By Binodan K D Sarma
I accidentally spilled tea over my copy of Arundhati Roy’s latest memoir-cum-biography (of her mother) – Mother Mary comes to me. I was horrified when this happened. It was the fifth day of me reading the book. I was on page number 230. It was the 29th chapter and was prophetically titled ‘The God of Small Things,’ the novel that catapulted Roy to the literary arena of modern greats. In this page, Roy was talking of the second reappearance of her truant father, ‘Micky Roy’ in Delhi and in her life, in midst of her own journey of completing the iconic first novel. In the next few frantic minutes, I wiped the red hardbound cover clean, wiping the stains on the spine and the edges. Yet from the headband of the top edge through its leaves to the tip of the fore-edge an uneven stain formed like a river charting its own path. I lovingly called this stain – Meenachil, the green river, where the young Roy found her escape in her early years in Kottayam, the place where Mary Roy, the activist, the educationist, the single mother brought up her two children. The Mary Roy, who shaped the Arundhati Roy, as we know her today. Mother Mary Comes to Me is no ordinary biography. It is a cathartic journey of Arundhati Roy’s – to tell the world of her mother, her ‘shelter and storm’. And while doing it, she poetically shows us how her mother shaped her to become the writer and activist she is – tough, resilient and extremely humane. Roy’s narrative in the book is no different from her earlier fiction or nonfiction.
Fast paced, focused and strewn with anecdotal humour, it will lead the reader through the world of Mary Roy and Arundhati. Often, the two worlds intertwine metaphorically, with memory serving as the bridge. From the mofussil Kottyam to the cosmopolitan Delhi, the memoir will trace every incident effortlessly, almost as if you are in a room with Arundhati narrating it to you. That makes it fast paced and enjoyable to the last word. The title itself is no less of an irony. Roy borrows it from the lyrics of The Beatles’ iconic song – “Let it Be”. Paul McCartney had written this song for his mother Mary Mohin McCartney, who died when he was a teenager. On the other hand, Roy by her own admission in the book left her mother as a teenager, when she moved to Delhi to study architecture. “I left home – stopped going home, or what passed as home- after I turned eighteen.” Yet Mary Roy remained Arundhati’s umbilical cord of memories. And the book tells us why and how. In Arundhati’s first novel, The God of Small Things, the character Ammu was ‘loosely’ inspired by Mary Roy. If a reader has read the novel, then the striking resemblance of the incidents and stories of the fictional will coalesce with the facts of the biography – and if I may say so, the latter is more interesting than the former. Mary Roy was a tornado, fierce individual, who took on a church, fought a lonely, long battle to ensure equal rights of women of the Syrian Christian Church in inheritance of property.
Leaving aside this biography, there is much that was said of her, when she passed away in 2022. The students of her school, Pallikodam have heaped her with praises, and one former student, the graphic novelist Appupen has featured her in his book “The Guardian of Light.” Appupen said in an interview, “The idea of questioning and dissenting comes from her.” Roy, reiterates this, but not as a student (who as per her, Mary Roy loved more than her own children), – but as the daughter who faced her wrath, yet was her ‘organ child,’ the girl who wanted to be her lungs during the severe asthma attacks her mother suffered throughout her lifetime. And then, as a teen she became the woman who writes, “I knew that I didn’t need to die if Mrs. Roy did.” This book is about that journey of the polarities that Roy exchanged with the mother Roy Through a broken timeline narrative, Arundhati guides the reader through the journey of her mother’s struggles, tyranny and dogmatism. In the same breath she pulls the reader into her own journey of writing, relationship, and activism. She is her mother’s daughter in her refusal of accepting hegemonic and authoritarian injustice, in finding and narrating her own voice and in becoming a personality that stands tall, much like her mother.
Through the pages of the book, the reader will dive into the ‘gangster’ Mary Roy was, the love-hate relationship Arundhati had with her, how all of that and more made her an author, how she found her stories in her experiences, and finally how she became a voice for the voiceless – a force of dissent that the state feared and loathed with equal measure. There are powerful chapters describing her experiences with the Naxals during the Narmada Dam Movement. In those chapters, Arundhati clearly establishes that although she supports the activism, she is not a Medha Patkar, who lives the movement. She considers her own super-power in the ability of carrying a point of view of the voiceless be it for the struggles of Kashmiris or the Naxals.
This honest dichotomy lends an honest tonality throughout the memoir. Mother Mary Comes to Me, Roy says, should not be seen as a ‘litany’ of horrors of her mother, rather a book of admiration of her. She admits in an interview to The New York Times, that she cannot hate her mother, because she sees much of Mary Roy in herself. The book must be read with that in mind which makes it ‘unputdownable.’ The two Roys will draw the reader into their world like a Pied Piper, drown them in their sea of ‘complexities,’ and at the end of it make them smile in delight.
(The author is an avid reader and dreamer of a happy and just world. He is based out of Delhi and runs an advertising agency.)
