Mother Mary Comes to Me- Arundhati Roy

 

I wanted to take my time with this, to write it slowly, to process what I read and what I felt, and only then to push it in front of everyone. But often, I am left confused, asking myself questions, some I eventually answer, others that linger for days. This time, I am left with two. Their answers evade me as I sit down to write this. I do not want to call this a review. Arundhati Roy has endured far too much for someone like me to review her work. I want to call this an internal monologue, typed as I think, on a cold, rainy night.

The first question finds its roots in an old conversation with a father figure in my life.

“Hunar, do you know what it means to be responsible?” my mother asked me one day, on our way back from somewhere in Thailand. I, thinking rather highly of myself, took my time to fashion an answer that would sound different, philosophical, suitably impressive, given how well-read I believe myself to be, how capable of difficult conversations I thought I was.

I said it was balance. Touché. I said it meant doing what you want while maintaining equilibrium with expectations you decide are worth meeting. I can have fun and still be a responsible adult. I can live without being reckless.

“Incorrect. We’ll circle back to this,” the aforementioned father figure replied. What he said next is what Mrs. Mary Roy seems to have embodied all her life. Responsibility, he said, is the ability to achieve whatever you wish to achieve, even if it comes at the cost of others. Because, at the end of the day, what you achieve will benefit both you and the people who truly love you. Anyone who stops you, anyone who discourages you, does not love you.

Mrs. Mary Roy fulfilled her dream at the cost of love, at the cost of a life governed by societal expectations, and, most painfully, at the cost of loving her children in the way a conventional mother is expected to. I want to believe that she loved them in the only way she knew how: by putting herself first, by refusing to sacrifice herself, so that she could be a role model rather than a martyr.

Perhaps that is what made Arundhati Roy the fearless voice she is today. A woman in India, my dear, who does not shy away from anyone who tries to bring her down, be it men or money.

The second question grows from a seed planted in the mind of a girl the moment she enters society: motherhood. An event deemed the most important thing that will ever happen to you, the one that will define your life once it does. I, along with many women I know, often think about the ordeals of childbirth, the physical violence, the emotional reckoning. Would we give it up and let men or any third gender bear it instead? Yes and no.

Mrs. Mary Roy takes on motherhood as an obstacle, something one must endure in order to become larger than life. She was not the kindest mother, nor the most nurturing, appreciative, or tender. She was a fierce mother, perhaps a better mother to the world than she was to Arundhati and her brother, LKC.

I hope that someday I will find answers to my questions, answers that unsettle me yet bring me peace. Answers that require me to put myself first, to unlearn what every mother in my life has taught me.

Mother Mary Comes to Me is Arundhati Roy’s best work. It is honest, unshakeable, and terrifying. It forces you to question your privilege, your obsession with things that do not matter, your motivations for wanting what you want. It gives you a mother and her children, some of whom have become unbreakable structures against a world that continues to move at a pace of its own choosing.

It gives you courage. It gives you a glimpse into a life that feels impossible to live today, yet one that many continue to live.

It makes you want to leave law and become a writer.