Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review

In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives.

The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs.

The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided Assam in 1961. Her father was a Bengali who was a manager in a tea estate. He was an alcoholic. When the 1962 war started between India and China, the family was forced to move out from the border region. Mary Roy took the two children and went to Ooty where her father had a cottage. Her father was an Imperial Entomologist.

Mary and her little children were soon evicted from that cottage by her own mother and brother. According to the Travancore Christian Succession Act, daughters had no right to their father’s property. Getting this Act annulled is one of the revolutionary deeds that Mary Roy would accomplish later in her eventful life. Ironically, that brother who evicted her from the small cottage in Ooty would himself be evicted from his own ancestral home later when Mary Roy wins her case against the succession act.

Mary Roy emerged as a champion of many things in Kerala. She opened a school in her village and that went on to become one of the most sought-after schools in the region. She was admired by her students. But her own son and daughter found it impossible to live with her. Arundhati left her mother at the age of 16 in order “to be able to continue to love her.” Loving Mother Mary wasn’t quite an easy thing to do. She was extremely temperamental, “crazy, unpredictable, magical, free, fierce.”

The formidable Mother Mary sometimes becomes a caricature in the book, though that caricaturisation is done intentionally. For example, when she went to Trivandrum to invite Laurie Baker to come and construct her school building, she is accompanied by an assistant to carry Mary’s bag that contained water, a flask of coffee, “egg sandwiches, emergency medicines, the asthma inhaler and the spare asthma inhaler.” The assistant also had “round peacock-feather fan” with which she was to keep fanning “my hot (in every sense of the word) mother.” A young apprentice of Laurie Baker would later describe Mary as a crazy woman. This young apprentice also became Arundhati’s first life-partner. Their marriage is described by the author as “Jesus marries a Japanese parcel.” Such metaphors abound in this book.

Later Pradip Krishen will introduce her to the movie-world and also become her life-partner. Writing becomes her passion after her adventures with movies. The second half of the book is about her writing career, activism, and the various threats she has had to face. Some of her own fictional characters appear in this section as powerful metaphors. Many of the chapters in this section are titled after Roy’s own books and essays.

Mother Mary hovers over these pages though the author lived far away from her. “Like an unaffectionate iron angel. The metallic swoosh of her iron wings spurred me to pick the big fights, not the small ones.” The fights are the ideological ones Arundhati Roy took up ceaselessly giving us such powerful essays as ‘The Algebra of Infinite Justice’ and ‘Walking with the Comrades.’ Mother Mary didn’t approve of such writings entirely; but she admired them.

Very few authors can write as candidly as Roy about their own lives. So poetically. So metaphorically and yet factually. Reading this book is both a delight and a pain. We move between a paradise and a graveyard, like Anjum the protagonist of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Mother Mary is hugely responsible for the creation of that ambiguous reality. It is exciting to meet that “Warrior Dreamer Teacher” [Mary’s epitaph] and the Warrior Writer Enigma she gave birth to much against her will.