Literature as cenotaph

In her grief-soaked memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy lays bare her difficult childhood, unusual journey, and unique mother

- Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

Arundhati Roy is author of The God of Small Things (operatic, unforgettable), The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (ambitious, dense), My Seditious Heart (polemical, well-meaning) and, adding to this cabinet of curiosities, a glorious, grief-soaked memoir: Mother Mary Comes to Me.

In the opening pages, as September arrives, "that most excellent month" signals an opportune time for her mother's death: even the weather in Kerala turns into a requiem and old wounds become apertures to even older grief. Hardly is Mary Roy — a formidable educator whose funeral drew alumni from across the state and an activist who forced the Supreme Court to recognise equal inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women — put to rest than the daughter measures air and light as though clauses in a will: what remains, who inherits, and what is indivisible - ancient sorrow.

From the start, Arundhati Roy resists consolations of the sanctified death; with a daughter's awe and bruising, she renders her mother as a "gangster". This nickname gives the book its grammar: love shorn of performative elegance.