Mother Mary Comes to Me

by Arundhati Roy

Deliverance from a troubled family history lies at the core of Arundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me, an origin story fueled by the Indian author's brilliant, ferocious wit and the masterful storytelling that is her trademark. Now a globally acclaimed literary phenomenon, Roy charts her path from the tea estates of Assam and a tiny village in Kerala to big-city life in Delhi via the beaches of Goa. Readers familiar with her fiction and essays might be surprised to learn Roy initially trained and worked as an architect, followed by fruitful stints as an actor and a scriptwriter before she stunned the literary world with her Booker Prize-winning debut, The God of Small Things. Relationships platonic and otherwise rotate through her narrative, while the one figure who remains present on every page, in person or in spirit, is Roy's larger-than-life late mother, the formidable Mary Roy.

Roy cautions that readers won't find "conventional declarations" of love, marriage, divorce, or affairs in her memoir, and yet what they will discover is a far more intriguing trajectory through friendship, romance, love, and heartbreak, with Roy's valued inner circle from her days as an "off-grid drifter" still intact today. With amused and fond nostalgia, Roy reflects on the Italian architect who "settled and organized the basic building blocks of my personality"; her hapless but endearing father; and the uncle who inspired one of her most memorable fictional characters.

Mother Mary Comes to Me draws on multiple strands of the author's early years, unveiling an empathetic and at the same time marvelously satirical portrait of an eccentric extended family with a fondness for spectacular family feuds. Roy's maternal lineage was saddled with a legacy of violence yet blessed with the gifts of education and English fluency. "Mrs. Roy" formed the tempestuous foundation upon which Roy and her brother, "LKC," raised themselves. A single mother who suffered from debilitating asthma and thunderous moods, Mary Roy founded a coeducational school--a revolutionary act in its time--and grew it into a spectacularly influential institution. The rage and unpredictability Mrs. Roy was known for was the secret to her success in a patriarchal society unaccustomed to seeing a woman soar to great heights while rejecting cultural roles designed to clip her wings.

With open admiration, Roy describes her mother as having "the edginess of a gangster" while embodying for her students "the burning flame of courage and defiance." Mrs. Roy famously petitioned the Supreme Court in Delhi to repeal the Christian Succession Act that limited a woman's inheritance rights, winning an equal share in her father's ancestral property. Arundhati Roy's self-dependence developed early, her playground and "refuge" the banks of the Meenachil River. Far from growing up in isolation, though, she and her brother were immersed in their mother's education project from its inception.

The author's experience of growing up inside a school with teachers and students who worshipped her mother leads her to conclude, only half-jokingly, that she was raised in a cult. Everyone--except for Roy and her brother--was in thrall to the charming, manipulative "diva" whose fury they suffered but who also dazzled her students and inspired their success. Along with entertaining anecdotes about her mother's teaching style, Roy remembers how the entire school could hear when the volatile matriarch roared at her. "Even the fish in the fish tank looked alarmed," she recalls.

Despite being a penniless teenager when she enrolled at the School of Architecture in Delhi, Roy blossomed away from her volatile mother. Her reflections are achingly tender and point to an understanding, even as a young child, that for Mrs. Roy to "shine her light on her students and give them all she had, [Roy and her brother] had to absorb her darkness." That darkness was a gift, the "route to freedom," releasing Roy from the shackles of her inherited past. Accustomed to having no money, she is now blissfully detached from the wealth earned by her success, and distributes it widely and generously. The central luxury of financial independence, she believes, is having a home of her own, "one from which nobody can order me to get out."

After winning the Booker Prize in her early 30s, Roy resisted the alluring "gilded cage" of publishing contracts and instead fulfilled her destiny as the daughter of Mrs. Roy to travel a blazing path of justice-oriented advocacy. She has an expansive view on a writer's role in society, deploying her craft to highlight, among other stories of marginalized groups, the plight of beleaguered Kashmiris under military occupation. Despite harassment from authorities for speaking truth to power, Roy has forged for herself "the freedom to live and to write on [her] own terms." Not one to be intimidated, Roy's only protection comes from the street dogs she nurtures.

With staggering clarity and self-awareness, Mother Mary Comes to Me excavates the deeper truths behind a fraught yet liberating bond with a mother who instinctively understood that Roy "has a writer's heart." Inspired by a desire "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..." this elegant book memorializes the maternal courage and devotion that was Mrs. Roy's final bequest. --Shahina Piyarali

Arundhati Roy (photo: Mayank Austen Soofi)

Arundhati Roy is the author of the novels The God of Small Things, which won the 1997 Booker Prize, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Her prolific nonfiction includes My Seditious Heart, an outstanding collection of political essays. Roy's upcoming memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me (Scribner, September 2, 2025), recalls her fraught yet liberating relationship with her extraordinary late mother and tells the story of the author's journey toward literary freedom.

