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Indian author-activist Arundhati Roy spoke about her memoir, Mother Mary Comes To Me, at St Xavier’s College in Kolkata on Wednesday. This was the first public event for her book outside Kerala.
Organised by the Kalam Club, the event featured an interactive session with Shohini Ghosh, a professor at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.
At the event, held at the Depelchin Auditorium, Roy spoke at length about her long period of introspection before deciding to write the book.
For Roy, her mother, Mary Roy, was never an ideal model of morality, but a complex and compelling figure who, at times, became a source of inspiration for her writing. After her mother’s death, Roy felt the world needed to know about her, though the decision to write the book came with its own set of hesitations.
“When she passed away, I was devastated. and as a writer of them, it was like I couldn't write anything else unless I dealt with this devastation that I was very confused about,” she said.
Roy further said, “And so I started to write Mother Mary Comes to Me, and I used to write it in the day. I used to stay up all night saying, what the f*** am I doing? So that was the way the book got written.”
Roy kept the crowd engaged by reading out passages from her book and also shared anecdotes about her childhood in Aymanam, Kerala. She reminisced about her days spent with her brother Lalit Kumar Christopher Roy and her ‘memorable’ encounter with her father Ranjit Roy.
The event came to a close with students dedicating a musical performance to the author by singing The Beatles song Let It Be, the track which inspired the title of the memoir. Roy joined the students to sing a few lines. The Booker Prize winner also signed out books for her fans at the event.
