Mother Mary Comes to Me

When you read Arundhati Roy's memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, you are reminded me of the world you stepped into when you first read the opening pages of The God of Small Things. Once again, you are a teenager reading about the Booker and the River Meenachil she has portrayed in The God of Small Things. 

 

Her memoir features her tumultous relationship with her mother whom she calls her shelter and her storm. The book is about her mother Mary Roy, leading educationist and the woman who fought for ancestral property rights in Kerala. Mary Roy was the founder of a school Pallikoodam in Kottayam and is depicted as a strong woman who stood for what she believed in and Roy traces how she meets Laurie Baker and his assistant, creating in her a desire to be an architect. 

 

The book begins with how Arundhati and her brother are addressless children trying to survive with their mother in the maternal family. Her mother had fled from Assam where her husband was working after their marriage ends abruptly. So, the first part traces her  childhood in Ayemenen in Kottayam and her youth as an architecture student in Delhi, her meeting with her future husband Pradip, the literary endeavours that she made throughout her life as a writer.

She has managed to capture the contradictions involved in the relationship with her mother- the devotion and the differences, the need to connect and the need to stay away. She reminisces about her writerly life and her various assignments. The book also captures the last days of Mary Roy including how the epitaph says Dreamer, Warrior, Teacher on her tombstone.