🎩🥻Arundhati Roy in fact and fiction – Himal Virtual Cover, December 2025

Dear reader,

Mother Mary Comes To Me, Arundhati Roy’s long-awaited memoir, is an intimate exploration of love, loss and the mercurial bond between a daughter and the mother who shaped her entire literary life. To guide us through this extraordinary work, via one of Himal’s most ambitious essays of the year, we have the writer and editor Supriya Nair. 

Himal’s virtual cover for December 2025 presents Nair’s reading of Mother Mary against the long arc of Roy’s career – taking in her unflinching political fire, her preoccupation with belonging, and her globally beloved novel The God of Small Things. Nair shows how Mother Mary both enriches and unsettles our understanding of Roy’s oeuvre, offering new perspectives on perhaps the most influential Indian writer alive today.

“In the 20 years between her novels, Roy’s work, entirely comprising non-fiction, was called rebellious, radical and revolutionary. The less limiting and categorisable description is disobedience,” Nair writes. “Mother Mary underlines what her fiction has always told us: that cocking the snook starts at home.”

Alongside this, we present four pieces from the Himal archives: