Mother Mary Comes to Me

Arundhati graduates high school and, at the age of 16, begins a degree in architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture and Planning. The country is in a state of upheaval: Indira Gandhi has limited civil liberties and is targeting Muslim men. Activism is on the rise, especially among students. Arundhati focuses mostly on popular culture rather than politics. She sews triangles into her jeans to make bellbottoms, begins smoking tobacco and marijuana, and makes new friends. She finally has freedom and realizes that she and her brother were raised in a kind of cult with Mrs. Roy as their guru.

The girls’ dorm is a small wing in the boy’s dorm, and she is thrilled to be in the presence of so many other young people. She reflects that if anyone in the administration had been thinking properly, the girls’ quarters should have been further away from the boys’ dorms.

She runs into Baker’s assistant, the one who reminded her of Jesus. He calls her beautiful—the first time she has ever received that compliment from anyone.

Arundhati travels home for the summer. Her mother has gained more weight because of her medication, and her asthma has worsened. As soon as Arundhati arrives, her mother begins berating her, even going so far as to say that she wishes she’d abandoned Arundhati in an orphanage. Arundhati feels a complex mixture of emotions. She is angry at her mother and knows that she can never express that anger. She also feels bad for her mother, whose poor health has made life increasingly difficult, and underneath it all she also feels love.

Arundhati often goes to the cinema. The Malayalam films are deeply steeped in Marxist ideology while the Tamil films feature gods and goddesses, kings and queens. These two areas of focus, Arundhati reflects, speak to the present political moment: Marxist and Maoist cells operate all over India and Nepal, and Arundhati knows countless students who are active in leftist groups. The counter-movements emphasize tradition and the rigid caste system that underpins society.

For a project, Arundhati travels with her uncle G. Isaac to his factory. She meets his wife, a former factory worker and the family’s new black sheep (because she is not of their caste). She produces a project steeped in politics whose focus is on the workers’ lives, rights, salaries, and homes rather than on the kind of architectural details her professors are looking for.

JC is also interested in politics and the rights of workers, and the two become lovers. At the time, Arundhati recalls feeling a newfound sense of freedom and sexual awakening. In hindsight, she can see that the relationship was a mistake.

Mrs. Roy begins to publicly speak out about the abuse she endured as a young person and about her difficult marriage. She describes the bloody beatings she and her mother endured at the hands of her father and the nights they spent out in the cold because he’d cast them out from the home. She describes the impact that her husband’s alcohol abuse had on her and on their marriage. She criticizes Indian culture for its patriarchal rules and norms and argues that women have no real freedom and limited choices.

She also levels particularly sharp criticism at the Travancore Christian Succession Act, which gave daughters the right to inherit only one-fourth of their father’s property or the sum of 5,000 rupees, whichever was less. Eventually she would petition the Supreme Court to strike down this law and demand an equal share in her father’s property.

Arundhati begins writing. Her early, unpublished stories feature characters modeled after her family members. She and her brother are close, but never discuss their mother or her abuse. After the summer during which their mother begins her public crusade against India’s gender inequality, they both vow never to return home. Her verbal abuse during those months is particularly hard to take, especially as she so often screams insults at them in front of other people.

Arundhati knows that her mother is motivated in part by the desire to appear more powerful than most women, but she can no longer stand being the target of so much vitriol. When she returns to school, she writes to her mother to explain that she will no longer come home or take her money. Her mother’s response is so hateful that she does not read it.

Without her mother’s money, Arundhati can no longer afford to live in student housing. She and JC squat for a time, but are then given the opportunity to move into a small shack in a shantytown near campus. They know that they cannot do so without getting married, but get bored while waiting in line for a civil ceremony at the courthouse. They decide instead to stage a wedding and take photographs. Their friend Carlo acts as the priest and Arundhati’s friend Golak is their witness.

Arundhati finishes her final project and graduates. Rather than completing a traditional architectural project, her work is a study of post-colonial city planning and its impact on people of various castes. Although her professors do not like her work, she passes.

Three years have now elapsed since she had contact with Mrs. Roy. She thinks of her mother frequently, but mostly just feels relieved to be free of her.

