There are many reasons why Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me is essential reading. For people of my generation, who read The God of Small Things in our 20s—and walked around in a daze afterwards, “like somebody had shot heroin up our arms”, to quote Arundhati’s literary agent David Godwin—this book feels like a vital companion piece. It is a vivid “making-of” chronicle, a kind of behind-the-scenes narrative that in some ways surpasses the original novel.
Unlike journalists and lesser writers who conceal their sources, Arundhati shares generously. We meet the inspirations for Velutha, for Chacko, for Baby Kochamma, the hideous sticky Orangedrink Lemondrink man, for doomed, dimpled Ammu and her beautiful, heartbroken children. We walk along the river, visit the pickle factory, ride in the tail-finned, sky-blue Plymouth and we get to see our Ammu live a long, massively successful life instead of perishing alone, ‘swollen with cortisone’ at 31.
She never gets with the real-life Velutha, though. Which isn’t as tragic as it seems really, because as a much older woman myself now, I find I am less interested in Velutha’s chocolatey abs and untouchable tongue (though they will always be swoonworthy) and more interested in what he symbolises. And boy, does Mary Roy (our Ammu) get down and dirty with what he symbolises!
At a private gathering, when asked what her mother’s greatest legacy to her was, Arundhati replied ‘an overactive middle finger’. In The God of Small Things, the affair with carpenter Velutha is Ammu’s/Mrs Roy’s overactive middle finger in action.
And in real life, the bums of the Syrian christian community have felt the power of her flipped middle finger, not just once, but twice. Her alcoholic, abusive husband—whom she left early, not because of the drinking or the beatings but because he was ‘a nothing man’—has felt it too. So has academia, when her tiny school bloomed into the iconic premier institution, Pallikoodam. All this, in the conservative world of 1986 and earlier.
And this finger flipping happened on home turf. Luke 4:24 in the Bible says, “A prophet is never recognised in his own land.” This, in modern parlance, translates to ‘you can conquer the world, but you can never win against the uncles in your family WhatsApp group’. Yet, Mrs Roy did exactly that when she went to the Supreme Court and secured equal inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women. Then, she went a step further, steadily buying up land around her school ‘like a mafia don’, right in the faces of the community that disapproved of her marriage to an outsider, her divorce, her vagabond children and her rowing with her brother and mother. It was a clear case of what toxic Pakistan-haters today would call “ghar mein ghus ke maarna”.
If Mrs Roy is the prophet who achieved recognition in her own land, Arundhati is the prophet who took the gig global. Refusing to be reduced to just her corkscrew curls, ‘beautiful neck’ and ‘domestic fiction’, she constantly, fearlessly spoke wonderfully eloquent truth to power.
The combined story of mother and daughter in Mother Mary Comes to Me is heady stuff. In a world of trend-chasing cinema obsessed with opening-weekend numbers, corporate-funded literary festivals kowtowing to the government-of-the-day, subservient media, IT raids, beauty-aids, toxic males, trad wives and the obsession with perfect, photogenically lived lives, the Roy women stand apart. Chaotic, unapologetic, uncompromising, they remain a beacon for mothers and daughters who are willing to pay the price for equality, excellence in their fields, and no b***shit—from either state or spouse.
editor@theweek.in