THE HOUSE THAT ROY BUILT

ARUNDHATI ROY'S NEW MEMOIR IS ABOUT HER COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP WITH HER MOTHER

- Shougat Dasgupta

“ANYTHING’S POSSIBLE IN HUMAN NATURE,” CHACKO TELLS HIS “FOUNTAIN-HAIRED NIECE”, in Arundhati Roy's debut, The God of Small Things. “Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy.” Roy’s latest book, out in shops now, is a memoir built on the foundations of this insight, of this all-encompassing embrace of humanity, of humanness.

In Mother Mary Comes to Me, Roy presents her mother to us, not sublimated in fiction, but in her brutal, glorious entirety. “She’s such an extraordinary, crazy, contentious person—woman—she needs to be shared with the world,” Roy says in a Zoom call. “She belongs in the pages of literature, of history as ‘she’, not as a fictional character.” A woman in full.

This is no hagiography. Roy doesn’t soft-pedal her mother’s terrifying violence—both physical and verbal—doesn't diminish the effect it has on her and her older brother, or hide her need to flee in the face of her mother’s rage. But how could Mary Roy have been a ‘conventional’ Indian mother—that domestic goddess, that icon of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice—when her life was a long, loud denunciation of convention and its hypocrisies?

MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME

By Arundhati Roy PENGUIN HAMISH