After Arundhati graduates, she has no income. She and JC struggle to make ends meet as their classmates mostly move to Europe or the United States. They move to Goa to be closer to JC’s family, but Arundhati is unhappy there. The beaches are overrun with American hippies who, in spite of their interest in “eastern culture,” are rude to Indians and sometimes overtly racist.

When JC’s mother comes to visit, Arundhati is struck by how ordinary JC seems. Without his mother around he is politically conscious, loving, and interesting. The presence of his mother somehow turns him into a typical Indian man: He expects to be catered to by the women around him. It unsettles Arundhati, and she leaves.

With great difficulty, she makes her way back to Delhi. She has no idea what she is going to do with her life, but she realizes that because she speaks English and has an education, she will have options that so many in her country do not. One of JC’s friends tries to convince her to return to him, even going so far as to say that what she really needs is probably a good slap in the face. The overt violence and sexism in this comment cement her decision to leave and face her future alone.

Arundhati obtains a position at the National Institute for Urban Affairs, working on their in-house publication Urban India. Her salary is not quite enough to live on, and she becomes hyper-fixated on money. She is grateful to have found a position, but during this time she realizes that education and class are only part of the broader picture of power and privilege in India: Taking the bus to work would be the cheapest option, but she would be subjected to verbal harassment from men as well as groping and physical assault.

She is forced to rent a bicycle, which she cannot quite afford, but even on her daily commutes by bicycle she is the target of taunts, jeers, and sexually explicit comments. This, she realizes, is just the norm in her country, but she still resents it. The alternative, however, would be to return to Mrs. Roy. She is unwilling to do that.

Unlike almost all of her female peers, Arundhati does not live at home with her family. It is highly unusual for Indian women to live on their own before marriage, even those with university degrees. She gets along with her new boss and doesn’t feel that she judges Arundhati for her living situation.

Arundhati’s boss is a woman in her 30s whose husband, a former university professor, now directs films. He wants Arundhati to play a role in the film he’s currently making, a historical drama called Massey Sahib. Arundhati reads the script as well as the book on which the film is based and finds them both racist and pro-colonial. She is troubled by the white supremacy evident in both the book and the film, but agrees to take part anyway. She is interested in the process of making a film and decides that she is young enough to explore a variety of options.

Arundhati applies for a six-month scholarship to study the restoration of national monuments in Italy. She hopes to save the modest stipend and then return to India with some extra money saved up. She will leave as soon as the shoot finishes.

She enjoys the film more than she thought she would, not only because the experience provides her with an inside view of the filmmaking process, but also because she falls in love with the director, Pradip, her boss’s husband. The two begin an affair, and he explains that both he and his wife routinely have extra-marital relationships but that they have no intention of divorcing.

Arundhati does her best not to become attached, although it is difficult. She becomes pregnant and has to travel to another city to obtain an abortion. On the way back, she is harassed by men constantly and has a particularly difficult bus trip. She and the rest of the cast and crew finish shooting, and she boards a plane to Italy.

Arundhati is desperately homesick in Italy. She largely ignores the architecture and wanders the streets thinking of India. She reads about the massacre of Muslims in the Indian papers and goes to see a showing of Gandhi dubbed into Italian. She writes to Pradip frequently, not because she wants him to fall in love with her, but because she hopes he will tell her she should become a writer. He does, and she seriously considers it. She has always loved reading and languages even though she did not excel in those subjects in school. She recalls her mother’s cruel criticism of her early writing and again feels gratitude that the two no longer have contact.

When she returns home, she stays first in Pradip’s apartment: His wife left him and he moved in with his parents. Then, she stays with Sanjay, another friend from the film set. Finally she rents a small room. She and Pradip continue their relationship and she works intermittently on small projects. Her savings dwindle, but she does not want to seek employment in an architectural firm. She is not sure what to do.

Then, Indira Gandhi is assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. This event unleashes a tidal wave of political violence. Hindu Nationalists are pitted against Sikhs, and the country is in crisis. Arundhati watches the violence unfold with only partial interest. She is much more concerned about her relationship with Pradip—she worries about becoming too attached—and her career prospects.