Not Just a Daughter’s Story: Arundhati Roy’s Memoir Is India’s Mirror

I smiled. Particularly looking at the deliberately chosen cover. She could have picked anything, but— a bidi-smoking Arundhati Roy was quite impressive. Brave. I, too, need a photograph of a sort. Iconic. One at least. Before my hair turns grey, I want to have it on my table. Fearless. I have just finished reading God of Small Things. My longest ever read, which took me a year. I turned crazy. Excited. I was finally familiar with the language and concept. It was painful. Tragic and beautiful. I was 28 years late reading it. While I was still engrossed, Roy launched ‘Mother Mary Comes To Me’. I was reading a pirated digital copy. A well-wisher had shared. I decided that a reader has no ethics. Crime justified. I was intrigued already.

In the opening chapter, she warns, ‘Perhaps what I am about to write is a betrayal of my younger self by the person I have become.’ The hook for me. It was us. All of us. Obscuring the trauma beneath the coatings of the long-erased past. The people we became. Heroes. A good friend sent me a hardcover as a birthday present. I read it like a spoiled teenager. Appreciating her rebellion and discerning her fear. How not to romanticize survival. How to recognize the wild pigs— perverts.

Turning the pages, it became clear that Roy’s defiance was inherited from her bloodline as much as it was earned through her art. Her mother, Mary Roy—the force who shaped and wounded her in equal measure—anchors this memoir.

The Mother Who Made and Marked Her

The mother-daughter relationship here is neither simple nor sentimental between Arundhati Roy and Mary Roy. She does not hide the bruises of that relationship; instead holds them up to the light. It carries friction, a lens through which Roy frames it: ‘When she got angry with me, she would mimic my way of speaking. She was a good mimic and made me sound ridiculous to myself.’ Roy pinpoints her brother, saying, ‘She treated nobody as badly as she treated you.’ Also reflecting: ‘I can understand him feeling that I was humiliating myself by not acknowledging what had happened to us as children. But I had put that behind me a long time ago.’

The memoir throughout reflects that Roy did not live through poverty alone, but a harsh childhood and youth that her mother shaped. Mary Roy could be cruel, even monstrous, in her actions. Yet she becomes a hero in her contradictions.

Yet Roy allows a sliver of something softer. Tenderness flickers beneath anger and unguarded defiance. Butterflies stirred inside me. When she died, some more, on her crush and ultimately separated with words, ‘The thing about women like you is that you will do anything to get what you want. You’ll even sell your body.’

Men do this when they fail to manipulate and dominate a woman—the struggles of life in those pages. And the struggles of building Arundhati Roy consume the reader. ‘I played the fool in class, made no effort, and understood nothing,’ I immediately connected. I yearned for a language. They imposed it. I resisted— by depriving myself of one.

From the wounds of childhood, Roy turns toward her mother’s fierce public self—the teacher, the reformer, the woman who refused to bow. ‘Mrs Roy made it her mission to disabuse boys of their seemingly God-given sense of entitlement,’ it reads like a sharp social observation on the surface without using heavy and technical words. Not patriarchy. Not misogyny. Only disabuse.

A daughter remembering her mother at work, absorbing her stubborn courage and carrying forward in her own life and writing. She captures the truth many women know: ‘As casually one might ask for a cigarette, he asked me if I would marry him,’ and in the next paragraph, she goes, ‘he had saved me from something bad. I was shaken and felt the least I could do was to marry him.’ Aren’t we women like this? We feel sorry for claiming our agency. For saying a ‘NO’. Perhaps we were raised this way. But not Arundhati Roy. That crazy mother of hers allowed no room for such a regret.

She writes without ornaments, plainly yet heavier: ‘I didn’t have the bandwidth to accommodate Delhi’s male commuters who thought of women passengers as snacks, as they could help themselves to whenever they felt like it. The indignity made me oscillate between self-pity and violent fantasies of vengeance. There were days when I would get off a bus mid-journey and walk, hating myself for the tears of shame and rage I could not control. Millions of women put up with this every day.’

