After reading The God of Small Things, I wanted to know more about Arundhati Roy. So when I came across Mother Mary Comes to Me, her memoir about her mother, Mary Roy, I was curious to meet the woman behind some of the emotional world I had encountered in her fiction.
I found it wonderful that Roy had written a book years ago and could later return to some of the people and experiences that had shaped it. I believe writers often write about people they know, transforming familiar personalities and experiences into characters. I didn’t find Mary Roy and Ammu particularly similar, though. I liked Ammu for her own qualities, especially her fierceness and independence, while I came to admire Mary Roy for rather different reasons.
Mary reminded me of something my own mother would say: that sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. I felt that the love between Mary and Arundhati had always been there, even when it was difficult. People sometimes have different ways of showing love, or even concealing it. I also felt that Mary was proud of her daughter.
The words on Mary Roy’s tombstone – Dreamer. Warrior. Teacher. really stayed with me. Of the three, I would describe her most strongly as a warrior, but also as a visionary. She started a school from almost nothing and built it with a vision. She wasn’t simply fighting against things; she was imagining something and then making it real.
The memoir also introduced me to another side of Arundhati Roy. I hadn’t realised how fierce an activist she was or how willing she was to put herself into difficult and sometimes dangerous situations. At one point she seemed almost like a hobo travelling through different and dangerous experiences. I couldn’t always understand what made her protest so many things, and as someone who isn’t very vocal myself, I found her adventurousness almost a little dangerous. But discovering this side of her only made me love her more as an author. She feels like a different creature to me someone who feels things very deeply.
I was particularly fascinated by how deeply she understands India and its politics. My own knowledge of Indian history and politics isn’t very strong, and I am not a particularly political person, but the memoir made me want to understand more. I would like to read some of her political essays, not necessarily to agree with everything she says, but to understand what she saw in these political situations and perhaps deepen my own knowledge of India along the way.
I was especially intrigued by her writing about Kashmir and by her suggestion that it would somehow find its way into every book she wrote. It made me want to read her essays alongside her fiction, slowly, so that I can perhaps understand the India beneath her stories a little better.
And then there was the title.
Mother Mary Comes to Me is, of course, a line from the Beatles’ Let It Be: “Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be.” I loved that connection. I felt that perhaps this was how Arundhati’s mother came to her not simply as the difficult mother she remembered, but as someone whose words, influence and presence remained with her. Perhaps, in time, she had learned to accept her mother as she was while continuing to love her strongly.
I finished the memoir feeling that Mary Roy was not simply a difficult mother or a remarkable woman. She was all of these things at once: educator, mother, revolutionary.
And perhaps that is what I liked most about the book. It allowed me to see not only the mother behind Arundhati Roy’s memories, but the woman behind the author I had only recently discovered.
I think I would like to keep reading Arundhati Roy her fiction first, slowly, while gradually making my way into her essays too.
There is something about the way she feels the world that makes me want to keep reading.
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