Arundhati begins to recount key aspects of her mother’s life. During the early days of her marriage, Mary wants to be a teacher. A career of her own is, however, out of reach in India’s deeply patriarchal society. Her husband has a position as an assistant manager on a tea estate in Assam, and like many of his coworkers he habitually abuses alcohol. When war breaks out between India and China in 1962, women and children are evacuated from the border provinces.

Mary, grateful for an excuse to leave her husband, takes Arundhati and her son LKC (Lalith Kumar Christopher) to Ooty, a small town in the state of Tamil Nadu. They live in a cottage once owned by Mary’s father, a colonial official whom Arundhati nicknames the “Imperial Entomologist.” There is some dispute over its ownership, as India’s legal system does not allow women to inherit much of their parents’ property, and Mary’s brother attempts unsuccessfully to evict her. Once their right to remain in the cottage is established, the family settles in.

Mary finds work as a teacher in a local school. The town has several schools, some for white children and others for Indian. Mary is interested in the new teaching methods used by teachers in the white schools, but is angered by the racism those teachers express about Indians.

Mary enjoys teaching and her newfound freedom, but becomes ill. Eventually she is unable to work and has to pack up her children and return to her mother’s home in Kerala, in the small village of Ayemenem.

Mary, LKC, and Arundhati move in with Miss Kurien, Mary’s older sister, Mary’s brother G. Isaac, and Mary’s mother. Miss Kurien has an MA in English literature and once taught university courses in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon). G. Isaac is one of India’s first Rhodes scholars and enjoys regaling the family with tales of Greek and Roman mythology.

Arundhati instantly realizes that their presence is unwelcome, that they are judged by family and servants alike for the absence of Mary’s husband. Still, Arundhati enjoys her life there. She makes friends among the village children, even those who are deemed “untouchable” by virtue of their caste. She learns to fish and, even more importantly, learns to flee the house whenever there is an argument. Her mother, grandmother, and her mother’s siblings are all quick to anger, and their relations are constantly shifting. A placid conversation can easily go awry and become a heated confrontation.

Mary becomes even more volatile. The steroids she is prescribed to help with her asthma cause weight gain, and when Arundhati innocently asks her mother why her sister Mrs. Joseph is so thin and she is so large, Mary explodes in anger. Arundhati is once again the target of her mother’s rage, and the incident becomes just one small piece in the larger tapestry of her childhood unhappiness.

It is only years later, reflecting on her mother’s poor health, lack of employment, and mistreatment at the hands of her own family, that Arundhati feels empathy for her mother. She realizes how hurtful her words must have been to a woman once considered beautiful.

Mary and Mrs. Matthews, a missionary whom she met in Ooty, found a small school together. It is a daunting task, and Arundhati realizes now the role that racism and sexism played in the school’s early days: Although Mary had experience and training, it was only the presence of a white missionary that convinced parents to enroll their children in the new school. Mary was, in spite of her credentials, a divorced woman of color and thus considered socially suspect.

The school does well, and Mary is able to contribute financially to her mother, sister, and brother’s household. She begins arguing with Mrs. Matthews over the school’s pedagogical orientation, and Mrs. Matthews leaves. The school continues to thrive, and Mary is able to rent additional building space to house boarding students. Mary, LKC, and Arundhati move into the school grounds with Kurussammal, a woman from Ooty who becomes their housekeeper.

The school continues to thrive, and as the students age it expands into the upper grades. Mary becomes “Mrs. Roy,” even to her children. Arundhati admits that even now, after her mother’s death, she still thinks of her as “Mrs. Roy” rather than “mother.”

Mary works tirelessly to educate her students not only in academic areas, but also in manners and ethics. She considers herself her students’ surrogate mother and acts accordingly. The boys she raises to be kind and gentle, the opposite of what society tells them they should be. The girls she raises to be assertive and ambitious, again the opposite of the “ideal” type for an Indian woman. She frees both the boys and the girls from the kind of rigid gender roles that made her so unhappy in her marriage.

During this period, Arundhati is sexually assaulted by a trusted pillar of the community, the man who plays Santa at their local Christmas party. She tells no one.

When LKC is 9, he is sent to boarding school. Arundhati follows two years later. By this point, Mary has begun to take out all of her anger towards men and India’s violently patriarchal system on LKC. He bears the brunt of her anger and physical abuse with a quiet stoicism, but Arundhati knows that he feels the trauma of their childhood more acutely than she does. Mrs. Roy passionately teaches her students about gender equality, but somehow by the time she gets home to her children, her desire to instruct becomes a desire to punish. She calls LKC a “chauvinist pig” for even the smallest of infractions.

Their boarding school, a military academy, is different from Mrs. Roy’s school in every way possible, and Arundhati bristles against the regimented schedule of her days and the harsh teaching methods. She is angry with her mother for mistreating her and her brother and for sending them away to such a terrible school, but her heart still swells with happiness whenever her mother attends one of the school’s events.

Mrs. Roy criticizes Arundhati also, although with less overt hostility than she directs at her son. Arundhati recalls her mother once calling her a “bitch,” however, and she can still feel the sting of that insult. It happened during a particularly fraught political time in the region.

The Naxalites, a breakaway Marxist sect who feel that India’s main Marxist party has sold out by participating in elections, begin threatening revolution. All over, rumors swirl and discussions about class and equality become commonplace. Even the Christian clergy (Mary and her family are Syrian Christians) begin addressing the issue of caste, although Arundhati observes that because so much of their congregation is affluent, the anti-rich rhetoric is somewhat toned down from what she hears of the Naxalites’ ideology.

Mrs. Roy attends church services only fitfully, however, and she seems much more interested in communism than she is in Christianity. Although not exactly a Naxalite sympathizer, she does teach Arundhati about the plight of the North Vietnamese in the face of imperialist invasion and introduces her to books on workers’ rights. Years later, Arundhati will include the Naxalites in The God of Small Things as a remembrance of those years.

In the present-day, as guests arrive for the funeral, LKC is jovial. He is a successful businessman who drives a BMW. He does not pretend that the difficulties of their childhood didn’t happen, and because of that he expresses little grief at their mother’s passing.

Mrs. Roy purchases a plot of land so that she can expand her school. She wants her students to study the arts. She enlists the help of Laurie Baker, a prominent architect, to build a series of buildings and a central stage. Arundhati, although she is to become a writer, finds herself drawn to the process of architecture and sets her sights on studying architecture after high school. It will be a difficult career path for a woman, but her mother tells her that she can do anything she sets her mind to.