I had to put down the book for a while. I froze with something shaking inside me. Silent, helpless, and furious at myself for being both. A touch, a stare, an invasion— is violence. The guilt stays forever because, as a woman, speaking for yourself is an arduous task. She comforted every woman who felt late, lost, and unfinished: ‘My recklessness took the edge off my anxiety.’ It is fine to be restless and uncertain if you have not found success yet. Her wildness is a permission to live, fail, and try again without shame.

A Woman Writing Against Silence and Shame

Even then, in her reckless world, she was not confined to her own boundaries but absorbing stories of women and violence, power and punishment: ‘It was 1983. In my halting Italian, I read about the massacre of thousands of Muslims in Nellie, Assam, by a local tribe, egged on by Assamese and mainstream Hindu nationalists. I read about how Phoolan Devi – the legendary female bandit of the Chambal Valley– had surrendered before a crowd of thousands and been put into prison.’ She was shaping her sense of justice, grief, and rage. The events became part of her emotional language long before she began writing fiction or essays. They taught her that the personal is always political, and the political is always personal.

She goes: ‘Even then, I knew that the language I wrote in was not mine…’ I felt something inside my skin because I have felt the distance between my feelings and words, allowing me to say. Roy is not talking about English or Malayalam but the private, untamed language every writer craves for— belonging to no nation, grammar, only to truth. Her honesty makes her writing so human.

She was not chasing silence at thirty-two: ‘I needed to cut out the noise and for once in my life stop running. I was tired of collaborative thinking. I wanted to think alone. I wanted to know what I thought about when I thought alone.’ To be alone with one’s own thoughts. She describes solitude as a bodily need, like hunger, like sleep, like sex. I think that’s where her writing begins. In desperation. Learning without interruption.

Even as she claimed her private voice, the world outside sought to cage it with names and labels. Names of women who speak too much are inconveniences: ‘They often referred to me as ‘that woman.’ The courtroom patriarchy. That woman has a name, Milords. It almost feels like the violence of being unnamed. ‘I was soon being called a ‘writer-activist’, 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.’ It reminds me of how individual journalists reporting on human rights and marginalized communities are dismissed as ‘journalist-activists’—as if questioning, feeling, and dissenting are not part of the craft itself. They label to reduce. To isolate. Roy refused to divide.

Her refusal to be silenced or categorized is beyond personal attacks in the political arena. Roy does the wild confession here: ‘The more I was hounded as an anti-national, the surer I was that India was the place I loved, the place to which I belonged. Where else could I be the hooligan that I was becoming? Where else would I find co-Hooligans I so admired? And who among us supposed equals had the right to decide what was ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ national?’ Belonging is not obedience. I almost accepted the challenge before my brain sent a red signal. Are we in a position to afford such waywardness? Treason.

Belonging Without Obedience: The Rebel’s Reckoning

Roy did not look away from the injustice in the world. She phrases violence ostensibly: ‘The killing was justified as ‘Hindu’ revenge for a terrible tragedy that had taken place on 27 February.’ Gujarat. She rightly called it the first tremor of an idea that has now grown into the reality of Hindu Rashtra— Narendra Modi 3.0. Further reminding: ‘They hanged a man to win an election.’ Those six words carry a weight that no argument could match. She means justice can be traded for votes in the theatre of power.

Life tested them in every way, yet in the end, mother and daughter found their way back to each other. And perhaps the most lasting question she leaves us with comes not in an argument. In these words: ‘Why was I not arrested while so many others were? Who knows. Maybe my readers protected me. Maybe my iron angel did.’ Their relationship had its storms. Mrs Roy and her daughter clashed, testing love and patience. In the end, they found their way back to each other. There is no better way to close than with the song they sang together.

A song of love is a sad song

A song of love is a song of woe

Don’t ask me how I know

And in that song, mother and daughter find their peace — and so do we.