The Booker Prize-winning novelist Arundhati Roy is talking to me from her apartment in Delhi. In her new book she relates how she bought this “beautiful” apartment “with the proceeds of literature”. She writes, “Every now and again I kiss the walls and raise a glass and a middle finger to my critics who seem to think that to write and say the things I do I must live a life of fake, self-inflicted poverty”.
The comment is characteristically Roy: combative, flippant, funny. And today, she is joined by her dog, who, she tells me, “people refer to as a walking middle finger. No one is sure whether she learned from me or I learned from her!”
After studying architecture, then writing screenplays, Roy has written two novels, two decades apart. She was the first writer to win the Booker Prize with a debut novel, when The God of Small Things took the award in 1997. Not until 2017 did she publish her second, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
In between, her work – on the page and in life – had taken a political turn. She wrote about, and protested about, Indian democracy, nuclear weapons, environmentalism and economics. Her aptly titled collected essays, My Seditious Heart (2019), weighs in at a wrist-straining 1,000 pages.
RM Block
And now Roy has written a memoir. Mother Mary Comes to Me, with its title from the Beatles song Let It Be, is a tribute to and a reckoning with her late mother, Mary Roy, who died in September 2022. When her mother died, she writes, “I was wrecked, heart-smashed. I am puzzled ... by the intensity of my response.”
Puzzled because, as her older brother said, “She treated nobody as badly as she treated you”. The fact that Roy refers to her mother in the book as Mrs Roy gives some idea of the nature of their relationship. It was, as we see from the book, not always easy; not ever easy.
“Friends always told me, ‘One day you’re gonna write about Mrs Roy, and I’m like, ‘No, I don’t think so!’,” she tells me. “But when she died, I was very puzzled by my response – grief, as well as a sort of shame and humiliation that I was so upset by the death of somebody that I hadn’t had such an easy relationship with.”
For people who haven’t read the book, can she describe her mother? “I wouldn’t dare to try. That’s why I wrote the book. For me, she’s a character who belongs in the pages of literature.” But one description might be found on the gravestone Roy and her brother chose for their mother, which reads, “Dreamer Warrior Teacher”. Another is in the description late in the memoir, where Mrs Roy is very sick, and failing, where Arundhati writes that “to watch her, this powerful woman, our crazy, unpredictable, magical, free, fierce Mrs Roy reduced to abject helplessness, was its own form of suffering”.
Mrs Roy, we learn, was larger than literature, larger than life. She brought up her two children mostly alone, after her alcoholic husband absconded. She took her children to different homes with different surrogate families – and she took out her frustration in life on her children. “We were the only safe harbour she had,” writes Roy.
Mrs Roy also started a school with another woman. It was a success, and it grew, with Mrs Roy finding new land and developing the project. She was extraordinarily driven. Where did her ambition come from?
“I think she also came out of a great deal of cruelty from her father. You can respond to that cruelty by caving in and breaking down and becoming a complete victim ... or you can just become cussed, which is what she became.” Roy laughs. “She just became this very stubborn person who was full of anger. I became so acclimatised to that stuff that I can say no without being furious. But for her it was a battle.”
What other effects did it have? “Very quickly in life I dissociated myself, and there was one part of me which took the hits – and the love occasionally – but there was one part of me that was writing notes. I think I began to try to figure things out, outside the family, inside the family.
“And those are good tools for a writer to develop, especially in India. Because despite what everyone thinks, despite what the hippies say or the travellers say about this country of chaos and colour, it’s not. It’s a country of rigid social mores, rigidly divided into caste and community and language. If you don’t fit in anywhere, someone like me, you learn to be on the outside very early.”
I ask what Roy learned about herself when writing the book. “Something that people struggle to understand more and more today. Why do people revere those who torment them? Why are people so obedient?” She herself was obedient towards her mother because Mrs Roy suffered from asthma and she feared that she would have a fatal attack. “And then I left and I became very disobedient in a lot of ways.”
Disobedience has become Roy’s signature. She stands up for causes and for people, but rejects the term “writer-activist”, which was, as she writes in her memoir, “a term I found absurd because it suggested that writing about things that vitally affected people’s lives was not the remit of a writer”.
