E-Paper
Review: Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhathi Roy
This grief-soaked memoir that lays bare the author’s magical but difficult childhood is literature as cenotaph
Arundhati Roy is author of The God of Small Things (operatic, unforgettable), The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (ambitious, dense), My Seditious Heart (polemical, well-meaning) — and adding to this cabinet of curiosities is a glorious, grief-soaked memoir: Mother Mary Comes to Me. In the opening pages, September arrives “that most excellent month,” signals an opportune time for her mother’s death: even the Kerala weather turns into a requiem and old wounds become apertures to even older grief. Hardly is Mary Roy —formidable educator whose funeral drew alumni from across the state and an activist who forced the Supreme Court to recognise equal inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women — put to rest than the daughter measures air and light as though clauses in a will: what remains, who inherits, and what is indivisible — ancient sorrow. From the start, Arundhati Roy resists consolations of the sanctified death; with a daughter’s awe and bruising, she renders her mother as a “gangster.” This nickname gives the book its grammar: love shorn of performative elegance.
Roy’s magical but difficult childhood is laid bare: an absentee father; relatives who, at best, are reluctant to help a single mother and, at their most feudal, committed to disinheriting her; the great tragic figure, of course, is Mary Roy: asthmatic and mean, loving and visionary. As a repository of intergenerational trauma, Mary Roy’s persistent cruelties send her young eighteen-year-old reeling out of home: not an act of rebellion but of self-preservation. In the years of no contact, Arundhati Roy comes into her own, she trains to be an architect, marries, divorces, moves from Goa to Delhi, where she is discovered by chance by maverick and gracious-hearted filmmaker Pradip Krishen.
Halfway through this profoundly moving book, the frame widens. The domestic ledger, which sometimes keels into the petty — who kept faith and who failed — tilts into a larger throw about law, property, money. Mary Roy rewriting her will “almost every other week” is both a sibling joke and a legal parable. But the shift from house to courthouse is not a literary swerve. Rather, as Roy did in her luminous first novel, she shows family is the first institution. And that institutions are simply families writ large — with all the attendant bitterness and DNA zings of familiarity.
Throughout, she writes frankly about prize money and public success, about grief and accounting that sit at the same table. “I am puzzled and more than a little ashamed…,” she admits applying the same surgical scrutiny to her fame she reserves for everyone else. Perhaps the self-scrutiny would benefit from more rigorous editing because the book courts a risk it mostly survives: self-mythologizing. A memoir chiefly about the mother is also, unmistakably, a narrative of the daughter’s making. Scenes of artistic formation — running away from home “in order to be able to continue to love her,” are cast with the deliberateness of origin stories. The effect is double-edged. On one hand, it clarifies how Roy’s compassionate expansive writer’s gaze came to be; on the other, it casts her as inevitable heir: not to property or principle, but as the book’s moral centre.
Is that a flaw? Or is it the cost of candour? The answer depends on what one believes a mother memoir serves. Roy’s wager is that to tell her mother truly she must tell of the self that Mary made — and unmade (blew up like a time bomb, more like). Roy’s self-regard is not coy. It is dramatized, where theatricality doubles as armour, with a wink to a screenwriter’s heritage. Luckily, the book autocorrects lapses by reverting to the modest scale. The book’s more remarkable passages are not about literary destiny or court cases; they are about texture and weather, how loss alters light in a room, the silence flaring after a slammed door.
The strength of the memoir is tonal: a cool, lucid jazz set that allows consideration and blame and acceptance to jam in the same dark club. Mary is “my shelter and my storm.” The phrase has the bluntness of a weather report, echoing Toni Morrison’s phrase in Beloved, of “sword and shield”. Roy is unsentimental about damage and rescues herself from resentment by finding love in its most secret, disorderly forms. She honours the unglamorous labour of care. “It was Kurussammal who taught us what love was,” she writes, opening a family portrait to those shunted to the margins: hands that feed, bathe, and witness.
The memoir finds a place within a larger canon of grief literature. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking wrote bereavement as a form of vigil while Patti Smith’s Just Kids consecrated the idea of friendship as the performance art of love. Roy’s book, its closest kin, may be the prickly memoirs of difficult mothers: works by Vivian Gornick and Adrienne Rich’s essays that resist the script of reconciliation. Where some grief memoirs are structured around absence, Roy insists on presence: Mary is not idealized in death but reanimated here in all her unruly, typhonic, complex force. This is literature as cenotaph.
By the end, an unsentimental, handsome elegy reveals inheritance as more than a document. It is a disposition of attention, a discipline of truth-telling (or truth-shouting), a promise to resist the calm laziness of tidy closure. Here, the daughter does not forgive her mother into grace; she writes her way toward something braver: to see the wound-giver’s wound is an act of self-healing for those who come through slaughter.
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi is the author of the novels, The Last Song of Dusk, The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay, and The Rabbit & the Squirrel, among others.
