Dear reader,
Earlier this week, we published one of Himal’s most ambitious essays of the year.
The Mumbai-based writer and editor Supriya Nair takes us through Mother Mary Comes To Me, Arundhati Roy’s long-awaited memoir of love, loyalty and the larger-than-life Mrs Roy – her mother. Along the way, she puts into perspective a whole career spent writing about the torment of belonging. The essay shows how the memoir both enriches and unsettles our understanding of Roy’s work, offering fresh insights into one of the most influential Southasian writers alive today.
My name is Shwetha, I’m an associate editor here at Himal and anchor the work on our book reviews and literary essays. After working with Supriya on her piece, I sat down with her to talk about the process of writing it, her long engagement with Roy’s oeuvre, and the craft behind reviewing such a singular work. Read on for some highlights from our conversation in this newsletter exclusive.
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Shwetha Srikanthan: Supriya, your initial draft of the review opens at midnight, just after you’ve turned the last page of Arundhati Roy’s memoir, which you had begun only six hours earlier. You used such a memorable line, that you were, “wracked by the purifying effects of grief, the process by which we make the complex and bitter parts of living love bearable in memory.” Could you take us back to that moment? What was your first emotional response to the memoir and what stayed with you after turning that last page?
Supriya Nair: Like many readers, my initial thought on finishing Mother Mary was just devastation. Certainly for those who are motherless or fear motherlessness, it can hit a nerve. I feel like that universal response and some of the euphoric reception that Mother Mary has got from readers has been because of the power of how she builds on this complicated life with her mother towards an ending that’s not complicated at all.
Those of us who reckon with the afterlives of our loved ones have often felt that it magnifies some of our emotional responses. You want to be angry and there’s no one to be angry at anymore. I think it could make your relationship and the memory of your relationship much simpler than it was in historical reality. Paradoxically, that very simplicity, that very purifying of emotion can in itself evoke confusion, longing, a certain unknowingness. How can you love someone so much and have nowhere to put your anger, your fear and your unresolved feelings for them? Roy touches on all of this very, very lightly and strikingly gently – perhaps this is the most self-consciously gentle work that she has published. I was excited to see that as someone who has been reading her for years now.
SS: You mentioned that you’ve read every word Arundhati Roy’s written after The God of Small Things, as it appeared. How did that long and close engagement shape the way you approached this memoir and your essay? And what, if anything, did the memoir make you see differently?
SN: I was thinking about Mary Roy before I started reading the book, and not about Arundhati Roy or her work. And I was thinking also of some of the women that we would see as her fellow travellers or comrades.
Opening the covers of Mother Mary Comes to Me allowed me to encounter something completely different, which was a reflection on the body of work that Roy had produced herself, and it threw into light the fact that Roy’s own life is really her great subject. It was an exciting kickoff point with which to revisit all her work.
I had read all of it almost as it came out because I was a school girl when The God of Small Things was published, and Indian magazine journalism had an absolute heyday I think for the 15 years after that. She would write features that would be cover stories for magazines, she was published in anthologies by Penguin, if she gave a lecture somewhere in the world it would be a splash on the homepage of some leading website. She was very much a newsmaker in that sense, but she also hasn’t produced a major work of non-fiction for a while now.
Once you read Mother Mary and you read about the parts of her life that corresponded to these parts of her publishing life, it was also a great opportunity just to go back and reread a lot of what she has done.
SS: What did you find most surprising or revealing about Arundhati Roy’s portrayal of her mother?
SN: It would be arrogant of me to say that I found it surprising that she navigated the complexities of grief with as light a touch as she does. But I think that was the thing that I admired most – it was her generosity in being able to write about the difficulties of living with her mother, of rejecting her mother, then experiencing something that felt like rejection from her, and then undoing that rejection and resuming this thorny, complex relationship in which they pissed the hell out of each other over and over again, and did real emotional damage to each other over and over again. There’s grace that Roy employs when she’s talking about this.
I think the book also makes it clear that she is able to do that because of the grace she herself has received. Life has been kind to her, and she writes about that without shame and without prevarication. She’s able to give love and receive love from an extraordinary number of people in ways that are not defined by the Indian family system. There are friends, there are lovers, there are allies. I think all of this reshapes who she is and how she’s able to give and receive love, and so the book is also a document of that. That was very nice to read.
It wasn’t surprising, but the shock was remembering how funny she is. There is a kind of mordant, ironic humor that she is capable of employing, often to searing effect, but she’s also just a goofball and she likes goofing off. Which great writer do you know who is celebrated in practically every hall of the Anglophone world who would title her first momentous memoir about a momentous relationship after a Beatles lyric? She’s able to do that high–low mixing really well, and some of that warmth really comes through also.
SS: You also note that Arundhati Roy’s history and her fiction and non-fiction have this excitingly tense relationship with each other. What is it that you think the memoir allows her to say that perhaps her other work could not?
