The title of this thread is a new book by Arundati Roy- the writer, activist, and many more. I love every piece of her writings from fiction to nonfiction. From “Greater Common Good to Ministry of utmost happiness” and from "Walking with comrades" to "Algebra of Infinite Justice” everything is a masterpiece. I like her bold strong prose and her narrative style and the command over English language.
To put it in her own words “My language, my style, is not something superficial, like a coat that wear when I go out.my style is me, - even when I’m at home, it’s the way I think. My style is my politics. The thing is, if you are a writer, you are not polling votes. I’m not here to tell stories that people want to hear. I’m not entering some popularity contest. I just say what I have to say, and the consequences are sometimes wonderful and sometimes not. But I’m not here to say what people want to hear.”
That’s what I like in her, unhinged in her expression. Whether it's “The Great Indian Rape Trick” expressed her anger, where Phoolan Devi should have been remembered as a great dacoity queen but dragged down on world panoramic broad glittering lights to portray her as mere gangraped Dalit woman who was raped again without her consent. AGAIN!
The way she blended the certain death of “Rooh Afza” - popular Indian soft drink which survived chaos of India and Pakistan partition but bite the dust over the onslaught of globalization and “Coca-Cola” in the story describing the plight of hijras Anjum/Aftab in “Ministry of Utmost Happiness”
This memoir that I am going to talk about is from a daughter about her mother. It’s an intimate, raw and unsparing portrait of her mother as gangster who had her dog shot for mating with a street dog! How many mothers would give a piece of advice to their daughters " Fucking don't get married until you earn and settle in a job " in an era of honor killings and the parents pushing their choice of grooms on their daughters? The momoir traces Roy’s journey from humiliations of her and her brother in their childhood and in the hands of this gangster- the formidable mother who successfully fought “Travancore Syrian Christian Succession Act” for equal inheritance rights for the women in Kerala. This is an intimate, stirring chronicle by a daughter who ran away from home for seven years as she couldn’t withstand the humiliation she was subjected to, with an unsparing honesty. Throughout the book she explores the paradox of love and pain in maternal relationships and how we inherit both wounds and strengths from our parents.
It’s a complicated bittersweet tale between mother and daughter and how her mother shaped her personal journey fed into her fiction. “The God of Small Things” (described her childhood, Ammu, her twin girls, Ayemenem, Kottayam, and Meenachil river ) which won Booker Prize is one of those. She blends her personal narrative and world view with broader social and political commentary in various essays, dialogues, and works whether its “Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA)”, “Sardar Sarovar Dam” or “Attack on Indian Parliament”.
As I said in the beginning, As I align with her political ideology- I loved reading every word and sentence of her works. I can’t brand her as leftist, rightist, hallucinaut, or religious fundamentalist but a simple Humanist because of her various charity works, donations, and her view about money.
Just for understanding and theme of this book, I am going to give few excerpts…
The church didn’t want her. She didn’t want the church. (There was savage history there, nothing to with God.). So given het standing in our town, and given our town, we had to fashion a fitting funeral for her. The local papers reported her passing on their front pages, most national papers mentioned it, too. The internet lit up with an outpouring of love from generations of students who had studied in the school she founded, whose lives she had transformed, and from others who knew of the legendary legal battle she had waged and won for equal inheritance rights for Christian women in Kerala. (page 2)
I left my mother not because I didn’t love her, but to be able to continue to love her. Staying would have been made it impossible. Once I left, I didn’t see or speak to her for years. She never looked for me. She never asked me why I left. There was no need for that. We both knew. We settled on a lie. A good one. I crafted it – “she loved me enough to let me go.” To the end of her days, she never asked me how I managed during those seven years when I was a runaway. She never asked me where I lived, how I completed my course of study and took my degree. I never told her. (page 4)
In that conservative, stifling little south Indian town , where in those days, women were only allowed the option of cloying virtue- or its affectation - my mother conducted herself with edginess of a gangster. I watched her unleash all of herself- her genius, her eccentricity, her radical kindness , her militant courage, her ruthlessness, her generosity, her cruelty, her bullying, her head for business, and her wild unpredictable temper- with complete abandon on our tiny, insular Syrian Christian society, which, because of its education and relative wealth, was sequestered from swirling violence and debilitating poverty in the rest of the country. I watched her make space for the whole of herself, for all her selves, in that little world. It was nothing short of a miracle- a terror and a wonder to behold. ( page 4)
As a child I loved her irrationally, helplessly, fearfully, completely, as children do. As an adult I tried to love her coolly, rationally, and from a safe distance. I often failed. Sometimes miserably. I wrote versions of her in my books, but I never wrote her. She liked those versions though and embraced the character of Ammu in The God of Small Things. She wanted to be Ammu because she knew very well that she wasn’t. When a mischievous journalist asked her whether she had indeed had a tragic love affair as Ammu did in the book, she looked him in the eye and said, “why? Aren’t I sexy enough?” She was in her sixties by then, a diva of her own making. She could say what she liked. ( page 5)
Mary Ammachi was in her eighties learning to read and write Malayalam, too. On the days when the sun was sharp, she wore a pair of stylish Christian Dior sunglasses and with those magnificent sunglasses on, she looked as though she could tackle the whole world single-handedly, Hindu god-men, Muslim maulanas, Christian bishops, Communist apparatchiks, corporate robber barons – no sweat. On the wall behind her was a poster with a black-and-white ink drawing of a huge, malevolent mosquito with a vicious proboscis and a children’s poem about mosquitoes written in Malayalam, which she would read aloud falteringly to show off her prowess to teachers and old students who visited her. There’s not a person I know who wasn’t floored by the charm of that performance.
