As we get older, we often struggle to understand the impact our parents have had on our lives. For the author Arundhati Roy, that process happened after her mother’s death in 2022 and resulted in her new memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” which will be published on Sept. 2. “I couldn’t write anything else until I wrote this,” she told me. “I was shocked by the quality of my grief.”
The book is partly a chronicle of Roy’s complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy. Mary’s bouts of “clawing lashing fury,” as Roy describes them, scarred both her and her brother. But there was another side to Mary: her work fighting for education and women’s rights in India, which Roy greatly admired. The book, though, is not just about Roy’s mother. It is also a search for the roots of Roy’s own evolution into a writer determined to expose the pain and suffering of the world.
Roy has spent her career writing about the rich lives and deep struggles of marginalized and oppressed people in India. Her Booker Prize-winning first novel, “The God of Small Things,” made her an international literary star when it came out in 1997 — a celebrity that made her very uncomfortable, she told me. While she did publish a second novel in 2017, Roy spent most of the years after the Booker Prize writing articles about a range of injustices, from India’s caste system to the treatment of Muslims, especially in the India-administered portion of Kashmir. Because of that work and her political activism, Roy has been targeted repeatedly by India’s government under the populist leader Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
When we spoke twice earlier this month, we started by talking about her mother and her memoir but ended up discussing the cost of speaking out and the parallels she sees between India under Modi and America under President Trump.
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Your mother was a very complicated and difficult person, as you describe her. While I was reading your book, it reminded me of a quote by the writer Czeslaw Milosz, who wrote, “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Did you struggle with how much to reveal about your mother and your family? When you write something like this, you choose what you write and what you won’t write. But I know that this doesn’t work as literature if you’re trying to present some acceptable version of yourself or of her. Then you might as well not do it. But it wasn’t so much of a struggle because what was incredible about her was that there was a part of her that hammered me but then it also created me. There was this public part of her, which was so extraordinary, so I could never settle on what I really thought or felt. The entire range was a challenge to me as a writer: Can I put down this unresolvable character?
Let’s talk about that public part of her before we get to her as your mother. Tell me about who she was outside of your relationship. She belonged to the Syrian Christian community in Kerala, which is a tiny but privileged community that’s insulated from the wildness and the poverty of the rest of India. But she married outside the community and then got divorced, which was absolute taboo. She started a small school initially in the rented premises of the Rotary Club. I used to think of it as a sliding, folding school because we had to sweep up all the stubs and the coffee cups of the men and put out our furniture, and they would come the next day and mess it up again. Then ultimately she built this beautiful school, which still runs. I studied there too in the early years.
But what she’s equally well known for is that when she left her husband, my father, we lived in this tiny little cottage [in Tamil Nadu] that used to belong to her very cruel father, who was dead by then. Her mother and her older brother came there, and they asked us to leave the house and said that, according to the Travancore Christian Succession Act, a daughter can inherit a quarter of her father’s property or 5,000 rupees, whichever is less. So we were literally going to be turfed out onto this road in the middle of the night by my grandmother and my uncle. We ran to the lawyer, and he told us that law applies in Kerala but not in Tamil Nadu. So we weren’t kicked out, but she nurtured this humiliation and kept it to herself for a long time. When she could afford to, she filed an appeal to the Supreme Court challenging this law, calling it unconstitutional. And the Supreme Court actually struck it down with retrospective effect and made it equal inheritance for everybody.
So there’s that side of your mother. You start the book, though, discussing how you were raised by her. Your early life was one of hardship, poverty, instability and abuse, both verbal and physical. I should ask before we continue, is “abusive” the word that feels right to you in describing your relationship to her? I flinch. I didn’t use any of these words in the book. If it was a single thing that one was dealing with — if it was just abuse or just violence or just one thing that you could settle on and decide how to feel about it, that’s one thing. But I had a schism in me very early. Even as a young child, I could see that her anger against me and my brother was somehow connected to what she herself was going through. So one half of me was taking the hits and the other half was taking notes. That, in a sense, made me a writer very early, where you’re trying to understand, Why is she doing this to me?
Some of the moments that were hardest to read about were when she would berate you, belittle you. You tell a story about being on a plane for the first time when you were about 6 years old. Can you recount that story? My mother had an older sister who was very different from the rest of the family. She was married to a pilot who worked in Indian Airlines, and she had a proper house and a proper husband and proper children. Because this uncle of mine was a pilot, we had free tickets to get on a plane, which we had never been on. And on the plane, I asked my mother how come her sister was so much thinner than her. My mother was a very severe asthmatic, and at the time she was on steroids and had become very overweight. She just turned on me in a fury and mimicked me. She had this way of mimicking my baby way of speaking, and that used to just rip through me. And then she said, By the time you’re my age, you’ll be three times my size. And, of course, very quickly, she said, I’m your mother and your father and I love you double. So you forgive her, and yet you’re shredded. That was the constant thing that you had to manage, that something would tear you up and then stitch you back together, then tear you up, then stitch you back together.
