Mother Mary Comes to Me

“My mother unloaded the burden of her quarrels and the daily dose of indignity that she had to endure onto my brother and me.”

As a child, Arundhati Roy is familiar with her mother’s anger and emotional volatility, but it is only as an adult that she realizes that her mother was herself the target of judgment and abuse. Roy highlights how, while her mother managed to cultivate an important career and presence outside of the home, she was abusive within it, introducing the theme of The Tension Between Public Legacy and Private Identity.

“The school began with seven students, including my brother and me. It sounds simple enough, but my mother couldn’t have done it alone. It was Mrs. Matthews’ presence, white, virginal Christian missionary, that won the confidence of the first few parents who enrolled their children in the new school.”

India’s fraught politics of race and gender are one of this memoir’s key subtexts. Here, the author acknowledges that her mother, although an expert in her own right, is not trusted even in her community because she is a woman of color. Although India’s colonial days are past, part of colonialism’s legacy is a social hierarchy in which white individuals, even those who are foreign-born, have more social status than their Indian counterparts.

“I say ‘my mother,’ but once she started her school she was no longer only my mother. The moment children entered the school, she became their mother too.”

Arundhati’s relationship with her mother is complex, and at times her mother is even abusive. One of the factors that adds to its complexity is her mother’s public role as an educator and activist. Arundhati admires her mother greatly for her work as a teacher, but struggles to navigate how her mother saves most of her maternal love and support for her students, not her own children. This dilemma reflects The Tension Between Public Legacy and Private Identity.

“Mrs. Roy directed all of her fury against men, her idea of men (her father, her husband, her brother in particular) on her son.”

Mary is fiercely independent and devoted to The Battle Against Sexism and Gender Inequality during an era in which patriarchal societal and familial organization are the norm and sexism is rampant. Many of Mary’s ideals are noble and she dedicates herself to her students’ academic and moral education with zeal, but in private she oppresses her son. One of the contradictions of Mary’s character is that, for all of her devotion to gender equality, she fails to see her son as an individual and not just a stereotypical representative of his sex.

“‘Get out.’ I got out. I was so used to getting out: Get out of my house. Get out of my car. Get out of my life. Every other day. She drove away, still being fanned by the peacock feather fan.”

During this scene, Mrs. Roy is angry with Arundhati for not having engaged the architect and his assistant in conversation. Furious, she orders Arundhati out of the car on a rural road far from any city or town, and leaves her there. This is just one of many examples of Mrs. Roy’s abuse that the author provides, and she additionally notes during her recounting of this moment that Mrs. Roy frequently ordered her out of her car and left her in strange places, even when Arundhati was just a young girl.

“Eighteen months after that, at the age of sixteen, I finished high school and applied to the Delhi School of Planning and Architecture. Mrs. Roy backed me and did everything she could to get me in.”

Mrs. Roy is a complex, multi-faceted individual. Although her parenting is always harsh and often abusive, she also supports her children in their academic endeavors and career ambitions. Part of why Arundhati still loves and respects her mother is that her mother does, in her own way, want the best for her children and tries to help them succeed.

“It had been three years since I met or communicated with Mrs. Roy. I thought of her often, but mostly with relief that I’d escaped. I worried about her, but I knew that I did not yet have what it took to withstand her, to survive.”

Arundhati’s relationship with her mother shifts as she ages. As a young person, she struggles with her mother’s abusive personality and with the amount of time she devotes to pursuits other than parenting. As a young university student, Arundhati realizes that in order to grow as an individual and heal from her years of abuse, she has to cut off contact with her mother. In realizing that she “did not yet have what it took to withstand her,” Arundhati chooses to focus on forging her own identity and confidence to lessen her mother’s impact.

“The more I got to know the hippies, the more I began to dislike dealing with them. Behind their dreamy, flower-power affectations, I saw, in so many of them, small-heartedness, petty calculation, and overt racism.”

