Books
Arundhati Roy
Mother Mary Comes To Me
Twenty-eight years after her seminal debut The God of Small Things, Booker Prize-winning author and activist Arundhati Roy returns with a seismic new work, Mother Mary Comes to Me. A memoir and biography, it traces her genesis as a writer and her relationship with her formidable mother. “It’s also about the village, and the state, and country and the world,”
she tells The New York Times podcast The Interview. “If it weren’t that, it wouldn’t be as important to me.”
The glimpses into Roy’s interior world are enthralling: her first hit of hash, the cowbead jewellery she wore, her friendship with John Berger, the men she loved whose hearts she broke, her time at architecture school in Delhi, the bus ride back to a film set after an abortion with no anaesthetic, her apartments on second floors and how “the safest place always felt like the most dangerous”. The book also paints incisive portraits of India: a favourite line throughout the book – “This is India, my dear” – highlights devastating issues, from rape to class culture.
Unsurprisingly, much of the focus is on the spectre of her mother, Mary Roy, a woman of many facets. She was a terrible asthmatic, a Syrian Christian divorcee, the beloved and pioneering founder of the Pallikoodam School in Kerala (“her third child”, as Roy puts it), a gender activist who fought a 39-year battle to overturn the sexist Travancore Christian Succession Act. She was also a violent and abusive parent, although Roy recoils from naming her mother’s actions as abuse.
Roy’s role as the “valiant organ child”, one where she breathes for her mother, is palpable even after her mother’s death in 2022. She credits her mother for shaping the writer she is today, recalling a schism in her as a young child: the part that copped it and the other that took notes. “How,” she asks, “do I write this irreconcilable character?”
Roy’s sense of self is inseparable from the woman who made her possible. Towards the end of Mary Roy’s life, she texts her daughter: “There is no one in the world I have loved more than you.”
“Despite everything that had happened between us, somehow I knew that to be true,” writes Arundhati Roy. “My lifelong refusal to love her no matter what, had finally breached her barriers … I sensed her end was near. My fingers were shaking as I typed out a reply. ‘You are the most unusual, wonderful woman I have ever known. I adore you.’ ”
Hamish Hamilton, 384pp, $36.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 27, 2025 as "Mother Mary Comes To Me".
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