Towards the end of 2025, this book by Arundhati Roy, which was published in August that year, was very much in my inbox: Petya Grady rated it; it was one of The Conversation's best books of the year; for Maria Popova and for NPR, ditto.

It's a memoir. So we learn a lot about Roy, her career, and her political affiliations. But we learn all of that in the context of her extraordinary mother, Mary Roy, who died in 2022 at the age of 88.



Several of the books I've read recently have -- coincidentally -- been about bereavement: Colm Toibin's Nora Webster (losing a husband); Sally Rooney's Intermezzo and Gwendoline Riley's The Palm House (losing a father); Penelope Lively's The Photograph (losing a wife); Claire Keegan's Foster (losing a child).

And, to varying degrees, all the above books also deal with motherhood, a role nobody's that good at, unsurprisingly. There are also plenty of struggling, resentful mothers in Rachel Cusk's Outline. And I'm guessing most daughters have some sort of overarching storyline that relates to their mothers. I certainly do.

But Mary Roy blows everyone out of the water. She was a colossal figure, with a kaleidoscope of qualities. Already on page 2, we're learning about her impact: She founded a school; she transformed lives; she waged and won legal battles for equal inheritance rights for Christian women in Kerala. She was an early feminist: "What she did for her girl students, the spirit she instilled in them, was nothing short of revolutionary. She gave them spines, she gave them wings, she set them free."

When she died, people came from far and wide to pay their respects: "People who had once worked for her, people she had quarrelled with, people she had fired, doctors who had looked after her thirty years ago, rival labour unions, construction workers, local politicians and shopkeepers, journalists who had trashed her, priests who had disagreed with her..." The master mason who had worked on her school buildings said with awe: "She made all this from nothing. She was an amazing woman. I saw how she worked. What she did. What she created. All alone."

She also demonstrated extraordinary personal courage for a woman of her times. Her own father had been vain and violent ("it was to get away from him, our mother told us, that she married the first man who proposed to her"). But she walked out on her alcoholic husband when Arundhati was three, and her brother (Lalith) four and a half. At that point, Mary Roy was 30, and broke. (The family didn't hear from the father again until the children were in their twenties.) Mary ended up in a court case with her elder brother, and though she was reconciled with him in their old age, she remained estranged from her mother till the bitter end.

She eventually settles in Kottayam, and establishes her school there, but it's an uphill struggle. For many in the district, they're "considered outsiders -- not sufficiently Christian, not sufficiently Malayali. Not sufficiently wealthy." But she powers on. She never gives up. Arundhati says: "Until the day she died, she never stopped learning, never stagnated, never feared change, never lost her curiosity... She loved herself. Everything about herself. I loved that about her."


I think this was the inner cover (I read the electronic version available from Libby). But the ghostly fading is very clever

***

Mary Roy was a towering figure. No question.

But very much with feet of clay.

She had, by her daughter's account, a temper that mutated over the years from bad to "irrational and uncontrollable".

And her attitude to her children was often cold and vicious. When her daughter was small, she regularly ripped her to shreds. She had this trick of mimicking the child -- to devastating effect: "I clearly remember everything about every instance she did that. Even what I was wearing. It felt as though she had cut me out -- cut my shape out -- of a picture book with a sharp pair of scissors and then torn me up." On one occasion, during a plane journey, Arundhati inadvertently insulted her mother by alluding to her weight: "Careless words from a careless child. So, she turned on me and mimicked my six-year-old's way of speaking. And I turned on myself. I remember the air in the plane -- there wasn't any... It was a horrible plane full of horrible people in a horrible sky. I wanted it to crash and for all us to die. I especially hated the spoiled children with doting parents... But in a while my mother said, 'I'm your mother and your father and I love you double.' And then the plane was all right." But it's a bewildering scenario for a child to cope with. She likens it to "a cold, furry moth on a frightened heart. That moth was my constant companion. I learned early that the safest place can be the most dangerous. And that even when it isn't, I make it so."

Mary's chronic asthma makes her manipulative, and Arundhati very early assumes responsibility for keeping her mother alive -- while also realizing that her mother will always put the school before her and her brother: "My older sibling was a boy, and my younger sibling was a school. There was never any doubt about who our mother's favourite child was." (She even insists Arundhati and Lalith call her Mrs Roy at school, to avoid allegations of favouritism. The practice drifts over into domestic life too.) Mary rages at her daughter over comparative trivialities. She even has Arundhati's dog shot, because she mated with an unknown dog off the street: "It was a kind of honour killing."

