HER PRECIOUS HEART

Arundhati Roy's memoir is a book of experience, violence, and grace. And not a few secrets. Before the book takes off on its India and global tour, she gave a glimpse of some of it at a select gathering in Delhi.

- PARAMITA GHOSH

AFTER half an hour of trying not to be a book launch, the event at Oddbird Theatre turned somewhat into one. For note-takers, assembled for Arundhati Roy's much awaited memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me (Penguin Randomhouse), at one of Delhi's most intimate spaces, it was a relief.

By habit, one had taken front-row seats, to notice better. There were chairs here turned towards a low stage overhung with dim lights; the setting seemed ready to receive a family gathering or a household deity. Snatches of conversation drifting between "this book and her last book", and a tiny store in Khan Market that was "as big as this stage" wafted into the ears. At some point, my neighbour in the next chair offered me her mutton slider I did not refuse.... The party went on till Arundhati, in a terracotta Eka dress, took her chair and walked her late mother, as it were, into the room.

Mother and I Mary Roy, Arundhati's mother, was an iconoclast, educator, feminist, family rebel, and a hell-raiser. After leaving behind a failed marriage with a Bengali tea-estate manager, she moved into the family cottage in Ooty like a fugitive, from which Arundhati's grandmother and uncle attempted to evict them. In the mid-Eighties, Mary Roy made her personal battle political.