The Exquisite Art of Failure

An excerpt from Mother Mary Comes to Me

- ARUNDHATI ROY

I WAS INITIATED into contemplating the many aspects and meanings of failure at an early age. The agent provocateur of this high-minded enterprise was none other than the grandest failure of them all—G. Isaac. Rhodes scholar turned pickle baron. It would have been my sixth or seventh birthday. We were still living in Ayemenem. There may or may not have been a cake, I don’t remember. I do remember that everybody gave me lots of the usual advice about studying hard and doing well in life. Not G. Isaac. Instead, he took me to his room, his annexe which had a separate entrance of its own.

As children we were rarely admitted into that hallowed space. Being taken there was a gift in itself. It looked like a bombed-out airbase for broken airplanes. He was obsessed with aero-modelling. Almost every week a new kit would arrive in the post. Balsa-wood airplanes that had crash-landed when he tried to fly them littered the floor. (Clearly, he was frittering away the profits from the pickle factory.) He dangled a cheap bauble in front of me, a chain with a sparkly locket.

“Do you want this?”

“Yes!” My greedy, acquisitive little heart soared.

“I’ll give it to you if you fail.”

My six-year-old self was stumped. I remember feeling as though I had bumped into something. Something that made me stop. He made failure sound fascinating, even worth striving for. It really made me think. From then onwards I began to view failure with great interest. I realised that the people I liked best, including G. Isaac himself, were considered failures. People who thought of themselves as successful and prosperous suddenly seemed like such an embarrassment, the way they strutted around and stole the light. Meeting Micky took me back to that incident. But that birthday moment in G. Isaac’s broken-airplane base was still a kindergarten class. Not long after I met Micky, G. Isaac gave me an adult masterclass in the exquisite art of failure.