Follow TNM’s WhatsApp channel for news updates and story links.
Note: Arundhati Roy is referred to as A, Mary Roy as Mother Mary
Attempting to review Arundhati Roy’s memoir about her mother, my body began showing withdrawal symptoms. Shaky, shivery, ready to run away with meagre belongings. The only way I could write this was to make it a non review. The fear is predictably naive: how could I write about her: She was She, to borrow one of A’s own epithets for Mother Mary.
I can’t remember in which paragraph I found it, this connection for feeling the way she does about Mother Mary. Mother B (mine) is many worlds away, and for reasons such as our common love for obscurity, I will not dwell on the ways we connected to A and Mary. I will just pick out one line where A writes about ‘her refusal to stop loving’ Mary (or the other way around), no matter what. My guess is, most daughters brought the image of their mothers to the page, gently pushing the familiar picture of the bobbed Mrs Roy to the side, till A would pull her right back in.
Mother Mary is everywhere, even as A leaves home at 16 and lives for years without a shred of connection, even as her life fills with events far removed from Mary’s world. Every reaction, every unreasonable choice that A makes and can’t figure out why she makes them, comes from life with Mary, you reckon. She ran because of Mary, but to be able to run away, she needed to have come from Mary. Girls at 16 plan their runaways, the faraway freedom they know is only the stuff of fantasy. But to run is a job you need preparation for – to be ready, to be able to carry it off – and life with Mary gives her that. A’s brother LKC runs away too, at a later age, but perhaps he did not inherit the sustainability of his sister, he kept flowing back to the root of his chaos.
Not A. When she ran away she was smitten not by the promise of literature but by bricks and design, the brilliance of Baker and the pull of first love. Hardships and unlikely friendships would keep her company through architecture and years of film scripting before she falls head over heels into writing. Imagine it all blend, she can trim the edges of her memoir like a draftsman, and tighten the details of life like a ruthless editor.
She swallowed names – of her boyfriend in Goa, of the vengeful Kottayam Collector who brought a ban to Mary’s play, of the Outlook editors who ran her outrageous pieces one after the other. I embraced the pseudonyms - Jesus Christ of Goa, Kottayam Collector not deserving a name, magazine editors safely locked away. I did not care for her reasons, but found it part of the dreamy language.
Interestingly, in those same ‘nameless’ pages, A persistently calls her mother by name, Mrs Roy. She carries over the traits of an uncle or the words of a stranger through hundreds of pages, quoting the same quote now and again, fascinating you by that back and forth -- Uncle G Issac’s embracing of failure, a passerby’s remark for the lesser place of women (“This is India, my dear”). Uncle G Issac, who fought the valiant battle with Mrs Roy for her famous court case to make things right for Christian daughters, is not made a villain of. By the end you let it slide, like A appears to have, that it was he, who had come with a nearly blind mother to throw the penniless Mrs Roy and her toddler kids out of their Ooty home, brandishing the same draconian Travancore Christian Succession Act. Over the pages, A carves out a lovable man out of G Issac and places him dearly next to his little sister, Mart Roy (yes with a T). It is too beautiful a gift, if you can elevate the villains in your life into affable creatures and love them through all the distances that grew between you.
In the same vein, she scatters the faults of the wayward father and somehow makes him adorable for the same reasons. Mickey the dad becomes in your eyes the human that emerged from the cartoon’s clothes, so endearing are his falls and his one piece of advice to the daughter he missed raising: don’t be good.
But if she made G Issac and Mickey Roy endearing, despite and perhaps because of all their flaws, she does not seem to extend the same courtesy to Mary. A’s words betray pride, yes, an admiration for the greatness of her mother who’d fought all her life and built a paradise of a school from nothing. But in A’s memoir, Mrs Roy looks like a towering, growing mountain you can’t begin to approach, let alone fathom. She yells, throws things, slaps, and can't possibly be trusted with even a toy gun. That she can grow empires or fight tooth and nail with anyone and bring them down only makes her more terrifying; someone to admire from a respectable distance. Someone to literally look up to, never face to face.
A appears to have listened to neither parent. I was impatient when she veered off to bigger things in life, to Narmada to stop the contentious dam, through woods with the hated Maoists, to a day in jail for repeatedly ‘contempting’ the court. And mesmerised when she drew Rahel and Esthappan and Anjum out of thin air and put them in her books. These did not seem like random endeavours, rooted as they were in her ill-shaped childhood: the love for the river (Meenachil) and the Naxalite stories she grew up with prompting her activism, the childhood itself writing into her first miracle of a book.
Through every difficult stage in her life, she invoked Mary, bringing out a memory, an argument, something. Mary, if diagnosed by the doctors of literature you read about, might have been told she’s bipolar. One day, she is all ‘baby girl’ this and that to A, another day she looks at the baby girl and calls her a bitch. Makes you wonder about Mary’s own childhood – the dad was introduced as a serial abuser who put a cut on the mom’s scalp.
How, you wonder more than once, did A get herself surrounded by all these characters? The epidemiologist granddad, the violinist grandmother he beat the hell out of, the failure-hugging uncle who left a Rhodes scholarship to start a pickle factory, the aunty who taught at Sri Lanka and came back to live alone and unmarried, and to top them all, Mrs Roy for a mother.
Living with A through so many pages, you think you know to pick apart the different loves of her life – the reverent attachment to Pradip the partner, the tear-inducing warmth for LKC, and what is in her own words, the refusal to stop loving Mrs Roy – because, it doesn’t come easy.
My only contention in all of A Roy’s writing is this: that she wrote it after Mary’s passing. The first thing Mary did when A wrote The God of Small Things was to shut herself in a hospital room and read it four times to see if the truth about her had come out. So, she feared it. It does not seem fair that she can't take Mother Mary Comes To Me to a hospital room. She can't choose to tell her side of the story now that it is out in Baby Girl’s words.
Prodded by the author, in her introduction, I tried to read it all like a novel. Perhaps Mary too, flitting about the Meenachil, will decide in her fourth reading that it's fiction. Baby Girl’s praanthu.