Arundahti Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me now ranks as one of the best memoirs I have read. 

She was my shelter and my storm.

Arundhati’s exceptional writing and story telling skills bring India alive on the page. And the story will resonate with anyone who grew up with a formidable mercurial mother whom they experienced simultaneously as confusing, hateful, loving and overbearing.

As I grew older, my very existence seemed to be enough to enrage her.

Mary Roy, a Christian from Kerala, was not a woman of her time. She married Micky to escape her parents, then left him when she found him to be an uninspired alcoholic. She calls him ‘a Nothing Man’ (he does return later in the story as a funny, lovable rogue). Mary Roy had a vision – big dreams, big energy, and she was a fighter. 

When it came to me, 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

Mary settled with her two children, Arundhati and brother LKC, in Aymanam, a village in Kerala. Here she set up a school that would grow a reputation as large as the woman herself. Arundhati and LKC began to refer to their mother as Mrs Roy like all the school children.

Until the day she died, she never stopped learning, never stagnated, never feared change, never lost her curiosity.

The first part of the book contains Arundhati’s life before she became a famous author. It also contains the world that inspired The God of Small Things, the novel that made her a household name.

I left my mother not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.”

Arundhati’s mother escaped her parents by marrying. Arundhati escaped her mother by going to study in Delhi at the School of Planning and Architecture. This part of the memoir follows the author into adulthood and a creative life. It provides insightful descriptions of the socio-political environment of the day and Arundhati’s confrontations with the nation-state. 

I began to refer to myself as the Hooker who won the Booker.

As an adult Arundhati rises to become both a literary star and an activist. She rages against the status quo (not entirely unlike her mother) and is charged with obscenity and corrupting public morality. She loves India, but it has a love-hate relationship with her because she will not conform.

While countries were being invaded and rivers were being dammed, while the earth was spinning faster than it should and I was on trial for not behaving like a reasonable man, Micky Roy went missing.

In Mother Mary Comes To Me, Arundhati sours between capturing the minute idiosyncratic detail of those in her life and insightful political observations. Mother Mary Comes To Me is a memoir that reads like a novel. A beautiful, passionate, funny and insightful tribute to a force of nature.

If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and antinational, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I own no territory. I have no flag.