Smita Diwan
When Arundhati Roy publishes a book, the world listens. But with her 2025 memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, the celebrated Booker Prize-winning author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness speaks not to the world but to herself. This is a book of return, reconciliation, and reckoning. It is also, in its own way, a revolution in intimacy.
Unlike her fiery essays or political manifestos, Mother Mary Comes to Me is a slow, searing journey into her own life. It is about mothers and daughters, about exile and belonging, about the making of a woman who never accepted the life she was handed.
Roots and Restlessness: The Beginning of Arundhati Roy’s Story
Born Suzanna Arundhati Roy in 1961 in Shillong, Meghalaya, she grew up between two vastly different worlds. Her father, Rajib Roy, was a tea planter from Bengal with a drinking problem and a temper that marked her earliest memories. Her mother, Mary Roy, was a Syrian Christian from Kerala – brilliant, stubborn, and fierce.
Arundhati’s parents separated when she was two. Her mother left her alcoholic husband and moved back to Kerala, where she later founded Corpus Christi School (now Pallikoodam), one of India’s most progressive schools. For a young Arundhati, growing up with her mother was a paradox liberating and suffocating at once.
Mary Roy was a legend in her own right. In 1986, she won a landmark Supreme Court case that granted equal inheritance rights to Syrian Christian women in Kerala—a legal and feminist milestone. But for her daughter, she was both a role model and a force of control. In Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati writes that “my mother made me strong enough to stand up to the world, but she didn’t make space for me to stand up to her.”
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The Lonely Girl and Her Brother
Arundhati’s early life in Aymanam, Kerala—the same village immortalized in The God of Small Things—was one of beauty and isolation. Her younger brother, Lalit, shared her childhood but not her temperament. While he remained closer to their mother’s orbit, Arundhati became the wanderer.
Their relationship, like many in Roy’s life, is marked by affection and distance. In interviews, she’s said that they grew up “like neighbours more than siblings.” Mother Mary Comes to Me revisits that quiet distance. The unspoken loneliness of a girl growing up under the shadow of a mother who was always more public than private.
Education, Poverty, and the Making of an Outsider
Mary Roy’s rebellion didn’t translate to financial stability. Arundhati grew up in modest circumstances, often on the edge of financial struggle. She once described herself as “a child of contradictions progressive in ideas but poor in cash.”
In 1976, at fifteen, she left Kerala for Delhi. She studied at the School of Planning and Architecture, graduating in 1984. Those years shaped her defiance. She cycled to college, lived in hostels, often skipped meals, and designed homes she could never afford.
Her financial condition in the 1980s was precarious—she survived on stipends, teaching jobs, and small architectural projects. But in Delhi, she also found freedom—a world away from the structured morality of her mother’s home.
Love, Loss, and the Architect of Her Own Fate
In 1984, fresh out of college, she married architect Gerard da Cunha. The marriage, like much of her early life, was brief but intense. They lived together in Goa in a thatched house near the sea—broke but idealistic. Within two years, they separated, the relationship undone by the same restlessness that defined her.
After the separation, Arundhati moved back to Delhi, taking odd teaching jobs and living hand-to-mouth. These were her “hungry years,” when she lived in a rented barsati room, scribbling fragments of stories that would later become her novel.
In the memoir, she writes, “Poverty isn’t always deprivation—it’s sometimes the tuition you pay for freedom.”
Meeting Pradip Krishen: A Partnership of Words and Vision
In 1989, Arundhati met Pradip Krishen, a filmmaker and environmentalist, on the sets of Massey Sahib. They married soon after, and this partnership transformed her creative life. Krishen encouraged her to write screenplays, leading to In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989), which won the National Film Award for Best Screenplay, and Electric Moon(1992).
Their home became a hub of artists, intellectuals, and filmmakers. Pradip’s daughter from a previous marriage, Mira, was part of this world too. Arundhati, though not her biological mother, developed a warm relationship with her—part friendship, part mentorship. In Mother Mary Comes to Me, she writes poignantly of how love often “finds its own architecture, even when it doesn’t fit the blueprint.”
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Mrs. Roy and the Mirror of Motherhood
One of the central figures in the memoir is ‘Mrs. Roy’ not Arundhati herself, but her mother, Mary Roy. She is not just a character but a storm. Arundhati portrays her mother as a woman both admirable and impossible. “She built a school for a thousand children,” Roy writes, “but she never learned how to speak softly to one.”
