What to Make of the Mother Who Made You

It is hard to overstate the literary impact, in 1997, of Arundhati Roy’s début novel, “The God of Small Things.” A family drama set in a small town in Kerala, in southern India, it was evocatively specific in its narrative, centered on twins whose mother—an erratic, imperious woman of exceptional gifts and unsalvable injuries—had been scandalously married, and more scandalously divorced. At the same time, the book achieved universality in its themes: the entanglements of kinship, the restrictions imposed by class and gender, the hazards of star-crossed love. Lyrical, comic, and intricately wrought, the novel won the Booker Prize, earned Roy a fortune in advances and foreign rights, and went on to sell millions of copies in dozens of languages.

If readers assumed that another novel would swiftly follow, Roy, then thirty-five, flouted their expectation; she didn’t publish a second novel—“The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”—until 2017. In the meantime, she devoted her energies and her international renown to political writing in India, taking on the expansion of the country’s nuclear arsenal, the despoliation of rivers and forests in the name of development, the brutalities inflicted on women, and the suppression of cultural pluralism in the name of Hindu supremacy. (She also established a trust, funded in part by a portion of her royalties, that supports activists, journalists, and teachers.) “My Seditious Heart,” a collection of her nonfiction work which was published in 2019, runs to more than a thousand pages and offers scarcely a glimpse of autobiography. A rare disclosure comes in a book-length essay called “Walking with the Comrades,” her report on time spent among Maoist rebels in the forests of central India. “The day before I left, my mother called, sounding sleepy,” Roy recalls. “ ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, with a mother’s weird instinct, ‘what this country needs is a revolution.’ ”

With her new book, “Mother Mary Comes to Me” (Scribner), Roy turns to her mother, Mary Roy, whom she calls her “most enthralling subject” and her “gangster.” In addition to rearing Arundhati and her older brother alone, in defiance of both family and society, Mary founded an enduring educational establishment and was so persistent an activist that a landmark legal ruling bears her name. For years, Arundhati was estranged from her mother, yet she was never free of her. She struggled against her mother’s dictates even as she remained entwined with her, not unlike an unborn child straining against the walls of the womb, fists and feet pressing for freedom from the very body on which she depends.

Some daughters manage to avoid developing a complicated agon with their mothers, but those lucky daughters, it would seem, seldom become novelists. For the rest, the struggle is formative. It may involve the daughter’s feeling not only that her mother can read her mind but that she has written it. Roy recalls her mother’s hypercritical gaze as an act both of creation and of demolition: “It felt as though she had cut me out—cut my shape out—of a picture book with a sharp pair of scissors and then torn me up.” She learned early the futility of trying to please or appease. What she absorbed instead was the power of unyielding dissent. From the moment Roy could walk, she was marching in step with a formidable rebel.

Readers of “The God of Small Things” will recognize the outlines. Like Rahel and Estha, the novel’s twins, Roy was the child of a mixed marriage: a father from a Hindu family and a mother from a Syrian Christian minority that prized its aloofness. Ammu, the twins’ mother, marries young to escape a violent home life, then returns when her husband’s drinking makes the marriage untenable. Mary Roy, too, married to flee violence—her father, a civil servant under the British, beat his wife and whipped his children—only to find that her husband was an incorrigible drunk. Before her children were five, she had left him, taking them to a holiday cottage littered with her father’s discarded formal clothing and shared with an eccentric English tenant who “wore her hair in a high, puffy style, which made us wonder what was hidden inside it. Wasps, we thought.” Eventually, Mary retreated to her family’s ancestral house in Kerala, presided over by an almost blind grandmother, a censorious great-aunt, and a Rhodes Scholar uncle who held forth at dinner about Dionysus. All would be transmuted, lightly, into fiction.

In “The God of Small Things,” it is Ammu’s illicit love for a low-caste younger man that sets in motion the tragic event at the novel’s center. That romance was invented. As Roy notes, the one boundary that her mother never crossed, so far as she knew, was “sexual probity.” Mary’s fervor lay elsewhere. She was intellectual, combative, and indignant at the structural disadvantages that she faced. Her name endures in Indian law: Mary Roy Etc. v. State of Kerala and Others, a 1986 Supreme Court decision that struck down her community’s practice of granting sons a larger share of inheritance. Trained as a teacher before marriage, she co-founded a school in the small town of Kottayam when Arundhati was seven, presiding over it with charismatic, autocratic force. She even required her children to address her the way the other students did, as Mrs. Roy—a title that Roy uses for the better part of the book.

Mrs. Roy’s pedagogy was strikingly unconventional. When she discovered boys teasing girls about their changing bodies, she convened an assembly, dispatched two culprits to fetch her Maidenform undergarment, and then held it up before the school: “This is a bra. All women wear them. Your mother wears them. Your sisters will too, soon enough. If it excites you so much, you are very welcome to keep mine.” But Mrs. Roy’s fearlessness as a shaper of the minds and morals of children curdled into cruelty when it came to her own offspring. Her son’s middling grades infuriated her. “You’re ugly and stupid. If I were you, I’d kill myself,” she told him when he was a teen-ager. Arundhati fared better in school, but any praise that she received was shadowed by her brother’s humiliation. “Since then, for me, all personal achievement comes with a sense of foreboding,” she writes. “On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room. If you pause to think about it, it’s true, someone is.”

At sixteen, Roy left for Delhi to study architecture, inspired by Laurie Baker, the British-born proponent of tropical modernism, whom her mother had recruited to design school buildings. In Delhi, Roy was, as she puts it, “the opposite of what Syrian Christian girls were meant to be—I was thin and dark and risky.” Within two years, she had broken with her mother. Before a visit home, she confessed that she had a boyfriend; her mother’s fury was volcanic. “Insults washed over me like a tide,” Roy recalls. “Apart from the usual ones, the additional theme of course was ‘whore’ and ‘prostitute.’ ” (She got off lightly, she mordantly notes, compared with the family dog, which her mother had shot after it mated with a stray—“a kind of honor killing.”) The rupture was decisive. Back in Delhi, Roy lived first in a squat, then in a hut next to a fourteenth-century fortress wall, with “open drains into which children practiced aiming their shit.” By graduation, at twenty-one, she writes, she had “become a strange person, of a somewhat vagrant disposition . . . a small person with spikes.”

Roy’s spikiness is an abiding characteristic in the account she gives of the years that came between her studies and her emergence as a novelist. Just as she maintained her distance from her mother, she pushed away lovers and kept other intimates at bay. Even when she met the man she eventually married—the filmmaker Pradip Krishen, with whom she worked as an actress and a collaborator—she remained vigilantly isolate. She began to write, searching for her own language: “I needed to hunt it down like prey. Disembowel it, eat it. . . . It was out there somewhere, a live language-animal, a striped and spotted thing, grazing, waiting for me the predator.” When she was in her mid-twenties, she and her mother managed a fragile rapprochement, but the severance remained, and this gave her time and space to write “The God of Small Things.” The novel, published to immediate controversy in India—an obscenity suit was filed over its portrayal of an intercaste romance—offended her Syrian Christian kin, who grumbled about misrepresentation. Mrs. Roy hosted the book’s launch at her school, then, characteristically, talked all the way through her daughter’s reading. “She presented me and, in the same breath, undermined me,” Roy recalls.