Review: Vivien Horler

Mother Mary Comes to Me, by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton)

Arundhati Roy, whose first novel The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize, left home after turning 18. She didn’t go back, or speak to her mother, for seven years.

“I left my mother not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her. Staying would have made that impossible.”

Her mother never asked why she had left – they both knew, she says. So they settled on a lie: “She loved me enough to let me go.”

The God of Small Things was dedicated to Mary Roy, with that line. Arundhati’s brother joked that it was the only piece of real fiction in the book.

After mother and daughter eventually reunited, Mary Roy never asked how her teenage daughter, who was about to go into her third year of architecture in Delhi when she left home, had managed or where and how she had lived.

Roy says in her first chapter she had to write this book, a memoir about the charged relationship between mother and daughter, “to bridge the chasm between the legacy of love she left for those whose lives she touched, and the thorns she set down for me, like little floaters in my bloodstream – fish hooks that still catch on soft tissue as my blood makes its way to and from my heart…”

Maybe Mary Roy had learnt her inter-personal family skills from her father, to whom Roy refers only as the Imperial Entomologist – he had retired as a senior civil servant with the British government in Delhi.

The entomologist and his family were estranged. His wife was an accomplished violin player who had taken music lessons when the entomologist was posted to Vienna. When her teacher told him she had the potential to be a concert-class musician, he stopped the lessons and smashed her violin.

Mary Roy’s husband, Roy’s father, was an assistant manager on a remote tea estate in Assam, where he became an alcoholic. In 1962, when war broke out between India and China, women and children were evacuated from border districts.

Mrs Roy – as Roy refers to her mother throughout the book – decided she was never going back to her husband or to Assam, and took the children, aged four and two, to Tamil Nadu’s Ootacamund – one of the fabled British hill stations – where her parents had a holiday cottage.

Mrs Roy had no money, but she did have a teacher’s qualifications, and so began teaching in Ooty. But she also suffered from debilitating asthma, and despite massive doses of steroids became too ill to work.

With no other option, Mrs Roy took the children home to her village in Kerala, a three-hour drive from Cochin, where the humid climate suited her health better, and threw herself on her family’s mercy.

The family accepted them, but with folded arms. And the family – Syrian Christians who spoke English as their home language – was dysfunctional. Mrs Roy’s brother, G Isaac, had tried to get Mrs Roy and the children thrown out of the Ooty house, so that when she moved back to the village with the children, there were terrible fights between brother and sister.

The whole house would shake, writes Roy: “Plates would be smashed; doors broken down.” Most of the fights were about money.

Mrs Roy never forgave her brother for trying to get them evicted from Ooty. G Isaac and their mother had arrived at the Ooty cottage saying they had no right to it, as under the Trivancore Christian Succession Act, daughters had no right to their father’s property.

This turned out to be the case in the state of Kerala, but not in Tamil Nadu. Mrs Roy bore the grudge against her brother for the rest of her life, and many years later went to court to get the law overthrown. The eventual result was that G Isaac lost his home.

They might have been Christians, but they weren’t gentle people.

In fact it’s hard to believe that with this background Roy turned out the charming and accomplished person as whom she comes across in the memoir.

Mrs Roy went on to start a successful private boarding school in the village, which flourishes to this day.

Roy pursued an interesting career n architecture and filmmaking in Delhi, meeting her life partner Pandip, a filmmaker from a wealthy family, and having two daughters with him. Yet when life got too cosy, she fled, as she had once done from Kerala.

After winning the Booker Prize, she acquired an international profile, and used it to write activist essays about the way India was moving towards Hindu ascendancy and intolerance of Muslims and other minority groups, including Christians and Sikhs.

This earned her criticism and even physical threats but, perhaps having inherited some of her mother’s steel, she took sensible precautions and otherwise ignored them.

Visiting Kashmir was a life-changing experience for Roy. “The only shield Kashmiri Muslims seemed to have against the systematic cruelty of those who governed them was the solace of religion and the shelter of their close-knit families… Grief, loss, anger, fear, shame – families were drawn close by these threads of acute suffering.”

Mrs Roy, who had never visited Kashmir, told her daughter: “If they don’t want us, why are we forcing ourselves on them? It’s so vulgar.”

Mrs Roy closely followed her daughter’s career, and Roy writes: “To me, that felt like love.”

She goes on: “She hovered over me like an unaffectionate iron angel. The metallic swoosh of her iron wings spurred me to pick the big fights, not the small ones.”

When she visited, her mother would ask her to speak to the school’s older students. “Sometimes what I said made their parents uneasy. She ignored them.”

Her death in September 2022 left Roy unexpectedly distraught. Despite her mother’s ill-health over the decades, Roy had expected her to outlast her. Her brother told her: “I don’t understand your reaction. She treated nobody as badly as she treated you.”

But Roy says she had seen so much sorrow, deprivation, “unmitigated wickedness, such diverse iterations of hell, that I can only count myself among the most fortunate”.

She says at the beginning of the memoir: “Perhaps what I am about to write is a betrayal of my younger self by the person I have become. If so, it’s no small sin. But I’m in no position to be the judge of that.”

Mrs Roy – a career woman, a divorcee in an intensely traditional world, who took on the law and won – was clearly a force of nature. By all accounts she wasn’t the cuddly sort.

But her daughter deeply admired – and admires – her. In the dedication to this book she writes: “For Mary Roy – who never said Let it Be.”

This a profoundly interesting read.