Race becomes an important, albeit subtle subtext in this memoir. Here, Roy observes the underlying racism in a group of individuals who, on the surface, praise India and its customs. She notes the way that white visitors to India, even as they travel there to study, still think themselves superior to the local population. This form of public persona masking private flaws echoes the theme of The Tension Between Public Legacy and Private Identity.

“My education, the class I came from, and above all, the fact that I spoke English gave me options that millions of others did not have.”

Arundhati moves to Delhi to study architecture, but she is ultimately more interested in politics and the way that caste shapes Indian society than she is in her major. Here, she realizes that she is insulated from some of the most difficult aspects of life in mid-century India by her class position and the privilege that it has bestowed on her. Although she will struggle to make a living in the time immediately after graduation, she has opportunities that so many other young people do not have. Such insights form the core of Arundhati’s political awakening, foreshadowing her later activism.

“I don’t want to come to your neat little home and meet your neat little parents and have them neatly disapprove of me.”

During the years immediately following university, Arundhati is on her own in Delhi, an unusual position for a woman during that time in India. Here, she refuses to meet the family of a recent acquaintance, knowing that as an unmarried woman living on her own, they will find her suspicious. She isn’t upset to refuse the invitation and doesn’t internalize any of the criticism she receives as a result of her life choices.

“Nothing made me think about the world like reading did.”

Arundhati devotes a portion of this memoir to the winding path she took towards her career as a writer, exploring The Links Between Creativity and Identity Development. Before she was a writer, she was a reader. Arundhati reads widely and, as she does, contemplates what constitutes “good” writing and begins to clarify what kind of writer she might want to be and what kind of stories she might want to tell.

“Mickey and Mary Roy. Thinking about them as a couple makes me laugh. I cannot imagine them being married for even five minutes, let alone five years.”

Mary Roy is a complex figure whose presence in her children’s life is almost always antagonistic. Nevertheless, Arundhati ultimately realizes that Mary herself is a survivor of childhood abuse and that, with few options, she married the first person she could find who would get her out of her violent father’s house. The resulting marriage was deeply unhappy and only added to Mary’s anger and emotional volatility. Arundhati’s desire to see her mother as three-dimensional figure speaks to how she seeks to reconcile The Tension Between Public Legacy and Private Identity.

“Then, the remote possibility of my becoming a writer began to coalesce into something like hopeful reality.”

Arundhati comes to writing via a circuitous path. She does not initially think that she could be a writer because Mary criticized her writing when she was young, and she cannot see herself in a role that her mother so scathingly told her she was ill-suited for. When Pradip encourages her, however, she begins to see writing as an actual possibility. Her embrace of a writing career as a “hopeful reality” shows her newfound confidence, reflecting The Links Between Creativity and Identity Development.

“I remember thinking that no matter how long and hard we fought, in India no woman of any religion, class, caste, or creed would ever feel safe enough to sing to the stars at night on a lonely highway while her buffalo took her home.”

These lines come from a scene during which Arundhati observes a lone man traveling in a car on a deserted stretch of road. One of the beliefs she inherits from Mrs. Roy is the importance of gender equality, and like her mother she often decries women’s difficult position in Indian society and society’s tolerance for violence against women. She makes countless similar observations during the course of her memoir, drawing attention to the importance of The Battle Against Sexism and Gender Inequality.

“There were all kinds of reviews. People hated it, loved it, mocked it, wept, laughed. The book flew off the shelves.”

The publication of The God of Small Things changed Arundhati Roy’s life. Personally, it represented the culmination of years of work and a new stage in her development as a writer. Arundhati Roy’s description here of the varying responses, from positive to negative, presents all of these responses as valid, with her matter-of-fact tone revealing her indifference to criticism and her strong sense of identity as a writer, invoking The Links Between Creativity and Identity Development.

“After the nuclear tests our newspapers and TV channels were saturated with triumphant bombast, much of it couched in the language of masculinity and virility.”