The memoir delves into their complex relationship—Mary’s expectations, Arundhati’s rebellion, and the long silences that followed. For decades, they lived in different worlds, occasionally meeting but rarely seeing eye-to-eye. When Mary died in 2022, Arundhati found herself facing the ghosts she had avoided all her life.
Their bond becomes the memoir’s emotional center—fierce, loving, wounding, and redemptive. It’s not just a daughter writing about her mother, but a woman writing about the woman who made her possible—and impossible.
Friends, Outsiders, and the Solitude of Fame
Arundhati Roy’s friendships have always reflected her personality which is deep, eclectic, and often transient. Her early Delhi circle included artists, students, and activists who shaped her worldview. Some drifted away after her fame; others became lifelong companions.
After The God of Small Things (1997) catapulted her to international fame, she found herself estranged from many. Fame, she says in the memoir, “isn’t applause—it’s an echo that drowns the voice you once had.”
Roy was never one for literary cliques. She kept her distance from the Rushdie-Ghosh-Vikram Seth circuit of Indian English writing, choosing instead to align with activists, adivasis, and journalists. In the memoir, she speaks warmly of her long-time friends and many of them anonymous, forgotten faces from Delhi’s architecture and protest worlds who “saw me before the world did.”
The God of Small Things and the God of Everything That Followed
In 1997, The God of Small Things changed her life. It sold over six million copies worldwide and won her the Booker Prize. But success, she writes, “wasn’t liberation—it was another kind of imprisonment.”
Roy used her platform to speak against nuclear weapons, dams, and state oppression. Her essays The Cost of Living(1999), Power Politics (2001), and The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2002) positioned her as India’s most eloquent dissenter. But they also isolated her from the literary elite.
Her finances, however, changed drastically after the Booker. She donated much of her prize money and royalties to causes she believed in. In the memoir, she notes, “I became richer in money but poorer in invisibility.”
Return to Fiction and the Circle of Life
After two decades, she returned to fiction with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). The novel spanned graveyards, protests, and gender identities—another epic of empathy and defiance. It was longlisted for the Booker, reaffirming her place in global literature.
Her later works, My Seditious Heart (2019) and Azadi (2020), further sharpened her political voice. But Mother Mary Comes to Me marks something different: a homecoming. It is a return not to her audience, but to herself.
Themes and Tone of the Memoir
This memoir is written in Roy’s signature style—lyrical, ironic, cinematic. But it’s also her most intimate work. Each chapter feels like a confession whispered to an old friend. She writes of her father with compassion and pain—“a man who taught me how not to be.” She writes of Mary Roy with reverence and rage. She writes of love as a series of “beautiful, necessary mistakes.”
There are glimpses of her younger self—the woman who bicycled across Delhi in a torn kurta, the one who lived without a bank account for years, the one who never wanted to belong anywhere.
Why Mother Mary Comes to Me Matters
This is not just a memoir—it is the autobiography of a generation of women who refused to conform. It’s about growing up with a mother who broke the law for justice but broke her child’s heart in the process. It’s about loving men, art, and ideas that couldn’t contain her. It’s about the price of being free in a society that rewards obedience.
In an era obsessed with curated vulnerability, Roy’s memoir is the real thing—unvarnished, uncomfortable, unforgettable.
Final Thoughts: The Woman Who Wrote Her Own Myth
There are thousands of opinions about Arundhati Roy—activist, radical, iconoclast—but as Mother Mary Comes to Meshows, there is no one quite like her. She belongs to the literary generation of Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh, yet she remains singular—a writer whose life is as compelling as her fiction.
This book is her reckoning—with her mother, her country, her fame, and her solitude. It is also a love letter to the women who raised themselves.
Because when Arundhati Roy writes, she doesn’t just tell a story—she builds a world, tears it down, and invites us to live in the ruins.
Arundhati Roy’s recognized works include:
- The God of Small Things (1997) — the novel that won the Booker Prize.
- The Cost of Living (1999) — a short nonfiction piece.
- Power Politics (2000) — a nonfiction collection.
- War Is Peace (2001) — essays.
- The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2002) — nonfiction essays.
- The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) — her second novel, published twenty years after her debut.
- My Seditious Heart (2019) — collected nonfiction.
- Azadi (2020) — commentary and critique.
- And now Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025) — her first memoir.
