One of India’s most loved authors, who is also targeted by some for her outspoken activism, spoke about another formidable woman in front of a packed Calcutta audience on Wednesday.
Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy discussed her memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, which also chronicles the life of her mother, Mary Roy, “her shelter and her storm”.
Mary Roy was a feminist icon, crusader for women’s rights, and educator. She walked out of her marriage when Arundhati was three and her brother four, and in 1967, she founded a school in a former Rotary Club hall in Kottayam, Kerala. One of her most enduring legacies was challenging the discriminatory Travancore Christian Succession Act and winning a landmark Supreme Court case that secured inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women. She passed away in September 2022 at the age of 89.
Arundhati described her mother as a complex figure. “I had a very troubled relationship with my mother, although I loved her deeply.... You cannot make up your mind about her. You cannot package her or tie her up in a ribbon and say she was this
or she was that,” she told the St Xavier’s College audience on Park Street.
For Arundhati, childhood meant that one half of her “was taking the hit” and the other half “was taking notes”, the author said.
The title of the memoir draws from the famous Beatles song Let It Be, though Mary Roy never uttered those words.
The event, hosted by Kalam Club in association with The Telegraph, featured Arundhati in conversation with Shohini Ghosh, professor at Jamia Millia Islamia, essayist, documentary filmmaker and longtime friend.
Mary Roy had married a Bengali man working in an Assam tea estate. His alcohol addiction prompted her to leave him and move south with her children.
“It is a great act of love, to write a book like this, where you can embrace and love somebody with all their light and darkness,” Ghosh said.
Arundhati read passages from the book. A portion from its final page: “I still see her clearly. All the time. She’s walking on the high seas. Through storm and stillness, through sunshine and rain. She’s walking when the tide is high, she’s walking when it’s low. She’s walking when I wake up. And when I drift into sleep. She takes small, unsteady steps, but she keeps going. She stops only to watch ships pass. Or to grimace at the small continents of garbage bobbing by. She’s always alone....”
The memoir spans six decades, portraying Mary Roy as a crusader, educator, mother, flawed human, and force of nature.