There was something—deeply etched in me—that made me dislike Arundhati Roy. For a very long time. Not that I read something she wrote and found it objectionable, but because I had learnt, almost instinctively, to resent her. It was a dislike I carried without argument, without reason—one that felt natural, even righteous. How could I not?
Every morning in Sainik (army) school, twelve-year-olds like me were administered a steady dose of nationalism—in how we walked, how we spoke, how we learned. This was hardly unique to army schools in India, but here, it was delivered with a particular discipline. In this everyday regimen of nationalism, figures like Arundhati Roy—who walked with Naxal comrades, sympathised with Kashmir self-determination, protested dams and nuclear weapons (at the supposed cost to the nation)—were cast as enemies. Enemies within. Years of indoctrination made this worldview seem natural and even virtuous. To ask questions in the army school was blasphemy, an act of disobedience.
When I went to college to study politics, I was still sceptical about Arundhati Roy. But I began, slowly, to ask questions. One in particular—long unasked—kept returning: Is the individual an end in itself, or is it the state? Who matters the most? For years, without asking these questions, I had assumed the answer was the state, which was an ultimate end, and which ought to be preserved at all costs. Now, equipped with a liberal education, a bit of social contract theory and some Kant and Foucault, I arrived at a different answer. It is the individual—the basic unit of social life—who is the end.
By then, I started reading more. George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 were significantly influential—they had changed the way I thought of the world. I read others too. Sometimes, it was Victor Hugo; other times, it was Dostoevsky; and sometimes, I read Rushdie. Then, one day, I thought I should read Arundhati Roy. After all, she had a new book out at the time, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. And then, I read it.
Roy wrote: ‘How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything.’ By the time I finished reading the book, something in me had changed. My distaste had given way to admiration. I loved the way she wrote and often thought for myself that I should try to write like her someday.
I also read her introductory essay for Ambedkar’s book Annihilation of Caste, where she pits Gandhi—the saint —against Ambedkar—the doctor. Although the text was polemical, it prompted me to ask questions that we often take for granted. It is often understood that Gandhi’s actions were virtuous. And Roy shows us how, upon a closer reading, one could discern a more critical picture of Gandhi.
When I picked up Mother Mary Comes to Me, I did so with admiration already in place. Yet, I still carried a residual suspicion: that Arundhati Roy was a rich elite who spoke the right truths at the right moments because she could afford to. Reading an all-lyrical memoir, so well-done prose-wise, she alters, again, how I read her.
In Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy opens her complicated, but honest, relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, or Mrs Roy, who had admirably fought the world for women’s inheritance rights, but at home, with her two children, unleashed the ‘gangster’-like hell. The book straddles between resentment and reverence (much like my relationship with Arundhati Roy). It opens up vulnerabilities: the mother’s vulnerability to losing hold of her power, the daughter’s vulnerability to navigating (some part of her) life without money, a place to stay, straddling between train stations and durgahs.
When Arundhati Roy was in her third year at design school, the relationship between her and her mother had stalled; she had decided not to meet her mother again. In the book, Roy writes:
I left my mother not because I didn’t love her, but to be able to continue to love her. Staying back would have made that impossible. Once I left, I didn’t see or speak to her for years. She never looked for me. She never asked me why I left. There was no need for that. We both knew. We settled on a lie. A good one. I crafted it—“She loved me enough to let me go”.
Elsewhere, Roy sums up her relationship with her mother like this: ‘After all these years of thinking about it, I have concluded that I grew up in a cult. A good cult, a fabulous one even, but a cult nevertheless, in which the outside world was a fuzzy entity, and in the inside world, unquestioning obedience and frequently demonstrated adoration of Mother Guru were basic requirements of membership’. Mrs Roy would teach Roy to think and then rage against her thoughts; she would teach her to be free, and then rage against her freedom; and she taught her to write, but resented the author she became.