And we're horrified when Mary says to her daughter: "'You're a millstone round my neck. I should have dumped you in an orphanage the day you were born.' I'd heard that many times before. It always made me feel drowsy. Airless." Later, she's given more context: "Mrs Roy had often told me about how miserable she was when she learned that she was pregnant with a second child. Me... When I was old enough to understand, she described to me the various ways in which she had tried to induce an abortion... It wasn't a nice thing for a mother to tell her daughter, but I sensed that she was warning me about drifting into a life of marriage and children without thinking it through carefully. I felt terrible for her. Even now when I think about it, I am not entirely on my side." That's a pretty terrible thought to implant in your child.

There's a rather creepy little exchange when Mary asks about a particular passage in The God of Small Things, Arundhati's Booker winner, in which the twins are remembering fights between their parents: "How they grew huge, like giants, and pushed the children from one to the other, saying, 'You take them, I don't want them.'" Mary interrogates her daughter:
"'Who told you about this? You were too young to remember.'
"'It's fiction.'
"'No, it's not.'
"And she turned to the wall."

Arundhati comments: "I have never felt the weight or the sorrow of this memory. I really believed it was fiction. I learned that day that most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination -- and that we may not be the best arbiters of which is which. So read this book as you would a novel. It makes no larger claim. But then, there can BE no larger claim. Fiction is that strange, smoky thing that writers don't entirely own, even if they think they do. Where does it come from? Our past, our present, our reading, our imagination -- yes. But perhaps from premonitions of our future, too?"


Kochi, Kerala 2006

***

So... This is one fearsome -- dare we say loathsome? -- woman. And yet... And yet... Mary's indomitable spirit certainly injected backbone into her daughter. Arundhati decides to study architecture, which was not an easy path for a woman at that time: "But if that girl was Mrs Roy's daughter, and if Mrs Roy backed her, then nothing was impossible. Between her bouts of rage and increasing physical violence, Mrs Roy told her daughter that if she put her mind to it, she could be anything she wanted to be. To her daughter those words were a life raft that tided her over pitch-darkness, wild currents and a deadly undertow."

It's also hard to imagine Arundhati becoming the fearless political warrior she is without the kind of boot camp Mary put her through. As Debjani Ganguly puts it, "With a childhood that felt like living on the edge of a ledge from which a fall was inevitable at any moment, she has grown accustomed to precarity."

And as the inspiration for fiction, Mary is a cornucopia: "Perhaps even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject. In these pages, my mother, my gangster, shall live. She was my shelter and my storm."

When Arundhati had her big success with The God of Small Things, her mother was definitely proud. She masterminded the Kottayam book launch, and invited a famous Indian writer as guest of honour. (Then, of course, she was disruptive throughout: "She planned the launch and then wrecked it, too. She presented me and, in the same breath, undermined me." It's as though she couldn't help herself.)

And yet... And yet... Even though Mary was clear-eyed (and worried) about the risks her daughter was running with her political writing, and worried about her safety, and even though Arundhati's stances were sometimes problematic for her mother's position in the community, she never asked her to back down. Here's one of Roy's brilliant sentences: "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."

It's a tribute to Arundhati's evocative story-telling that we're incredibly moved when she receives, a few months before her mother's death, a message of maternal love: "Her phone messages were never casual. They were declarations. Statements of policy. The one I received that night said, 'There is no one in the world whom I have loved more than you.'" How that must have felt, after all those years... Arundhati replies: "You are the most unusual, wonderful woman I have ever known. I adore you."

The death of this gargantuan, chiaroscuro figure creates a huge void: "That first night in a Mrs Roy-less world, I spun unanchored in space with no coordinates. I had constructed myself around her. I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her. I had never wanted to defeat her, never wanted to win. I had always wanted her to go out like a queen. And now that she had, I didn't make sense to myself any more."

The crux of Arundhati's problem with her mother was this: "She was complete without me, and I was incomplete without her."



***

Mary's admirable feminism had a dark side in the way she treated her son, Lalith: "From the time he was only six or seven years old, for even the smallest mistake or slip-up she would call him a male chauvinist pig". And she beat him for getting an "average" report. Arundhati recalls: "When he was a teenager, she once said to him, 'You're ugly and stupid. If I were you, I'd kill myself.' He was neither of those things. He was just quiet and unsure of himself because he remembered his father and was marked by the trauma of losing him more than I was. It was remarkable that Mrs Roy felt able to say these terrible things to her son in this, the land of son-worshippers. The land in which sons must be given more than daughters, more of everything -- attention, love, money, education, inheritance, even food. The land of infanticide and female foeticide, in which millions of daughters are done away with even before they are born, and some just after. Sometimes my mother behaved as though all of this was my brother's fault. Because he was the only man she could reach, the only man she could punish for the sins of the world. The way she was with him has queered and complicated my view of feminism for ever, filled it with caveats."

Arundhati concludes that living with her mother resembled being part of a cult: "A good cult, a fabulous one even, but a cult nevertheless, in which the outside world was a fuzzy entity, and in the inside world, unquestioning obedience and frequently demonstrated adoration of the Mother Guru were the basic requirements for membership. The only involuntary members, press-ganged into the ways of the cult, were my brother and I." But perhaps, she concedes, Mary didn't have many options: "One of her school drivers said it best to me... 'It's only this crazy-lady style of Mrs Roy's that will work in this Kottayam of ours.'"

