Arundhati Roy Confronts Her Fiercest Subject

The Booker Prize-winning author turns inward with Mother Mary Comes to Me.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My Mother, My Gangster. Arundati Roy confronts her fiercest subject
by Bilal Kureshi read by Bob Danielsson. Long before she
became a booker, prize winning novelist and international icon, Arundati
Roy was a teenager who refused to come home. Rejecting
the walled miseries of her divorced mother's volatile household, She

(00:24):
often retreated to the banks of the open River where
she grew up in southern India. When Roy left the
state of Kerala for New Delhi to study in the
nineteen seventies, she vowed never to return, cutting off contact
with her mother, Mary Roy for years. That same river
and the fraught emotional landscape would resurface as fiction in

(00:44):
her acclaimed debut novel, The God of Small Things. Subsequent
essays on politics, inequity, and oppression made her both celebrated
and reviled, showered with global awards, censored, and even briefly jailed.
Now to her most private battle. In a vulnerable and
searing memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, she tells how

(01:06):
the mother she once loathed and learned to love shaped
her into the writer and woman she became. Mary Roy,
a prominent educator and social reformer, passed away at her
home in Kerala in September twenty twenty two at the
age of eighty nine. Flying from pollution choked Deli to
the post monsoon tropics. For the funeral, Roy came undone.

(01:28):
I had constructed myself around her. I had grown into
the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her. She writes,
I didn't make sense to myself anymore beyond the rituals
of mourning. She was embarrassed by the depth of her
reaction and began searching for language to express what was
more than grief. She was like an airport with no runways.

(01:49):
You just keep your airplane in the air at all times,
she says, describing her mother's restless, ungrounded energy. I just thought,
apart from my own surprise at myself and my reaction,
this is a person who is so unfathomable and so interesting.
She should live in literature. As Roy writes in the memoir,
in these pages, my mother, my gangster, shall live. She

(02:12):
was my shelter and my storm. The book is both
a map of a late parents legacy and a first
person buildings roman, a portrait of the artist as a
young woman and as a daughter. When I ask Roy
if a memoir felt like a natural progression in a
literary career that has spanned screenplays, two novels, and several
collections of nonfiction, she seems uninterested in the question. These

(02:34):
are labels for publishers and booksellers and reviewers. She says,
I just write my instinct and only write when I
can't look away and when I have to. This was that.
Roy was thirty seven when The God of Small Things
was published in nineteen ninety seven. Her Booker Prize heralded
a new voice in international fiction, and the novel became
a commercial blockbuster. Its publication coincided with the fiftieth anniversary

(02:59):
of India's into from Britain. The feel good optics of
a woman born into postcolonial freedom, writing in English and
charming global critics and audiences with a deeply Indian story
also made her a symbol of the new India. Her
serpentine descriptions of Kerala's landscape swelled and soared. She braided
a steely social novel of caste and violence with the

(03:21):
poetics of fragility, care and grace. Despite its lyrical language,
and cinematic evocations of lotus flowers and lilypads, which also
appeared on the olive green covers of the many translations.
Roy resisted mango and sitar plucked subcontinental tropes. She also
soon refused to remain an ambassador of Indian achievement. Within

(03:42):
a year of the Booker announcement, as the country tested
its nuclear weapons and neighboring Pakistan followed, Roy published her
first political essay, The End of Imagination. If protesting against
having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain as anti
Hindu and anti national, then I seceed. She declared, I
hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I own no territory,

(04:06):
I have no flag. Many essays, filled with rage and
resistance followed. Their roving and restless eye was trained on
injustices and indignities from Afghanistan to Iraq, Palestine, and the
post nine to eleven United States. For two decades. There
would be no sequels to the lush and lyrical narratives
that had made Roy a literary darling. Big dams, capitalism, caste,

(04:30):
and occupation became her villains, earning her accolades among progressives
for infusing social justice, with literary finesse and hatred among
Indian nationalists. Lawsuits, censorship, and gendered epithets followed. She became
that woman. I began to refer to myself as the
hooker with the booker, she writes in her memoir Mother

(04:51):
Mary Comes to Me tells the inside story of Roy's
assent to literary fame and the political infamy that followed.
It's a literary origin story recast as a rollicking, often
darkly comic travelogue, the tale of a rebellious young woman
who struggled to find her voice in her mother's home
and refused to surrender it once she did. It's filled
with sexy college affairs, hand rolled cigarettes, including the one

(05:14):
Alight on the cover, professional failures, and literary breakthroughs. Above all,
it's the story of Roy's stubborn insistence on freedom, learned
from an equally stubborn mother. Roy was born in nineteen
fifty nine into a minority Christian family in Sheilong, northeastern India,
twelve years after the country's independence. On the collapse of

(05:34):
a troubled marriage, Mary fled to Karala with two young
children in tow the bitterness and rage she carried turned
into disdain and violence directed at young Arundati. A single
mother in a culture that demanded deities of its women,
Mary refused to comply. As a child. I had to
sort of disassociate, Roy says from her home in New Delhi.

