It is worth reiterating that Arundhati Roy is a brave woman. This aspect of her character, an unapologetic voice that stirs our consciousness, championing the cause of the wronged and minorities, proves itself once more in the pages of her much-anticipated book Mother Mary Comes To Me (Penguin Random House India). For a public figure often misinterpreted and under attack for her stance to be an open book, laying bare her life in 360-odd pages, is bravery of a different sort. It also makes her extremely vulnerable. But that’s Roy. Brave, vulnerable and her “mother’s savage daughter”. (The Wyndreth Berginsdottir song kept playing in my head throughout while reading the book and even writing this.)

In the pages of Mother Mary Comes To Me, Roy’s mother is consciously immortalised, and deservingly so. Mrs Roy, as the author refers to her mother in the book, was an extraordinary educationist and women’s rights activist whose story ought to be told. Who better than Roy, who has watched her grit from close quarters. And, in the memoir, she jots everything down — her greatness, her flaws and what makes Mrs Roy, the author’s “gangster, shelter and storm”.

With the book, one enters the sacred chambers of Roy’s heart, witnessing her fraught relationship with her mother, not as a voyeur but as a seeker. It’s not the first time that Roy has essayed her mother in a book, but it’s her first at being direct and honest.

Mother Mary Comes To Me is a tale of two women in one book. It is as much about Mrs Roy as it is about the Booker Prize-winning author of The God of Small Things, who meandered from the world of architecture to films and writing to activism; from Kerala, Goa, to ultimately Delhi. It’s a book of love, a complicated one. Not the romantic kind but the love shared between a mother and daughter that’s not idyllic, but worth understanding because humans are not perfect, their relationships are not always perfect and love is about embracing both perfections and imperfections.

A tete-a-tete with the gangster, the shelter and the storm’s daughter, who has her own gangsterism. Excerpts.

The book reiterates the fact that you are very brave as writing a memoir and opening up chambers of your heart for the common reader is brave. What led to the memoir?

The catalyst was not just the fact that she died. I was really puzzled at how much that death affected me, especially because my entire life was a training for her death. She was constantly telling me, I’m going to die, I’m going to die, and then she died when she was 89. Because it’s such a complicated relationship and there was a private part to that relationship, a part when I was a child and she was an adult, but then we both became adults. And I think even when I was a child, I was her mother. I think she was not my mother. I was her mother, you know, I was the one understanding this difficult child and thinking about how to be with her.

It’s a book of love but of a very hard and complex love. I just felt that this was a woman who deserved to be in literature and in history with all her complexities, not a hagiography kind. The challenge was can I write this woman with all the complexities and the contradictions, the rage and the grace, and the anger, viciousness and her genius? Can I write it all? That was why I wrote it. She was an extraordinary woman, and a lot of the way I am is because of the great things as well as the not so great things about her.

More than a daughter mourning the loss of her mother, I mourn her as a writer; we lost a most enthralling subject. There’s also that public side to both of us, which is also very much a part of the reason I wanted to write a novel, because, for all the difficulties of having her as a mother, I was always conscious of those battles that she was fighting.

You had also described your writing process and how each book comes up as a picture for you, and then you write. Was it the same for this one?

It was in some ways the same. I think the first thing that I wrote, which ended up being at the end of the book, was this description of my mother being bathed, like as an old lady. It was a kind of ritual of conquest or something. So, yeah, that image of her and all these people.

You called your mother your “gangster, shelter, storm”. And whenever you used to write, she used to read and give you feedback. Now that she’s not here to give you an honest review, what do you think she would have said?

If she reads the book, as you know, it would depend on the day of the week. The thing about her was this unpredictability. The fact that she was asthmatic, she used it as a way of keeping everybody quiet. Like, there’s no way that I could have a conversation with her or talk to her or react to her or anything. So, in some ways, this is my considered reaction to everything. But I think she would know that it comes from a place of love and honesty, because she deserves more than a hagiography.

