“This is Arundhati, My Dear”: A Review of Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me
by Mahima Ann Siby
Chasing the ghost of a dead, never-known mother throughout life is often brought up in relation to Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft. If the world had these two Marys, India had another similar but different, more volatile ghost chase—a known-unknown alive mother, Mary, and her haunted daughter, Arundhati. In Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy breaks down into a memoir that is neither a tribute, nor an elegy, not even a reconciliation. “She was my shelter and my storm,” is Arundhati’s earliest declaration about Mary (8).
The 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award (for autobiography) winner, Mother Mary Comes to Me, opens us to the famous mother-daughter duo as individuals, telling us there’s more to them that can only be understood through each other. The Mary Roy we know won a legal battle for inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women in Kerala (1986) and was a nurturing educator. The Mary Roy Arundhati knows is her mother, a contradictory figure in her memories of dependence, admiration, resentment, and escape (love, perhaps, if this is it). Between Arundhati’s childhood in Ayemenem, Kerala; her fleeting time in Delhi; writing Booker Prize winner The God of Small Things (1997); and decades of political activism, the paradox of her mother persisted. Mary Roy remained someone who taught her to think free, act free, speak free, live free, and yet struggled to accept the independent Arundhati, a product of this very freedom. The God of Small Things followed a similar tone, though with fictional distance; however, it was not entirely fictional, as became more apparent after this memoir. In every frame, whether Mary is physically present or not, she is very much in spirit and the frame. For Arundhati, her mother settles like a cold moth over her heart, with a fitting self-identification as a valiant organ-child. In other words, Arundhati was the metaphorical lungs breathing life into Mary, perhaps owing to her asthmatic, semi-functional organs.
Escaping (of sorts) from Mary is often reminisced as a poetic ‘to-love-is-to-let-go’ moment, while accepting that there is never an escape. Especially when this escape tagged along with the undeniable inheritance of gifts and horrors that helped her survive life, the real trap. I wonder if Arundhati would’ve preferred to fight and lose this inheritance, unlike her mother. The tenderness and cruelty together made Arundhati detest sacrifices for sure, realizing early on that they came with a greater cost. After settling the land-rights dispute in court, Mary Roy devoted her energy to running an unconventional school, Pallikoodam, in Kottayam, Kerala. Mother to everyone, except her own—“Mrs. Roy”—is the fondest reference growing up in their workable, cult-like hostel-home-school set-up run by a divorced and single-mother Mary, who had locked horns with her patriarchal, socially elite family. All about love for Arundhati, the non-sacrificial kind, comes through the many hospitable friendships she etches. Clearly, identifying aspects of oneself in others by choice, rather than inheritance, played its part here. “Friendship is the raft I sail on. Friendship is the pennant I fly,” and she lives by it (130). New and old friends and family enter and leave Arundhati’s life.
Yet, Mother Mary comes to her. And mind you, not in a saintly manner. Ghostly would be more apt.
Life after The God of Small Things saw fewer corporeal appearances of Mary Roy. The ever-wandering daughter is still accompanied by her mother in thoughts (and spirit, cold moths rarely leave) as Arundhati nears dams and valleys, forests and prisons to write her political essays in a growing Hindu-nationalist India. All while meeting more friends, families, and comrades. Arundhati frequented Kottayam to visit her ailing mother during this period. Health conditions and old age led to a different Mary, more unpredictable than the ghost Arundhati chased all this time. Bound to home and hospital, Mary keeps coming in and going out of life (literally and otherwise). Attentive to Arundhati’s whereabouts through the news but reluctant to be under her daughter’s shadow, Mary leads the way forward to her imminent death. At once, we are exactly at the spot where we began—the September 2022 that she left.
Mary’s final declaration of love addressed to her daughter, the response she received was one of deep adoration. Fun conversations about a possible burial on the school grounds are thwarted by Mary, who claims she does not want to haunt her school. Never does she take the pleasure to extend this benevolence to her daughter, whom she actively chases, even after her death. Arundhati is right; there is “no bargaining with the ghosts” (312). Housing these ghosts within her, more than Mary Roy or the mother-daughter ghost chase, Arundhati carves out a ghost of herself among all these ghosts, as reflected in her life and work. Testament to love and friendship, Mother Mary Comes to Me braces us with a tacit overall punchline:
This is Arundhati, my dear.
ARUNDHATI ROY is the author of the memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. She won the Booker Prize for her debut novel, The God of Small Things.
MAHIMA ANN SIBY is a graduate student of English at Florida State University. She received a bachelor’s degree in English from Manipal Center for Humanities, Manipal, India. She is currently working on life-writing and postcolonial studies.