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Arundhati Roy: "Mother Mary"

 Mary Roy feels ambivalent about child-rearing. We know this because she has harsh words for her son, when he fails a class: "You are ugly and stupid. If I were you, I would kill myself." Also, Mary Roy berates her daughter, Arundhati, for having failed to impress a visiting architect. "You couldn't think of one intelligent thing to say?"


When Arundhati publishes her Booker-winning debut, "The God of Small Things," Mary says, "I struggle to imagine what all the fuss is about...."

Arundhati initiates a seven-year period of estrangement--"not so I could escape my mother, but so that I could continue to love her." Mary never asks about these seven years; Arundhati doesn't dwell on this. "I lived. I was fine." Arundhati feels admiration for Mary--"my gangster"--because Mary starts an astoundingly successful school and actually wins a feminist legal battle. Mary changes an important law in India. She teaches boys not to be helpless and entitled. She teaches girls to recognize that they can become writers and architects.

All of this would be interesting enough on its own--but you also get Arundhati Roy's extraordinary, impassioned prose:

In that conservative, stifling South Indian town, where, in those days, women were only allowed the option of cloying virtue, my mother conducted herself with the 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 the swirling violence and debilitating poverty in the rest of the country. I watched her make space for the whole of herself, for all of her selves, in that little world. It was nothing short of a miracle--a terror and a wonder to behold.

Mic-drop storytelling.
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