Arundhati Roy’s Revealing New Memoir “Mother Mary Comes to Me”

HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thanks. Arundhati Roy, thanks so much for joining us. You have a recent memoir out called “Mother Mary Comes to Me” and it is about what I’ll — I can say it’s a tumultuous relationship between a woman and her mother. And for our audience that doesn’t know, your mom was a celebrated educator. She was an activist in her own right in India. You write, “She was woven through it all taller in my mind than any billboard, more perilous than any river in spate, more relentless than the rain, more present than the sea itself.” Why write about this?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I don’t think any writer can answer that question really about almost any book, you know? But honestly, for me, it was just, it’s just in every book I write, but I think, especially in this book, it’s almost like that’s all I could do. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t do anything else until I wrote this, you know. Because she was such a extraordinary person in, in good ways and bad. And I felt that a, a woman in that time, in that place who unleashed all of her herself, you know, her darkness, her light, her genius, her cruelty, all of it. She deserved a place in literature, you know… sort of in a way where you know, women are expected to be certain ways, and especially mothers in India, you know? And on the other hand, they’re vilified often in the West. And I just felt like, let’s, let me see as a challenge, can I, can I put this extraordinary person out as a writer without labels, without wrapping it up, without giving, you know, without sort of mitigating it in some way? Because she was confounding. And I wanted to know whether I could share her with the world in that same confounding way, you know?

SREENIVASAN: You know, you, you describe in excruciating detail how, you know, she berates and insults you. She beats your brother with a ruler till it broke. She’s a woman who shot and killed your dog. And then yet, you describe being basically an external organ to her: inseparable and breathing your life into her. And I just found that, you know, really kind of just every few pages I was going back and forth, like, how, why is she doing this? What, to this woman? 

ROY: It was, I mean, that part you describe about it, she was a, I mean, when she left my father and she came down, back down south to South India, she was a very severe asthmatic. She couldn’t — I was three years old, you know, and she would continuously be — and, and you could see it like life was just one minute here, and the next minute may be gone, and we would have nobody, you know? And later she would even say, so to me, I, I might die any minute, and what will you do? And where will you live? And, and that’s when I was like, I’ll breathe for you. You know, I’ll be your external lung. You know? And it was just a, a, a a a sort of, you know, just a way of trying to make sure that that one person who was there for you wasn’t going to leave.

But then when I became a teenager and I went to Delhi and to School of Architecture, and I realized that I would survive on my own, and I stopped being that valiant organ child, as I call it. And that immediately set — you know, she sensed that independence and that sort of turned up the hostility a little bit. 

But, you know, I mean, those are terrible things she did. But also she did the most extraordinary things. I mean, I keep saying people who have passions, you know, people who are singers or poets or politicians often have sort of very, very risky relationships with their children, with their own children, because of their calling. But my mother’s calling was other people’s children, you know? The school she started, and the generations of students that she educated and put into the world. It’s an extraordinary place. And for me, as obviously someone who survived, I mean, if I had fallen off the high wire, I might not have had this — I would not have had the same view of things. But since I did survive, I cannot ex — I cannot but see the extraordinary parts of her too, you know? And to me, that was the challenge: Can I present the light and the darkness without kind of taking away from either?

SREENIVASAN: So I, you know what, it’s — when I, when I see the descriptions that you have of your early childhood and you’re standing there. I’m, I’m picturing you standing there very still trying to catch tiny fish, right? <Laugh>, And you’re just out kind of galavanting with your brother out in the, the woods. And I’m juxtaposing that with kids today, who are on TikTok and YouTube and, you know, just constantly inundated with different kind of sensory overload. And I wonder how — I guess maybe that ability to learn to be still —  whether or how that maybe influenced you later in your life?

ROY: Honestly, that’s such a great question, because I always think about it. You know, the fact that I grew up in, in a village where there was no restaurants, no shops, no cinema theaters, no going out. You know, all the food we ate was just grown around us. I spent hours on the river catching, you know, tiny little fish and thinking. And there was no ex — you know, it’s not like your brain was just being filled with other people’s thoughts, and whether they were great, or whether they were not, or images or — there was space for you to think and listen and wonder. And I feel absolutely terrified of, of childhoods where this is simply not possible. I mean, from the time you’re an infant, you are just put onto an iPad, you know. 

So I, I certainly think that it is the fundamental you know, ways in which I’m structured have to do with that, you know. Which is not to say I’m some great person, but I’m just saying to me the idea of, of that childhood, which people might think of as, you know, I mean, of course there was cruelty and there was terror and all of that, that’s in the book. But the, the fact that I grew up on that river in that village, and that I knew every squirrel and bird. And for me, they were like people, those animals, you know? So I consider it a great privilege, actually.

SREENIVASAN: You write about your mom in a way that I think some people would really be startled with the types of things that she said to you. You write that, you know, “Her insults borne into me like a volley of bullets. My metaphoric execution ended with ‘You’re a millstone around 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. I wanted to sleep for a long time.” And I wonder if that sank into you, that feeling of maybe being worth less than, or — and also to your brother who suffered kind of differently. But when you went away to college, when did you figure out kind of your own identity was not those words that, you know, you were more than that?

ROY: You know, I actually, the thing is that I always could see — I don’t know why — but I could always see her rage at me coming through when she was suffering something, you know. In, in this particular instance, she had put on so much weight, and she had gone because of her steroids that she had to have for asthma. And she was in some, some ayurvedic resort or whatever when she was being starved, you know, and forcibly made to lose weight, or the insults of the community around her. So I could see the process always, even from the time I was very young. 