Fiction to me is freedom. Fiction is prayer in some ways. Whereas the nonfiction I write has usually an argument
Her memoir goes into detail on her protests and arrests, including a stay in jail, but it is also a book that is lively, entertaining and full of love. Where else could one read of a writer going on a bra-shopping trip – for Mrs Roy – in Ferrara with the author John Berger? “I hung back to experience the sheer delight of watching this extremely handsome eightysomething man say in his British-accented Italian, ‘Excuse me, could you show us what you have in a size 44DD?’”
One element of Roy’s nature that comes across repeatedly in the book is her need to get away – she flees in order to write. Is she one of those writers who is most alive when alone? “Definitely, definitely, definitely. I remember watching, what’s that actor’s name in The Singing Detective?” Michael Gambon. “He says, writers – they eat their own young. It’s true. There’s a danger to having someone like me around.”
But as we talk, I’m reminded that we haven’t discussed the other thread that runs through the book, starting with the title. Roy’s love for The Beatles comes through regularly, from her response to John Lennon’s assassination, to someone giving her a gift of still frames from the film Yellow Submarine. What do the band mean to her?
“Well, I grew up in this tiny little place. Everything in my life was so closed in, it was just taking away all the oxygen, and The Beatles just put it back for me. I mean I love all sorts of Indian music but none of it puts steel in your spine, or a giggle when something terrible is happening and you’re trying to see the funny side of it.”
I wonder what it is that fiction provides for her that nonfiction doesn’t. What itch does it scratch? “Oh, fiction to me is freedom. Fiction is prayer in some ways. Whereas the nonfiction I write has usually an argument, when I see the mainstream media closing down on someone, and I know it’s possible for me to make a dent in that.”
One of the subjects that comes up in Mother Mary Comes to Me is the treatment of women in India. Roy refers to “Delhi’s male commuters who thought of women as snacks they could help themselves to whenever they felt like it.” Have things improved since the time she was writing about?
“They’ve improved greatly in certain ways. Now there’s vast armies of young women working and living on their own. Restaurants are full of women; that wasn’t so when I was young. Women have somehow broken out of the homes they were locked into, not just because they’ve got jobs, but also because of the internet. There are ways of earning a living from fashion and music and being YouTube influencers, even if you’re in some rural area. The empowerment that way has improved.
“Yet there’s the whole thing still going on, the female feticide, the violence and the humiliation and the rape. And in places like Kerala it’s so sexist still.”
Roy’s willingness to stand up and be counted has won her many enemies. In her memoir she writes of one Indian actor-turned-MP who objected to her writings on Kashmir and “suggested I be tied to a Jeep and used as a human shield by the Indian army”. In the book Roy is dismissive of such attacks, but do they ever affect her personally?
“It’s not just me it happens to,” she says. “They do it to a lot of women, especially Muslim women. It’s just so obnoxious, [talking about] putting them up for auction, and threatening them with rape.
“It’s actually what’s happening in India now because of this Hindu right-wing regime,” referring to the government of prime minister Narendra Modi. He and what she ironically calls “his glorious political career” get short shrift in her memoir.
“You know, everything that Trump is doing now, it already happened here in 2014. In fact, the people in the fur and the antlers [referring to the QAnon, Trump-supporting rioters who attacked the US Capitol Building in January 2021 and attempted to overturn the election of Joe Biden] are ruling us now. [In India] they succeeded in carrying out the coup and we are now 10 years on.
The difference between the US and here is that [here] the mainstream media’s entirely controlled
“It’s frightening, because people are used to the horror, but we are actually swimming in a sewer of moral rot. You know, thousands of people with swords calling for the death of Muslims, we have Dalit [India’s lowest caste] being flogged and raped and killed. Of course that is something that has gone on forever, but it’s almost like it’s the new normal.
“So many students are in jail, so many activists in jail, people who talk about murder and lynching are in jail, and the lynchers are [government] ministers.”
Is India, traditionally the largest democracy in the world, still a democracy? “It’s a very twisted democracy,” says Roy. “The difference between the US and here is that [here] the mainstream media’s entirely controlled. We have the charade of elections, but the intelligence services, the police, the army, all these have been infiltrated by this ultra right-wing organisation that Modi belongs to, the [volunteer paramilitary organisation] RSS.
“Back in 2008, I wrote a piece which began with a paragraph, about what have we done to democracy. What happens when it’s been used up and emptied of meaning, and every institution has been turned against you?
“But,” she concludes, “you have the most incredible people fighting back too, so that one cannot forget.” She will be in the front rank.
Mother Mary Comes to Me is published by Hamish Hamilton