Both Arundhati and Lalith went to boarding school when they were nine. Arundhati stopped going home at the age of 18 (when she was about to enter her third year at the School of Architecture in Delhi): "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... She never asked me why I left. There was no need for that. We both knew. We settled on a lie. A good one. I crafted it -- 'She loved me enough to let me go.'" That's the line at the beginning of The God of Small Things: "My brother jokes that it's the only piece of real fiction in the book." Mother and daughter had no contact for seven years.

In the very first chapter, as we learn about Mary's death, Lalith remarks that she treated Arundhati worst of all. Arundhati, however, thinks that honour is his... Lalith also left home. But then Mary goes all maternal, and persuades him to return. Then "the old Mrs Roy came roaring back", and the pattern recommences. She screams; he freezes: "I became the useless, lazy bastard she accused me of being."

Has Lalith dealt with it all better? He displays no emotion at his mother's death, whereas Arundhati is cut to pieces. She says: "We either house all our ghosts, as I do, or unhouse them all, as my brother does. There's no bargaining with ghosts."


The little family: Mary, Lalith, and Arundhati

***

This is probably a good point at which to discuss the title... Of course, it's a quote from a Beatles song. And the lines of that song do resonate with what Arundhati is saying (mostly tongue-in-cheek, I'm sure, but also with a measure of genuineness):

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

There's an awful lot she has to "let be" in this story, at the end of the day. And as Arundhati says, "I still see her clearly. All the time."

It's a tricky title, though. It lends itself somewhat to mockery. Of the translations I could find, only the Dutch edition sticks with it (still in English, because I guess you don't translate the Beatles...) The Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan versions, on the other hand, have all gone for that little phrase I quoted above: "My shelter and my storm". Which does absolutely capture the heart of the book.


Kovalam

***

The relationship with Mary Roy the mother is the heartbeat of the whole work. But other themes are also interesting:

1. Arundhati's politics

I empathize wholeheartedly with her antipathy to the "where-are-you-from?" question. What matters, always, is that we're here now: "The more our world fractures into dagger-shaped shards, the more we club each other to death with our genes, our gods, our flags, our languages, the colour of our skin, the purity of our roots, our histories both true and false -- the more my answer to that question remains the same. I'M HERE NOW. It isn't a slogan or a solution to anything. Just the personal feelings of an off-grid drifter."

She has lots of bones to pick with what India has become. She hates violent Hindu nationalism; hates what's happening in Kashmir ("nothing that you read or watch in the Indian newspapers and television channels prepares you for the reality of Kashmir"); wants to show people that the story of the Naxalites is "about mining companies, money, lies, soldiers, guerrillas, vigilantes, barbaric violence, and the vandalism of the earth".

And always she rails against the rampant sexism she sees everywhere. There's a very poignant little vignette that exquisitely sums up the nub of the problem: "We passed a buffalo cart with a lantern tied behind it for a tail light. The driver of the cart was lying on his back, singing to the stars, confident that his buffalo would take him home. I remember feeling jealous of him. I remember thinking that no matter how long and hard we fought, in India no woman of any religion, class, caste, or creed would ever feel safe enough to sing to the stars on a lonely highway while her buffalo took her home."

And yet she loves her country: "The more I was hounded as an anti-national, the surer I was that India was the place I loved, the place to which I belonged...

As Amit Chaudhuri points out, "Roy loves India deeply, but the nation-state isn't India, and it doesn't love her back. The conflict is comparable to, albeit profoundly different from, her relationship with Mary Roy."

2. Her development as a writer

She had always wanted to write. But she'd always done badly at English language and literature as school subjects. Her mother gave her terrible marks...

This was because, she feels, she hadn't found "writer's language": "Language that I used, not language that used me. A language in which I could describe my multilingual world to myself. I knew even then that that language was outside me, not inside me, I knew it would not come to me on its own. I needed to hunt it down like a prey." When she finally gets stuck into The God of Small Things, she knows immediately: "I had hunted down my language-animal. I had disembowelled it and drunk its inky blood."

Her prose is beautiful. There would be so much to quote if I didn't fear making this post ridiculously long.



***

Mother Mary could undoubtedly have been ironed out in places (there was some repetition, and although the story is largely chronological, there were some back-and-forths that could have been clearer). But these are minor quibbles compared with its undoubted emotional impact. I came away in awe of what people somehow manage to survive.

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi sums up Arundhati Roy's achievement very nicely: "The daughter does not forgive her mother into grace; she writes her way toward something braver: to see the wound-giver's wound is an act of self-healing for those who come through slaughter."