So, I don’t know, I, I mean, I can’t say that I ever felt worthless because of the things that she didn’t said to me, ’cause I could just see that it was coming from some place of anger, and it wasn’t…I don’t know. It, it somehow it didn’t make me feel like, “Oh, I’m nothing.” And I didn’t feel, I don’t remember feeling that, but I just remember feeling that I need to get away fast, you know? In order not to be destroyed, I need to get away fast. So I was a plotter. You are like, I was plotting my escape all the time. I was always got my eyes on the exits, you know?

SREENIVASAN: Yeah. You, you write also lovingly about the relationship that you had with your partner of both in work and in life, Pradip. And you met in his, his movie, and I, and — Massey Sahib — but you know, eventually the relationship falls apart. And you said, “The price I paid for being Mother Mary’s daughter, and the writer that I am was not prison or persecution, although there was some of that too. It was catastrophic heartbreak.” What do you mean by that?

ROY: Well, what I mean is that after I wrote “The God of Small Things” — “The God of Small Things” was written at a very crucial time in what was happening in India. You know, just as — very soon after the book came out, like it came out in ‘97, and by early ‘98, the right-wing Hindu government had come to power. They did the nuclear tests. And I was this you know, like I was just being paraded as this item of national pride and sort of Hindu national pride almost, along with the nuclear tests and the Miss Universes and the whatever. And I realized that if I didn’t say anything, I would just be considered part of this. And so I wrote this very big essay called “The End of Imagination,” which was about nationalism and nuclearism and Hindu nationalism, and somehow foreseeing in some ways what was the situation in which we are now, you know? And from that, I just, you know, I just became a person who, who was, who had my eyes open to everything that was happening. 

And that home with Pradip was a very privileged place. You know, it was a place of inheritance and comfort, and it wasn’t the life I had earlier with him because his parents had just died, and he had inherited everything. And it was, I, I, I mean, it wasn’t judgmental. I was not being judgmental. But I just knew that I couldn’t live in there and be the writer that I was wanting to be, you know, the writer that I am, which is a little bit of a hooligan and a little bit of a, you know, person who’s just walking, walking on the edge of things, you know?

SREENIVASAN: ‘Hooligan’ would be one way to describe it, but look, your activism has gotten you into plenty of hot water in India. It is something, which as soon as they heard that part of your voice they called you traitor. They said, ‘You should go off to Pakistan,’ right? I mean, I, I wonder if, was that in a way liberating, because you didn’t have to live as the Arundhati Roy on billboards representing Indian writers of the future?

ROY: It was, it was liberating because, you know, if I had —  first of all, I must say that I don’t think of myself ever as an activist. It was just what writers do and have done. But nowadays, people want to say it’s activism, because literature is considered to be something tamer and less political or whatever. So I don’t think of myself as an activist, but that political writing that I was doing really kicked me off that literary fairy princess, Booker prize-winning person. And yes, it was liberating because somehow from, from the time of my childhood, I’ve always dreaded being trapped in a space where I’m expected to be a certain way, you know? And here it just blew open that gilded cage forever, in a way. And I walked through the villages and towns and forests and slums of India, and I wrote what I had to write. 

And I never wrote it for approbation. It was almost the opposite, you know, a time when you did not have to be — I did not necessarily want to be that person who everybody agreed with, or everybody felt comfortable with, because what was happening in this country was deeply, deeply disturbing at the time. And now it’s far more so.

SREENIVASAN: I don’t know the exact update, and if you have one, please clarify — but are you still being held now in contempt of court in India for something you said years ago? And if this is the case, I mean, why do you feel it’s still crucial for you to keep using your voice this way?

ROY: In India, you, there are, yes, cases of contempt of court against me, but they sort of go into the freezer, and then they, you know, just stay there. That’s how the legal system works here. There, there is, there isn’t a case against me, but there’s a permission to file a case against me, which is much more serious than contempt of court. But also something from 12 years ago. But I don’t know, you know, everybody’s kind of caught in this sort of mesh of legal threats and police threats. Some people have been in prison for a long, long time, held as examples to other people. You know, comedians have been put into jail for jokes they almost made, but didn’t, you know? All sorts of people are in jail, activists in jail, lawyers are in jail, students are in jail.

 And all of it was glossed over by everybody, because at that point, it seemed like this was a, a, a very robust economy and a very big market. And so let’s just unsee the things that were going on with, you know, human beings. And now all of it is unraveling ’cause, you know, here the Hindu right, was, was doing puja, hoping for Trump to come to power. And suddenly they left shocked at the fact that he’s not a great friend and he’s not really interested in, in this country, and is in fact imposed the highest tariffs on India, more so than anywhere else in the world, you know? So there’s a lot of shock and confusion among the Hindu nationalists about this relationship.

SREENIVASAN: Yeah. You know bringing it back to your mom for our last question here. You know, you write about your mom, it says, “It was almost as though for her to shine her light on her students and give them all she had. We, he and I” — that’s your brother — “had to absorb her darkness. Today, though, I’m grateful for that gift of darkness. I learned to keep it close, to map it, to sift through its shades, to stare at it until it gave up its secrets. It turned out to be a route to freedom too.” So, explain, how is that darkness a route to freedom?

ROY: Well, because you learn very early in life, you know, that it’s not, it’s not as if all of us are entitled to happiness and all these beautiful things. The world is a rough place, you know? And you have to find your way through it. And to me, I, I learned those lessons early, not just with her, but also in the years I spent in Delhi where I had nothing and no one and no money. And that was a great university for me, you know? So I don’t think that I could be the writer that I am if I had had another mother or another life, you know? Of course, you know, it depends on what you make of it, right? I mean, I could have gone down very easily, and then I would not be saying these things. I could have gone down, but I did not go down. I, I turned it into literature, into art, real writing, you know?

SREENIVASAN: The memoir is beautifully written, it’s called “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” author Arundhati Roy, thanks so much for joining us.

ROY: You are so welcome.