There are writers you admire from a distance, and then there are writers who walk into a room and make you feel as though you've been slightly asleep your whole life. Arundhati Roy is the second kind. I first encountered her in person when she came to my city to promote The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a book I confess I never got around to reading, despite being entirely captivated by the woman behind it. She spoke about India as a country that lives in several centuries simultaneously. She said the feminist movement there had been NGO-ised. She was sharp, certain, and utterly herself. I left that evening a little in love.
When I heard she was returning to promote a new book, I bought my ticket and my copy immediately. The event was eventually cancelled, a strike, of all things, but I read the book anyway. And I am so glad I did. Mother Mary Comes to Me is beautiful, unrelenting non-fiction built around the life of Roy's mother, Mrs. Roy, now deceased. She was a woman who, by any conventional measure, was dealt the worst possible hand. And yet she played it with the kind of defiant grace that leaves you breathless. She was determined, it seems, that nothing, not circumstance, not society, not the grinding weight of expectation placed on women in India, would ever bring her all the way down. It never did.
Reading this book, I kept thinking: Arundhati Roy is her mother's daughter. They share the same refusal. The same conviction that the world, as it is, is not good enough. What separates Roy from many writers who hold such convictions is that she doesn't simply believe them, she writes from them. Her prose here is not decorative. Every sentence is doing the work of a statement.
"I think I had a cool seraph watching over me. Especially each time I was at a crossroads and had to make a decision. My education, the class I came from, and above all, the fact that I spoke English protected me and gave me options that millions of others did not have. Those were gifts bestowed on me by Mrs. Roy. At no point, no matter how untenable my circumstances, did I ever forget that."
Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me
There is something extraordinary about a person who can hold both grief and gratitude in the same breath, who can look at a difficult mother and say, clearly, she gave me everything I have. Roy does this with honesty that is almost uncomfortable. Almost. Because she is too good a writer to let it tip into sentimentality. Instead it lands exactly where it should. I understand Roy, through this book, as a woman who writes because she has a social and political responsibility, in a country where women do not easily find a seat at the table. Her bravery is not performative. It reads as constitutional, as something she inherited from Mrs. Roy and then forged further in her own fire.
I did not want this book to end. That is perhaps the simplest and most honest thing I can say about it. Arundhati Roy writes the way she lives, with fury, tenderness, and nothing held back.
If you haven't read this yet, please, go and get your copy. This is one of those rare books that doesn't just move you. It stays with you, quietly rearranging things. Arundhati and I below.
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