a concept or a cunt, asked Roy, her incandescent rage at the marketing of Phoolan Devi’s ‘aesthetic’ rape singeing the reader with its intensity.
Mother Mary Comes to Me has the same intensity but an entirely different nuance. It is tender and sad in parts, reminiscent of the heartbreaking artlessness of her prize-winning first novel, The God of Small Things, where she sketched the raw vulnerability of the twins, Rahel and Estha. Estha, who “occupied very little space in the world.” Estha and Rahel, fictional twins of Roy’s first novel, appear as her real life siblings in Mother Mary Comes to Me, transfixed and traumatised in equal measure by their volatile, iconoclastic mother.
Roy brings alive Mother Mary with a quality and depth of feeling which is almost elemental. She is as bewildered by her mother’s unfathomable cruelty towards her children as she admires her brilliance, irreverence and courage. For a woman who married outside the endogamic, privileged community of Syrian Christians, doors had been closed on Mary Roy when she reappeared. With her two small children, she squatted on a dilapidated property of her father’s before she was sought to be evacuated by her mother and G. Isaac, the brother with whom Mary Roy fought and won an epic battle to change the Travancore Succession Act that ensured property rights to Christian women in Kerala. She also went on to set up a school designed by the legendary Laurie Baker who inspired the young Roy to study architecture.
Inspirational story
But there are more shadows than light in this inspirational story where Mary Roy’s complex, larger-than-life persona towered over her stupefied children. There were intermittent bouts of volcanic anger that the children cowered at and coped with, barely. Their scabs and scars are couched in quintessential Royisms that would doubtless be remembered for their vivid originality. Roy’s six-year-old self-recoiling as her mother mimicked her in a rage. “I felt myself shrinking from my own skin and draining away, swirling like water down a sink until I was gone,” she writes.
Even before she was 16, Roy was planning her escape. It came in the form of the School of Planning and Architecture in faraway Delhi where the young Roy arrived, ready to do battle in the big city with a knife in her bag. What distinguishes the rest of Roy’s story from the millions of small-town migrants who throng the city with hopes of a bright future is perhaps precisely this complex nature of her upbringing. Her status as an outcast in the close-knit Syrian Christian world, her intellectual initiation in the art of being a failure by G Isaac, who lost the epical battle with Mary Roy, coalesce in the creation of Roy as we know her now. She emerged from extreme poverty brought upon by an eight-year-long estrangement from her mother – she had to leave her in order to love her, she says. From a storeroom in the back lanes of Nizamuddin Auliya’s dargah where a security officer would bang the door at night to be allowed in, Roy rose to dazzle the world with The God of Small Things.
In the late 1990s, when Brand India was emerging on the world stage, her first novel put Roy right on top of the literary stratosphere. But Roy not only turned her back on the league of the Conquerors-of-the-big-city, she actively provoked and heckled middle India with a searing critique of rising Hindu nationalism, the nuclear bomb, the big dams, the policy on Kashmir and walked with the Maoists in an essay that humanised them.
Fame and money
The most significant aspect of this journey is Roy’s relationship with her fame and money. The lesson in how to use it came from her friend Golak, who exclaimed: “Good, Roy. ‘Thang’ God we’re rich”. And she has shared it, not just with friends and family, but thousands of small publishers, language magazines, aspiring writers, activists. It’s not charity, it’s part of politics that defies the successful-loser binary that capitalism has so neatly created. It is, what she calls, ‘the exquisite art of failure’ taught to her by G Isaac. And she disburses the knowledge with abandon and joy, sticking by the outcast and the pariah, treating with tenderness her father, the ‘nothing man’ who drank country liquor, wet his pants and made binoculars with his fists.
Mother Mary Comes to Me gives some explanation for Roy’s fierce commitment to the dignity of the small human, the one who has been crushed in the Ayn Randish race for success. And we cheer on from the sidelines – give flowers to the little gods who failed, Roy of Ayemenem.
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First published online by BusinessLine and updated on !0 September 2025 Republished by permission.
Poornima Joshi is the Resident Editor, Delhi of BusinessLine daily.
