Arundhati Roy is known globally as a novelist, an essayist, an activist who is both loved and reviled by her readers. In India, especially, where the current regime supports Hindu supremacy, many people sue her, threaten her, and attack her on social media. Yet, she courageously writes and speaks challenging the government, the legal system, the culture, and walks with the marginalized in their struggles for liberation. Her mother, Mary Roy, was a tremendous influence on her life. Mrs. Roy (as Arundhati Roy refers to her in most of this memoir) was an educator and feminist who founded a progressive school in Kottayam and challenged the law that allowed Syrian Christians to pass on their property and inheritance only to their sons. Readers of Roy’s Booker prize winning debut novel, The God of Small Things, will recognize Ammu, the twins’ mother, as the fictionalization of Mary Roy. This memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, lays bare the complicated and painful yet loving mother-daughter relationship and testifies to the deep scars people bear from intergenerational violence.
As in the novel, Mary Roy, married a Bengali man who worked on a tea plantation and when her two children were rather young (Arundhati was 3), divorced him due to his alcoholism and moved back to Southern India. Mary Roy entered her marriage hastily to escape a violent household where her father, an Imperial entomologist in British India, regularly beat his wife and once hit her with a vase. Arundhati’s grandmother spent most of her later life blinded by cataracts and playing her violin. Mary Roy took her children to Ooty where they squatted in her father’s abandoned cottage which she could not inherit as a woman and lived in poverty while also struggling with asthma. Her mother and brother, G. Isaac (fictionalized as Chacko in God of Small Things), arrived in Ooty to evict Mary and her children from the only home they had. After more financial struggles, Mary Roy, moved back to Ayemenem, her hometown (and the setting of the novel), before moving to Kottayam to establish a school where her own children were among her first students. As Roy narrates Mary Roy’s life, we see the mother’s grit and resilience to survive and thrive in a world that refused to accept her for being a divorced single mother. But Mary Roy was violent both physically and verbally with her children shattering Arundhati and her brother’s sense of safety and selfhood. At 16, Arundhati Roy left home to go to Delhi, an alien city, to become an architect after being inspired by Laurie Baker who designed and built her mother’s school. Arundhati writes candidly about her poverty, her discovery of rock n roll, her friendships with Golak, Sanjay K, and her marriage to JC and to Pradip Kishen. She describes her growth as a writer and her complicated relationship with both her parents, her love for her brother, and how her friends and husbands nurtured and supported her as an artist.
Roy’s memoir is narrated with the skill of a fiction writer who can bring characters and scenes to life, the incisive social and political critique that is the hallmark of her writing, and an emotional candor that is profoundly moving. For those who love her work, this memoir tells us so much about her evolution as a writer and the relationships with people, places, and political movements that made her who she is.
Arundhati Roy will be at Seattle Arts and Lectures on September 18 at 7:30 PM. Both in person and online tickets are available.
Nalini Iyer is a Professor of English at Seattle University where she teaches courses in Asian American, Postcolonial, and South Asian Studies. She is the author/editor of several books in literary criticism. She lives in Kirkland. WA.
