A reading of Arundhati Roy’s memoir, Mother Mary Comes To Me, provides insight into the book that made her popular: The Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things.
The book unveils her life, almost in full. It is easy to see the links between her personal life and The God of Small Things. The memoir tells of an absentee father, wicked relatives, sibling rivalry, and above all, her “gangster” mother, the one who married the first man that came because she felt unloved at home but didn’t hesitate to dump the man when all he had to offer were sorrow and tears.
Not waiting for him to add blood to the mix, she bolted paying no mind to what the society would think of her. She didn’t care if she would be seen as wayward and not Christian enough.
The book explore’s Roy’s growing up in a land where sons got more than daughters: more education, more attention, more love, more money, more food and more inheritance. In short, more of anything and everything.
In the India into which she was born, femicide was not uncommon. And in this same land, her mother, Mary, said terrible things about LKC, her son and Roy’s elder by a year and a half.
“Sometimes my mother behaved as though all of this was my brother’s fault. Because he was the only man she could reach, the only man she could punish for the sins of the world. The way she was with him has queered and complicated my view of feminism forever, filled it with caveats,” Roy writes.
Mary, Roy’s crazy mother, returned to her father’s abandoned home after leaving her husband and resisted her brother’s and mother’s quest to evict her because women were not entitled to inheritance. When illness forced her to live in the same house with the mother and brother who sought to make her homeless, she stood up to them. And when she teamed up with a British missionary to start a school, she became the mother of all her pupils with her two children compelled to address her as Mrs. Roy.
Her pupils got better treatment and many a time Arundathi Roy wished she were a student rather than an offspring and no surprise there; with a mother who called her a bitch. Who wouldn’t wish to be one of the pupils offered a happy place?
Interestingly, Roy’s choice of architecture as a profession was influenced by her mother. It all started when her mother purchased some acres of land for her school’s permanent site and got Laurie Baker, a well-respected architect with ties to Mahatma Gandhi, to handle the building plan and construction works.
Roy was fascinated with how Baker handled the assignment. It impacted her fifteen-year-old mind leaving her wanting to be like Baker.
Her mother backed her and what seemed like a tall order for a girl from Kottayam became easy to accomplish. All thanks to a mother who despite being given to bouts of rage and physical violence was highly supportive of her daughter becoming another Baker.
Roy’s time at the school of architecture was a breath of fresh air. But it was a tumultuous period for her country. Indira Gandhi, the then prime minister, was facing a tough time and to curb unrest and resentment, a state of emergency was declared.
Key institutions such as the judiciary and the press were imperiled with the prime minister’s brother, Sanjay, at the head of a birth control gang forcing men to become sterilised. Meanwhile, people protesting the demolition of their homes were massacred in Delhi and it would be another year before Roy knew the sort of madness that was going on at the time she was studying in the city. It was thus with a heart full of joy that she celebrated when the prime minister lost the election.
Roy’s relationship with her asthmatic mother was so bad that she avoided her for years. Her decision to stay away started when she went home for holiday and a member of the cult (that is how she describes people working for her mother and the students) informed her that her mother was not interested in seeing her.
Roy, based on her mother’s instruction, was to stay in the sick room, where her food would be brought to her. The crying informant was convinced “it’s only because she loves you”.
Of course, her mother later gave her a task during the visit, which she failed at and got tongue-lashed. That was the moment she declared to her brother, who thought their mother sounded like a character from ‘The Exorcist’, that she was never coming home again.
The author recalls that her mother did everything to drive a wedge between her and LKC for fear they could conspire against her. “It’s only now, after she’s gone, that we meet freely and laugh about things. He didn’t pretend to be sad when she died. Not even when she was lying in her coffin,” she writes. Unlike her brother, seeing her mother in a coffin broke Roy and left her in emotions in tatters.
The political violence was pervasive as Marxists railed especially against Maoists. Roy recalled a particular incident where Maoists, who were far-left, radical insurgents and who had broken away from the Marxists whom they saw as bourgeois beheaded one of them and hung his head on a pike. These believers in armed revolution were also known as Naxalites. It was the poor versus the rich with the poor and their supporters believing that the rich deserved to be wiped out for them to inherit the earth.
Class and caste differences insinuated itself into the church. The poor were prevented from membership of the Syrian Christian churches while priests emphasized that it would be difficult for the rich to make heaven. “I wasn’t sure what was to become of us, who were neither rich nor poor,” Roy recalls.
Despite the gloom at home and in their society, Roy and LKC have turned out well, one is a globally renowned author-cum-architect and the other a successful business tycoon.
Roy’s recollection, especially the part about her mother, is sad, yet in the hands of a gifted writer, the memoir never becomes depressing. Instead, it is unexpectedly uplifting and humorous.
***Olukorede S. Yishau is the author of two novels: In The Name of Our Father and After The End; a collection of short stories: Vaults of Secrets; and a travel book: United Countries of America and Other Travel Tales. He is concluding work on his third novel. He lives In Houston, Texas.
