Reading Arundhati Roy’s Memoir Made Me Wonder How Will My Own Children Remember Me?

Arundhati Roy’s “Mother Mary Comes to Me” is the story of a writer being forged—by discipline, chaos, rebellion, and a mother who poured tenderness into her students while treating her children as their bankers. Reading it felt like reopening a sealed room in my memory. I too grew up cherished and protected, until after my marriage, when I left with my two children because my parents kept urging me to return to my husband’s home. I mistook their fear for abandonment. Years later, I understood it as love in its most panicked form, shaped by a society with no place for women who refuse to endure suffering.

So when I read about Roy’s version of her Mother—brilliant, fierce, contradictory—I felt something shift.

Mary Roy is a force of nature: uncompromising, wounded, magnificent. She battled patriarchy, bureaucracy, asthma, and loneliness with equal ferocity. She founded her school first in tiny Rotary Club rooms—with child-sized sinks, militant cleanliness, Bharatanatyam, drama, and free-writing exercises that helped form Arundhati’s electric prose. Later she built a full school on Motta Kunnu with Laurie Baker. Roy’s description of school staff carrying Mary up the stairs on a stretcher, trailed by machines, towels, curtains, and a jar of jujubes, is both hilarious and tender. Mary presided over her universe like Cleopatra in her private bath.

The memoir shows how a writer is shaped not by comfort but by friction—by trying to understand an impossible mother.

Mary’s contradictions amuse and wound in equal measure: mimicking her daughter in a baby voice, making her feel like “dirty water flushed down the sink,” holding the household hostage to her asthma while Arundhati became “a moth fluttering over her heart,” breathing for a woman who couldn’t exhale. In steroid-fueled paranoia, Mary interrogated nurses—“What is your caste? What is your religion?”—until Arundhati hurled a chair in protest. After that she visited her mother only in short, negotiated bursts, like a wary insect testing a spider’s web.

Mary Roy became a national figure—signing letters as “Mary Roy c/o India”—and famously taking the state to court to win inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women. Reading about her, I thought of the Indian mothers I had known, especially my mother-in-law, who waited hand and foot on her son and treated me as useful only when I served him. Mary was the opposite. She once called her six-year-old son “a male chauvinist pig!” She refused to serve anyone’s ego.

Arundhati’s father—alcoholic, mostly absent, but never cruel—left a quiet void: giggling to himself, telling her not to look “muggrah,” blowing spit bubbles, staring at nothing. His absence shaped her relationships with men: JC and their brief, fake marriage; Sanjay K, who lent her his jeep windshield to use as a kitchen counter; Golak, with matching kambal ponchos and designing stage sets; Pradip Krishen, who loved her “bonsai looks,” cast her in Massey Sahib, married her, and predicted she would leave him when he read The God of Small Things. 

Roy sees her mother, “the iron angel” clearly—not through trauma bonding alone but through tenderness.

There were others: her brother LKC, her silent partner in suffering their mother’s wrath, and playing “The Day is Done”; her Oxford-educated uncle J. Isaac, who taught her the importance of “failure”, convinced he was the character Chako; her agent David Godwin, arriving in a wrinkled linen suit (she almost offered to iron it for him) when she received the Booker in 1997; and John Berger (“Jumbo”), flapping his ears like a gentle elephant encouraging her to finish her book: “Your fiction and nonfiction walk you around the world like your two legs.” Even her father-in-law, who said before he died that he wanted to see her name written in the stars.

These men who nudged Roy toward writing remind me of my own father, always reading, always marking passages for me to discover.

Roy’s stubbornness became her compass: arriving in Delhi with only one sentence of Hindi—“Subeh uthkar dekha to kutiya mari padi thi”—and surviving a new city, new language, new culture. She lived near Nizamuddin Auliya masjid in squalor, suspected of aiding a drug lord and greeted daily with “Aaj bhi bach gayi?” She earned her architecture degree, acted, wrote screenplays, protested, wrote searing political essays—and finally, “The God of Small Things.”

Her instinct to protect the vulnerable—dogs, squirrels, monkeys, rivers, hijras, tribals, minorities—was shaped by witnessing cruelty up close. Her descriptions of home by the green Meenachil River, a squirrel perched on her shoulder, and her Alsatian Dido shot for trespassing pulse with the same trembling intensity as her political writing. I remember my Irish mentor asking me in 1993, “You’ve read “The God of Small Things”? Is it true?” I nodded, unsure. I still wonder what “true” meant to him.

Old-age Mary Roy is unforgettable: supervising assembly in a kaftan and Christian Dior glasses, learning Malayalam to the end, interrogating everyone around her. Once, being asked, “Are you Arundhati Roy’s mother?” felt like a slap. And yet years later, at the hospital, she screamed, “I am ARUNDHATI ROY’S MOTHER! LET ME OUT!”

Reading their complicated bond made me wonder: How will my own children remember me? Will they hold onto my flaws, my young-mother anxieties, my improvisational parenting? Or will they recognize the fear beneath the mistakes.

“Mother Mary Comes to Me” is ultimately about how a writer is formed through wounds, rebellion, bewilderment, and the need to decipher a mother who was both a dilapidated Ooty cottage she fought to own and a roaring dust storm shaping generations of students. It reminded me that mothers—my sweet, dimpled, strident mother waking vendors at dawn; my mother-in-law who might have meddled less had she run a school; my grandmother who weaponized frailty; Mother Teresa; Kurussammal, the school mother who bathed children in boiling water and cooked rice with green chillies—are never simple beings. They are weather systems. We spend our lives learning to decipher them.

The final chapter, “A Declaration of Love,” is exquisite: the phone message, the funeral, the town spilling into the school, the 21-gun salute, the reading of the will, her brother “Kuttapen” wanting Arundhati to have their mother’s house. Arundhati restored it by planting whistling bamboo, ginger, pepper, orchids, and a pond for fish and frogs—a small “Jannat” guesthouse where Mary’s spirit could roam free.

And at last, Roy sees her mother, “the iron angel” clearly—not through trauma bonding alone but through tenderness. Mary is revealed not only as the woman who told her to “get out” of her car and her life, not only as the “millstone,” but who loved ferociously. She tells her daughter through a dictated phone message:

“There is no one in this world whom I have loved more than you.”

Roy’s political writing—collected in “My Seditious Heart” and “Azadi” — delivers unflinching critiques of capitalism, and rising nationalism, erosion of human rights, environmental devastation, and the power structures behind them.

Through it all, Arundhati becomes the independent, financially and emotionally self-sufficient woman who can lie in a bullock cart at night, singing to the stars. And I think that by following my father’s steady advice, carrying my mother’s resilient artistry, and moving in quiet neuronal rhythm with my children and my present life—I am striving toward the same freedom.

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With one foot in Huntsville, Alabama, the other in her birth home, India, and a heart steeped in humanity, Monita Soni writes as a contemplative practice. She has published hundreds of poems, movie reviews, book critiques, and essays, and contributed to combined literary works. Her two books are My Light Reflections and Flow Through My Heart. You can hear her commentaries on Sundial Writers Corner, WLRH 89.3 FM.