After half an hour of trying not to be a book launch, the event at Oddbird Theatre turned somewhat into one. For note-takers, assembled for Arundhati Roy’s much awaited memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me (Penguin Randomhouse), at one of Delhi’s most intimate spaces, it was a relief.
By habit, one had taken front-row seats, to notice better. There were chairs here turned towards a low stage overhung with dim lights; the setting seemed ready to receive a family gathering or a household deity. Snatches of conversation drifting between “this book and her last book”, and a tiny store in Khan Market that was “as big as this stage” wafted into the ears. At some point, my neighbour in the next chair offered me her mutton slider I did not refuse…. The party went on till Arundhati, in a terracotta Eka dress, took her chair and walked her late mother, as it were, into the room.
Mother and I
Mary Roy, Arundhati’s mother, was an iconoclast, educator, feminist, family rebel, and a hell-raiser. After leaving behind a failed marriage with a Bengali tea-estate manager, she moved into the family cottage in Ooty like a fugitive, from which Arundhati’s grandmother and uncle attempted to evict them. In the mid-Eighties, Mary Roy made her personal battle political. She went to court and won for Christian women in India, the same inheritance rights as men. The home, however, continued to be her battlefield; her children were her punching bags. To her credit, she brought them up and educated them single-handedly.
In Mother Mary… Arundhati pulls off the difficult task of trying to be fair and square with a messy family history—and not just with her mother. In her readings, that evening, however, Mary Roy had centre stage with Arundhati presenting before the audience a woman who was in a place with “giant billboards…taller in my mind than any billboard, more perilous than any river in spate, more relentless than the rain, more present than the sea itself”, and yet had the capacity for arbitrariness and everyday harm. Their dog was put to sleep for mating with an unapproved dog. Arundhati said, at times, it felt it may have been “better” for her had she been a student of her mother’s than her daughter. The root of Mary Roy’s anger and the scale of her rage, was also put on the table that evening.
The writing of the book, begun in the aftermath of her death in 2022, also showed how the family’s scars shaped Arundhati’s character and the emotionally charged and individualised register of her writing. Writing more than 25 years after her Booker Prize-winning book, The God of Small Things, and eight years after her last novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati has written a book of innocence, experience, violence, and grace. And not a few “secrets”.
Making the connections
The soft launch in Delhi included a conversation between the author and Manasi Subramanaiam, editor-in-chief, Penguin Random House India. Subramanaiam asked the writer about her many “re-inventions”, from being a student of architecture and acting to writing and activism. She shared her memory of reading a manuscript that was fierce, droll, disturbing and unputdownable. Though different bits of the life of India’s first Booker winner is known to all, Mother Mary, will tell readers how the different parts were connected. “Every word in this book is doing emotional, intellectual and political work”, said the editor.
The first ‘stand’ Arundhati took in her life, was against her mother. Talking about the process of writing about it, the author seemed to say half in jest: “There was one half of me taking hits, the other half was taking notes… as a very young child, I learnt to disassociate.” Childhood was spent in “plotting her escape” from home. In the Seventies, Arundhati took a train and landed in Delhi. A majority of the room that evening were integral to what-Arundhati-did-next.
A room full of friends
The room, said the author, was full of her “beloveds”. Filmmaker and naturalist Pradip Krishen, documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak—some of the beautiful passages of the book dwell on these two friendships and relationships—and Mira Nair were part of the audience as were old friends from Arundhati’s student days at Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture, besides colleagues from the Narmada Bachao Andolan and other civil-society movements. Historian Romila Thapar, actor Sharmila Tagore, writer and publisher Urvashi Butalia were also spotted.
The big reveal of the evening was that NDTV founder Pranoy Roy—“when we first met in Delhi we didn’t meet as cousins”—is a relative from her father’s side. (Suckers for stories of separated families reuniting will also love the tragic-comic episode of how Arundhati’s brother arranges for a sudden meeting between the three of them 20 years later in a Paharganj hotel room.) Her elderly aunt, her father’s sister, was also part of the audience that evening.
The actual launch of the book is set to be held in Kochi on September 2. But as was said a few times that evening, until then this book will remain “ours”. Delhi’s.