Mother Mary in Arundhati’s world

I remember the precise moment I came across ‘The God of Small Things’. I was in the ninth standard at a school in Oman and a newly-arrived English teacher from India handed me this book. “Read it. It has just come out,” she said. And since then, the world has never been the same. Years later, reading Salman Rushdie did cause another stir in the imagination, but it was not in the same seismic league as Arundhati Roy. I am going to ignore any raised eyebrows.

I have never let a word written by Arundhati go unread. There is something unsettling about her writing, just as there is something unsettling about her persona. There is an intensity of feeling, an affective quality that very few writers have been able to convey. Her writings insist on undivided attention while her body language asks for anything but. It is like she’d rather meet in prose.

The answer to this and much more has finally come to light in ‘Mother Mary Comes To Me’. In a sense, this memoir was being written much before it was actually begun. It is present in the very dedication of ‘The God of Small Things’:

For Mary Roy

who grew me up.

Who taught me to say “excuse me”

before interrupting her in Public.

Who loved me enough to let me go.

For LKC, who, like me, survived.

One sensed even then the towering shadow of the Mother. It was apparent that the book walked the thin edge of the blade that separated fiction from life. Like her debut novel, this memoir, too, opens with a dedication to the same two people:

For LKC

Together we made it to the shore

For Mary Roy

Who never said Let It Be

‘Mother Mary Comes To Me’ is a powerful work that recounts with astonishing clarity the impact a parent, especially a mother, can have on a child. It deconstructs the myths of the ‘angelic’ mother and instead presents a figure that makes Margaret Laurence’s Hagar Shipley in ‘The Stone Angel’ pale in comparison. Mary Roy was a force to reckon with, as those who have met her can testify.

‘Mother Mary’ looks at Mary Roy in all her raw, human glory. It doesn’t apologise or make excuses for what is extremely abusive behaviour; instead, it tells us what coping mechanisms and survival skills the children, especially Arundhati, cultivated to find a way around her. The temperamental, mercurial figure of the eccentric, genius mother looms large over their consciousness.

Once, after a particularly nasty showdown, Arundhati is joined by her quiet brother, who comments, “Doesn’t she sound like that person in ‘The Exorcist’?” She tells us, “I couldn’t help laughing. It was the first time either of us had admitted to ourselves or each other what we were going through.”

The book is unputdownable, with its range of audacious people, the frailties that inhabit them and for the socio-geographical range that she narrates. The generous and sumptuous design makes it extremely special.

There are large spaces where Mrs Roy — as her children got used to calling her — does not appear. But you know she is there in the very atomic processes that fuel the daughter’s rationale — or lack thereof.

After the Booker Prize announcement, her mother is the only person Arundhati calls. She sat up at 2 am watching the news. “Well done, baby girl,” she says. We feel the winner’s happiness, but the tenuousness of the moment is not lost on her or on us. We meet her father, uncle and also run into lines from ‘The God of Small Things’ that turn up in conversations and realise how close to the bone Arundhati had cut to write the book.

We meet people who become familiar names and when we look though the dedications of her previous books, we are finally able to ascribe a precise function to the name. The memoir shows the close gathering of people who Arundhati holds dear and who are her talismans. Long years of being unmoored can do that, is what she implies.

The book gives an insight into the ‘behind the scenes’ aspects of Arundhati’s works. ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’, while highly anticipated, was also critiqued for being too anxious to cram all that was wrong with the country into one novel. But now, reading about the vagaries of the legal system that she was forced to confront and the anxieties she faced as a writer, the intrinsic value of ‘The Ministry…’ goes up exponentially.

There is also a sense of ironic amusement in that the writer who takes on the mighty governments, who walks with comrades, who writes of her friend GN Saibaba and who speaks of the conspiracy behind the hanging of Afzal Guru, pales when her mother invites John Cusack to tea.

There is more to ‘Mother Mary’ than being a powerful tribute by a daughter. It is also an intensely political and social critique of all that ails a world that is going down the slippery slope of not being able to recognise and respect Life in its many forms of existence. It is also a testimony to the cost of producing art and the exacting consequences this responsibility can have on the artist.

Like Life itself, the book walks, crawls, canters, gallops through various phases and comes to rest at a space of understanding.

“I’m your mother and your father and I love you double.”

— The reviewer teaches at All Saints’ College, Thiruvananthapuram