A Legacy of Defiance

Arundhati Roy's new memoir recounts a life of resistance, survival, and radical empathy, and explores how an accomplished, and complicated, mother shaped her fierce independence and refusal to conform

- BY Shougat Dasgupta

“I NEVER WANTED TO defeat her,” Arundhati Roy says about her mother. We're speaking on Zoom, several days before the much-anticipated release of her memoir, Mother Mary Comes To Me, available across India now. In Delhi, at one well-known bookshop, the entire window display has been given over to Roy. Her ubiquity is a reminder of the extraordinary grip she has had on readers' imaginations ever since The God of Small Things was published, winning the Booker Prize in 1997, as independent India turned 50 and the stage appeared to be set for a newly confident country to emerge from the long shadow of British colonialism.

Mother Mary Comes To Me can be read as a companion text to Roy's loamy debut, a novel spilling over with human nature in all its variety and pungent excess. In her memoir, Roy indeed chooses not to defeat her mother, not to settle scores, or take the opportunity to have the last word. Instead, she—as she always did—cedes the stage to the formidable, volcanic, Mrs Roy. She may have died in 2022, but in these pages, Arundhati vows, “my mother, my gangster, shall live.” And so Mother Mary... is both a celebration of a difficult, unequivocally great, woman, and an account of how to survive, or rather transcend, one’s childhood.

In another writer's hands, Roy’s memoir might have been an extended meditation on the famous opening lines of Philip Larkin’s poem This Be The Verse—with its resigned, hard-won acceptance that parents will inevitably fail, will inevitably do damage to their children, and will inevitably leave lasting scars. But, Roy told me on Zoom—as a well-fed, ageing dog ambled into view behind her—from the time she was very young, she learnt how to dissociate her mother’s public persona, the grand battles she fought, and the private darkness, the violence she visited upon her children.