One of her first students published a book, Brick by Brick, about her life. She edited it herself, slashing through whole pages mercilessly, excising paragraphs that even tangentially praised other people, rewriting sentences as if it were a holiday assignment that her student (who would have been in his mid-fifties) was turning in. Her one-page introduction to her own hagiography, which she had signed below, as though she was issuing a check, was entirely in capital letters:
“It’s true, it’s true.”
She tested my brother’s and my love for her by giving us shopping lists for the most unlikely things. Mostly clothes and shoes. When I brought them for her, she would put them all on at once. On one of those occasions, I found myself sitting next to her on her high bed. She was perched on the edge, looking thrilled, swinging her legs like a schoolgirl, wearing her oxygen nasal cannula, her diamond earrings, a size 44DD lilac lace bra, adult diapers, and a pair of high-top Nike basketball shoes – “for stability,” she explained.
I remember thinking, what chance do I have at anything that vaguely resemble normality?
She loved herself. Everything about herself. I loved that about her (pages 283-285)
When Mrs. Mary Roy was in her sixties - she sent a text to her daughter - "There is no one in the world whom I have loved more than you" very strange to get this kind of message from a Gangster! - but I replied - "You are the most unusual, wonderful woman I have ever known. I adore you. (pages 314-315)
Note:
To put it in her own words “My language, my style, is not something superficial, like a coat that wear when I go out.my style is me, - even when I’m at home, it’s the way I think. My style is my politics. The thing is, if you are a writer, you are not polling votes. I’m not here to tell stories that people want to hear. I’m not entering some popularity contest. I just say what I have to say, and the consequences are sometimes wonderful and sometimes not. But I’m not here to say what people want to hear.”
That’s what I like in her, unhinged in her expression. Whether it's “The Great Indian Rape Trick” expressed her anger, where Phoolan Devi should have been remembered as a great dacoity queen but dragged down on world panoramic broad glittering lights to portray her as mere gangraped Dalit woman who was raped again without her consent. AGAIN!
The way she blended the certain death of “Rooh Afza” - popular Indian soft drink which survived chaos of India and Pakistan partition but bite the dust over the onslaught of globalization and “Coca-Cola” in the story describing the plight of hijras Anjum/Aftab in “Ministry of Utmost Happiness”
This memoir that I am going to talk about is from a daughter about her mother. It’s an intimate, raw and unsparing portrait of her mother as gangster who had her dog shot for mating with a street dog! How many mothers would give a piece of advice to their daughters " Fucking don't get married until you earn and settle in a job " in an era of honor killings and the parents pushing their choice of grooms on their daughters? The momoir traces Roy’s journey from humiliations of her and her brother in their childhood and in the hands of this gangster- the formidable mother who successfully fought “Travancore Syrian Christian Succession Act” for equal inheritance rights for the women in Kerala. This is an intimate, stirring chronicle by a daughter who ran away from home for seven years as she couldn’t withstand the humiliation she was subjected to, with an unsparing honesty. Throughout the book she explores the paradox of love and pain in maternal relationships and how we inherit both wounds and strengths from our parents.
It’s a complicated bittersweet tale between mother and daughter and how her mother shaped her personal journey fed into her fiction. “The God of Small Things” (described her childhood, Ammu, her twin girls, Ayemenem, Kottayam, and Meenachil river ) which won Booker Prize is one of those. She blends her personal narrative and world view with broader social and political commentary in various essays, dialogues, and works whether its “Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA)”, “Sardar Sarovar Dam” or “Attack on Indian Parliament”.
As I said in the beginning, As I align with her political ideology- I loved reading every word and sentence of her works. I can’t brand her as leftist, rightist, hallucinaut, or religious fundamentalist but a simple Humanist because of her various charity works, donations, and her view about money.