Although Arundhati focuses much of her activism on class and religious freedom, she does note the relationship between gender-based violence and India’s wider political discourse. In emphasizing how the development of nuclear weaponry—highly expensive, and extremely destructive—is “couched in the language of masculinity and virility,” she draws attention to how toxic ideals of supposed strength and domination can have wide-reaching negative consequences even in areas beyond daily gender dynamics. This observation adds a new dimension to The Battle Against Sexism and Gender Inequality.

“I wasn’t Christian enough. I wasn’t Hindu enough. I wasn’t communist enough. I wasn’t enough.”

Arundhati has to find her own identity against the backdrop of both an abusive childhood and the political turmoil of 20th-century India. She does not fit neatly into any of her country’s acceptable identity categories and is, like her mother, not legible within any traditional societal frameworks. She finds her voice when she realizes that she does not have to live into any particular model and that, like her mother, she can make her mark as an independent woman.

“International Islamophobia arrived like a gift from god to Hindu nationalists in India. When president George W. Bush said ‘You’re either with us or with the terrorists,’ the BJP government could barely hide its glee.”

Arundhati becomes a champion of the rights of India’s Muslim minority, and in India her political essays are as widely read as her novels. She uses writing as a way to both draw attention to the plight of Indian Muslims and to criticize the Indian government for the Hindu nationalism that it fosters. Although she does not initially want to be known as an activist, ultimately she cannot remain silent in the face of injustice. This is another significant development in her experience of The Links Between Creativity and Identity Development.

“To be guarded or diplomatic about what I was seeing and learning in Kashmir wasn’t easy. Anything that I said, casually or formally, invited violent responses.”

Arundhati Roy demonstrates her strength of character and willingness to speak her mind in spite of risk by continuing to publish writing that criticizes Hindu nationalism and violence against India’s Muslim minority. Although she must tread carefully, she does not choose to remain silent. Even though she realizes that “violent responses” await her no matter what she writes, her perseverance reflects her growing confidence in who she is and what she stands for.

“My new doctor says that all of my sickness is because of you.”

As she ages, Mrs. Roy’s health worsens. Her asthma causes frequent infections which are dangerous enough that each one could be fatal. She finds a new physician who reads The God of Small Things and suggests to Mrs. Roy that part of her illness might be from the guilt of having been an abusive parent. Mrs. Roy demonstrates her continued unwillingness to come to terms with the past and take ownership of her abuse in her response to the doctor. Rather than apologize to her daughter, she twists the doctor’s message, making Arundhati the source of her illness. This illustrates the toll Mrs. Roy takes on her, even as Arundhati becomes a successful adult in her own right.

“Until the day she died, she never stopped learning, never stagnated, never feared change, never lost her curiosity.”

Mary Roy is a complex figure. Although her relationship with Arundhati is abusive, and she remains unrepentant about the impact of her behavior on her children, Arundhati does admire many of her mother’s qualities. A lifelong learner and intellectual herself, she sees those qualities in her mother and recognizes her appeal to countless students and community members. This speaks to The Tension Between Public Legacy and Private Identity.

“I felt ashamed of our country.”

Arundhati notes how reluctantly she assumed the title of “activist,” but she is driven towards political writing by the ferocity of her objection to India’s many injustices. She believes passionately that inequality between the sexes, classes, and religious groups is at the heart of India’s social system and uses her writing as a platform to draw attention to that injustice, reflecting The Links Between Creativity and Identity Development as she develops her role as activist.

“There are few things I am more grateful for that Mrs. Roy lived to see her school reopen and children return to campus.”

Mary Roy remains devoted to her school until the very end of her life. During the Covid pandemic she is chagrined to see schools shuttered, and here Arundhati notes how happy she is when life returns to normal. Mary Roy is defined in large part by the importance she placed on career. Through teaching, she instilled the importance of career in generation after generation of young women, teaching them that they could be more than wives and mothers.