Mother Mary Comes to Me

Review by Rochona Majumdar

Arundhati Roy. Mother Mary Comes to Me. Scribner, 2025. pp. 352. US $ 30.00.

Two caveats. First, this article has spoilers. If you have not already read Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, you may want to stop reading. Second, I almost did not finish this book. For on page hundred, “Mother Mary,” does something I could not forgive her for. We learn that she had Dido, her thirteen-year old daughter’s beloved three-year old Alsatian, shot because Dido “mated with an unknown street dog.” Yet, read I did; all 372 pages in a day, breathlessly, like one reads a thriller. Arundhati Roy, who shot to global acclaim after her debut novel, The God of Small Things (1997), writes about two lives that have been extraordinary, uncertain, irreverent, angry, and experimental. This, despite the strange, unpredictable, harsh, and “orphan” childhoods she and her brother had.

Indeed, by the end of Mother Mary, we are left in the presence of a family—not just the Roy siblings, but the large collectivity of friends, relatives, and employees—who are bound together by their collective experience of Mary Roy, a visionary teacher, mercurial boss, manipulative and cruel matriarch, mother, sister. Mary Roy (1933-2017) was a remarkable woman. She was founder and principal of Pallikoodan, a renowned, experimental school she built from scratch in Kottayam. Once she moved the school out of a neighboring Rotary Club to an empty plot of hilly land, she appointed the architect, Laurie Baker, whose economical and sustainable architecture was way ahead of its time, to build the main structure. Mary Roy was also the individual responsible for a 1986 lawsuit filed before the Supreme Court of India that gave Syrian Christian women equal rights to their parental property with their male siblings.

Alongside these significant accomplishments, she was also a mother who told her daughter repeatedly and in graphic detail that she regretted her birth. Despite her best efforts to induce an abortion with an overdose of green papayas and a wire hanger, she failed. “Mrs. Roy” inflicted corporal punishment on her children and staff. The book has instances of wooden rulers being broken on a son for being “ordinary” in school; cups and saucers flung at servants and minions for small slips like serving lukewarm coffee; withering remarks—“bitch,” “whore” — to a little girl who disconnected the phone in error or told her mother about a new relationship. Yet, writes Arundhati, “we all hung on that old trope, the life-raft on which battered wives, mistreated children, and abused employees stay afloat: ‘It’s only because she loves us.’” (308)

Despite Arundhati’s explicit and graphic account of Mrs. Roy’s cruelties, readers realize early on that she cannot be reduced to a sum of those alone. Mrs. Roy emerges as a complex and enigmatic figure — who evokes love, respect, fear, and exasperation. She comes to life through her daughter’s incomparable ability to represent these contradictions. Mrs. Roy is not always a sympathetic character, but she anchors the book’s extraordinary narrative energy, evokes laughter, and inspires. As Arundhati tells the reader early in the book, “...read this book as you would a novel. It makes no larger claim.” (7)

Arundhati credits her mother with what is probably her greatest asset—writing. It was Mary, we are told, who sat her down with a pencil and urged her to write down what was on her mind. She introduced Arundhati to Shakespeare, Kipling, Milne, and scores of others. She preserved Arundhati’s earliest prose attempts as only proud mothers do. Yet when she hosted a book launch of The God of Small Things in Kottayam, she spoiled the event by continually chatting with Kamala Das, the famous author she herself invited as the guest of honor in a low voice, on stage, holding a microphone to her mouth throughout the event. There are many things, I found, that were shared by mother and daughter. One of them is a consciousness about money, or the lack thereof, and the ability to speak about it.

Arundhati details her vagrant days in New Delhi and Goa with JC, her first lover and partner, and then her days of considerable prosperity, thanks to “my crazy royalties,” after the success of her debut novel. I draw attention to these passages because we often underestimate the difficulty of money-talk, especially by women, unless it is expressed with a spirit of ruthless self-interest or Gandhian self-sacrifice. Mrs. Roy was the same in the way she spoke of herself as her children’s “banker” or in the steely resolve with which she fought her own brother and mother over property, eventually evicting them. Mother and daughter did not lack what in Yiddish is referred to as chutzpah (audaciousness). Mrs. Roy was repeatedly audacious: when she challenged a longstanding patriarchal law, when she wanted to stage the irreverent rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, Jesus Christ Superstar, that tells the story of the gospel from Judas’ point of view, by students in her Christian school. Arundhati Roy’s audaciousness is well-known to us through her writing and activism, and is recounted in this book through her reminiscences about Dantewada, Kashmir among other places. One last resemblance that struck me powerfully was both mother and daughter’s feelings of oneness with their environment. In Mary’s case, it was the motta kunnu (bald hill) on which she built her school, brick by brick; the jackfruit trees she planted and whose wood she wanted to be cremated with. For her daughter, it was the Meenachil river, and squirrels in Ayemenen, the intensity of Kerala monsoons, the hornbill bird, and amaltas in New Delhi.

Mother and daughter seem different when it comes to questions of sexuality. While Arundhati memorializes with affection and respect her relationships and loves—JC, Pradip Kishen, and also Carlo Buldrini, whose splendid photograph is on the book’s cover—Mary’s only (failed) love seems to have been Rajib Michael “Micky” Roy. Some of book’s most hilarious passages are when Arundhati writes about her father, the “Nothing Man.” They are also among the most poignant. And both Mary and Arundhati are gifted with a sense of biting sarcasm and humor.

A drunk father who hustled for money on his deathbed even as he remembered there that Don Bradman died of peritonitis, and a mother who was a better school teacher than a mother left two beautiful and accomplished children. Arundhati Roy’s pride in Mrs. Roy outstrips her critiques of Indian culture’s valorization of mothers. It reminded me of that immortal line from Deewar spoken by Ravi (Shashi Kapoor), “Mere Paas Maa Hai.” She might cringe if she ever heard this, but it does not matter. For Arundhati has (again) given this reader a gift of beautiful writing on a theme about which we do not have nearly enough—love for family which can be simple and straightforward, but rarely is.

Arundhati’s relationship with Mrs. Roy does not mellow with age. Even when Mary is ill, mother and daughter still have dark confrontations. The book’s power comes from its ability to convey the force of the love and loss experienced by its author for her mother, but to also pause to reflect on uncomfortable lessons she learns along the way from this difficult relationship. One of the starkest scenes occurs when Mrs. Roy wakes up her young sleeping son to give him a sound beating for his “ordinary” report card that arrived by mail. Arundhati is praised the next day for her “brilliant” results. Starting then, on the occasions “when I am toasted and applauded,” she writes, “I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room.” (43) This childhood attunement to success and failure, life’s choices, haunts other relationships throughout the book.

Nevertheless, they do not detract from the delight we experience as its readers, a delight that listeners derive from the song “Let it Be” by the Beatles, with its refrain: “When I find myself in times of trouble, / Mother Mary comes to me / Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.”