The inevitability of Mother Mary and Arundhati Roy

As I sit down to write this review, it comes back to me in stills: the Meenachil River, almost as treacherous as the paths Arundhati Roy trod to make sense of the life she was living; the cold looks from Shri Mary Roy; the Delhi School of Planning and Architecture, which looked nothing like the one I had conjured up in my mind; Dido, Queen of Carthage; the Naxalbari folks; the tumultuous Kashmir; and the shatterproof-glass jeep windscreen.

I was speaking to two (yes, I must mention two) of my friends about how reading Arundhati Roy often involves googling words you have never encountered before and marvelling at the fervent ways she weaves them together to make you feel what she herself might have been feeling, in the most austere sense. However, with this memoir, both of my friends glided through the pages, baring their hearts.

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I went into the book with no expectations. I knew that it would inevitably make me relate to her relationship with her mother, sure, but I did not anticipate the way the book would envelop me socially, politically, and personally. It made me rethink the very idea of a memoir. One cannot exist without being permeated by human ties and the untamed experiences life offers when one is simply trying to survive and write.

As you read the memoir, you cannot get past the vitriolic words thrown at a daughter by a mother who is seen as both transgressor and warrior, even in the most ordinary of scenarios. Those moments are powerful enough to alter the neural wiring of the reader. Yet you also develop the most unusual liaison with people who almost feel like characters from a beautifully written novel. Why do I feel so connected to Ammal, the flamboyant downstairs couple, the people living in the Narmada Valley, and the man on the bus who asked Arundhati for her hand in marriage? At other times, the memoir made me morph into the ugly bicycle that could not be left at the gate of her Malcha Marg home.

As much as Roy's writing prowess can be exemplified through her remarkable screenplay for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones or her Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, I believe she is most in her element when writing about the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, the genocidal violence in Gujarat, the plight of the people in the Narmada Valley and Kashmir, or the Maoist guerrillas trying to soften the onslaught of the Salwa Judum. What I mean is that she is at her most compelling when she embraces the "writer-activist" identity, which she herself believes to be inseparable from one another. Standing beside the unpopular team and becoming unpopular nationwide because you believe in the rights of those who have been hustled by the "big guys" with their "big memoranda of understanding".

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I must mention a few lines that will stay with me for years to come: "A Kashmiri journalist asked if I was going to write a book about Kashmir. I told him that I would never presume to write a book about Kashmir, but that Kashmir would be in all the books that I wrote."

Perhaps that is what I can call a hard-earned understanding of the gut-wrenching and diverse experiences of the downtrodden – not by speaking for them, but by writing about them from the most authentic part of one's being: the heart. When a writer's politics is steeped in empathy, the pen follows the same traces left by the writer's love and conviction.

Circling back to the key theme, Roy did not tend to the lacerations left by her mother because she believed that, if she allowed her mother to be the woman she was, then she and her brother had to become the subjects of her wrath. Arundhati knew that her mother loved her in her own unusual ways, so she stopped trying to understand her and instead absorbed whatever came her way. She came to realise that understanding her mother could only be achieved through an ongoing willingness to inhabit ambiguity. Maybe her one act of absolute defiance came when she broke a chair in front of her bedridden mother. At that moment, her consciousness collided with the fact that her mother was contributing to the very social vitriol she abhorred.

The memoir felt like a reconciliation because there was no real exploration of irresolution. Arundhati Roy writes about her mother as someone she wholly absorbed; she was both a destructive and a liberating force. Mary Roy's fierceness and ruthlessness made her a woman entirely of her own making, while simultaneously shaping her daughter's imagination and politics. This intimate struggle eventually expands into one between the individual and the nation — the nation that gives and takes in equal measure.

Yes, Mother Mary Comes to Me is about the unrelenting Mary Roy, but it is also about the acknowledgement that our deepest inheritances are neither material nor sentimental. They are ways of seeing the world, an unwillingness to mistake comfort for truth, because truth rarely is. When I first read Arundhati Roy's second novel as my introduction to her in 2017, I was 17, struggling to understand every third line. Yet now, nine years later, after reading her essays and The God of Small Things in between, I am left with a feeling akin to the defiant yellow amaltas blooming in the blazing summer.