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At the global launch of her new book at the start of this month, Arundhati Roy gathered her friends, her agents and publishers from around the world to Kochi, Kerala, in a venue fittingly called the Mother Mary Hall.
There, in front of an audience of many hundreds that spilled out of the building, her brother sang the Beatles’ Let it Be, from which the title of the book was drawn. Later, at her mother’s school in the nearby town of Kottayam, students also sang the song, “aged five to 15 in their best Paul McCartney pouts”, describes the author, whose spoken words are every bit as lyrical as her written ones.
Mother Mary Comes to Me is Roy’s memoir, which is in large part about the often-difficult relationship between herself and her mother, Mary Roy. The poignancy of the song extends further: as alarming as the retellings of the minutiae of their relationship are – the spats that sometimes spilled over into neglect, verbal abuse and abandonment – the writer wants her readers to know that she is fine. “We were so imperfect, the both of us, and you know, it’s OK. I survived, she survived.” Let it be.
Arundhati Roy, often described as the enfant terrible of India’s literary world for her passionate and polemical non-fiction writings on issues of development, politics and society, is now in her early 60s, a time when many slow down, take stock and reflect. For Roy, this reflection was precipitated by the 2022 death of her mother, whom she calls Mrs Roy throughout the book, a reference to her position as a school principal.
When we speak she is relaxed, smiling beatifically via Zoom.
Roy after winning the 1997 Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things.Credit: AP
She has just arrived in London for the next leg of her book tour, and is propped up on her bed and wedged against chintzy wallpaper, awkwardly angled as she speaks into her plugged-in phone. She is upbeat, even giggly, throughout our conversation, which comes as a surprise. I assumed that her manner would reflect the darkness of the subject.
“I don’t think of this as publicity. It’s political protection, and my readers are my protection in this political landscape I find myself in. And I don’t take this [travel] as a burden at all, I love it,” she says, smiling widely.
A new Arundhati Roy book is no small thing. And this book in particular is one of the big releases for 2025, perhaps even the biggest for Penguin India, which I’ve heard anecdotally started planning its marketing strategy a full year ago. Kochi has gone all out: readers citywide are sporting tote bags featuring the cover, and a city bus has been painted accordingly. Social media is teeming with clips of the launch and snippets of Roy’s early interviews.
Roy with her brother, Lalith Kumar Christopher Roy, and her mother, Mary Roy, in front of their house in Ooty, India, in 1963.Credit: Courtesy Arundhati Roy
Mary Roy herself is known throughout India, particularly in her home state of Kerala, where she blazed a trail: firstly by establishing a school in 1967. Pallikoodam, in the wealthy city of Kottayam, is now hailed for its progressive values and high educational standards. Mrs Roy also famously took her fight for a change to legislation to allow women in her Syrian Christian community to be granted equal inheritance rights to the Supreme Court, winning in 1986. In Kerala, she is revered and every bit as famous as her Booker Prize-winning daughter.
However, she found motherhood difficult, which Roy excavates in often excruciating detail in Mother Mary Comes to Me.
“My early childhood was about trying to negotiate an unpredictable and difficult [relationship], and yet even from the time I was really small, I could tell she was an extraordinary woman,” Roy says. “And as I say, my brother and I had to absorb the darkness so that others could see the light.”
There are numerous anecdotes depicting this troubled relationship in the book. One came when Roy was six, and asked her mother why Aunt Joseph was so much thinner. Mrs Roy, whose weight gain could be traced to the steroids she took to treat her chronic asthma, reacted in a blazing fury. “My mother turned on me in a rage and mimicked me. I felt myself shrinking from my own skin and draining away, swirling like water down a sink until I was gone.”
In other tellings, Roy returned home to find her beloved dog Dido put down, after mating with a street dog. And in yet another incident, Mrs Roy banished her from the car for a perceived transgression. Roy waited, and the car returned, and the ensuing five-hour drive home was in complete silence.
How did Roy manage? “I left when I was a teenager and didn’t see her for seven years, and when we re-met I was an adult woman, and trying to watch her from a safe distance, trying to be near her but not near her,” she says.
“So my relationship with her, as I say in the book, she was my shelter and my storm. It was never a settled relationship. And to write about her was important because I believe she’s a woman who deserves to be in literature, not just because she was wonderful but also because she was terrible. The idea that a woman could unleash all of herself, including her very obviously prickly relationship with motherhood itself, was important.”
The book traces Roy’s journey from a small-town girl, child of a single mother, to the cosmopolitan Delhi-dwelling writer and activist she was to become. Roy left home at 17, spending three days on a train from Kerala, at the very south of India, to the capital Delhi, in the north, where she attended architecture college and married a fellow architecture student who, in the style of the early 1970s, resembled a kind of rock-star Jesus (they divorced four years later).
She later married again, to filmmaker and environmentalist Pradip Krishen, who came with two daughters from his first marriage. The pair collaborated on a couple of independent films, with the screenplays written by Roy. One won an award. “It was hilarious because that first screenplay that I wrote won my favourite award: ‘Best film in languages other than those specified in Schedule 8 of the Indian Constitution’.” Still wedged against the wallpaper, she laughs heartily at the memory.
