Unconventional Lives of a Mother and a Daughter : Reflections on Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me

Mother Mary Comes to Me

H. Srikanth

Initially, I found the title of Arundhati Roy’s new book intriguing. After my singer-daughter schooled me, I understood the words are taken from the popular Beatles song, ‘Let it be’.

The song starts with the words, ‘Whenever I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me speaking words of wisdom’. Mary in Arundhati Roy’s book, Mother Mary Comes to Me is not the Biblical Mother Mary; she is Mary Roy, mother of the author. Mary Roy was a spirited lady who rose to fame as an educationist, more so, as one who fought and won the battle for an equal share of property for daughters in the Syrian Christian community in Kerala. When she died on September 1, 2022, at 89, the media reflected on her achievements. Three years later, Arundhati Roy comes out with this book as some sort of memoir to her mother.

After the death of a person, it is normal not to say anything negative about the dead person. While writing memoirs, the authors usually mention all the good deeds the person did during his or her lifetime. The book Mother Mary Comes to Me is not a memoir of the usual kind. Arundhati Roy does not glorify or berate her mother. She presents her mother as a human being with her own virtues and frailties. The book narrates her mother’s struggles as a divorcee and single mother. The readers get to know all the humiliation and challenges that she and her kids faced in her maternal house, where she was unwelcome.

In a dispassionate way, the book talks about her mother’s efforts to build a school brick by brick and shape it into a model school that every middle-class Malayali parent aspires to send their kids to. It also recounts why and how Mary Roy took the battle to the Supreme Court to get the archaic Travancore Christian Succession Act of 1916 quashed.

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But all these achievements are told only as passing references. The primary focus of the book is not on Mary Roy per se, but on the uneasy relations between the mother and her children. The book throws light on the eccentricities and tantrums of this otherwise successful woman; the way she behaved or misbehaved with her, compelling her to leave home and chart her own trajectory, away from the mother’s influence.

The book is not just the memoir of her mother; it is also an autobiography of the defiant daughter. Most admirers and critics have kept track of Arundhati Roy’s life as an author and social activist after she received the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things. Some knowingly, and some others unknowingly, have attributed her success and fame to her privileged upbringing. This memoir shows that many of our assumptions about the privileged status of the mother and daughter are false.

What we knew about them is too little. Mary Roy, who married to escape from her patriarchal father, had no job or money when she divorced and returned to Kerala. She had to fight her way to bring up her two kids. True, Arundhati Roy and her brother had the fortune of studying at a relatively elite school in Ooty, for which she should thank her mother, who worked hard to pay for their school education. Her mother encouraged her to study in Delhi and financed her first two years of college education.

But at 18, when she was still a student at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, Arundhati Roy could not take her mother’s taunts and decided not to take money from her. She fends for herself, doing odd jobs, living in the shanties and cycling through the streets of Delhi.

The book informs us many other unknown, or little-known facts about Arundhati Roy – her college life, her first love, life with a boyfriend she calls JC, subsequent breakup, her struggles to make a living in Delhi, her new friends and everlasting relations, her abortion, her career in films as an actor and screenplay writer, her emergence as a successful novelist, her awards and royalties, her political essays and confrontations with governments, her legal battles, her reunion with her father and brother, and her final reconciliation with her mother. 

The book acquaints us with several people she met, the places she visited, and the experiences she accumulated since childhood. Many of these persons, places and experiences found creative expression in her novels.

Mother Mary Comes to Me is a book about a mother and a daughter who sought freedom and identity in their own ways. Nothing came to them on a platter. Both had to fight their battles to establish themselves as autonomous individuals. They are poles apart in their ideas and ambitions. Barring the daunting spirit, which is common to both, there is little in common between the two in their looks and temperaments. Given the generational and ideological differences, there is no way that they could live together peacefully under one roof.

Hence, each chose their own path, which crisscrossed at times but never converged. It was difficult for a spirited daughter to accept the eccentricities and tantrums of her mother. Nor was it easy for the mother to accept the anarchic and free-spirited life the daughter had chosen. The only alternative left for both is to accept, reconcile, and respect each other as they are.

Compared to her earlier novels, this memoir, written more like a novel, is easy to follow and reflect. Many of her well-crafted sentences in the book will become memes and quotes. While some revelations are shocking, some make us smile.

The book is personal and also political. Her reflections on their personal journeys take place in the background of all major political developments in the country – the Naxalite movement, the Emergency, the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the Anti-Sikh Rights, the Rath Yatra, the demolition of Babri Masjid, the attack on the Parliament, the terrorism in Kashmir to the consolidation of the Hindutva forces.

Although she is aware of the likely consequences of her revelations, Arundhati Roy does not hesitate to express her opinions on the persons and the events that changed the politics of the country. She takes to humor and sarcasm to respond to different allegations made against her over the years.

But several things that she shared in the book about her life will provide adequate ammunition to her critics – right, left and center – to attack her for living a life on her own terms. Her countless haters will queue up to dissect everything she wrote and scream, “Didn’t I already tell you so? She is such a mean creature, so hollow, superficial and hypocritical; a blot on society, a threat to the nation…..” To them one can only say, “How colorless and boring life becomes if we don’t have persons like Mary Roy and Arundhati Roy around us”.

Prof. H. Srikanth, Department of Political Science, North-Eastern Hill University , hskant@gmail.com

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