When I find myself in times of trouble

Mother Mary comes to me

Speaking words of wisdom

Let it be.

 

And in my hour of darkness

She is standing right in front of me

Speaking words of wisdom

Let it be.

 

This 1970 hit song ‘Let it Be’ by The Beatles and its allusion to either Mary, Paul McCartney’s dead mother, or Mother Mary herself, is an interesting entry point into Arundhati Roy’s 2025 memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. How Mary Roy becomes the enigmatic looming presence of the book with her method and madness, and how she becomes Arundhati’s ‘shelter and storm’, this emotive exposé aims to lay bare. And while the dedication aptly reads: “For Mary Roy/Who never said Let It Be/”, as the tenacity of Mary Roy fills almost every page of the book, equally mirrored in the memoir, is this same stubborn, unbreakable spirit of the daughter.

 

Arundhati Roy’s hard-hitting, moving memoir carries an unarticulated disclaimer: I cannot and will not canonize my mother. However, it also inserts a Postscript to say that, after all, I will. The black and white photograph on the first and the last pages of the book, with Mary Roy’s image blurred in the second frame, not only illustrates the ephemerality of life but also the indelibility of singeing memories that Mary Roy engendered.

 

Mary Roy tore into the firmament of a ‘stifling South Indian town’, divorced, unemployed, and a mother of two. While she imagined that paternal home and fraternal ties would offer shade and succour, she would soon learn the bitterest of life lessons. Her legal battles for inheritance under the Travancore Christian Succession Act, known as the Mary Roy case, are now the stuff of history. Mary Roy proved to be a trailblazer in all that she set her mind to. The school she set up in Kottayam defied the traditional axes of education; her collaboration with Laurie Baker introduced sustainability into her classrooms when it was practically unheard of; and her decision to stage Jesus Christ Superstar in a conservative Malayalee Christian town was the quintessence of maverick Mary.

 

Mother Mary Comes to Me, however, is not your gentle dose of saccharine offerings to motherhood; if at all, it undoes all that a mother has conventionally embodied, and ruptures goodness, sacrifice, virtue, and love. Mary Roy, the gangster, the mean queen, the venom-spitting Hydra, and the seeming hypochondriac who threatened her daughter that she would be the cause of her death, every time she had an asthmatic attack, was never a paradigm of ‘cloying virtue’. For the child Arundhati, that proverbial moth of The God of Small Things kept coming back and settling with all its furry coldness in her heart, whenever Mary, in her petulance, her disdain, and her frustration accosted her. The child becomes increasingly afraid of losing her mother, and yet develops an invisibility around her to escape her insane rage. It is sometimes almost impossible to read passages without feeling a lump in the throat when the little girl is called a bitch, or when she’s thrown out of the car, and when she silently becomes a writer as a child, locked in her silence, trying to understand and love the phenomenon called Mary Roy.  Arundhati, of course, acknowledges an undying debt to her mother for all that she is, as the book begins with the chapter “Gangster” and ends with the chapter “A Declaration of Love”. She says in the opening chapter, “I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject”.   

 

The book, besides dealing with the tormented mother-daughter relationship, is also a chronicle of the author’s life: her running away from home when she was sixteen, foraying into architecture and films, living up close and personal with the underbelly of Delhi, romance and marriages, her life-changing moment of the Booker Prize, her affiliation with social causes and writing about them, and of course circling back to Mrs Mary Roy after the hiatus. Mary Mary, quite contrary, never asked her what she did or how she lived for those seven odd years!

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The book is lyrically brilliant, typical of Arundhati Roy’s oeuvre, and one almost forgets that one is reading non-fiction. Coming from a rather reclusive Roy, the reader will lap up even the tiniest details of her life. The act of baring oneself to one’s readers requires a complete ownership of all one’s foibles and those of others, too, which has been attempted in the memoir. However, there is so much in the book that we already know. Readers would already be familiar with Amu’s story through The God of Small Things and Roy’s nonfiction through her essays. The pages are teeming with snippets about both Mary Roy and Arundhati that have crisscrossed the reader through earlier writings. The work lacks the novelty one would expect from a writer like Arundhati Roy, who has consistently sprung stellar surprises through her works.  

 

However, Mother Mary Comes to Me is a deep and delicate labyrinth, with its trellises binding hearts in the most unexpected ways. Mary Roy shines through as this enigmatic, eccentric genius who imprinted herself as the deepest influence on the life and work of Arundhati Roy. And true to her genius, her headstone says, inter alia:

 

Mary Roy

Dreamer Warrior Teacher