In the book, you travel back in time and talk about memories from when you were nine or even younger. You have, of course, an exceptional memory. Did you have to reach out to your family and relatives as part of your research?

It’s not about having an extraordinary memory; it’s about things that happen to you that you can’t forget. It’s not that I remember everything, but I remember those unforgettable things. So there wasn’t any need to talk to anybody about those things; those are my things. The parts that included my brother, I talked to him about it. It is hard for him; he was crushed differently. I continue to have an extremely close and protective relationship with him. But I know that this book is hard for him.

At one point in the book, you talk about writing and say that writing politics and fiction is much easier for you. So how difficult was it to write a memoir?

Technically, these are labels that publishers and booksellers and newspaper people give to a book. The difficulty about this is if you’re trying to present some nice version of yourself, you’ve got to be, at least the initial imperative has to be honesty, however hard that might be. Also, in this climate that we have in this country, the sort of Hindutva brigade is always whispering she’s not a Hindu and all that…. There’s a sort of ethics about writing something like this, where you do not try to promote some nice version of yourself.

You have lived in an eventful India, witnessing major events like the Emergency, the Gujarat Riots, the Babri Masjid demolition and others. Putting everything in one book is not possible. So where did you want to contain it?

It was important that the book itself has its own integrity. The point is not to write a political discourse about every single thing that happened, but all these things that were happening were often personal. I mean, you experience them personally in a real sort of way. Whether it was moving while building a film set in Madhya Pradesh and encountering the Rath Yatra… or going to prison and meeting the woman who was imprisoned for the Parliament attack and had no clue why she was there…. All those things had to be integral to the book.

You’ve always had that streak, to give it back and not take any nonsense. You also write with a similar courage. Do you think you got it from your mom? Do you think of the consequences when writing?

I’m sure I got it from her. I do bother about the consequences when writing because one should bother about it in an intelligent way. You shouldn’t be dumb, and just to survive in this regime, in this country, you’ve got to be intelligent about how you do it.

Are you saying that you are more conscious now while writing than you were earlier?

No, I’m just saying that I have so much experience of being misinterpreted, of things being twisted around, or edited out, or whatever… so you have to.... not thinking of consequences is irresponsible, either for yourself or for someone else.

Coming back to the book, there’s something that you repeat a few times. You say: ‘The safest place becomes the most dangerous, because I make it.’ Do you still feel the same about yourself? And do you think that you were harsh on yourself?

For many women, it is the most dangerous, the most desolate space. And sometimes, when you refuse to, or when you can no longer put up with that danger, you eject yourself. In the whole book, you can see that there’s this continuous series of leaving. I think the safe place finds you, and then you leave the place. Also, when I say dangerous, I mean that if you’re a writer, or an artist, you keep evolving, you keep changing... whereas in that safe space, it can only be safe as long as you’re the same.

And that’s not just in a family. You win the Booker Prize, then they want you to keep on writing The God of Small Things to The Son of the God of Small Things… they want you to keep on repeating yourself. To me, that signals danger; it’s a trap, all those things are traps. Some people remain the same, or may be they change internally in some way, but people who are artists, or musicians, or writers, or in the arts, you have to change to remain.

You called writing The Ministry of Utmost Happiness a benediction. What would you call this book?

When fiction came back to me, I felt that ease and the freedom to write it. This book had another feeling. I felt that there was nothing else that I could write except this right now. There was no possibility of not looking at this and taking it. I mean, it was a challenge, a writing challenge. So, to me, this book was just sitting right there on the road I was walking on; I couldn’t walk around it or over it or under it. I had to write it.

Also, you mention that you completed The Ministry of Utmost Happiness while in the midst of turmoil. How do you shut out noise and get back to your desk?

A large part of the writer’s mind and soul is a ruthless one.

So you would call yourself a ruthless writer?

I can be. My soul has that compartment in it, a little gangsterism of my own.