Does Mother Mary Really Come? You bet!

Prolific writer-activist-thinker Arundhati Roy's memoir, an ode to her mother's formidable personality, is cleverly titled, Mother Mary Comes to Me. Below the title is a picture of young Roy nonchalantly smoking a bidi. Irreverence, thy name is Arundhati Roy!

At 372 pages, it is a tome, a sweeping saga that recollects both her mother's remarkable life, as well as her own.

Is it a Memoir?

Yes and no. Though the book title refers to their mother-daughter relationship, the book - at several junctures treats each one of them as independent and exclusive from one another. In fact, for a good part, her mother finds no mention at all, and the reader is engrossed reading about Roy's exploits and struggles through Architecture College, early attempts to find her vocation and calling, her dabbling with cinema, acting, scriptwriting; her romantic liaisons with the luscious JC, Sanjay, Pradeep et al. A life as extraordinary and unapologetic as Arundhati's mesmerizes in itself. Though we found a large part of her childhood in idyllic Kottayam in the pages of her first literary output - The God of Small Things, here we live through her early twenties life in Nizamuddin, living with vagrants and squatters, gawking at Delhi's glitter and squall alike.

Then why is the book called a memoir? I think this has to do with every dominant parent's overreaching and intrusive influence in a child's life. Mary Roy or Mrs. Roy's words echo at crucial crossroads, her "lessons" singe the mind at tender moments. Mrs. Roy assails the mind of her daughter at once with crippling doubt, then she fills it with brilliant clarity. Her quirks have shaped Arundhati, her sharpness has cut her and bruised her irrevocably.

As a headstrong daughter, tortured mentally and emotionally by her mother in her most vulnerable years, Arundhati directs her life in a trajectory that challenge her mother's notions. Her guiding force is to quell that voice of sarcasm, that cruel snubbing she faced from her mercurial mother, irrespective of provocation. 

Shades of her Mother

But try as her daughter might, Mrs. Roy's formidable impact wasn't going away any too soon. Even when she severs contact with her mother for twelve long years, the latter's looming presence lingers. That idealism she follows has come from her mother's teachings. That scathing self-criticism, that quest for justice, that surgical fairness, all owe their origins to Mary Roy's scrupulous conduct in public life. Even running away from the control and comfort of steady relationships comes from having being told to "get out" umpteen times, metaphorically and literally. 

As she writes about her mother's influence on her students - "She gave them spines, she gave them wings, she set them free. She bequeathed her unwavering attention and her stern love to them, and they shone back at her."

Her children weren't so lucky, having received the wrong end of Mary Roy's stick too often. But the harshness, the brutality firmed their spines too, made Arundhati and her brother LKC, the stellar humans they were.

"There's nothing I feared more than being trapped in Kottayam with Mrs. Roy." This is the driving force in Arundhati's life choices. She runs, away from conventionality, from domesticity, from smugness in her own talent, from appreciation (that seems false all too often".

Mrs. Roy's school and residence, designed by the genius Laurie Baker spurs Arundhati's architectural ambition too. Though her calling turns out different later, she uses the opportunity to escape from her mother's clutches.

Activism and Writing

For Arundhati, the intolerance of injustice governs all her actions. She protests for the displaced, the repressed, the tortured. It may be her catharsis of dealing with the pain she has borne all her life. She rushes ahead where angels fear to tread, rushes out to mend fractured lives. She has known the pain of one.

It is remarkable how her mother always knows when she courts trouble. Before going to jail, before traveling to Kashmir, before she ruffles feathers with her anti-establishment statements and actions, Arundhati receives a call or a signal from Mrs. Roy.

Even her writing is spurred by images and metaphors. She finds her "language animal" after "disemboweling" the normal phrases and words. The cold moth that visits her during her moments of doubt every now and then, is her mother's legacy. Like the squirrel in Ayemenem, the young grey hornbill in hot Delhi supervises her writing her second book.

In between travelling to Narmada villages to voice her support, walking with the Naxalites in Dantewada, lashing out against communal crimes, and staying with Kashmiris through their splintered lives, she writes her masterpieces. She also wins awards, queens it in the literary world, and freely disperses her prize money in charity.

That is the discipline than her mother has bequeathed her, that is the spine she has firmed. It also unexpectedly has given her a kindness, a gentleness, and a flexibility that helps her make peace with her demons.

I don't think this review has quite managed to capture the brilliance and range of the book. But as a fledgling writer, I am trying...

#memoirs #ArundhatiRoy #motherdaughterrelations #torturedselves