There is a separate cast of characters: Roy’s brother LKC, her maternal uncle G Isaac – who had tried to expel the family from the house, then bitterly fought his sister for inherited assets, but is remembered fondly by Roy.
And then, there is her father, known as Micky Roy. When I mention his name, her face lights up. “I’m so glad you asked about him! Nobody ever does!”
Micky Roy had been an assistant manager on a remote tea estate in Assam when the children were young, but his alcoholism had driven his family away. Roy has no memories of him from childhood, but met him as an adult – and was shocked by what she saw.
“By then, his addiction had progressed a lot, he had been living on the street, he had been in Mother Teresa’s home for the dying and destitute, and he was perfectly cheerful. One eye was blind with cataracts, his ear bitten off in some brawl. And at first, I thought, oh no, this cannot be, and within a second I thought, well, how would you have felt if it had been some smarmy cigar-smoking CEO? It would have been worse.”
Years later, Micky went missing, and Roy and her cousin walked the streets of the outskirts of Delhi looking for him. “And we found him in this building site living in this shack with some other drunk guy, perfectly happy.” She chuckles at the memory. “And I tricked him into getting into the car, then to hospital, then to rehab.”
Roy being showered with flower petals at Parthrad village in central India, in 1999, where she lent her support against the Narmada Dam project.Credit: AP
In the three decades since The God of Small Things won her the Booker Prize, Roy has carved out a place for herself as a teller of political truths – which has often landed her in trouble. Whether railing against the depiction of gang-rape scenes in the Shekhar Kapur-directed Bandit Queen movie – Roy wrote a magazine article criticising their gratuitous nature, thereby killing a commission to write another screenplay – or standing up for villagers who could be displaced by the flooding of a river, she has never shied away from difficult, complex, controversial issues. Kashmir is perhaps the most vexed of all, and Roy has thrown her heart into the region, supporting activists, including those jailed.
She has also been a vocal antagonist of the Modi administration. While many voices of dissent have fallen quiet, Roy has been unfailing in her criticism. And given the international stage she occupies, this is something that has earned her few fans.
She now sees India in events in the US. “To people who don’t know India, I can say that what is happening in the US right now happened in India in 2014. And the January 6 attempted coup in America actually succeeded in India. And the people in furs and antlers actually rule us.
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“And now, in Modi’s third term the terribly fearsome thing is that the violence, the cruelty, the hatred, the nationalism, the filth of it all has been normalised. So you can have thousands of people with swords calling for Muslims to be killed, for mosques to be demolished, for women to be raped, and it hardly makes the news.
“India,” she adds, “has lost its dignity, it has lost the moral core.”
The author has often faced criticism for statements such as this bald pronouncement about the state of India’s sociopolitical climate without delving into the nuance. It’s why historian Ramachandra Guha famously criticised her for a “tendency to exaggerate and simplify, a Manichean view of the world, her shrill hectoring tone, have given a bad name to environmental analysis”.
It cannot, however, be denied that she has shown an uncanny prescience in articulating what is to come. In 2009 she wrote an essay, Democracy’s Failing Light, later published in a book of essays, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. In it, she questioned whether there is life after democracy: “What happens when each of [democracy’s] institutions has metastasised into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximising profit?”
Reading this essay in 2025, when many of the questions she posed are now part of mainstream discourse, feels unsettling. Does she think that democracy remains important?
“It’s flawed, but it’s all we have, right?” She mentions that people have often asked her whether she would consider moving countries. “And I would say, OK, so my choices are, would I prefer being in jail in India or exile in the West? But now I say the choices are, jail in India or jail in the US or UK? Because it’s darkening there too.”
Jail is not an abstract consideration; in 2002 she spent a night in a cell after she found guilty of contempt of court. And now, she faces the ongoing threat of sedition charges over comments made more than a decade ago. She is outwardly sanguine about the prospect, but skilfully sidesteps making any comments that could land her in further trouble.
Roy wants to keep drawing attention to the figures and issues she feels exemplify the true rot of human rights protections in India and elsewhere.
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When it comes to Australia, however, Roy is more enthusiastic. She watched the recent Sydney Harbour Bridge march for Palestine, “and I felt so happy that it happened there, and I felt so ashamed that it didn’t happen in India.”
She sat down to write Mother Mary Comes to Me after her mother’s death, but throughout the process, she felt her presence, like a poltergeist.
“When I was writing I was sitting at my dining table, first my ceiling fan fell on the table, then my pipes burst, my roof fell down, the water poured in. And I was like, I’m doing it anyway. You can bring the house down, but I’m doing it anyway!”
Even in death, the mother-daughter battles continue.
Mother Mary Comes to Me (Penguin) is out now.
Aarti Betigeri is a journalist and editor of Growing Up Indian In Australia (Black Inc).
www.aartibetigeri.com