Mrs Roy’s love for her pet project—the school—further complicated her relationship with her own children. Arundhati Roy writes: ‘Quite often I found myself wishing I was her student and not her daughter’. She adds: ‘It has taken me years to come to terms with the fact that I was a middle child, one of three siblings, not two. My older sibling was a boy, and my younger sibling was a school. There was never any doubt about who our mother’s favourite child was.’ Arundhati struggled against her mother’s dictates ever since, even as an unborn child who was not wanted.
But the book itself is not all about Mrs Roy. In telling the story of her mother, Arundhati Roy opens up to us about her own life. There are also others, like G. Isaac, a Balliol-educated brother of Mrs Roy, who show what it is like to be gracious and funny even in their failures. LKC, her quiet brother. Micky Roy, her estranged, drunkard father.
At sixteen, Roy left for Delhi to first study and later to pursue a career in architecture. Within a few years, Roy married JC—or Jesus—who was her senior at architecture school in Delhi. But it soon came undone when Arundhati and JC moved to Goa, where Roy felt suffocated and longed to return to Delhi to live it all over again. Thereafter, a few years in, she became involved with the husband (Pradip) of her boss in the office. She would marry Pradip—the filmmaker, and later, an environmental conservationist—years later.
With Pradip, she would act (as in Massey Sahib), write and direct films (as in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones), and only later decide to write. Roy first wrote a long essay titled “In a Proper Light” in Sunday, a weekly magazine, by chance. And upon the reception the essay garnered, the editor would call to say that he would consider publishing anything that Roy would write. But her first book was some time ahead. Roy recalls writing The God of Small Things:
The more I wrote, the more it puzzled me. It behaved as though it had a volition of its own. There was a rhythm to it, a sort of backbeat, a formal architecture that I could sense but for a long time couldn’t put my finger on. I had to trust it. Sometimes it felt as though it were writing itself, and that I just happened to be around. I was puzzled because I realised that I wasn’t writing it from beginning to end. I felt as though I were sculpting smoke. Generating it, then organising and disciplining it.
When Roy finally finished the draft of a book, a hardbound copy was first circulated to Pankaj Mishra, who was then heading Harper Collins in India, who would send it to Patrick French, the author of India, who would then send it to his agent, David Godwin, who would, then, call up Roy to request her not to sign anything until he arrived in India in two days.
In 1997, Roy published her Booker-winning novel, The God of Small Things, whose rights were sold in a dozen other languages, and whose advances and sales earned her millions of dollars. The substantial royalties Roy accumulated would then be distributed through the trust (which does not bear her name) to journalists, activists, writers, lawyers, artists, and filmmakers who had the courage to stand up against power.
About fame, Roy wrote gloomily, ‘the feeling that each time I was applauded, someone else, someone quiet, was being beaten in another room’. The feeling of causing the beating of someone else, out of one’s supposed acclaim, is so true in India. Just because your neighbourhood kid did well at school, you would become the object of ridicule—not just at home, but almost everywhere.
With the success of The God of Small Things, Roy wrote a critical essay in Outlook and Frontline titled “The End of Imagination” on India’s acquisition of nuclear weapons after the Pokhran blasts in 1998. And a flurry of insults and outrage followed—“Get out of India”, “Go to Pakistan!”—which continue to dominate public discourse to this day. After Pokhran, Roy engaged in the Narmada Bachao Andolan, then wrote a text titled “Walking With The Comrades,” where she literally walked with Naxals. Thereafter, she travelled to Kashmir, which she recounts would appear in everything she wrote—in its bleakest forms of the human condition.
In her last days, Mary Roy would phone (or dictate a message to her staff, who would then pass it on by phone to) Arundhati to inform, ‘There was no one in the world whom I loved more than you.’ Mrs Roy, in this sense, was her ‘shelter’, her ‘storm’ and most of all, her ‘most enthralling subject’. And in her presence, Roy would become the person she is—defiant.
In Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy steers the flow of rage, defiance, sorrow, joy, and love in the correct portion. Just like her fiction, this memoir reads lyrically. In this memoir, Roy opens up about almost everything that haunts her with utmost authenticity. It’s a raw, visceral and searing recollection of a life worth living—or a life worth having tried to live so far.