‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’ is a bittersweet mother-daughter tale that no fiction can outdo

It’s nice to know who inspired the character of Velutha in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Or how her beloved uncle G Isaac—the Rhodes scholar known for such dinnertime utterances as ‘Isn’t it wonderful to have a god of wine and ecstasy?’, the sometimes villainous, often sparkling presence in their lives—became a character in the same Booker Prize-winning novel. Or the many intermissions that marked the decade-long path that led to the eventual publication of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness in 2017. Everyone likes being able to tug at the thread that binds a name on the page to its real-life doppelgänger.

However, even if you leave the literary gold nuggets aside, what makes you keep turning the page in Roy’s recently released memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, is the figure in the title itself: Mary Roy, mother of Arundhati Roy (even if the former hated being described as such). There’s a line from the book that’s on the cover and keeps getting quoted by journalists in interviews and reviews of the book: “In these pages, my mother, my gangster, shall live. She was my shelter and my storm.”

While we all have a complicated relationship with our parents, in Mother Mary Comes to Me what we witness is a more consequential play of shadow and light—consequential for Arundhati Roy, for generations of her mother’s students at the pathbreaking school that she founded in Kottayam, and for us, the rapt readers, who are grateful for the writer all this shaped.

Mary Roy was a formidable figure. In the ’60s, she left her alcoholic husband and moved to Ooty with her two children, aged four and a half and three, and squatted in the family home there till she came up with a plan. Someone, who through sheer grit and an entrepreneurial spirit rare for the time, went on to establish Pallikoodam, the model school that revolutionised education in Kottayam district and the state of Kerala, on a barren hill that people believed to be haunted. She was the one who bought her daughter her first typewriter and introduced her to Shakespeare and AA Milne. Mary Roy moved the Supreme Court against the Travancore Christian Succession Act, which prevented women from inheriting property, and won—a fight spurred not just by the greater good but perhaps also by petty vengeance. Following her death in 2022, at the age of almost 89, she received a 21-gun salute from the Kottayam City Police.

Through this life marked by brilliance, if someone suffered, it was her two children, Lalith Kumar Christopher Roy (LKC) and Arundhati. Mary Roy was Mrs Roy for everyone, even to Arundhati and LKC—first in public, then, to simplify matters, everywhere. School report cards led to beatings or praise, and constant reminders of her efforts towards raising them began with “Speaking as your banker…”. Their father was a “Nothing Man”. Her favourite reprimand, “Get out!”, would become a source of mirth to her children and her loyal employees, but only much later.

The memoir, however, is not a vengeful vent about a parent who determined her daughter’s lifelong attitudes towards money, relationships, family, and the idea of home. Throughout, there’s a constant acknowledgement of the ire directed by Mrs Roy towards her children as a natural consequence of the tender, fierce love that needed to be channeled elsewhere. “It was almost as though for her to shine her light on her students, and give them all she has, we—he and I—had to absorb her darkness,” writes Arundhati about her and her brother. Like a beam from a torchlight with a disc of night bang in the centre. It’s a sentiment that recurs in the book.

There’s a constant back and forth between Mrs Roy’s benevolence and its abrupt withdrawal—the good and the bad see-saw—“her genius, her eccentricity, her radical kindness, her militant courage, her ruthlessness…”

The long-term consequences of a childhood spent walking on eggshells are examined with a weary, often forgiving, eye; every unforgivable act alternates with a moment of overwhelming redemption. One gets the feeling that in the process of writing, memories and feelings are getting clarified, even if catharsis seems impossible. The equanimity with which the author bears the thousand tiny cuts inflicted by her mother becomes a larger political question: what makes us love our oppressors?

There’s sunlight and humour too, like the jar of jujubes that follows Mrs Roy around during a serious illness that necessitates a hospital stay. Sometimes they’re like tiny instances of ironic juxtaposition, like a pink teddy bear lying amid grey rubble. When Arundhati wins the Booker Prize, Mrs Roy is proud. When she witnesses the adulation and recognition that comes her daughter’s way as a consequence, she’s all fire and brimstone. That see-saw again; nothing stays up or down for long.

Throughout the periods of vulnerability and intimidation that Arundhati faces over her political opinions, there’s her mother’s surprising support; the author calls her her “unaffectionate iron angel”. The title of the book, then, comes into play, along with the rest of the Beatles song.

What would you do if you had a parent the ground around whom resembled a minefield, but who topped it with a declaration of love that threatens to muddy everything you thought you felt? Well, if you’re Arundhati Roy, you just write a book others can’t put down.

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy is published by Penguin Random House India