You write that her mimicking you and calling you names made you feel that “I swirled like water down a sink and disappeared.” I think that anyone who has had a difficult parent, which I have, can identify with that line. Did you think that you had to disappear when she was attacking you? Yeah. She was the only parent and also the only person in a society and in a family that makes it clear that you’re not part of it. So she’s all you have. I mean, there are no relatives. There are no neighbors. There’s just nobody. So I welded myself to her when I was very young. And then exploded apart when I was older.
She had these terrible attacks of asthma, and she used to keep telling me, I’m going to die, and you better figure out what you’re going to do. Who’s going to look after you? And so I became like her lung. I used to breathe for her. My body was an extension of her body. And then when I was 16 and I went to architecture school and I walked into those lawns and watched all the students, I knew that I would be fine. I would be able to work. I would be able to survive. I wouldn’t die if she died. I didn’t have to breathe for her. And she sensed that the valiant organ child of hers, the lung, suddenly was breathing for itself. That generated a whole lot of hostility. But I don’t want this to end up like some litany of horrors about her because as I keep saying in the book, I had huge admiration for her too.
You talk about the battles that she was fighting even within the school, how she taught women and men to look at gender dynamics in a completely different way. You tell a story about her making the boys parade around in bras because one of them had disrespected one of the girls. Not parade around, but she learned that they were making fun of the girls because they’d started wearing bras. So she said, Go to my cupboard and get my bra. And then she showed them. She said, This is a bra, this is what it’s for, and if it excites you so much, you can keep mine. It changes the pH balance of what goes on between boys and girls when the girls know that there’s someone who’s got their back.
In the book you describe India as the land of son worshipers. You also describe how harsh your mother was with your brother in particular. She would call him a male chauvinist pig when he was only a child. When he was a teenager, she said to him, “You’re ugly and stupid, you should kill yourself.” You write that the way she treated him was like she was punishing him for the sins of the world, and that complicated your own views of feminism. How did that play out for you? My brother is one of the most amazing people that I know. My brother’s the one that asked me, “I don’t understand how you can be so upset about her death after everything that she did to us.” And I understand that it’s very puzzling for him and perhaps even hurtful that I don’t hate her. I think it’s because I see that her public battles were making space for women in ways that included making space for me. But at the same time, just because you’re a feminist doesn’t make you a great person. Feminism doesn’t have only to do with women’s rights. It has to do with a way of looking at the world in which men and women are equal and men and women are respectful of each other. It doesn’t mean disrespecting a lovely man, which is what I saw happening with my brother. It affected me deeply.
What have the conversations around this book been like? Has he read it? He has read it, and it was hard initially for him to read, because maybe he thought he had put it behind him. But then he wrote to me saying, I’m laughing and crying and I can’t breathe and if I die, it’ll be your fault. He did say, I don’t understand why you feel so much about her. I said I can’t hate her because there is so much of her in me, I’d have to hate myself.
There is this other moment that really struck me. You and your brother are being sent to boarding school. And you write that your brother got a report from school that said “average student,” and your mother beat him with a ruler until it broke. And in the morning, she turned to you and gave you a hug because your report card had been good and said that you were brilliant. And you wrote, “On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room.” That stopped me in my tracks. I think the sentence after that is, “If you stop to think about it, it’s true, someone is.” When you get applauded and rewarded and everybody claps and you know that somebody you love and somebody quiet has been beaten — to me that expands far beyond my brother and me. It expands into the country that I live in now or the world. I might be a writer with whatever is conventionally known as success. But the things I write about and the people that I write about are being beaten, even as we speak today. They are being starved in Gaza, they are being broken, they’re being occupied. And so what does it mean when you are applauded, when your heart belongs in the whole world?
When you wrote that section and were thinking about that incident and how it applies to your life, was it a sense of discovery? No, I don’t think that the process of writing this made me understand it deeper. I wrote it because I understood it. In order to survive or to make sense of my life, I’ve had to think and think and think about all these things. When I won the Booker Prize, there was more than one half of me that was thinking, What does it mean to be this best-selling novelist in this country where people can’t read, in this country hurtling toward what we have now? So there was hardly a moment for me to feel great about myself before things started to unravel quickly. Even the celebration of me had this whole nationalistic fervor, which I despised at that time, in ’97. So I was very quickly kicked off that pedestal, and I kicked myself off it too. I always have this feeling that those of us who’ve been very unsafe as children, we seek out the unsafe. We seek out the lack of security, and if you have security, you blow it up.