You were a bona fide vagrant in your youth, a term you use fondly in your memoir. What does that word mean to you today as you take a backward glance at those years?

Yes, I was a vagrant--a moneyless, reckless, runaway. I use the term fondly not to describe myself, but more to describe those times. Because during those years--the '70s--in the company I kept in Delhi, I did not feel shamed or judged or looked down upon as I probably would have been now. In my early childhood in Kerala there was not a small amount of shaming about other things--my missing, unknown father, my divorced mother--and so much else that's in the book. But once I took the decision to leave home and leave Kerala, I lived a sort of off-grid life, very removed from stable Delhi society. So, in my immediate circle of friends, there was no judgement. I was happy. I drifted. I did not go into a "family" home or eat at a "family" table for years. I was constantly worried about money. But not ashamed. It was almost the opposite--we mocked rich kids, we didn't envy them. It would not be possible today for me to make the choices I made then and to still manage to take my degree in architecture. There is no way I could have put myself through college the way I did. Not even with the help of my fellow student/boyfriend at the time. There's no respect for vagrancy now... it's a great pity. A failure of imagination.

Most of us have narratives about our childhood, our family, how growing up as we did helped shape us, for better or worse. Were you, in writing so deeply about everything of your past, surprised, and did it cause you to see things differently than you had before?

I'm surprised that I wrote this book. I had no intention of ever writing a memoir. I was shocked and a little ashamed at my reaction to my mother's death, I was devastated in a strange, almost spooky way. I couldn't understand it. After all that had happened between her and me. Those emotions blocked my blood flow. I found myself unable to write anything else. It took a fair amount of persuasion by my U.K. publisher, Simon Prosser, for me to even consider writing something this personal. Fortunately, it isn't only personal. Because neither Mrs. Roy--that's what I had to call my mother--nor I are hothouse plants. Both of us ended up living very public lives. I don't think I could have written a book that was only about our private selves. I couldn't have written a book in which the world doesn't come crashing in. I knew that the book would be worth nothing if I was not honest. About myself above all. And about her. But I do feel that Mrs. Roy deserves a place in literature for the woman that she was. For the very great as well as not-so-great things about her. I would write in the day and fear what I had written at night. But once it got going, I could not stop. Writing it has not caused me to look at things differently. It did not and of course cannot resolve or untangle what happened. The challenge was to see if my writing could accurately convey that un-resolvedness, those slashes and ragged edges that were the substance of our relationship. It was interesting to try and write without blinking, without making judgement--about her I have no judgment to make. It was a circus. Entertaining and often dangerous. I was just one of the creatures in it. I survived to report on it.

It's wonderful how you describe yourself as having a PhD in "not reacting." Does that get harder with age, as we are less willing to put up with the nonsense of others as we get older?

Ah yes. I earned that PhD the hard way. Mrs. Roy was a serious asthma patient. So, any talk-back, any reaction whatsoever from me would bring on an attack, maybe even a few days in hospital. It often led to my being blamed for causing her almost-death. As a very young child I lived in constant terror that she would die. So I learned to keep my counsel. Never to react. It has stood me in very good stead politically in the face of the storm that my writing evokes here in India. Particularly when I am in public. On a personal level too--I learned to be calm in the face of all sorts of assault. It's just habit. Training. Mother-managing behavior. But now that she's gone, I find myself being less patient.

This book shows a lot of love for Kerala, for the childhood you had there, notwithstanding the challenging moments. Did Kerala, as it's been in your life and as it is today, feel different in writing about it now? Do you visit there often?

Yes, I do. My beloved brother lives there. Many people I love are still there--many of the characters from the book. My mother's wonderful school is still running. Kerala has its shortcomings. When I was growing up, all I wanted to do was escape. But compared to the rest of the world, it feels positively enlightened. Muslims, Hindus and Christians live together in peace. People are educated and know their rights. The Hindu nationalists from the north have not been able to break it. But they have it in their cross-hairs and are doing everything they can to destroy the fabric and pit communities against each other. At the moment, it is in the grip of a massive drug crisis. I cannot help but feel there are political machinations behind that too. If Kerala falls--what a fall it will be.

India, as you say, is the water you swim in. Looking ahead to the next few decades, what is your most fervent wish for your homeland?

I have a few. An end to this hateful regime of corporate bank-rolled Hindu nationalism, an end to the persecution and brutalization of Muslims, in particular of people in Kashmir. My most fervent wish would be that my fellow Indians take a hard look at themselves and realize how disgusting and repulsive the caste system is. And for humans to understand that desecrating the planet they live on, our mountains, our forests, our rivers--is a form of suicidal psychosis. --Shahina Piyarali