Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

First Impressions

This is a book that radically altered my perspective, and I think it's genuinely going to change how I inhabit the world going forward. I don't say that lightly. I read a lot of books, and this doesn't happen to me very often, but there is greatwisdom in this memoir. Even though it's a very specific, individual story, it carries such a real universal application that I'd recommend it to pretty much everyone. This is a memoir about this celebrated author's life and her very difficult relationship with her mother, Mary, over the decades. But it's also about so much more than that.

A Different Way of Reckoning with the Past

I think we often reach a certain point in life where we start looking back, both on the households we were raised in and the country we were raised in, and we interpret the limitations of those things as having permanently inhibited our ability to fully inhabit the world, as having damaged our emotional well-being to the point that we feel defeated by having originated under circumstances that involved neglect, abuse, discrimination, or corruption, whether within a family or within larger institutions. It's a very seductive frame of mind to take, essentially deciding that's why we can't fully live and be as happy as we want to be. But that isn't the perspective Arundhati Roy takes in this book, and I don't think it's one she arrived at easily or lightly over the course of her life.

The way she describes growing up with her mother, whom she mostly refers to formally as Mrs. Roy, there's a real distance in that naming itself. Her mother severely emotionally abused her throughout her childhood and was constantly putting her down. Roy recounts many of the things her mother said to her, including that she'd wanted an abortion when she was pregnant with her, that she actively hadn't wanted her. For so many people, hearing something like that from a parent would confirm a deep sense of being unwanted in the world, and it would understandably lower their self-esteem and their ability to participate in and enjoy life. But Roy has such a different way of holding it. She writes that her mother was both her shelter and her storm, and that these two ways of seeing her mother can coexist: appreciating her mother and the difficult circumstances she came from, while not denying or glossing over the fact that her mother treated her, and many people around her, abysmally, and still admiring her mother's genuine accomplishments.

Mrs. Roy's Extraordinary, Contradictory Life

What her mother did was, in its own way, extraordinary. She left her husband, who'd become an alcoholic, to raise her children alone, and she campaigned to overturn a prejudiced law in India that prevented daughters from inheriting their father's property, taking her own case all the way to a higher court. She also built a genuinely progressive school from nothing. So she achieved so much in her life, while also not being a traditionally nurturing parent, often antagonistic toward her children, making them feel like nothing. Roy understood this was simply who her mother was, and still loved her and remained an active part of her life, though there was also a long period of estrangement between them, no contact at all for a stretch of time. So many people have had to sever ties, either with a parent or with their own country, because of how they were treated by one or the other, and I think that parallel is really at the heart of this memoir.

From Family to Nation

The book moves in two halves. The first focuses on Roy's childhood and her relationship with her parents, up through the point where she writes her first novel, “The God of Small Things,” which became an international bestseller and won the Booker Prize, turning her into a globally recognized figure. From there, the second half follows her engagement with Indian politics and society: calling out corruption, campaigning against prejudice, and helping to bring about positive change in India. She feels a love for her country even though she is clear-eyed about its imperfections. Interestingly, she doesn't favour being called an activist, doesn't really see a clean distinction between that label and being a writer, even though everything she does: contributing money, contributing her intellectual work, writing articles, raising awareness, protesting, engaging with different groups, reads to me as activism in every meaningful sense.

I'm not trying to draw an exact equation between someone's experience with their parents and their experience as a citizen of a nation; they're not the same thing. But there are real parallels here, because in all of this work, Roy has faced persecution from corrupt police and governmental forces, including a short imprisonment, simply for trying to stand up for what's right. For many people, facing that kind of opposition might lead them to disengage, to stop trying to enact change, or to simply leave and live somewhere else, which Roy could certainly have done. She's chosen not to. There are so many specific instances in the book, decisions she's made, mistakes she freely admits to, that add up to something like a lesson in how to inhabit one's life positively without being defeated by circumstances that, in so many cases, would make it entirely understandable to become apathetic and cynical.

A Specific, Absorbing Life

Beyond the larger message, I found this an absorbing memoir simply for the specificity of her story. She writes about the real struggles, joy, and defeat of leaving home, of a number of different relationships, of the prejudice she's faced as a woman. There's an extraordinary section where she describes how, riding public transport, it's simply accepted as the norm that men will treat attractive women as available for the taking, to grope, to make salacious comments toward, and how that's just the daily reality for so many women. There's also her time in the film industry, her development as a writer, and the overwhelming experience of “The God of Small Things” earning so much attention and love. I read that novel many years ago and really ought to reread it.

She also writes about her second novel, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” which came many years later, and the circumstances and inspirations behind finishing it. I found all of that fascinating, and it made me think back to when the novel was first published, when I was lucky enough to attend an event where she signed my copy. Thinking back now, knowing everything she was going through while writing it, has given me more appreciation for that novel which I felt quite mixed about at the time. I'd like to reread both at some point.

Her Father, and the Deaths That Prompted the Book

Alongside her mother, there's also her father, whom she didn't know for much of her life. There’s an extraordinary scene describing their eventual reunion. The book follows the emotional journey through to both of her parents' deaths, and I understand the initial impulse to write it came from her mother's death and the intense, complicated grief that followed, complicated precisely because Mrs. Roy was such a difficult figure. I felt genuinely devastated toward the end. There are some extraordinary coincidences she recounts around her parents' deaths that, if she'd invented them for a novel, would seem unbelievable, but they actually happened, and it's hard not to feel there's some larger meaning in them, one she's clearly sat with and meditated on, both for herself and for how she moves through the world.

