THE STORM RIDER

ARUNDHATI ROY, IN HER LATEST BOOK, BRINGS OUT THE MANY SHADES OF HER MOTHER—HER COURAGE AND HER COQUETRY, HER WARMTH AND HER VENOM. AFTER ALL, SHE WRITES, SHE IS CONSTRUCTED FROM THE DEBRIS OF HER MOTHER'S FURY

- ANJULY MATHAI

Reformer, rebel, role model—Mary Roy was many things to many people. But to her students like me, she was more than the sum of her parts. While others described her, we experienced her. We feared and admired her in equal measure. We would do anything to please her and anything to avoid her ire. Her smile could supercharge our day; her wrath could smash it to smithereens. She could walk out midway through a song you sang or a play you staged without a backward glance. Or the weather forecast in her fiefdom that day might be sunny, and she would be all warmth and affection. My brother remembers clambering on to her lap as a child while watching the horror film Jaws in her house. (I don't think I would have ever dared to do that, no matter how afraid I was. No shark, for me, could be as scary as The Lap.)

But if you wanted to explain Mrs Roy, you had to visit her school—Pallikoodam in the town of Kottayam in Kerala. It was an extension of her; the instruction manual that explained the machinery of her mind. Her school was something else, its brick jaalis ventilating the dreams of hundreds of her students. As in the musical The Sound of Music (which, incidentally, we once staged in Pallikoodam) there were no 'raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens,' but there were many favourite things—Duckback raincoats rendered useless during afternoon rain walks, cross-country races with glucose-and-lime pit-stops, white canvas shoes in which you sleep-jogged during early morning PT sessions, kit inspections on Sundays, Nancy Drew detective novels read from end to beginning... the cargo of a childhood that, at the time, seemed to have no expiry date.