Mother Mary Comes to Me: the small and big events that shepherded Roy to ‘hunt down her language-animal, disembowel it and drink its inky blood’
- Shailja Chandra
- Feb 11
- 4 min read
Updated: Feb 13
Barely a handful of pages into Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, I had this heart-wrenching revelation that even after almost three decades since my first read of The God of Small Things (TGOST) I am still not over the cataclysmic tragedy of Estha and Rahel.
I realised that the younger me, who devoured the booker prize winner in one sitting, is somewhere still stuck at ‘Ten to Two’ – the time on Rahel’s plastic watch – and inside the sky-blue Plymouth with the twins in the traffic jam. And all these decades she has carried a dull ache for that ‘Tomorrow.’ that would never be…
I find no excessive insanity in the fact that on finishing my second (of the four reads) of TGOST, I couldn’t go back to everyday living. So wretched I was with grief and sadness that the only solace I could find was in the very book that shattered my heart in million shards. And so, as I turned the last page, I decided to reread it the third time. “May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month “…and “It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem…and “Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire….”
I think one Redditor describes it better “This is the only book that has ever made me feel physically ill while reading”. Another wrote, “Every time I read it I get that heart sick grief from too much beauty, too much life…”
“My first Act of Literature would be a private pact between me and Meenachil River. I wanted to try to write the opposite of screenplay. A stubbornly visual but unfilmable book.”
Unsurprisingly, more than a quarter century later when I saw Roy’s memoir at a friend’s house – I quickly (but reluctantly) agreed to swap it with my beloved copy of TGOST (for a limited time, of course).
During my first read of TGOST in 1998, Roy would have been in her mid-thirties. Millions of dollars, a jail term, a seditious heart and several anguishes were yet to break and build the daughter, the writer, the householder, and the activist in her.
In Mother Mary, Roy allows an intimate and iridescent peek into the many small and big events from her life that shepherded her to eventually ‘hunt down her language-animal, disembowel it and drink its inky blood’, write her magnus opus in 4 years, and – post TGOST – collect millions of hearts, pounds, a Booker prize and a day in jail.
“I knew even then that that language was outside me, not inside me. I knew it would not come to me on its own. I needed to hunt it down like prey. Disembowel it, eat it. And when I did, I knew that language, my language, would ease the way blood flowed through my body. It was out there somewhere, a live language-animal, a striped and spotted thing, grazing, waiting for me-the-predator. That was the law of my jungle.”
Four things stayed with me after reading Mother Mary Comes to Me:
1. Her relationship with the ‘indecent sums of money’ she earned from the contract and royalties of her literary unicorn. Her objective gaze at the concept of money is strikingly refreshing. That she did not fuse with her earnings – instead she could view her ‘crazy’ sums of royalties as a phenomenon to be watched dispassionately, chuckle at, and often quietly and curiously feel guilty and uncomfortable about – for ambushing “the pipeline that circulates the world’s wealth between the world’s wealthy”.
“I felt as though I had ambushed the pipeline that circulates the world’s wealth between the world’s wealthy, and it was spewing money at me.”
2. How Roy’s relentless longing for her mother’s love and recognition – despite having received tough love and disdain from her – fires the pace, feeds the ‘language-animal’, and furnishes this memoir with both solemnity and merriness.
“In these pages, my mother, my gangster, shall live. She was my shelter and my storm.”
3. How her razor-sharp worldviews, fierce political and social ideologies, and finely-calibrated moral compass stood squarely in the way of some of her deeply loving and respectful relationships – making her preventatively moving away from them. Although, a Freudian reading may reveal whether something else was also at play! Given Roy’s mother’s ‘undiminished self-regard’ – and disregard of others, especially her daughter (“she treated nobody as badly as she treated you”) – could it be that the daughter built tall emotional defences against vulnerability and rejection and grew cold in her own relationships?
“I followed my instinct, which is the place from where all art and literature comes. It showed me the way. Once again, I made the safest place the most dangerous. Once again, I ran. I moved out.”
4. Despite my trying to hunt for traces of TGOST in the memoir, the book asserts that Roy is so much beyond her insanely popular debut. There is no shortage of reasons for the memoir to be this long. Afterall, it chronicles the life of someone who, in equal measures, has been uninhibited and guarded, wildly successful and deeply yearning, uncaring and a crusader. The whole is so much larger than these parts!
Finally, Arundhati Roy’s memoir has granted me with a small reprieve from the epic tragedy of the fraternal twins by humanising her writing process, recounting how the publishers clamoured for the book’s rights, prophesying how her life was soon to be swept under by the avalanche of imminent money and fame, revisiting the real people behind some of the characters, and more. The memoir does take some gloom out of the foreshadowing that looms from the onset of the novel and helps dislodge some of the colonizing fear of the menacing disasters unfurled in the book.
Amongst the many praises for TGOST, I have always found this one by John Berger to be the most fitting: “Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one”.
I believe that the world is richer for knowing what shaped the author of this ‘single story’ and, better still, it is written with the same inky blood of her ‘language-animal’! So, grab your copy of Mother Mary Comes to Me now, because:
1) “Anything Can Happen to Anyone.
2) It’s Best to Be Prepared.”
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