Memoirs centred on the writer’s mother are nothing new and can feel staid unless elevated by creative penmanship or an extraordinary maternal subject — both, ideally.
In her first book, the 1969 autobiographical debut that launched her literary fame, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou writes, “To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colours of a rainbow. That hurricane is something we are all familiar with; a whirlwind blast of opinion that, when it hits, stings like the purest poison, served with a spoonful of sugar.” Exit Wounds by Peter Godwin was one of the gentlest, most moving memoirs of recent years, at its core a tribute to his mother but also far wider-ranging.
Award-winning Indian essayist and novelist Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes To Me can be bracketed among these exquisite examples. As a window into the complex psychology of her mother, Mary, as an indomitable force, it astonishes, portraying a woman overcoming dreadful poverty and, ahead of her time, throwing off the shackles of tradition to leave a lasting legacy. In her autobiography, Roy cuts her mother slack, realising the inspiration she represented and loving her irrevocably despite the appalling psychological trauma her mother inflicted on her. Fortitude applies to mother and daughter, albeit in different ambits and to different degrees.
Roy gained worldwide acclaim in 1997 when her debut novel, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize. I prefer her essays, published in collections that remain relevant long after the events that inspired them. They are searing polemics against the injustices wrought by governments, India’s and those of other countries, or of the ruptures caused by unfettered capitalism. (“Let’s face it: the free market is not free, and it doesn’t give a s**t about justice or equality,” she said in 2018.)
These sorts of anti-establishment and often controversial views, embodied in Roy’s nonfiction writing, should not put Business Day readers off. Even Financial Times saw the merits of her social justice instincts when, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, it published her essay “The pandemic is a portal”. “The tragedy isn’t new,” she noted. “It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years” — a clear reference to rampant capitalism. The pandemic “offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.”
Besides, her political ideology is difficult to pinpoint. The God of Small Things was heavily criticised in India by both communists and anticommunists, for example. “I am a Maoist sympathiser,” she told an interviewer in 2011, qualifying this by adding, “[but] I am not a Maoist ideologue because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism. But right now, when the assault is on, I feel they are very much part of the resistance that I support.”
Context is everything: India is far from the democratic, egalitarian and entrepreneurial utopia reflected in mainstream media stories. In Mother Mary Comes To Me, Roy’s outrage — veering from scorn and ire to sarcasm — is directed at the Hindu fundamentalism that has been responsible for atrocities and the end of the country’s multicultural ideals, and at public-private deals to create megadams that have wreaked ecological devastation and human suffering.
Much of Mother Mary Comes To Me is thus Roy the daughter explaining how she became engaged with social justice causes. Her mother seeded this sense of fury and fight, a determination to resist India’s gross gender and caste inequities. This is Mrs Roy’s admirable quality. From nothing, she created a tiny rural school, building it into a large campus and earning a reputation as one of India’s finest teachers. She mounted a legal challenge against the Travancore Christian Succession Act, which disinherited the country’s Syrian Christian community’s women from their ancestral property.
However, she is impossible to like — even, for much of her life, for Arundhati, love not being the same thing. She and her brother only ever called their mother Mrs Roy. The abuse the mother dishes out to her children is fathomable only with reference to her debilitating, chronic asthma and the probability that she didn’t want children at all.
She bullied, sniped, cajoled and told her children she hated them. She gets her young daughter a dog, but she shoots it when Arundhati comes to love her pet deeply and demonstrably. This pathological jealousy continued when Arundhati grew up, but the hostility became ambiguous, passive-aggressive, interspersed with phases of unwavering support when her daughter was up against authority or the law. “Mrs Roy taught me how to think, then raged against my thoughts. She taught me to be free and raged against my freedom. She taught me to write and resented the author I became,” Roy writes.
In the hands of a less skilful writer, the parent-child relationship theme could dominate, distorting the book. But Roy amplifies the personal into the political. Mrs Roy’s story is a lens into the quagmire of India’s inequality and systemic discrimination; her strategies and eventual success are a universal template for gender rights; Arundhati’s autobiographical elements fuse activism into the role of a writer, though this should be a given, she says.
I found a portion of the book’s concluding chapter, repeating out-of-context catchphrases from the dialogue in The God of Small Things, to be the book’s only disappointment. The last chapter would be better without it: Roy’s narration of her mother’s final months and days, and the funeral gathering, are both solemn and funny, as in real life.
Arundhati knew her mother’s death was imminent. A few months earlier she had been shocked to receive a text message in which — the only time in her life — her mother declared her love for her daughter. Finally, the book’s title becomes clear.
