Shelter and Storm

FAME OFTEN SERVES as a disguise. Today we see the writer Arundhati Roy as a Booker-winner, whose debut novel, The God of Small Things (1997) is still spoken about with reverence both for the rhythm of its storytelling and the royalties it received. The public has anointed her as a “writer-activist” as she uses her pen to perforate big dams, trace the footsteps of Naxalites in Bastar, to stencil in Kashmir. But who dwells behind that facade? How did she come to have such a jagged relationship with authority, one that is always elbows and knees? Where does her chutzpah to take on vengeful governments and bullying bosses come from? Why has she made a life that snubs the boxes of relationships and families?

Roy’s most recent book, her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, provides some answers. It chronicles the many cataclysms that she has gone through, the “cult” she grew up in, and allows us to see the palimpsest of the person. It pivots around her relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a force unto herself. But the memoir is about so much more than a mother-daughter relationship. The reader will understand why Roy has such an affinity for the underdog, and why she writes of injustice not from the watchtower but the trenches. She knows what it is like to be absolutely alone in the world, with no money, and no backing. For seven years (from age 18) she had no contact with her family. She knows what it is to be vagrant, homeless, loveless. Always seen as “thin, dark, risky,” the daughter of a divorced mother, in conservative Kerala, she knew intimately the life of an “off-grid drifter”.

This is a book about being a writer, and becoming a writer; it is a book about icons, how great teachers can be lousy mothers; it is a book about language, finding a language for a novel, a language for protest, and finally a language for catharsis. It is a book about transformation. We see Roy change from a feral child with a squirrel as best friend, to a dogged young woman pedalling to work on a rented cycle in Delhi, and sharing beedis with rickshaw wallas, to a woman who can support others and has built a room (house) of her own. It is about a father who she sees as a three-year-old and then doesn’t meet until her 20s. It is about a mother who called her a “millstone” around her neck, who yelled and screamed and taunted, who threw cutlery and food at people, and threw her daughter out of the car on the Kottayam- Trivandrum highway. But it is also about a mother who made her who she was.

This is a book about how relationships and intimacy grow, shrink, morph, revise between parent and child, sister and brother, between friends, between lovers, between spouses. It is an account of how a wild child became a free woman. It is, ultimately, a declaration of love.

It is a book peopled with genius and oddball characters, from the famous architect Laurie Baker who builds a path-breaking school on a bald hill, to John Berger who like an “old elephant” champions her second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), to Pradip “one pole of the axis” around which her life revolved, the other being Sanjay, to her father, Micky Roy, who was utterly charming, but also an addict always hunting for his next fix, to her uncle G Isaac (whom her mother took to court) and who taught Roy how to make friends with defeat. And then, of course, it is about her mother, Mrs Roy.

Mary Roy was an educator and a national feminist icon, who is especially well known in Kerala, where she won a landmark case that changed the prevailing inheritance law of the Travancore Christian Succession Act. She also founded the Pallikoodam School, where she was “the burning flame of courage and defiance”. She didn’t believe in school uniforms or in segregating boys and girls. She even wore a swimsuit in her 50s and walked down the school ramp. Those familiar with Mrs Roy (as she was called by generations of students), might ask—why is her daughter airing family laundry (metaphorically and literally, as we encounter different anecdotes hooked around Mrs Roy’s bras)? But that question undermines all of writing. In less accomplished hands, this memoir could descend into navel-gazing and chest beating, but with Roy it becomes literature. Roy does not merely provide a ledger of a mother’s negligence and cruelties (an incident around a beloved pet dog is particularly disturbing). Instead like a forensic pathologist, she seeks to understand why her mother was the way she was. Like all complex (and all human) relationships this isn’t simply a relationship of love or hate. It is about a daughter needing to extract herself from her mother in order to know herself. To understand her mother, she—“the valiant organ-child”—turns her lens to others and ultimately to herself. As she writes in the Introduction, “Seeing her through lenses that were not entirely coloured by my own experience of her made me value her for the woman she was. It made me a writer. A novelist.”

Roy wrote The God of Small Things over four years in a near trance-like state. By the time she finished the manuscript, she knew the entire book by heart. Anyone who has read the novel will remember its river, the pickles, preserves, the sibling children Estha and Rahel, and of course, Ayemenem. To read the novel and the memoir side by side is to see Fiction and Life in tandem. In The God of Small Things she writes, “Though you couldn’t see the river from the house any more, like a seashell always has a sea-sense, the Ayemenem house still had a river-sense. A rushing, rolling, fishswimming sense.” And in her memoir, we read that at Ayemenem she “turned into a part of its landscape—a wild child with calloused feet who knew every hidden path and shortcut in the village that led to the river”. She adds: “I lived outdoors and went home as seldom as possible.”

As a child, home was more often a storm than a shelter because of her mother’s acute asthmatic attacks and volcanic temper. Roy was always a good student at school, unlike her brother Lalit who would return with an ‘average student’ report card. When Mrs Roy received his report card, she would beat him with a wooden ruler until it broke, while a young Roy watched through the keyhole. This early childhood experience complicates her understanding of success. For her success can never be undiluted. She writes: “Since then, for me, all personal achievement comes with a sense of foreboding. On the occasion when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room. If you pause to think of it, it’s true someone is.” This awareness that fame can be a form of captivity, that success always comes at a cost, that privilege can insulate, that money and inheritance can vanish, that wealth is the ultimate discriminator, that the most interesting people live by the river—makes Roy the writer she is.

Roy might be famous, but given her writing and politics, she has haters as well. She’s had court cases filed against her and has even spent time in jail. But it is India that she loves, as she writes, “The more I was hounded as anti-national, the surer I was that India was the place I love, the place to which I belonged.” With her memoir, Roy once again proves that while we are lucky that she belongs to India, it is in language that she has found her home.

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