Between shelter and storm, Roy finds the language of survival: A deep dive into Mother Mary Comes to Me

Some books arrive in our lives not when we first seek them, but when we are ready to be undone by them. Arundhati Roy came to me at a much later stage of my life, and yet when her work found me, it felt less like reading than like finding refuge. Her words gave my scrambled literary thoughts a language, a home. 

So, when I approached 'Mother Mary Comes to Me', her first memoir, it was not only as a reader, but as someone waiting for a reckoning. And a reckoning is what I found. I just didn't devour it, I took my time to savour every bit of it, page by page, chapter by chapter. 

Roy does not write the kind of memoir that consoles. This book does not arrive like a hushed elegy but like a gale. It is a howl disguised as a hymn, a resistance against the easy tenderness with which we are taught to remember our dead. 

Mary Roy, her mother, the matriarch at the heart of this book is presented not as a saint but as a storm: both creator and demolisher, liberator and tyrant, a force of nature who shook the foundations of law and education in India even as her own household lived under the weight of her tempests.

Roy addresses her mother as "Mrs Roy," and it folds an entire history into that formality: of distance, defiance, and awe. In one of the book's most searing confessions, she recalls becoming her mother's lungs, her "valiant organ child" smuggling air into an asthmatic body. 

The image captures ambivalence of their bond: intimacy and suffocation entangled into one. Mary Roy emerges here as a paradoxical liberator, a woman who raised boys [students] to be gentle in a society that demanded hardness, while leaving her daughter [and son] cut, bruised, and unfinished.

In the pages readers will not only find raw emotions of a daughter, but also rage and helplessness of a (girl) child, when memory veers into nightmare: the grotesque unveiling of a predatory "Kottayam Santa," or the longing to crawl into an empty dog kennel for refuge. Trauma and tenderness interlace like barbed wire threaded with jasmine.

Yet this is not only a personal story. What makes Roy singular is her ability to braid the private and the political until they are indistinguishable. Who else could invoke Frantz Fanon in a memoir and make it feel inevitable? 

But Roy has always lived what theorists write which the book charts as her political awakening: her pact with the Meenachil River becomes the seed of her solidarity with Narmada's displaced. Visiting the Narmada Valley "realigned [her] skeletal structure," teaching her to stand against the violence of dams and dispossession. 

The Kashmir valley, in turn, "spun [her] heart around," becoming a lodestar in her writing, a wound and a wellspring. These are not metaphors- they are recalibrations of self. 

When you live the problem, breathe in it, the solution finds itself out of theory and lands in reality. This realisation echoes when she wrote "I wanted everybody to be able to do the kind of work that funders wouldn't easily fund. 

Because all of us realized that big money always tended to soften edges and support the status quo. Sometimes brazenly, and sometimes in sophisticated, round-about ways. Small money is always more subversive."

Maybe what makes Roy's work and her [seditious] heart so fearless was also the lessons of G Isaac on art of failing. You have to read the book to find out more about mastering this art.

For readers of her novels, this memoir offers glimpses into her fictional universe too: Rahel slips through from 'The God of Small Things', Tilo strides in from 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness'. 

Mother Mary Comes to Me refuses to sanctify grief. Instead, it offers salt, scar, and the glitter of rage. It is a dirge stitched with nettles, a love song sung in the key of dissent. In refusing to smooth over contradiction, Roy gives us something far more truthful: a portrait of love as a battlefield, of grief as compass, of dissent as the inheritance that endures.

There's a thrill in realising that these characters were never simply invented- they were lived, fought with, breathed into being. While I was immersed into the chapter of Roy's architecture days, suddenly I had the compulsion to open 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness' and there it was, when Tilo and Arundhatina spoke to each other, they became one. 

The final pages shimmer with a strange and much relatable paradox: in losing her mother, Roy loses her coordinates. "That first night in a Mrs. Roy-less world, I spun unanchored in space," she writes. Liberation arrives hand in hand with disorientation, the queen departs, and the daughter finds herself crownless, shapeless, undone.

Mother Mary Comes to Me refuses to sanctify grief. Instead, it offers salt, scar, and the glitter of rage. It is a dirge stitched with nettles, a love song sung in the key of dissent. In refusing to smooth over contradiction, Roy gives us something far more truthful: a portrait of love as a battlefield, of grief as compass, of dissent as the inheritance that endures. 

This memoir bears witness not only of her childhood but her fierce adulthood as a writer and activist as well. It gives us the access to peep through her inspirations.

For me, reading it was a soul-cleansing experience. It made me realise that love and rebellion can co-exist without apology. That dissent, too, can be an act of devotion.

And so, I close this book not with resolution, but with questions [for the rebel, Arundhati Roy] that flutter still: Do you still feel that cold moth pulsating? How are Kuttappan Patti and Chhutkoo Mal? Do you still feel Anjum's presence?