Just for understanding and theme of this book, I am going to give few excerpts…
The church didn’t want her. She didn’t want the church. (There was savage history there, nothing to with God.). So given het standing in our town, and given our town, we had to fashion a fitting funeral for her. The local papers reported her passing on their front pages, most national papers mentioned it, too. The internet lit up with an outpouring of love from generations of students who had studied in the school she founded, whose lives she had transformed, and from others who knew of the legendary legal battle she had waged and won for equal inheritance rights for Christian women in Kerala. (page 2)
I left my mother not because I didn’t love her, but to be able to continue to love her. Staying would have been made it impossible. Once I left, I didn’t see or speak to her for years. She never looked for me. She never asked me why I left. There was no need for that. We both knew. We settled on a lie. A good one. I crafted it – “she loved me enough to let me go.” To the end of her days, she never asked me how I managed during those seven years when I was a runaway. She never asked me where I lived, how I completed my course of study and took my degree. I never told her. (page 4)
In that conservative, stifling little south Indian town , where in those days, women were only allowed the option of cloying virtue- or its affectation - my mother conducted herself with edginess of a gangster. I watched her unleash all of herself- her genius, her eccentricity, her radical kindness , her militant courage, her ruthlessness, her generosity, her cruelty, her bullying, her head for business, and her wild unpredictable temper- with complete abandon on our tiny, insular Syrian Christian society, which, because of its education and relative wealth, was sequestered from swirling violence and debilitating poverty in the rest of the country. I watched her make space for the whole of herself, for all her selves, in that little world. It was nothing short of a miracle- a terror and a wonder to behold. ( page 4)
As a child I loved her irrationally, helplessly, fearfully, completely, as children do. As an adult I tried to love her coolly, rationally, and from a safe distance. I often failed. Sometimes miserably. I wrote versions of her in my books, but I never wrote her. She liked those versions though and embraced the character of Ammu in The God of Small Things. She wanted to be Ammu because she knew very well that she wasn’t. When a mischievous journalist asked her whether she had indeed had a tragic love affair as Ammu did in the book, she looked him in the eye and said, “why? Aren’t I sexy enough?” She was in her sixties by then, a diva of her own making. She could say what she liked. ( page 5)
She was my shelter and my storm.
Mrs. Mary Roy read every article of her daughter in “Outlook, and Frontline” magazines and commented like “You’re just deliberately being nasty. But she never asked me to back down. ( page 242)
Mary Ammachi was in her eighties learning to read and write Malayalam, too. On the days when the sun was sharp, she wore a pair of stylish Christian Dior sunglasses and with those magnificent sunglasses on, she looked as though she could tackle the whole world single-handedly, Hindu god-men, Muslim maulanas, Christian bishops, Communist apparatchiks, corporate robber barons – no sweat. On the wall behind her was a poster with a black-and-white ink drawing of a huge, malevolent mosquito with a vicious proboscis and a children’s poem about mosquitoes written in Malayalam, which she would read aloud falteringly to show off her prowess to teachers and old students who visited her. There’s not a person I know who wasn’t floored by the charm of that performance.
Mooli pattu paadi varunnoru
Chora kudiyan kurukomban…
Here comes with harmless hum,
That bloodsucking evil little tusker…
Until the day she died, she never stopped learning, never stagnated, never feared change, never lost her curiosity. Chora kudiyan kurukomban…
Here comes with harmless hum,
That bloodsucking evil little tusker…
One of her first students published a book, Brick by Brick, about her life. She edited it herself, slashing through whole pages mercilessly, excising paragraphs that even tangentially praised other people, rewriting sentences as if it were a holiday assignment that her student (who would have been in his mid-fifties) was turning in. Her one-page introduction to her own hagiography, which she had signed below, as though she was issuing a check, was entirely in capital letters:
NOTHING CAN BE MORE REWARDING THAN TO WIN THE TRUST OF YOUNG PEOPLE. TO TEACH THEM, TO LEARN FROM THEM AND TO USHER THEM INTO SOCIETY AS ADULTS, READY TO USE THEIR SKILLS TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE TO LIVE IN.
She had done that for generations of her students. Without a doubt. But when my brother read it, he threw his head back and laughed his delighted laugh.
“It’s true, it’s true.”
She tested my brother’s and my love for her by giving us shopping lists for the most unlikely things. Mostly clothes and shoes. When I brought them for her, she would put them all on at once. On one of those occasions, I found myself sitting next to her on her high bed. She was perched on the edge, looking thrilled, swinging her legs like a schoolgirl, wearing her oxygen nasal cannula, her diamond earrings, a size 44DD lilac lace bra, adult diapers, and a pair of high-top Nike basketball shoes – “for stability,” she explained.
I remember thinking, what chance do I have at anything that vaguely resemble normality?
She loved herself. Everything about herself. I loved that about her (pages 283-285)
When Mrs. Mary Roy was in her sixties - she sent a text to her daughter - "There is no one in the world whom I have loved more than you" very strange to get this kind of message from a Gangster! - but I replied - "You are the most unusual, wonderful woman I have ever known. I adore you. (pages 314-315)
Mary Roy,
Dreamer Warrior Teacher
07.11.1933 – 01.09.2022
Founder Pallikoodam.
Dreamer Warrior Teacher
07.11.1933 – 01.09.2022
Founder Pallikoodam.
Note:
- I would have elaborated more on her writings/works which are very political in nature, but as per site rules - I am not venturing into that.
- I would have added my commentary on every single chapter of this book, but stayed away from the spoilers
- Text in red is Arundati Roy's text
~EkaLustYa
25.NOV.2025
25.NOV.2025