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...