God of small and large things

Today it is quite common to jokingly label a mother – especially your own – as crazy. Nevertheless, around the topic of complicated bonds with the primary attachment figure, people still tread carefully or even reverently. To a large extent, there remains a romanticization and tabooing of mothers, who envelop them in a mass amber, where they become holy images: loving, suffering, untouchable.

In response to this approach, naturally, a squad of outcasts and pariahs with their own stories arises. These are often reductive and, in the style of feed generated by an annoying algorithm, they wield repetitive terminology describing narcissistic traits or outright personality disorders (the highest form). An adult child pointing a finger at such a mother usually spends the rest of their life on a pulpit, from which they preach about their own suffering – often with humor or irony – but ultimately with an intensity and immutability that refer to their own mother.

The memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy will undoubtedly delight fans of her previous novel The God of Small Things. It will certainly also please children who are psychologically and otherwise battered by their parents.

The Indian writer and activist decided in her latest book to come to terms with the death and life of her own mother, Mary Roy. The first part of the memoir takes us through the initial troubles into Kerala. Specifically, into the city where we will discover the backdrop of the aforementioned book crowned with the Booker Prize. It is in the reference to her famous debut that the main reason for my choosing Mother Mary Comes To Me lies. However, I will not pretend that I am not at least partly affected by amber, the pulpit, and other details.

I also openly admit that if I hadn’t promised to write about the book, I would probably have definitively closed it at some point and moved on. And since we’re on confessions, I will reveal a plot twist related to reading the book and a happy ending, and I will use my favorite storytelling cliché: it would be a mistake!

The beginning of the book, or rather the good half of the memoir, is rich in information about the author’s emotionally drained childhood, chronologically well-structured and psychologically dense, but it lacks elegance and lightness, and perhaps most of all, a certain wildness and juiciness to which we are accustomed in her work. Naturally, writing about a mother with whom Arundhati Roy had a lifelong complicated relationship without softening it with fictionalization must have been challenging. Gaining distance from such a gigantic object as one’s own mother requires not only time and space in reality but also in the number of pages. What irritated me the most were frequent clarifications, emphasis on the point, and stylistic exclamation marks acting like shovels. Capitalized words highlighting emotionally charged moments (for example, Redemption) or overuse of the metaphor “cold mole” recycled from The God of Small Things were among other irritants.

The first half of the book, set among eccentric relatives, is heavily burdened by the experience of children, whom the mother does not regard with kindness and empathy but rather with irritability and often outright cruelty or hatred. For Mary Roy, only the institution she founded and led for the rest of her life holds a warm place. Her school, opening new and previously inaccessible opportunities for girls and the impoverished youth in India, was progressive in almost every respect. It is clear that Mary Roy nurtured her “darling” – meaning the school – not only as a true visionary but also as a great – yes – mother. “It was completely clear which child was the mother’s favorite. She loved, fought for, and protected her youngest child as much as she could. This type of concentrated, furious love, regardless of what object it chooses, represents a blessed love. The challenge for us unchosen ones, watching love pass us by, is to learn from it, to enjoy it, and not to let ourselves become bitter or lose the ability to love.”

It seems that Arundhati Roy remains faithful to this manifesto. Despite the frequent eye exercises provoked in me by the first part of the book filled with similar grandiose phrases, the author managed to avoid self-pity and even anger or the popular lay diagnosis from the beginning of this text. Sometimes with slightly rough strokes, she sketches the difficult position of the children, including her brother. One must also appreciate how stubbornly she refuses the victim role. She perceives and later accepts her mother’s undoubtedly grand personality as an inevitable consequence of her own villain origin story. And although she does not dispute her mother’s malignant influence on her own childhood, she has no problem portraying Mary Roy with well-deserved respect: as a visionary with “the right” opinions, a revolutionary with an egalitarian spirit, a feminist fighting for women’s rights and changing the system (through women’s inheritance rights), a progressive educator, an Enlightenment thinker with an ecological approach, and so on. None of this benevolent and literally positive energy, however, is reflected in her relationship with her own children, as she often behaves like an aggressive psychopath, but… Arundhati Roy always finds a “but” that accompanies her until independence and adulthood, when she miraculously becomes herself. Ultimately, we must be openly hostile parents, in fact, grateful – unlike parents crushed by hidden pathologies, we can at least more clearly delineate ourselves from them.

The book gained new momentum for me the moment the author consciously decided to cut herself off from her mother and start a new life in Delhi. We will follow her through architecture studies, largely inspired by her mother’s choice of environmentally-minded architect Laurie Baker, who built a school in Kerala, through wild squat years, new friendships, and first relationships. We live with her in terrible conditions in an Indian metropolis, experience sexism and lack of money. And we watch how a young woman, who inherited only nonconformity from her mother, becomes intoxicated with her own freedom.

The freedom to think outside all established frameworks directs Arundhati Roy, despite her architecture degree, into the film industry. From there, she writes her debut novel The God of Small Things, and then embarks on a path as an activist who openly writes about complex human-political issues afflicting her homeland India. She protests – physically and verbally – against the construction of mega-dams on the Narmada River, rising nationalism, attacks on Muslim populations, nuclear armament, and the senseless, violent, and terrifying situation in Kashmir. All of this reflects the struggles and wars we observe in our own geopolitical sphere, here and now. It shows us how not to be afraid to speak about them, to respond to them, and not to let ourselves be silenced.

The first half of the book, therefore, consists of intimate memoirs. The second part, in which the author recapitulates her lifelong activist work through essays, functions as sharp political critique of the Indian state. She has a complicated relationship with India, much like with her mother. Amit Chaudhuri summarized it well in his review for Guardian: “Roy loves India deeply, but the nation-state is not India, and India does not return her love. This conflict can be compared to her relationship with Mary Roy, although they differ fundamentally.” A certain contradiction in the author is also caused by the international success of her first book. Through an unexpected change – not only in her financial situation – her themes and problems related to globalization touch her personally.

However, Arundhati Roy, like Mary Roy, redeems herself with something greater than herself. And ultimately, this can also be said about her memoirs. For both – the book and perhaps even the author herself – it is important that the themes of activism transcend the shadow of personal narrative, and that the author allows them to impact the reader in all their immediacy. Mother Mary Comes To Me offers us too many thought-provoking reflections on relationships, writing, and creation, on freedom and the world as such, to be discouraged by the essentially marginal flaws of the text.

Arundhati Roy: Mother Mary Comes To Me.  Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House, 2025.

The author is a prose writer.