(05:57):
Half of me was taking it the blows are, whatever
it was, and the other half was taking notes because
I could see so clearly what was going on with
her that she had to unload on us. With the
music of the Beatles and Janis Joplin as her soundtrack,
The rock and Roll Era. Having found its way from
hate Ashbury and London to a backwater village in India,
Roy describes how one day she decided to leave her

(06:19):
mother's home for good. She was accepted to architecture school
in New Delhi and eventually broke off all communication for
seven years. I left because I didn't want to be
mauled by her, and yet I didn't want to defeat her.
I just wanted to be able to survive and to
do my own thing. She says. Her mother didn't pursue
reconciliation either. She poured her energies into building an acclaimed

(06:42):
school educating generations of young women and men. In Krola
to be fearless feminists and confident adults. I watched the
ferocious way in which she loved her school, and in
which she loved the children in her school. I often
wished I was a student and not her daughter. Roy says,
I watched the love pass me by in some ways,
and yet I knew that was a very precious love

(07:04):
that she had, and that was something to be admired.
Even after they reconciled in nineteen eighty five, a distance
and tension remained. Mary suffered from acute asthma and couldn't
travel easily to follow her daughter's flourishing career, but she
insisted on reading the writing, having encouraged Roy to record
anything on her mind. As those collections of words became

(07:25):
larger and more dangerous, she hovered over me like an
unaffectionate iron angel. Roy writes, the metallic swoosh of her
iron wings spurred me to pick the big fights, not
the small ones. Those iron wings often make for painful
and unsettling reading. Roy lists a litany of insults doled
out by Mary, including I wish I had dumped you

(07:47):
in an orphanage, You're a millstone around my neck. All
my sickness is because of you, and of course, bitch.
She references physical violence, albeit without disclosing specific acts. When
I ask Roy why she doesn't use the word abuse
in the book, she begins shaking her head and insists
on this addendum, you can say that she shook her

(08:08):
head vehemently. I don't use the word abuse. Is it
a story of forgiveness? Then I ask her, no, these
words are dealt out like cards, she says, and have
lost their meaning. I think it's important for younger women
in particular to see this woman who just gave herself
the permission to be everything bad, good, cruel, crazy, wonderful, genius.

(08:31):
Roy says. She was this person, whether you liked it
or not, and that was what she was. I thought
that was very important to write about. Roy's last international
speaking tour was in twenty seventeen to mark the publication
of her second novel and last major work of fiction,
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Its story unfolds between a
Muslim graveyard and old Delhi and the independence movement in Kashmir,

(08:54):
the Muslim majority province administered by the Indian military. Hindu
nationalism is the novel's central villain, with followers of Prime
Minister Nearendro Moodi's Baratiya Janata Party described as the Parakeet Reich.
Reviews were mixed, with many lamenting that a fine novelist
had let her essays and political concerns overwhelm her fiction.
The title of critic Parul Segal's review for The Atlantic

(09:17):
was Arundanti Roy's Fascinating Mess. Roy's criticism of Modi sparked indignation.
Many called for her prosecution, and one particularly furious Bollywood
star even recommended her public execution. But from her apartment
in the leafy center of New Delhi, a home she
regards as one of her greatest achievements after buying it
with literary royalties, she's continued to write even as many

(09:40):
critics of the government have been arrested and punished. The
b JP's extraordinary assent and success is both the political
and cultural project, and one that has explicitly supplanted founding
father Jawaharlal Nehru's secularism with the revisionist and fervent Hindu nationalism.
Student activists have been charged with Sedi journalism and cinema

(10:01):
critical of the ruling party, have been censored, and there
have been acts of political violence against Indian Muslims and
other minorities. Roy says that given the scale of the
enmity against her, her readers have become her consolation and
her protection. She commands a rare stature and a literary
marketplace that's starkly different from the analog turn of the
century when she became a star. She's not on social media,

(10:24):
doesn't have a podcast, and isn't live streaming anywhere. And
yet Roy is entering her fourth decade as a marquee
literary icon and embarking on an extensive American and European
tour for Mother Mary Comes to Me. She began in
Kerala and New Delhi, with the Brooklyn Academy of Music
in London's Cadogan Hall, among other stops. She also possesses

(10:45):
and exercises a moral authority that spans global conflicts and audiences.
As the recipient of the Penn pinter Prize, she spoke
out at the British Library in October last year on
behalf of Egyptian political prisoners and the Palestinian and Lebanese
victims of Israeli bombard her lyrical sentences from across her
writing are eminently quotable as progressive mantras for the instagram age,

(11:07):
among them, Another world is not only possible. She is
on her way on a quiet day. I can hear
her breathing. Mother Mary comes to me. However, is not
the book of fighting words Roy's admirers and detractors may
have expected. It does not touch on the ongoing conflict
in Gaza or the post pandemic rise of the right

(11:27):
she warned against in her landmark twenty twenty essay for
the Financial Times. The pandemic is a portal instead of
the rallying spirit of her political essays. The memoir is
a return to the languid pace and moral, private ambiguities
of Roy's first novel. I know that this book is
written during a genocide, and a genocide which I refuse
to ever keep quiet about, Roy says. But at the

(11:49):
same time, we have to keep constructing our world and
our worldview. She says, writing about her mother and their
relationship wasn't a matter of foregoing political essays or other commissions,
but about celebrating a certain way of being in the world.
This is ultimately a book about love and all kinds
of love, difficult, love, savage, impossible sometimes, she says. But

(12:11):
if you lose that ability to love, and not just
your mother, but to love, freedom to love, the ability
to walk away from anything, whether it's fame, whether it's money,
whether it's failure, anything that will jeopardize that freedom, then
what are you