Arundhati Roy's international splash with her 2025 non-fiction book

She writes autobiographically on her life with her mother and brother and titles her book Mother Mary Comes To Me, mother Mary being her own mother - Mary Roy, a Malayali Jacobite Syrian Christian who was educator and women's rights activist known for winning a Supreme Court lawsuit in 1986 awarding equal rights to women to inherit family property.

- By NAN

The book is published by Hamish Hamilton. I was sent a Guardian article which was an edited extract from the book.

It carries the long title: Arundhati Roy on her fugitive childhood: 'My knees were full of scars and cuts - a sign of my wild, imperfect, fatherless life.' The book appears to be starkly telling, cruelties and all, with a mother who was ill with asthma and on steroids and very very short tempered, who vented her wrath on her two small children. It seems to be brutally honest and thus the sympathy the reader feels will be for the two children; the mother too.

Maybe Arundhati wrote this all revealing autobiography as a cathartic exercise as she says her mother was actually cruel to the two young ones aged less than 10-years. The title is intriguing as Mother Mary is also the compassionate mother of Jesus Christ.

Mary married Rajib Roy, a Bengali Christian tea plantation manager from Kolkata. He was alcoholic and abusive so Mary with her son and daughter left him in 1964. The father met the children only 20 years later.

Suzanna Arundhati Roy was born in 1961 and her brother, Lalit Kumar Christopher Roy, maybe a year previous. Thus when they left the father they were four and nearly three years old. This was when war broke out between India and China. Mother and kids moved to Ootacamund - Ooty in Tamil Nadu, to live in an almost empty house of Mary's grandfather. It was here that the mother's ire was roused so she turned activist.