Byline: Shinie Antony
Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me may not be a sequel to The God of Small Things, but a BTS of sorts, it certainly is, complete with scene references, location, flora and fauna, right down to that moth that landed on hearts. We are back in Ayemenem. There are relatives and family politics, mythologies and backstories, some songs too, but most of all, there is the matriarch. To whom the Booker-winning novel: ‘For Mary Roy… who loved me enough to let me go.’ Which, according to Roy’s brother, was the only piece of real fiction in the book.
The memoir is a Roy-Roy world—two Roys bound by battle but also blood. A pair of fate athletes. One runs from Delhi to Assam to Ooty to Kottayam. The other picks up the relay race back to Delhi. But can she escape Mrs Royhood? ‘I learned early that the safest place can be the most dangerous. And that even when it isn’t, I make it so,’ the author writes.
Mary Roy perhaps foresaw that her child would grow up to be a writer who would turn around one day and say, ‘Even writers were children once’. A memoir can grow complacent, curate itself into self-worship, make the writer look good, but here, it is a constant whodunnit where facts meet fiction, as fiction once met facts, and we unravel what unravelled us once.
In some places, it is a daughter writing about any daughter, rather than her mother, because the flashbacks carry a detached understanding. Like when little Roy enraged her mother by calling her fat, only to look back tenderly now, beyond the reach of that rage, to what caused that rage. There’s an elegiac and fluid forgiveness that flows through the text while also demystifying motherhood. Breaking it down into a basic tale of survival. Mrs Roy meets us on her own terms and is not to be confused with Ammu. Roy, aware of the unfairness inherent in presenting a mother no longer available to refute or respond, goes to the other extreme, exercising empathy like a wand.
Maternal absence or presence is left for us to gauge via snapshots of the child Roy was. Growing up with a brother who, unlike her, ‘remembered being loved’; gawking at the first telephone she ever saw and practicing to say ‘Hello? Who’s speaking?’; the time she ‘became the backseat’ in a car with Mrs Roy, realising she had a third sibling, which was the school her mother set up, Pallikoodam. All of which leads Roy to see through the ‘Mummydaddy people’, ultimately the Muggles of middle-class existence. With a brother, she must ‘absorb her darkness’ so Mrs Roy could shine her light on others.
While Mrs Roy got her share of ancestral property in a landmark lawsuit, the younger Roy is here for a stake in memories. As if she knows the dangers of ending up an unreliable narrator, Roy is hardest on herself, hunting down every last thing in her mother’s favour that she can. ‘She loved herself. Everything about herself. I loved that about her,’ she writes. A mother who ‘hovered over me like an unaffectionate iron angel. The metallic swoosh of her iron wings spurred me to pick the big fights, not the small ones’.
Despite finding ‘it impossible to gauge what would anger my mother and what would please her’. Roy owns the Kerala she knew. Laughing at husbands who throw down letters for wives to pick from the floor — you know, those affluent-looking wives with diamonds ‘like tiny searchlights’ in their ears. Harking back to a parent in a sleeveless blouse, smoking a cigarette, when ‘she wasn’t Mrs Roy. She was someone else’. Remembering what her mother said about her father: ‘He was a Nothing Man.’ Being ‘alone, and unpregnant’ in Rome.
Evolving into the Roy we read, who has ‘begun to prefer descriptions’. ‘In ruins’, as her mother lay in a coffin; on trial ‘for not behaving like a reasonable man’. With a heart that ‘began to take public things extremely personally’. Nearly three decades after that novel comes this love poem from a daughter to her mother, which I, unsurprisingly, read in one go on September 1, exactly three years after Mrs Roy died.
It is a literary delight despite the broken heart that comes from reading it (as perhaps writing it) when Roy holds up Small Things from her past against the light. She writes: ‘As soon as the shouting began, I would flee. The river was my refuge. It made up for everything that was wrong in my life.’ And the wistful reader wonders where Rahel ends and Roy begins. Because they ache the same. I read it as a mother, like all guilty mothers out there who joke about not having a maternal bone in their body, but whose hearts are filled with guilt and panic for daughters they are doomed to love but not understand.
Mary Roy perhaps foresaw that her child would grow up to be a writer who would turn around one day and say, ‘Even writers were children once’.