Hail Mary: Book Review Of Arundhati Roy's 'Mother Mary Comes To Me'

Every memoir is a reckoning. A stock-taking of all the selves the writer has inhabited. All the lives she ever lived. At 63, ‘heart-smashed’ by her mother’s death, Arundhati Roy retraces the paths she has walked; beginning her memoir with the end of her mother’s life, then, circling all the way back to the beginning. At the core of Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me is her bond with her mercurial mother, Mary Roy, who passed away in September, 2022. She was 89.

Mrs Roy—as her students, and her daughter and her son Lalith Kumar Christopher Roy, used to address her—was a force of nature. Educator and founder of the unconventional Corpus Christi High School (Pallikoodam) at Kottayam. Crusader who sued her brother George Isaac to claim equal access to their ancestral property. Her perseverance won a landmark legal battle for Syrian Christian women to be granted equal inheritance rights. Though she was criticised by many in her community, Mother Mary was never the one to say ‘let it be’.

A couple of years ago, at the Wayanad Literature Festival, Roy told a packed hall that Mary Roy was one of the most extraordinary women she has ever known. “And one of the reasons for it was that she was not a great mother,” Roy said with a smile, adding, “I had to un-daughter myself to admire her wildness.” Mary Roy often raged against her children, and motherhood itself.

She suffered from chronic asthma. Her temper was a beast; she hit her children sometimes, and humiliated them in soul-crushing ways. She built up her daughter and also tore her down. She taught her to think and also resented her for her thoughts. Roy says at the start of the memoir that in order to fathom her mother’s contradictions, to understand what hurt her, she herself turned into a maze, “a labyrinth of pathways” which she hoped would give her “a vantage point for a perspective other than my own.” And this made her the writer that she is.

The adult Roy understands that the odds were stacked against her mother: her father was a violent, abusive man; her husband, addicted to alcohol, ‘a Nothing Man’; her brother a bully on attack mode. To expect a child to see the big picture is ludicrous. In her childhood days, Roy says she loved her mother “irrationally, fearfully, completely, as children do.” In adulthood, she aimed to love her “coolly, rationally, and from a safe distance.” She admits she often failed.

The memoir is Roy’s origin story: as a writer, a private individual, a public intellectual, a speaker of inconvenient truth to power. She shares her notes from the inside with readers (I suspect she’s been taking notes—intense, witty, moving, disturbing—ever since she learnt the alphabet) without glossing over the messy bits. Hers is not a quest to tame love’s ambivalence, or to package a life as a selection of presentable bits. In Roy’s words, her memoir is out in the world “to bridge the chasm between the legacy of love she [Mrs Roy] left for those whose lives she touched, and the thorns she set down for me, like little floaters in my bloodstream—fish hooks that catch on soft tissue as my blood makes its way to and from my heart…”

She opens up in the book about the overwhelming sadness she felt at her mother’s passing, which her brother didn’t share. The extent of her grief is a mystery to her. Making a larger point, she wonders whether a better understanding of her own self would bring a deeper understanding of the world and of her country—where many people seem to “revere their persecutors” and feel grateful “to be told what to do, what to wear, what to eat and how to think.”

The first half of the book covers the mother and children’s move from a tea estate in Assam—where Roy’s alcohol-addled father Rajib Michael Roy (Micky Roy to his friends) worked as an assistant manager—to Ooty, and later on to Ayemenem on the banks of the Meenachil river near Kottayam, Mary Roy’s birthplace. When they set out for Ooty, Roy was three and Lalith, four-and-a-half. They didn’t have any contact with their father again till they were in their 20s. Roy chronicles the trio’s ‘fugitive life’ in Ooty.

Their maternal uncle and grandmother show up one day to evict them from their grandfather’s cottage, insisting that a daughter who had defied her parents by marrying a Bengali Hindu and gone on to divorce him (scandalising the Syrian Christian community on both counts), had no right to her father’s house. Later, when they go to live at Ayemenem, the single mother and her children are made to feel unwelcome by their relatives and their community. There are portions here that will wreck you. Roy writes them with the same intensity and insight she shone on the fictional lives at Ayemenem in her Booker-winning novel The God of Small Things. Read Mother Mary and you’ll see why the novel’s twins, Rahel and Estha, were stuck in fight-or-flight mode, swearing, ‘“Anything can happen to anyone” and “It’s best to be prepared”.

In the memoir’s second half, Roy leaves for Delhi to study at the School of Planning and Architecture. For a long stretch, she keeps her distance from her mother, and puts herself through college. She marries (not totally legally) her first love JC. They are happy together, but the safest place eventually turns into “the most dangerous” for her and she cuts loose. Whenever she is at a crossroads, Roy realises that her education and her background offer her choices that are denied to millions in the country. For this, and her steely spine, she is grateful to her mother.

She writes, “At no point, no matter how untenable my circumstances, did I forget that.” Mother and daughter reconnect after a long silence, and then begins the phase of trying to love her “coolly, rationally, and from a safe distance”. Throughout the years, as Roy carves out a space for herself in the world as an actress, an activist, a screenwriter, essayist and novelist, her mother remains her ‘shelter and her storm’.

***

On turning memoirist, Roy joins a fine band of writers, including Kamala Das, Yiyun Li, Jeanette Winterson, Mary Karr, Maya Angelou, Vivian Gornick and Sheila Heti. With Mother Mary Comes to Me, she urges us to interrogate our assumptions about mothers and daughters, kinship and friendship, nationhood and personhood, and patriotism and progress. Her mandate is to embrace complexity and contradictions, not to flatten them with neat labels.

Roy writes to find clarity as many memoirists do, but never forces teachable moments down the reader’s throat. Her book is a finely crafted search for answers; a search rooted in the awareness that there is something fundamentally “knotty about the human condition” and that every puzzle is not meant to be solved.

“Maybe it’s best to leave some things un-understood...” she suggests. “I’m all for the unclimbed mountain. The unconquered moon.” That is a compelling reason to read her memoir.

Vineetha Mokkil is associate editor, Outlook. She is the author of the book A Happy Place and Other Stories