Book Review | A Mother-Daughter Love Saga

— Deborah Levy, Hot Milk

“Shri Mary Roy, c/o India, my dear.” In Mother Mary Comes to Me, India’s premier English language novelist Arundhati Roy performs three functions, she processes her grief at the loss of a parent (grief memoirs as a genre being made fashionable by the coronavirus in India), pays tribute to the departed and preserves for posterity her history with the formidable Mary Roy, ‘Mart’ to her brother and adversary G. Isaac, teacher, founder and ex-principal of the Pallikoodam School in Kottayam, champion of women’s rights and the woman who in 1986 secured equal property inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women, winning a fierce legal battle in the Supreme Court.

Born in 1933, Mary, or Mrs Roy, as she is called throughout the book (where Arundhati Roy refers to all its main characters by name excepting one), was cast out of her imperial entomologist father’s bungalow by her mother and brother with her two young children, Arundhati and her brother LKC, after she returned there from Assam, having divorced Micky Roy, son of boxer Paresh Roy and her alcoholic husband from whom LKC as a young child learned to feint and shadow-box. Struggling to support them, Mary Roy fell ill and had to give up her job, contracting asthma which then became a lifelong problem. She found her feet with the help of a British missionary, Mrs Mathews. Mary Roy did not die of Covid, but of age-related illnesses at 89. Surprisingly, or not, she and her brother became close friends in her final years.

But this book is equally about the writer’s journey from the little girl in frilly frocks to the worldly and accomplished author. “The Adventures of Arundhati Roy” could very well have been its alternative title. At age 16, Arundhati applied for and got herself a seat in the Delhi School of Planning and Architecture. She is one of those rare people who truly loves that city. For an extended period, she lived by the Nizamuddin graveyard in a second-floor single room and cycled to work on a trusty black bike. She mixed freely with beggars and people who are often called lowlifes who, in turn, believed she was a drug-cartel moll, and greeted her every evening with a lusty, “aaj bhi bach gayi”, so you are back again safe and sound? She was off the grid for seven years. Which is why it disappoints a bit more when she writes that Delhi women who travel by bus all put up with unwanted contact.

For many Indians, certainly, Arundhati Roy has been an idol. Those of us who respect her as a writer learn from her memoir that the Meenachil river is her muse. When literary agent David Godwin read The God of Small Things for the first time, he felt as though “someone had shot some heroin up... [his] arm”. And that Ammu of that self-same Booker-winning work is not, as many might like to think, her own ascetic mother. Arundhati also admits to a “slightly warped sense of culpability that comes with sudden fame” behind her politics, which is liberal guilt in other words?

What makes her latest offering not just entertaining but interesting and wise, though, is its clear-eyed examination of motherhood or “Mrs Royhood”, as she terms it for herself, wherein she says she always felt like the “middle child”. Also, that “she [Mrs Roy] was not the kind of mother with whom it was safe to share your vulnerabilities. I knew I had to keep a safe distance”. But at the same time, Mrs Roy shows how important it is for mothers to put community first, to be a role model, to set an example before their children, even mothers like her who “struggled and chafed against motherhood” (which few as a matter of fact don’t still today), in order to raise successful children. So in the end, this book is all about love, in all its shapes, forms and phases, where the restoration of the brother-sister bond between G. Isaac and his ‘Mart’ is Arundhati’s return gift to her own mother.

Mother Mary Comes to Me

By Arundhati Roy

Penguin

pp. 376; Rs 899