Book: MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME
Author: Arundhati Roy
Published by: Penguin
Price: Rs 899
A compelling memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me takes us to the heart of Arundhati Roy’s passage from and to her bigger-than-life mother, Mary Roy. More than the heart, Roy’s organ metaphor, the lungs, aptly elucidates her life story, beginning with her role as her asthmatic mother’s “valiant organ-child” to becoming “a strange country inside her own skin” once she let “lungs return” to her own body.
Roy’s journey to selfhood wasn’t easy as she says that she left her mother, a towering personality in public and in private realms, so that she could “continue to be able to love her”. While her brother “didn’t pretend to be sad” when Mrs Roy lay stiff in her coffin, Roy’s puzzlement at feeling “wrecked, heart-smashed” by the finality of the matter emphasises how motherhood reproduces gendered modes of thinking. Even for Roy, the scars ran deep as Mrs Roy’s brutalisation of her son “complicated” Roy’s “view of feminism forever”. It took her years to find women friends and learn to be “qwicked” too.
Within the overt tale of embattled love, Roy’s account of her knotty leaving, spanning a good part of the text, is fascinating. It amplifies the personal chronicle of “my shelter and my storm” into a larger story that is played out not in sleepy Kottayam but in Delhi. Roy’s decision to leave “what passed as home” was fuelled by the “usual” reasons of “money and sex”, but her landing in Delhi in the middle of the Emergency makes for interesting reading, especially since the Emergency profoundly affected the political imagination of writers. One has only to recall the despair and the disintegration in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and the olfactory declaration of the protagonist, Saleem Sinai, echoing Shakespeare, that “during the winter of 1975-6, something smelled rotten in the capital.” True, but what did those times mean to someone, not a thirty-something-Sinai, who remains “handcuffed to history”, but to an adolescent looking for her history?
Despite being armed with formidable cultural capital that provided her with “options that millions of others did not have”, Roy had no idea “that in that year (1976) India was going through its biggest political crisis since Independence”. However, Delhi gave Roy what she most needed: anonymity and social mobility. As a coming-of-age memoir, Roy’s account shows that contrary to its savage reputation, Delhi’s portals of higher education offered freedom avenues to willing newcomers, especially to young women who were in search of new lives, away from their oppressive homes in faraway towns.
Expectedly, Roy embraced the city, “the soot, the chaos, and above all the anonymity”. But because of the School of Architecture’s sequestered existence, Roy’s growing-up
and cultivation of the “big-city attitude” excluded the common university fare: discussions, protests, and street theatres inspired by international and national feminist and civil rights movements. Low on funds but high on narcotic adventures, romance, friendships, and classroom arguments, Roy discovered Delhi’s shanty enclaves adjoining the School, nearby flea markets, far-flung resettlement colonies, and posh South Delhi neighbourhoods where movies could be watched for free. Some of these anarchic social margins, parts of the old city and the area around Nizamuddin dargah where Roy aced her cycling life, find their way in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
Roy characterises Delhi in “those early years” as a city of movement and mobility, a city in which political events are either narrated or watched as though “from some other lonely, faraway planet”. From the alleys of Nizamuddin to the well-heeled hoods, Roy’s upward mobility paralleled her professional and personal progression. And while her screen appearance as a “lead character with no lines” followed by scriptwriting awards nowhere matched Mrs Roy’s achievement as a “national feminist icon”, they were enough to reconnect broken bonds and forge new ones. Well into the 1990s, the decade that heralded Roy’s emancipation as a writer, her struggles remained largely personal and familial, be it her inner battles over finding her language, her embattled love relations, or her fractious filial life.
Strikingly, the storms begin post the Booker Prize. Far from being “one of those bottle caps” blown away in the dust storm that she witnessed in 1976, Roy experiences real “fury” at the political storms from 1998 onwards. And as she seizes the eye of successive storms by becoming a “mobile republic” — a joiner and a writer of struggles — the city changes. From its populated lanes and sheltering parks, it becomes a city of bars and barricades which also close in on her. Despite the odds, Roy doesn’t quit her calling or her place. But since this is a book about loving, Roy ends where she begins. She devotes the last section to her mother, to family bonds, and to her architectural efforts at restoring her mother’s “beautiful unplastered-brick Laurie Baker home”. The songs of the grove and the appropriate headstone complete the story.
Somewhere at the end, Roy says, “I made a hobby of twisting old adages to suit my situation. Where there’s a will, there’s a way out.” Not just at the level of language, but Roy’s ability to find “a way out” is inspirational.