MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME, by Arundhati Roy
To the long, sonorous roll call of difficult mothers in literature — Mrs. Bennet; Joan Crawford; Rose Hovick; heck, Medea — now add Mary Roy. Mrs. Roy to you. And most tellingly, to her own daughter.
That daughter is Arundhati Roy: the Indian author and activist who burst onto the best-seller list in 1997, and won a Booker Prize at 36, for her first novel, “The God of Small Things,” the luminous story of a beleaguered family. Her more politically inflicted second, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” was published 20 years later, after many books of nonfiction.
Let’s hope Roy’s new memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” is not the capstone of this unconventional career (she studied architecture, and also wrote and acted in films), but it is certainly a keystone: sturdy and polished in its depiction of a foundational monstrosity.
Though she lacked material riches, the majestically named Mary Roy rises from these pages as an imperious and volatile parent, a “gangster” akin to that notorious television Roy, Logan of “Succession”: hurling crockery, slinging insults and beating her son, Lalith, for an average report card, with a wooden ruler until it broke. He grew up to thrive as an extroverted seafood tycoon, but to this day his sister, praised for her superior grades, finds the cloak of celebrity a bit itchy.
“On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room,” she writes, and — nodding at her well-established social conscience — “if you pause to think about it, it’s true, someone is.”
Mrs. Roy died in 2022 at 88; afflicted with terrible asthma, she was in later years followed always by a “frightened minion carrying her asthma inhaler, as though it were a crown, or a scepter of some sort.” She didn’t just forbid wire hangers; she told Arundhati (born Susanna) that she’d tried to abort her with one. And after that didn’t work, she wished she’d dumped her offspring, “a millstone around her neck,” in an orphanage.
“Get out!” was a frequent edict, from home or car. “You bitch,” Mary exclaimed after Susanna, aged 9, accidentally hung up their new Bakelite telephone during a conversation.
Four years later, the child came home from a military boarding school to find her beloved Alsatian, Dido, named for the Queen of Carthage in the Christopher Marlowe play, shot dead. The crime: mating with a street dog.
Let’s get to this complicated character’s good points. Her Waystar Royco was Pallikoodam, the renowned school she started in a former Rotary Club in Kottayam in 1967. She collaborated with a Christian missionary, who quickly departed after the arrival of teachers of Bharatanatyam, a form of Indian classical dance (“heathen, unchristian and unacceptable,” the missionary huffed). Mary’s intellect was wide-roving and generous: telling her daughter about world conflicts, reading her Rudyard Kipling and singing “Ol’ Man River.”
Having rebuilt a new facility for the school on three acres of wilderness, she would eventually persuade her country’s Supreme Court to overturn a judgment against students performing the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar.” She had already successfully petitioned against a statute denying daughters the rights to their father’s property.
The patriarchy failed Mary. Her own father, a natty entomologist for the imperial government, had also been violent, once splitting the scalp of his wife, an accomplished violinist, with a brass vase, and smashing her instrument. Mary’s brother, G. Isaac, was a Rhodes scholar who started a pickle factory; his taste for younger women inspired Mary to call him Humbert Humbert.
She married the first man she could to flee this family of origin, and he turned out to be an absentee alcoholic, so she divorced him but kept the surname. Micky Roy was the son of a boxer, whose feckless charm, when he turns up, has a dash of Johnny Nolan, the singing waiter in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”
These relatives and their dynamics are depicted with extraordinary precision, all the way to the Rabelaisian grotesqueries of eldercare, her mother deploying a call bell along with her Christian Dior sunglasses. So is Arundhati’s inevitable leave-taking, refashioning herself with the help of Janis Joplin and the Beatles (note the book’s title), while “literally living on air.”
Inspiration means breath, which for Mary Roy was always labored. Her daughter compares the process of writing “The God of Small Things,” which had some autobiographical elements, to “sculpting smoke.” But her descriptions of public advocacy — against nuclear tests, dams, gang rape — arrive here more like dust storms: urgent, impressive events that disrupt the microclimate of this book.
Money and its morality are constant considerations in “Mother Mary Comes to Me.” After a childhood of abuse and material deprivation, Roy is rolling in dough, setting up a charitable trust to deal with the excess, “my crazy royalties.”
Checking her dad into a rehab center: “Thang god for royalties.” Her beautiful apartment in Delhi: “My royalty home, bought wholly with the proceeds of literature. A dangerous place of my own. One from which nobody can order me to get out. Every now and then I kiss the walls and raise a glass and a middle finger to my critics, who seem to think that to write and say the things I do I must live a life of fake, self-inflicted poverty.”
You can see Mary in that middle finger. but she also put the Roy in “royalty.”
MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME | By Arundhati Roy | Scribner | 352 pp. | $30
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
The post She Raged. She Terrified. And She Shaped Arundhati Roy. appeared first on New York Times.