Verdict

This book offers such a powerful example of how to process and emotionally reckon with the circumstances we're born into, while recognizing that we remain independent beings who can determine our own course and choose how much the past is allowed to shape what we do next. That message goes far beyond the specific details of Roy's story, even though that story is, on its own terms, enthralling: a genuinely fascinating life that left me with enormous respect for her and eager to read and reread more of her work, fiction and nonfiction alike. We live in difficult, worrying times, and I think recognizing that our influence is limited but real, that we do have agency to stand up for what we believe in and to live a fulfilling life despite the circumstances we face, is exactly the kind of message I needed right now. I was genuinely blown away by this memoir. If you've read it, or read any of Roy's other work, or have your own book that completely changed how you inhabit the world, I'd love to hear about it.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

Oh how I fretted starting this novel so weighted with expectation! It took Arundhati Roy twenty years to write this second novel after the phenomenal success of her first Booker Prize-winning novel “The God of Small Things.” Add to that the fact that the author is an astute political campaigner and activist who writes extensively about Indian politics and society – which I know little about. Add to that the murmurings I’d heard about the novel’s complexity and someone who told me she had to put this novel down because, despite the beauty of the writing, the sheer extent of references was overwhelming. So I frequently picked up this book and ran my hand over the cover, read the back and put it back on my shelf. But two things prompted me to finally start reading “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”: it’s long listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize and a lovely booktuber named Annie at ‘Am I Write?’ offered to buddy read it with me. I’m so glad I was finally pushed to read it two months after its publication. While this novel is definitely a challenging read, it is also an intricately layered, surprising and wondrous depiction of a society in transition. And how glorious to find growing out of the story of this great civilization in turmoil a tender shoot of hope!

What surprised me the most since I’d avoided reading any reviews of this novel is that one of the central characters we’re introduced to at the beginning was born intersex. Anjum has both male and female genitals, but was raised as a boy. In her adolescence she leaves her family to live as a woman and joins a haveli filled with other intersex and trans people. They are a collective and family and become even more so when Anjum adopts an abandoned child named Zainab. When she takes this three-year old girl in: “Her body felt like a generous host instead of a battlefield.” It’s so beautiful and moving the way this individual whose family feel disgraced by her and who is scorned by the majority of society finds a way to pour her love into caring for someone instead of allowing herself to be crippled by being branded as a hijra outcast. However, we quickly learn that in her later years Anjum leaves her haveli called Khwabgah (the House of Dreams) to live in a graveyard where she gradually establishes a home for herself and eventually forms a community of individuals displaced by social conflict. She has a wonderfully unprejudiced view when taking people in stating: “I don’t care what you are… Muslim, Hindu, man, woman, this caste, that caste, or a camel’s arsehole.”

Rather than continuing to primarily focus on Anjum’s story (as I wished it did), the novel branches out to encompass a multiplicity of characters from many different parts of society. Roy introduces a dizzying array of people all connected with particular political movements, social clashes or devastating disasters. These centre largely around a location of vast protest called Jantar Mantar. In the centre of this vast amount of voices of dissent, a baby is abandoned and kidnapped. Who this baby is, where she came from, why she was left and what happened to her is gradually explained over a few hundred pages. But built around her story are the tales of people still caught within the repercussions of Partition, national/religious battles and especially the conflicts within Kashmir, the northernmost part of the Indian subcontinent. The novel mostly focuses on a group of people who knew each other in childhood and worked together in a theatrical production in their youth, but have gone on to take different sides in the political struggles. It charts their various romances, quests for revenge and how they’re helplessly drawn into conflicts that seem to have no end.

Roy describes how amidst war: "Still the Amaltas bloomed, a brilliant, defiant yellow. Each blazing summer it reached up and whispered to the hot brown sky, Fuck You."

Something that really carried me along while reading this complex novel is the beauty and disarming nature of Roy’s prose. This is something that Annie (my read-along buddy) noted as well. There are frequently bizarre metaphors and descriptions which really caught my attention. For instance, there is an owl which is compared to a Japanese businessman. There’s also a character that is compared to the voice of Billie Holiday: “Not the woman so much as her voice.” At other points she has a disarming way of drawing the reader into the character's particular experience: “She could hear her hair growing. It sounded like something crumbling. A burnt thing crumbling. Coal. Toast.” These odd descriptions have a way of reaching across national and cultural boundaries to draw you into the intense dissociation from reality the character has in a moment of crisis. Roy also has an acute sense of the tragic ironies which frequently exist in this society such as an air-conditioned mortuary: “The city’s paupers who lay there in air-conditioned splendour had never experienced anything of the kind while they were alive.” The narrative frequently also serves as social commentary making observations about how it's always women and children who are oppressed and abused the most in class, religious and political warfare.

It's true, the novel’s story isn’t straightforward and it will reference a lot of things most Western readers probably won’t be familiar with. Even though I occasionally would look up terms or events, I largely resisted this temptation because I preferred to immerse myself in the flow of the story and let certain things remain mysterious for the time being. Now, I can go read up more about them. But I got to a section of the novel where I think Roy really points out why she can’t write a straightforward story. This is from one character’s notebooks: “I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there’s lots to write about. That can’t be done in Kashmir. It’s not sophisticated, what happens here. There’s too much blood for good literature.” I think Roy probably feels the same way. She is far too knowledgeable about everything that’s going on in India, its immense history and complicated politics to write a simple story. As such this novel probably isn’t what you’d classify as “good literature” in a traditional sense because the story goes all over the place. But at the same time, Roy revolutionizes the form of the book to fit all the multitude of things going on inside her head. And, after all, that’s what the novel is for – it keeps reinventing the form to suit the subject matter and the outlook of its author.

It takes dedication, patience and time to read this novel properly. But it encompasses a vast amount of heartfelt compassion for humanity so I'm immensely grateful for the journey it took me on.