You’ve risked your security many times in your career. You are under legal threat in India for your writing and things that you’ve said. What do you think the role of writers and creators is at a moment when there is censorship and people are trying to shut you down? Whether it’s in the Soviet Union or whether it is in East Germany or in the darkest places and times, writers have managed to survive. Their work has survived. For me it’s very important to understand that I just can’t keep striking the same note again and again. You have to change it up, you have to experiment, you have to insist that your work is not just a reaction to what’s happening to you. Your work is a thing in and of itself, a way of positing another vision of the world. And that’s a challenge because you can’t do it as a manifesto, hitting everybody on the head with some ideological hammer. You’ve got to do it beautifully. Somebody told me the other day, “Oh, the reason I like your writing is because you write as though they’ve already killed you. [Laughs.] You don’t hold back.”
Just in the past few days, the Indian regional government of Kashmir has banned one of your books. The book is “Azadi,” which was published in 2020. It’s about the fight in India-controlled Kashmir and the concepts behind freedom and authoritarianism more broadly. The directive said that your book and others — yours wasn’t the only one that was targeted — would “deeply impact the psyche of youth by promoting a culture of grievance, victimhood and terrorist heroism.” Why do you think your book was included in that list, and what’s your response to that more broadly? My response is to not respond, because I don’t know. It sounds like some list they got out of ChatGPT. You never know why these things happen when they happen. When they target me now, I just don’t say anything, because you never know whether they really mean it or it’s just some side game to distract from something. I have no idea, so I’m not really going to say much about it.
You are currently under threat of arrest in India for comments you made about Kashmir in 2010. Do you feel comfortable explaining your position? And can you tell me a little bit about the status of that legal case? I really don’t want to talk about it, actually, because it just increases the risk of something being taken out of context and something blowing up. It’s dormant right now, so I just let it be.
Even the manner in which you’re responding, which is that you do not want to address this because of the fear of legal repercussions, what does that say? Well, I think in America you’re beginning to head in that direction. Ours started a long time ago, and one has to learn how to navigate it. And the reason that I don’t talk about it is because I would much rather write what I want to write than have some controversy about something you say off the cuff. It’s like they’re always trying to trip people up and trying to prevent you from thinking clearly. This culture of fear is everywhere here. People are arrested for things they say on Facebook, on Twitter, or what they don’t say. In the U.S., it seems new to you, but we have been living with this, and it’s increasingly becoming normalized. It’s a very disturbing situation, especially for Muslims, where it doesn’t stop with just court cases and jail. It goes on to lynching and murder and social boycotts and economic boycotts and homes being bulldozed. You meet people who have stories that you can’t look away from.
You touched on this a little, and so I would love to hear your thoughts on how you view parallels between the Hindu-nationalist movement in India and the MAGA movement here in the United States. There are a lot of parallels. One of the first things that happened when Modi came to power was demonetization — this direct hit on the economy, where he said 500-rupee notes were illegal, like, overnight. If you look at the attack on citizenship, the attack on universities, the attack on students, the attack on Rohingyas, the continuous uncertainty, the fact that you might be ambushed by anything at any time — it’s so similar that you wonder, is there a playbook or is it just osmotic authoritarian behavior? The ruling party is confused with the government and all of it is confused with one man. So you’re seeing that in the U.S., and I look at it in shock. You thought that there was a mechanism in place, there were checks and balances in place. But clearly there isn’t a way of handling someone who’s completely out of control. The way statisticians are being fired for giving out figures that the authoritarian doesn’t agree with — same thing here, you can’t believe any of the government figures on economics because everything that doesn’t suit the ruling establishment is dismissed, it’s thrown away, and a new picture is put in its place.
The one big difference is that in India, the mainstream media has completely compromised. It’s not just rolled over, it is actually an organ of the authoritarian state. It’s actually calling for people’s arrest or making up lies. And of course America is sitting on top of a crumbling world. Whatever Trump does affects the whole world, whereas here, it just affects this country.
Why do you think authoritarian leaders go after people like you, people who deal in ideas? When you said there’s a playbook, we’ve seen that in places all around the world. From time immemorial.
But as someone who’s the subject of that kind of censure, I’m wondering why you think it happens. They are terrified of people who they feel can communicate, not just cerebrally, but emotionally. However small they are, and even however little access they have to the mainstream or to the thundering, pulpit-thumping television anchors, they know there are some people who people eventually do listen to. They know who is read. They know who is loved. They also know who is not invested in the things that everyone else is invested in — fame and money and awards. There are a lot of people like that who they know will not bow down. We are just people who look at things and say it how it is.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music or the New York Times Audio app.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro is a writer and co-host of The Interview, a series focused on interviewing the world’s most fascinating people.
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