AWA Book Review: Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (2025)

By Mandakini Arora

Arundhati Roy takes a sad song — going with the Beatles theme — and makes it not just better but outstanding. The best book I have read in years, Mother Mary Comes to Me could have been a pure misery memoir. Instead, written in organically beautiful language, it is bright and uplifting. Set in South India, it has global resonance, as did Roy’s Booker-prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things (1997).

At the center is the author’s mother. The formidable Mary Roy, “a terror and a wonder to behold,” after leaving her alcoholic “Nothing Man” husband in the mid-1960s, “unleashed” herself with “the edginess of a gangster” on her hometown of Kottayam in Kerala. Founding a visionary school, she raised sweet boys and assertive girls and gave teachers alternatives to “obedient house-wifey lives picking up things their husbands flung to the floor.” Mary’s long legal battle for equal inheritance rights changed the law for Syrian Christian women in Kerala.

“Unleashing” herself with abandon on Kottayam, Mary — whom Roy and her brother, as students in the school, addressed as Mrs. Roy — unleashed all her ugly emotions on her two children. There is nothing generic about Roy’s description of her volatile childhood. Not anxiety, dread, and a constant alertness to danger, but life like a bird on a wire, as her mother’s attacks — flying objects and invective, the killing of a beloved dog — turn her into a paper doll, cut out and shredded; shrunk away from her skin; drained like water down the sink. And a cold, furry moth — familiar from The God of Small Things — lives on her heart, lifting a cold leg or flapping a wing in threatening circumstances. 

Not the threatening circumstances one imagines — marching with Maoists in the jungle, facing legal trial, speaking publicly for the dispossessed and the terrorized with a target on her back, facing vitriolic calls to get out of India (the calls harmonized with her mother’s repeated shouts to “Get out!”). Normalcy is threatening. The cold moth stirs in seemingly safe situations of close-knit families, “‘Mummydaddy’ people,” and loving couples. Roy writes, with characteristic wryness, “it would be nice for people like me if baby-talking adults came with a statutory warning.” 

A writer extraordinaire, Roy makes dark situations laughable or at least smile inducing. Absorbing her mother’s insults, she calls herself “The Hooker who won the Booker.” Her dog’s death is an honor killing of sorts for mating with an unknown street dog. A government clerk, insisting she cannot substitute her mother’s name for her father on a form, explains. “This is India, my dear.” Roy adopts the expression. Her uncle of many transgressions is buried in the Christian cemetery where her mother — the memoir opens with her death — has no place. For he is a man, and this is India, my dear.

The author creates complete images with sparing words. Her mother-in-law, “a Swiss finishing school all of her own,” preoccupied with her own light skin (at a premium in India), compliments the darker-skinned Roy’s lovely neck. A man on a lonely road at night, lying on his buffalo cart, sings to the stars. Roy has a moment of jealous realization. No Indian woman of any social rank can safely sing to the stars alone while her trusty buffalo takes her home. 

Mother Mary Comes to Me is about parental neglect, abuse, and inspiration. It is about the writing process — we see the germination and growth of Roy’s two novels. It is about the remaking of India since 1990 as Hindu nationalism burgeons, and about the author’s journeys with the dispossessed. It is also a commentary on gender. 

There is such light in Roy’s darkness, a light illuminating unforgettable images. Mary, obese from asthma medication, sitting on the edge of her bed wearing a nasal cannula, diamond earrings, a size-44D lilac lace bra, an adult diaper, and high-top Nike shoes, causes Roy to wonder, “What chance do I have at anything that resembles normality?”

Her mother — “my shelter and my storm” who “could break my heart and mend it too” —telling Roy she could be anything she wanted to be, gave her daughter “a life raft that tided her over pitch-darkness, wild currents and a deadly undertow.”

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Mandakini Arora co-chairs the Writers’ Group of the American Women’s Association, Singapore, and reviews books for the online AWA Magazine. As travelling_bookmark, she shares book news on Instagram. A collector and writer of women’s stories, she has a PhD in History from Duke University where she was a James B. Duke Fellow, and an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths’ College-LASALLE College of the Arts. She welcomes comments on the books she reviews at mandakinni@gmail.com