Mother Mary Comes to Me, 2025, Arundhati Roy *****

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:

The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga, 2008 ****

I have read quite a few novels set in India or by writers of Indian heritage and one of the topics that keeps on popping up is the blatant poverty and caste discrimination that perpetuate their society, The White Tiger is no exception. We get to read about the life style of an upper-middle class through the voice of their servant Balram. It is quite interesting as Balram tells us what he knows about his master  through pieces of information he gathers while being enslaved.

Balram narrates his ordeal with a witty sense of humour, you might  find yourself laughing in front of his adversity.

"The Great Socialist himself is said to have embezzled one billion rupees from the Darkness, and transferred that money into a bank account in a small, beautiful country in Europe full of white people and black money"

Balram narrates about life in his village Laxmangarh, his mother died when he was very young, his father a rickshaw puller died miserably of tuberculosis. A life of misery. One thing led to another and Balram becomes a driver and moves

Behind The Beautiful Forevers, 2012, by Katherine Boo *****

I stumbled upon this novel for the first time on Biblioglobal, the title, the cover and the nationality India caught my eye. I glanced through it, and thought I would like to read it. Although, I don't know when, since I do not have the book. However, some days later, as usual,  I asked the high school librarian if there was any book of my interest available. Eagerly, he handed me "Behind The Beautiful Forevers" and said it was about India, that it arrived not long ago, and asked if I was interested. I looked at him and smiled.

This nonfiction novel (of which I was sceptical about) introduced me to  Katherine Boo. Who, I haven't heard about untill this time. She is actually an American journalist, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2000, she is popular for highlighting the existence of the impoverished citizens in her homeland. This is her first novel.

It was somewhat difficult for me to rate this book, because Katherine isn't a novelist but an acclaimed talented journalist, reporting actual fact in form of fiction. In my opinion, her narrative style (in this book) lacks the vibe of a nonfiction. Besides, It is not a page-turner.

Regardless of her journalistic experience evident in the novel, her writing style is high quality, zealous, rich in vocabulary, beautiful and creative in style. She is, indeed, a gifted writer.

In "Behind The Beautiful Forevers" Katherine, eruditely, expatiated on the hardship of the Anawadians. Indian citizens, slum-dwellers of the city of Mumbai. Rife with poverty and precariousness. In Annawadi, the blatant disregard and disrespect for people's lives is frightening. The poor oppress themselves, child labour is popularised. Infanticide, prostitution and murder are out of control. In fact, corruption is rampant. Most of the children in the filthy slum are bitten by rats and they therefore develop head boils and worms. Women forget how old their children are in the struggle of keeping them from starving. Jaundice and tuberculosis are common. Garbage sorting is the most dignified means of survival and sewage lake is water source. Sadly, self-immolation and drinking rat poison their way to end it all. Citizens considered to belong to the "low caste" are doomed, ostracised and discriminated. Their death "a nuisance case to dispense with". Unfortunately, the Annawadians lived in squalor adjacent to the city International Airport and luxurious hotels, where the affluent Indians and foreigners comfortably lavish their money. Entertaining themselves with excess of food, drinks, music and so on and so forth.

Do I recommend this book? Of course yes. Even so, keep in mind that it could be difficult and distressing. In any case, Katherine was accounting on the ruthlessness that exists in the slums of India.

I rated this book five stars because of  its finesse, even though I am not used to the journalistic form of writing. I am not surprised that "Behind The Beautiful Forevers" was shortlisted for The Samuel Johnson Prize and just recently it won the National Book Award, it worth it. Kudos to Katherine Boo.

The God of Small Things, 1997, Arundhati Roy **

As I've mentioned before, summer makes it hard to get through a book, especially when you're busy with outdoor activities and soaking up the sun. It's even harder when the book itself keeps drifting on and off track, and that's exactly what happened to me with The God of Small Things.

It genuinely surprises me that this novel won the Booker Prize in 1997. Maybe it just wasn't a strong year for the prize.

The storyline itself is compelling: it follows a family in India, allegedly "touchable," headed by a hot-tempered father who batters his family members from time to time. The novel traces how death, divorce, failed love, sexual abuse, the political climate of the time, and their tangled relationship with another Indian family (allegedly "untouchable") shape and transform who they become. All in all, it's a sad, heavy story.

Told in a clear, chronological way with a single steady voice, I think this could have been a genuinely gripping read. But from where I sat, there was no real main character to hold onto. Instead, it wanders through a lot of small things in a very extended, meandering way that dragged me back and forth until I lost track of where the story was actually heading. Honestly, this book put me to sleep more than once, in broad daylight, purely from boredom. I nearly abandoned it several times, especially in the middle, but I pushed through for the sake of my readers. It is not an easy read.

Luckily, I didn't buy this one; a school library lent it to me. This is the second Booker Prize winner I've struggled to get through, and sincerely, it's not one I'd recommend.

If you're looking to read about India and the separatism within its society, at least what this book was trying to convey, I'd point you instead toward The Space Between Us, 2006, by Thrity Umrigar ****, which I found far more rewarding. There are plenty of other wonderful Indian writers out there worth exploring too.

The Space Between Us, 2006, by Thrity Umrigar ****

The title of this book describe its content at its most. This novel tells the story of the relationship between 2 indian families (especially between the women). One is a middle-high class and the other is a low class and she lives in the slum and works as a cleaner for the middle-high class woman.

It tells their story separately and it unite them but still made it clear there was still a space between them.

It is an entertaining story, sometimes slow but worth reading till the end. I recommend it.