SN: That’s a great question because the memoir doesn’t really deviate from some of what we already know of her, and some of what we could already guess at from the fiction. She says it was a lie to dedicate The God of Small Things to Mary Roy – “who loved me enough to let me go”. But while it’s clear that things were more complicated than that, I don’t think if it came down to an Oxford Union debate, she would really be able to defend the position that this woman never let me go.
The truth is, when you have a long relationship with the person who gave birth to you, two or more completely contradictory things can be true and real. A lot of people turn to fiction to, in fact, simplify this relationship. Perhaps we can guess at Roy doing some of that through her own fiction. There is, for example, a scene in Mother Mary Comes to Me that I feel has been much remarked on, where she talks about being at her mother’s bedside during a crucial moment in her mother’s last years of serious illness. This woman is clearly not in full control of her body and perhaps her mind, and so through her rambling and her giving free rein to her tongue, she happens to be alone with Roy when she says something. Roy is pretty circumspect about this in the memoir, she says something that is very blatantly a caste insult. Roy is so incensed by it that she picks up a chair and slams it down, which is like this act of transferred violence. Obviously she feels like crap about it.
It’s a tough moment and she writes about it with surprising gentleness, especially when you consider that a version of this has already made its way into her fiction. A character named Tilottama, who is one of the main characters of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, has this exact experience when she goes back home to look after her own difficult mother, with whom she has a love-hate relationship. Surprise, surprise… In that scene in Ministry, the narrator actually makes explicit the casteist insults that the mother figure reels out from her hospital bed.
Arundhati Roy’s stand-in character has the exact same reaction. She brings the chair down by her mother’s bedside, and then the mother dies. It’s possible for you to do these kinds of heightened things in fiction that are not possible in non-fiction. So perhaps some of what Mother Mary allows Roy to do is to reclaim or to reinscribe some complexity into her own versions of these scenes, these feelings, these settings, these relationships that she has scattered through her previous writing.
SS: Another thing that really stood out to me in the piece is where you write that Arundhati Roy, “has left systems and institutions to other writers. Despite how stridently her words can fall on unwilling ears, there is rarely a totalising force to them.” How do you think that plays out under the cultural and political realities of India today?
SN: I think Roy’s own response to how India has changed makes the scale of transformation fairly clear. The last work of hers that appears in her collected non-fiction, which was published in 2021, was an editorial about the arrest of G N Saibaba, and she got into legal trouble for it and there hasn’t been a major publication after that in non-fiction, which may well be because she turned to fiction, then her mother passed away and she spent the last few years writing this memoir. But I don’t think the coupling of intent and output is entirely down to Roy’s own choices over here.
She’s often been criticised as someone whose work is insufficiently radical, and I do think that it’s true that her anarchism, her own contrarianism, perhaps her own love of saying the opposite of what’s expected to be said or done, can produce less than revolutionary responses. But of course, if you were to judge a writer on outcomes alone, there’s something more complex and more far-reaching going on than can be described in very straight and narrow terms when it comes to both emotional and political transformation.
One of the things that I would love to have had a bit more time to think about and maybe write about was the question of influence, and who Roy has influenced as a writer.
I do think that the political effects of the things that she has written about and her achievements in non-fiction will be long-ranging, but this refusal to be bucketed and perhaps this inability to marry her work to perfect ideological clarity – inability, disinterest, call it what you want, maybe it’s a mix of both – may end up having surprising effects.
We live in a time of ideological simplification, if not simplicity, and so I think some of the ways in which Roy troubles that might end up being productive and fruitful in unpredictable ways in the future.
SS: We’ve titled the piece as “The memoir that changes how we read Arundhati Roy”. If there’s one thing you hope readers take away from your essay, what would it be?
SN: My great hope is that people read and engage with what writers write and are excited to think about its context and the origins of where it comes from and possibly about the things that it will go on to generate, because that’s what I’ve tried to put into the essay. I hope people read most of the essay, if not all of it, and I hope they enjoy it, and I hope we can have some productive responses to it, which I will not be counter-responding to, at least not on social media.
My second wish is that people see what a wonderful publication Himal is. And if there are people who haven’t encountered it before and encounter it through this review, that it makes them super-fans of Himal Southasian.
SS: And we couldn’t have had a better person writing on this. To wrap up our chat, I wanted to ask, why Himal? What made our small magazine the right home for your words on Arundhati Roy?
SN: It really delights me that a publication like Himal exists. I would, if I had a magic wand, wish for ten more, because I think the ability to be rooted in our context, in a Subcontinent that so few people outside it understand, and to be able to embrace it generously and very carefully and without the arrogance of mainland dominance that you often get when projects like these are based within India, or at least within India’s big cities, is truly special and unique. I’ve admired the Himal project and I’m so glad that it has held us all together for years now.