Mary Roy is a complex figure who embodies deeply toxic traits while also emerging as an important educator and activist in her native Kerala. In public she is charismatic and driven, supportive of her students, and a champion of women’s rights. In private, she is an abusive, emotionally withholding mother who leaves her children with lifelong scars. Arundhati describes her as having provided “help and harm in equal measure” (24). Through her portrait of Mary, Arundhati examines the tension between public legacy and private identity. 

Mary Roy’s public persona is built initially on her career as an educator and founder of one of Kerala’s most prestigious schools. Her academic standards are high and she prepares her students for important careers, but she also uses her educational platform for activism. Mary is deeply critical of patriarchy and of the sexism that underpins Indian culture. She hopes to teach her male students to be more respectful of women and her female students to want more out of life than marriage and motherhood. Of her students, Arundhati reflects: “She freed them of the burden of being what society thought men ought to be. She raised generations of sweet men and sent them out into the world. What she did for her girl students, the spirit she instilled in them, was nothing short of revolutionary” (34). Ultimately, Mary takes this activism one step further and successfully petitions the Indian courts to reverse their sexist inheritance laws. By the time of her death, she is seen as a champion of women’s rights and a transformative educator.

Nevertheless, in private she is a deeply troubled mother and an abusive figure in both of her children’s lives. Her temper, Arundhati notes, is “irrational and uncontrollable” (19). She berates Arundhati for all kinds of perceived faults and blames LKC for India’s sexism. Both children ultimately spend years refusing to speak to her, and each carries the burden of their childhood trauma well into adulthood. Arundhati has to navigate the difficulties of adolescence and early adulthood largely on her own, and her search for identity will be, at times, entirely focused on processing the impact of her abusive childhood. That Mary Roy was herself abused makes their family history even more complex: Their trauma, rooted as it is in Mary’s father’s abuse, is intergenerational and will become especially difficult to move past given Mary’s unwillingness to discuss her own abusive tendencies.

LKC is never truly able to forgive Mary, but Arundhati does. She finds that she can move past Mary’s abuse in part because she becomes more aware of the difficulties that Mary faced as a young, intellectual woman in a deeply patriarchal India. She admires her mother’s activism and realizes that her own entrance into the world of social justice happened in part because of her mother’s influence. Her mother’s public persona ultimately overshadows her private faults, and Arundhati forgives her because she realizes that her mother’s legacy is much more than her parenting.