Arundhati Roy has always written from the edge of fracture — the fracture of family, of caste, of politics, of nation. Her debut novel, 'The God of Small Things', carried within it the seeds of rupture, both stylistically and thematically. Her essays that followed, polemical and unsparing, located her as a political conscience for some, a public irritant for others. Now, with Mother Mary Comes to Me, Roy turns inward with the authority of one who has long written about the outer world, only to discover that the inner has never ceased to trouble her.
The memoir is both personal and spectral. It begins in Kerala, but it travels, as all memories do, through the corridors of Delhi, the dust of political rallies, and the quiet despair of old houses. The figure of Mrs. Mary, at once maternal and elusive, becomes a hinge for the narrative, a presence that returns uninvited, like the ache of an old wound. Roy does not write the memoir as a confession or even as an explanation; she writes it as a reckoning.
Spectre of Mrs. Mary
Mrs. Mary is not merely a person but a motif of belonging and exile. She enters the text quietly, in fragments. At times she is a caretaker, at others a custodian of memory. Roy renders her with the delicacy of a novelist but the detachment of a chronicler. She appears not to answer questions but to deepen them. Who was she really? A guardian? A witness? A ghost of childhood? Roy never settles the matter, and that refusal becomes the memoir’s secret strength.
In memoirs, figures like these—maids, caretakers, strangers—often bear the entire weight of cultural memory. Mrs. Mary, in Roy’s telling, becomes an embodiment of the subaltern archive, the keeper of untold stories, those that official India would rather discard.
A Space Of Loss
The memoir is haunted by spaces: the canals of Kerala, swollen in the rains; the barren stretches of Delhi where the city pushes against its own ruins; the bureaucratic interiors of ministries and courts. Roy moves across them with the eye of a cartographer, yet she lingers on what is vanishing. She catalogues the details not for nostalgia but as evidence. She is, after all, both novelist and activist, aware that memory is also a form of resistance.
In one passage, she writes of the smell of wet earth after a downpour in Ayemenem. But the description is less about earth and more about the impossibility of returning to childhood. It is here that Roy sounds closest to Nirmal Verma’s notion of smriti—memory as both intimacy and estrangement.
Memoir as Counter-Narrative
Why, in our time, does memoir occupy so much space in literature? Because fiction no longer suffices. The velocity of history, the collapse of institutions, the urgency of survival — these demand that writers speak from the authority of the lived. A memoir, unlike a novel, refuses the luxury of allegory. It insists on naming.
Roy’s memoir does precisely this. It names the violences of caste and state; it names the small, unbearable humiliations of growing up a child of mixed parentage in Kerala; it names the silence imposed on women in literary and domestic worlds. And yet it also names the absurdities, the moments of beauty, the laughter that survived.
In this, Roy joins a long line of literary figures who turned to memoir not after, but during, their engagement with politics and art: Jean-Paul Sartre with Words, Simone de Beauvoir with Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, and, closer home, Mulk Raj Anand with Seven Summers. Memoir becomes not merely a recollection but an act of defiance against erasure.
The Private and the Political
In Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy has always refused to separate the personal from the political, and the memoir continues that refusal. A childhood episode of being silenced at a family gathering is linked to the larger silencing of dissent in contemporary India. A fleeting encounter with Mrs. Mary becomes a meditation on the invisibility of domestic workers. The memoir’s rhythm is not linear; it circles, digresses, doubles back. This structure mirrors the way memory itself operates—not as chronology, but as accumulation.
In the book, Roy is unsparing with herself. She does not romanticise her mother, nor does she sanctify her past. She writes with suspicion, with irony, even with cruelty. Yet the cruelty is born of honesty. “To remember,” the memoir suggests, “is to wound again.”
Memory as Resistance
Memoirs today are not just recollections but interventions. In times when histories are rewritten and archives sanitised, they insist on a subjective truth. Roy’s work belongs to this space of urgency, where personal memory becomes collective memory.
Her years at the Delhi School of Architecture emerge as formative, an early discipline in shaping spaces that later informed her prose. Her long friendship and brief marriage to filmmaker Pradip Krishen, known for Massey Sahib, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, and Electric Moon, to which she contributed as screenwriter, appear, in her telling, as a misstep she allowed to fade.
The Craft of Voice
The voice of Mother Mary Comes to Me is unmistakably Roy’s: lyrical yet jagged, tender yet polemical. Sentences stretch and coil, only to break into fragments. She has always been a writer of rhythms, but here the rhythm is that of hesitation—the pause before a revelation, the detour before a confession.
There are sounds of literary memory, too. One hears the spectral quality of Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being, the restlessness of James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son. Roy converses silently with these predecessors, not imitating them but acknowledging their presence in the architecture of memoir.
The Burden of Recognition
A memoir inevitably asks of its reader: Do you recognise me? Roy complicates this expectation. She knows she is already too well known, already overexposed by her fame and her controversies. So she writes against recognition. She refuses to make herself legible in neat categories. The Arundhati Roy of the public sphere — the Booker winner, the activist — is present, but only obliquely. What dominates instead is the Roy who is uncertain, fractured, unfinished.
This is what makes Mother Mary Comes to Me remarkable. It resists the temptation to close. It is not a memoir of triumph or reconciliation. It is a memoir of ongoingness, of wounds that do not heal but continue to shape.
Unfinished Legacies
Mother Mary Comes to Me is not an easy book. It unsettles more than it consoles, and that is its value. Roy offers less a memoir than a meditation on what it means to remember, to belong, to be haunted.
Her brother, LKC (Lalith Kumar Christopher Roy), surfaces as a spectral echo of a difficult childhood in Ooty. Her estranged father, Rajib “Micky” Roy, reappears in a Delhi hotel room—an encounter at once tender and absurd, more estrangement than reconciliation.
The Future of Memory
Memoirs today are more than recollections; they are interventions. In a time when histories are rewritten and archives sanitised, the memoir insists on its subjective truth. It may not claim objectivity, but it claims urgency. Roy’s work enters this space of urgency, where personal memory becomes collective memory.
In that sense, Mrs. Mary is less an individual than a metaphor for India’s forgotten figures—the ones who slip between census categories, who remain absent in development reports, who live only in someone’s half-remembered stories. Roy’s act of remembering Mrs. Mary is also an act of restoring dignity.
One closes the book not with answers, but with questions: Who was Mrs. Mary, really? Why does she return again? And perhaps most hauntingly, who are the Mrs. Marys in our own lives, unacknowledged yet unforgettable?
Indeed, Arundhati Roy offers no closure. She leaves us with the sensation of memory itself: sharp, incomplete, necessary. And in doing so, she ensures that Mrs. Mary will come to us too, unbidden, in the quiet hours.
Book: Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
Published: Penguin
Price: Rs 899
(Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is a management professional, literary critic, and curator based in Bangalore.)
