In Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy marks the passing of her late mother by fathoming her on the page for the first time. “I wrote versions of her in my books”, Roy explains, “but I never wrote her.”
Doing so is difficult, even painful for Roy because of who her mother was and how she mothered. To her students, Mrs Roy was a committed headmistress who left a legacy of learning. To her country, Mary Roy was a tireless advocate for Syrian Christians, whose landmark legal case in India’s supreme court set precedents for women’s inheritance rights.
But as a parent to two children, Roy tells us, Mrs Roy was mercurial and stubborn. A bundle of contradictions, she compelled her daughter to think and be free, only to then rage against her for the thoughts she had and the freedoms she claimed.
Despite its title, then, Mother Mary Comes to Me does not conjure Mrs Roy as an adoring mother like the one once invoked by Paul McCartney in his timeless Beatles song Let it Be. Instead, Roy characterises her mother as a prickly porcupine who simply did not let it be. The UK hardback edition, cased in a striking red stiff cotton, is debossed with the book’s central idea: “In these pages, my mother, my gangster, shall live. She was my shelter and my storm”.
In order to tell her mother’s story, Roy must tell her own. She starts by getting back to where she once belonged, recounting a childhood in Kerala in south India “where there is a whole dictionary of words for different kinds of rain”. Then, she transports us to Delhi, the sooty megacity that once liberated her from her past, but today has become a “nightmare” of “guards and security cameras”.
Roy’s warrior-teachers
What begins as a mother-daughter memoir therefore shape-shifts, subtly and slowly, into a writer’s autobiography. By tracing the long and winding road of her life – from architecture school to filmmaking, from the Booker Prize to court charges for environmental protests in the 2000s and a provocative 2010 speech on Kashmir – Roy shows how her tempestuous upbringing shaped her intrepid search for truth and justice. “I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I travelled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-writer.”
Roy is always quick to throw off the piety of commitment. “To me”, she says, “‘writer-activist’ sounded a bit like a sofa-bed”. Yet the positions she has taken on her motherland’s most contested issues – male violence against women, Hindu nationalist pogroms and the dispossession of people due to India’s megadam projects – have all been inspired by her mother, the “unaffectionate iron angel” whose ghost watches over her life, offering her the armour to withstand the worst. Roy’s mother once forced darkness upon her. Now, Roy says, she recognises this darkness as a gift.
Mother Mary Comes To Me stands as Roy’s literary memorial to her “dreamer warrior teacher” mother. But the book also pays tribute to all those other dreamer-warrior-teachers – family, lovers and comrades – with whom Roy has built friendships and felt solidarity. Instructing us to read the book as we would one of her novels, Roy has written a memoir that is as uncompromising as her life – and her mother’s, too.
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Dominic O’Key does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.