Deliverance from a troubled family history lies at the core of Arundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me, an origin story fueled by the Indian author's brilliant, ferocious wit and the masterful storytelling that is her trademark. Now a globally acclaimed literary phenomenon, Roy charts her path from the tea estates of Assam and a tiny village in Kerala to big-city life in Delhi via the beaches of Goa. Readers familiar with her fiction and essays might be surprised to learn Roy initially trained and worked as an architect, followed by fruitful stints as an actor and a scriptwriter before she stunned the literary world with her Booker Prize-winning debut, The God of Small Things. Relationships platonic and otherwise rotate through her narrative, while the one figure who remains present on every page, in person or in spirit, is Roy's larger-than-life late mother, the formidable Mary Roy.
Roy cautions that readers won't find "conventional declarations" of love, marriage, divorce, or affairs in her memoir, and yet what they will discover is a far more intriguing trajectory through friendship, romance, love, and heartbreak, with Roy's valued inner circle from her days as an "off-grid drifter" still intact today. With amused and fond nostalgia, Roy reflects on the Italian architect who "settled and organized the basic building blocks of my personality"; her hapless but endearing father; and the uncle who inspired one of her most memorable fictional characters.
Mother Mary Comes to Me draws on multiple strands of the author's early years, unveiling an empathetic and at the same time marvelously satirical portrait of an eccentric extended family with a fondness for spectacular family feuds. Roy's maternal lineage was saddled with a legacy of violence yet blessed with the gifts of education and English fluency. "Mrs. Roy" formed the tempestuous foundation upon which Roy and her brother, "LKC," raised themselves. A single mother who suffered from debilitating asthma and thunderous moods, Mary Roy founded a coeducational school--a revolutionary act in its time--and grew it into a spectacularly influential institution. The rage and unpredictability Mrs. Roy was known for was the secret to her success in a patriarchal society unaccustomed to seeing a woman soar to great heights while rejecting cultural roles designed to clip her wings.
With open admiration, Roy describes her mother as having "the edginess of a gangster" while embodying for her students "the burning flame of courage and defiance." Mrs. Roy famously petitioned the Supreme Court in Delhi to repeal the Christian Succession Act that limited a woman's inheritance rights, winning an equal share in her father's ancestral property. Arundhati Roy's self-dependence developed early, her playground and "refuge" the banks of the Meenachil River. Far from growing up in isolation, though, she and her brother were immersed in their mother's education project from its inception.
The author's experience of growing up inside a school with teachers and students who worshipped her mother leads her to conclude, only half-jokingly, that she was raised in a cult. Everyone--except for Roy and her brother--was in thrall to the charming, manipulative "diva" whose fury they suffered but who also dazzled her students and inspired their success. Along with entertaining anecdotes about her mother's teaching style, Roy remembers how the entire school could hear when the volatile matriarch roared at her. "Even the fish in the fish tank looked alarmed," she recalls.
Despite being a penniless teenager when she enrolled at the School of Architecture in Delhi, Roy blossomed away from her volatile mother. Her reflections are achingly tender and point to an understanding, even as a young child, that for Mrs. Roy to "shine her light on her students and give them all she had, [Roy and her brother] had to absorb her darkness." That darkness was a gift, the "route to freedom," releasing Roy from the shackles of her inherited past. Accustomed to having no money, she is now blissfully detached from the wealth earned by her success, and distributes it widely and generously. The central luxury of financial independence, she believes, is having a home of her own, "one from which nobody can order me to get out."
After winning the Booker Prize in her early 30s, Roy resisted the alluring "gilded cage" of publishing contracts and instead fulfilled her destiny as the daughter of Mrs. Roy to travel a blazing path of justice-oriented advocacy. She has an expansive view on a writer's role in society, deploying her craft to highlight, among other stories of marginalized groups, the plight of beleaguered Kashmiris under military occupation. Despite harassment from authorities for speaking truth to power, Roy has forged for herself "the freedom to live and to write on [her] own terms." Not one to be intimidated, Roy's only protection comes from the street dogs she nurtures.
With staggering clarity and self-awareness, Mother Mary Comes to Me excavates the deeper truths behind a fraught yet liberating bond with a mother who instinctively understood that Roy "has a writer's heart." Inspired by a desire "To bridge the chasm between the legacy of love she left for those whose lives she touched, and the thorns she set down for me..." this elegant book memorializes the maternal courage and devotion that was Mrs. Roy's final bequest. --Shahina Piyarali