Reading Arundhati Roy is like exploring the labyrinth of a brilliant, but disruptive mind that refuses to settle into the well-established certainties of tradition and expectations. I have always viewed Arundhati as an enigma, and I began reading ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’ in the hope of understanding her better. A Booker Prize winner, she often seems angry, even irritable, determined to cross every boundary, but strangely elusive. And yet this is only one side of it. She has stood shoulder to shoulder with those fighting for a cause, demonstrated immense courage in challenging authority and sparking debate. He never hesitated to use his fame to enhance the struggle of those opposing injustice. Success, in Arundhati’s case, did not attract her to the spontaneous warmth of public approval; If anything, it appears to be thickening the veil of secrecy around him. Interestingly, she who lives away from the public eye, unashamedly exposes herself in the pages of her latest book – a memoir that is unapologetic and unfiltered in exposing her vulnerabilities, contradictions, rebellions and her formidable, yet remarkable, role as a mother during her formative years.All her insecurities, eccentricities, pain and anger are linked to her relationship with her volatile mother, renowned educationist and women’s rights activist Mary Roy. “She was my refuge and my storm,” Arundhati claims plaintively in this memoir, which highlights her tumultuous relationship with her mother, whom she described in an interview as “a woman who was wonderful, and also very, very dark.”Trained at an early age not to react to the jokes and insults thrown at her through the manipulations of a ‘crazy, violent single parent’, Arundhati declared that she grew up confused about what she wanted, and afraid of safe spaces and relationships. “Once again, for me, the safest place became the most dangerous. Once again, I made it so… my behavior was incomprehensible even to me.” In an interview, Arundhati admitted, “I am naturally attracted to the vulnerable.“Roy’s writing is full of candor, but at times the act of confession devolves into posturing. The narrative is full of anecdotes clearly designed to provoke or shock: young Roy urinating in the gardens of rich houses, her bedside tea and breakfast with the crippled beggars of her residential area, the “old Santa” who groped her, a young man clinging to her on the bus, the grand-uncle in Delhi patting her back while commenting on her not wearing a bra, and of course, the time she first met her father in a Delhi hotel. “He was lying on his stomach with his knees bent, his legs dangling over the ceiling.”“Described in his trademark caricaturing style, some of these moments seem so bizarre that you wonder whether they are faithful memories, deliberate exaggeration, or performative. The reader is left wondering whether certain scenes are meant to take the narrative forward as well as thrill. Over long periods of time – especially from the time she leaves home to study architecture and beyond – the book returns to Roy with a relentless self-preoccupation that begins to test the reader’s patience.You almost give up, but just when you start to feel like the memoir is sinking under the weight of its own self-absorption, it steadys itself.The latter retrieves the book.The narrative now moves beyond the dramatization of Arundhati’s rebellious young self to the larger world with which she is fiercely connected. His activism, writing on development, displacement and state power, the conflict with the law, a night in jail, the time spent traveling with guerrilla fighters to understand the Maoist insurgency from the ground, and his standing with Narmada Bachao activists and displaced villagers – the memoir now gains depth as the writing intensifies with the turn outwards. Roy writes with the clarity and wit that has always been her hallmark, and which has made her a powerful public voice. She is playful, disrespectful, sometimes rebellious and disrespectful, sometimes accusatory and morally angry. Her keen observations and wit are irresistible to the reader, even as she firmly remains the protagonist of her narrative. This memoir is among the most poignant in the pages that talk about her mother’s final years. The tone becomes vulnerable, and turns into that of a daughter grappling with loss, her memories, and the complicated relationship she shares with her mother. Do I understand Arundhati better now after reading this memoir? I think I do. If anything, the book provides clues to the contradictions that defined his public persona. The eccentricity, the deliberate center stage for rebellious causes, and yet the refusal to inhabit the platforms that others desired, the air of elusiveness that she carefully maintained, the fierce independence, the impatience with authority, the defiance and the seething anger – these can all be traced to her childhood. The child she was can be reflected in the woman she is today – curious, questioning, rebellious, unwilling to bow to the pressures or expectations imposed on her. As she says in an interview, “As a child, I had a very adult mind… so maybe there’s something childlike in me as an adult.”One of the most striking features of the book is how disarmingly Arundhati chooses to be, without trying to soften the memory or remove any embarrassment of awkward experiences or uncomfortable moments. And yet, it’s that unapologetic nakedness that raises the question – how much honesty is too much honesty? After all memoirs aren’t just about memory – they’re also about craft. The story, to achieve resonance beyond itself, needs to come with some filters so as not to overwhelm the reader. The same quality that makes a memoir most surprisingly lively can also make it at times tiresome. Would the memoir have become sharper with a little patience?
