Mother Mary Comes to Me (Arundhati Roy, 2025)
Hard not get swept up in this. Roy’s lived a dense textured life and none of it has been easy. அ and I wondered why and how Roy is who she is and having read this we agree that this is a singular personality shaped by the perfect goldilocks conditions of her life. The same can be said about each of us but well, to put it charitably, we’re yet to anchor a protest or win the booker.
Literally bookended by two photographs of her: one young with an expression of learned cold defiance and an older one, warmer, wistful, wise. Yet within these pages it’s almost as if I hear an even younger Arundhati, a girl who watches the lunacy around her — her mother, her family, her country — and so yearns for something, err… normal? Only to arrive at the realisation that ‘normal’ is despicable and seeking a new normal is a valiant act of imagination, an ability that requires practice for that muscle threatens to oxidise and rust, the minute it comes into contact with the ‘real world’.
I understand it isn’t easy to write a memoir that remembers so many lives while also being a pointed albeit impressionistic portrait of a thorny figure such as Mary Roy. But, grief and anger must either make way for more sobering emotions or find that rooftop to scream or jump. But what transpires here is something more recursive. Arundhati and by extension the prose feels stuck in a loop. Perhaps this is meant to be read as a conversation-over-chai-transcribed. The writing while casual, verges on clumsy. The elegiac and overtly sentimental voice, feels monochromatic, repetitive and as a result dulls the vicious force of its many characters, including hers. Sure a retrospect is meant to look back at life from that vantage point of wisdom, but there is an urgency, a wildness simmering just underneath this prose and I wish it didn’t feel so dressed up, civilised.
But then again, is that what age is meant to do? Is our blurred vision meant to soften those edges and tint our lives with a sepia coloured smile? If so, then I can’t wait!