Arundhati Roy revisits her life through the lens of her relationship with her mother Mary Roy

In her masterful new memoir, Arundhati Roy revisits her life through the lens of her relationship with her mother Mary Roy

- Somak Ghoshal

Arundhati Roy makes a striking confession early on in her luminous new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. Explaining her reason for running away at the age of 16 from her home in Kerala and her mercurial mother, the renowned educationist Mary Roy, she writes, "We (she and her mother) settled on a lie. A good one. I crafted it—'She loved me enough to let me go.' That's what I said at the front of my first novel, The God of Small Things, which I dedicated to her." A tiny stab of fiction, framing a putative work of fiction.

When I meet Roy on a video call on a balmy August afternoon, it's the first thing we talk about. As she writes towards the end of the book, the late writer, and Roy's close friend, John Berger, never made a distinction between her fiction and nonfiction. "To pit one against the other, fact versus fantasy, is absurd," she says. "As (the Italian filmmaker Federico) Fellini said, fiction is truth. Everything I write is a search for the form and language for this truth."

In Mother Mary, Roy has to repeatedly reckon with the force behind this statement as the lines get blurred, often in unexpectedly hurtful ways. After Mary Roy read a passage in The God of Small Things (where the twins, Esthappen and Rahel, remember their parents fighting, pushing them from one to the other, saying, "You take them, I don't want them"), she asked her daughter, "Who told you this?" When Roy said it was fiction, she retorted that it wasn't—then she turned to the wall and fell silent.

"There are things that I thought were fiction but turned out to be subconscious memories," Roy, who is now in her mid-60s, tells me. "I am not even conscious of burying my pain." In a sense, writing this book has been an exercise in trying to answer the questions that bother us all: Who are we? Where do we come from? What are our memories?