Arundhati Roy: “I didn’t want my mother to destroy me, but I didn’t want to destroy her either”

No matter the kind of relationship you had with your mother growing up, Arundhati Roy’s memoir will unlock something primal in you. Some chapters will make you want to call up your mum and let her offload on you with abandon—it doesn’t matter what she’s saying as long as you can hear the sound of her voice. Other chapters will feel like you’re drowning under the weight of all the words you’ve never said to her. Whichever side you fall on, Mother Mary Comes to Me (published by Penguin Random House India) is a book of kinship: between a headstrong mother and her unyielding daughter; between a brutally honest author and her eager readers.

Mary Roy, founder of the prestigious Pallikoodam school in Kottayam, women’s rights activist and the persistent woman who fought and won a Supreme Court lawsuit against the inheritance law of Kerala’s Syrian Malabar Nasrani community, is the sometimes-hero, sometimes-villain protagonist of her author-daughter’s latest book. When she passed in 2022 at the age of 89, the shape of Roy’s own memoir began to form. But because so much of who the 61-year-old Booker-winning author is today is inextricably tied to her mother, Mother Mary Comes to Me ends up being as much the late Mary’s memoir as it is her daughter’s.

When Roy appears on Zoom, her grey curls are wet—whether from the shower or a walk in Delhi’s rains, I know not. In any case, to ask Arundhati Roy about the weather feels both irrelevant and irreverent. Instead, I launch into an impassioned preamble about how the book felt like a gentle breeze caressing my cheek at times, and at others, like a gigantic brick hitting me square in the face. I prattle on about mothers who demand too much and daughters who leave—both physically and emotionally. How does one write about a mother, I ask, who abandoned her young daughter by the roadside when she failed to dazzle a stranger with her intelligence, and only returned to fetch her after dark had fallen? How does one write about a mother who checked herself into a hospital to read her daughter’s first book because she was worried about how she might be depicted within its pages? “Did you feel like this was a book of rage?” Roy interrupts me, not unkindly. “I see it as a book of complicated love. I didn’t want my mother to destroy me, but I didn’t want to destroy her either.”