Mother Mary Comes To Me

How do you build a truthful life inside systems that demand simple labels—good mother, good daughter, pure artist, apolitical citizen—when your experience refuses simplicity? In this book, Arundhati Roy argues that an ethical, creative life in India requires learning to stand inside contradiction and act anyway. She contends that you remake the world through institutions, architecture, art, and writing—while resisting both domestic tyranny and public co-optation. But to do so, you must understand how private love can become a weapon, how a school can be a political machine, and how place can write itself into your body.

You move through a life built on ledges—literal and metaphorical. On one ledge stands Mary Roy, the mother who is shelter and storm: the school-building feminist who petitions the Supreme Court to strike down the Travancore inheritance law, and the domestic despot who humiliates and strikes her children. On another ledge stands motta kunnu, the bald (but not bald) hill where Laurie Baker’s low-cost architecture turns ethics into brick and light. And along another ledge runs the Meenachil River, the tutor of a child who learns survival and language among fish, birds, and paddy fields. Each ledge anchors a theme: maternal ambivalence, institution-building, and place as pedagogy.

What the book asks you to see

The book asks you to hold paradox without flinching. A mother can rescue abandoned women and break a ruler over her son’s back. A school can be a sanctuary for hundreds of children and a theater for power and public humiliation. A designer can reject the glamour of concrete-and-glass excess and instead compose with rat-trap brick bonds, filler slabs, and jalis that breathe. A film can be an honest, scruffy revelation (In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones) or a battlefield of class and race (Electric Moon). And a novel can rise from a single image—twins pressed to a car window—into an architecture of memory that is both visual and unfilmable.

Along the way, national politics refuses to stay offstage. The Naxalite beheading in the newspaper, the Emergency’s sterilizations and slum clearances, and the smoke of 1984’s anti-Sikh pogrom enter the kitchen and the schoolyard. These events seed an ethic that later flowers into essays and actions—against Big Dams on the Narmada, in defense of those maligned as Maoists, and alongside Kashmiri voices long misrepresented. When lawfare arrives—contempt charges, obscenity suits, a day in Tihar—the book shows you how legal theater works to frighten dissenters, and how to endure it.

How the narrative moves

First, you meet Mary Roy as a moral engine framed by ambivalence—feminist courage outside, ferocity and control inside. Then you watch a school grow—from two Rotary Club halls to a campus woven around trees—while learning how pedagogy, governance, and architecture can rewire a town’s gender politics. You inhabit Ayemenem as both cradle and school, seeing how cross-caste friendships and river lessons teach a child to recognize unlettered brilliance and elite hypocrisy.

Next, you leave with the narrator to Delhi—migration as a strategy to continue loving a dangerous mother by practicing distance. The city becomes a forge: drafting tables, trade fairs, cheap rooms, counterculture songs, and the practical economics of survival. Film work follows—Massey Sahib as apprenticeship, Bargad as collapse, Annie as proof that small budgets can safeguard truth, and Electric Moon as cautionary tale of culture clash and censorship. Out of this comes the need for solitude, and with it The God of Small Things—an unfilmable pact with the Meenachil River, shaped in years of patient craft and midwifed to the world by Pankaj Mishra and David Godwin.

What success changes—and doesn’t

Fame and money arrive together, and the book refuses to romanticize either. Sudden wealth liberates time, helps collaborators, and funds an anonymous trust for independent journalists, lawyers, teachers, and filmmakers. It also invites new traps—saintly benefactor scripts, relatives’ expectations, and the risk of being captured by the very systems you critique. The answer here is structural: share resources without paternalism, create transparent channels, and refuse the fantasy that money purchases moral clarity.

Finally, the book returns to care and memory. It remakes a house like the Ship of Theseus—every beam and floor replaced, identity intact—and plants a Grove for a complicated mother: bamboo, a granite trough with an oxygenator, fish, orchids, and a stone that says B E L O V E D. It refuses lineage-as-possession (“wife of, mother of”) and offers instead “Dreamer Warrior Teacher.” In the end, inheritance becomes a form of communal care rather than property, and remembrance becomes repair rather than domination. (Note: the Grove’s “Beloved” nods to Toni Morrison; the mother-daughter ambivalence recalls work by Elena Ferrante.)

Key thread

Make things—schools, buildings, films, books, memorials—that redistribute attention and care. Do it while naming violence in both private life and the state, and while building structures that outlast the storms that made you.

If you’ve ever balanced devotion and self-preservation, or tried to turn personal survival skills into public gifts, you’ll recognize this itinerary. Its central insight is simple but demanding: your life’s architecture—emotional, spatial, and political—must let in light, cross-breezes, and people who were never meant to belong.

Mary Roy, the mother at the story’s center, refuses reduction. She is a reformer who changes Indian inheritance law and a headmistress who invents a school that mothers whole cohorts. She is also a public and private tyrant to her children. You feel this whiplash in scenes that move from shelter to storm—the inhaler that commands a room, the peacock-feather fan that signals both fragility and authority, and the ruler snapped over LKC’s back. Love in this house is both refuge and weapon.

Public courage, private theater

In public, Mrs. Roy is formidable. She hires abandoned women, protects homesick boarders by putting them in her own bed, and fights in court for women’s rights. In private, she humiliates her daughter in dining rooms and planes, and weaponizes expulsion—get out of my car, get out of my house—as a ritual. Illness becomes choreography: the asthma attack that galvanizes an entire campus. You witness a domestic stage where authority is performed as much as exercised. (Note: this mirrors patterns in other mother-daughter literatures—fierce public virtue paired with private control.)

Ambivalence as moral training

For you, the lesson is neither to excuse cruelty nor to deny the gratitude owed to public achievement. The narrator learns to hold both. She becomes the “valiant organ-child” who breathes for her mother, then leaves to continue to love her by creating distance. You realize that surviving ambivalence is an apprenticeship for public life: it teaches you to see how good institutions can be run with bad methods, and how to love a community without imitating its injuries.

Control, obedience, and feminist contradictions

Mary Roy’s feminism is practical—she insists on girls’ dignity, orchestrates bra-demonstrations to curb male entitlement, and runs a coeducational experiment that shakes a small town. Yet at home, she demands obedience and scripts deference. This contradiction is not resolved; it is documented. You’re asked to consider whether public feminist courage can coexist with private authoritarianism—and what kind of repair is possible when it does.

Care, rupture, and return

Time reconfigures the struggle. As Mrs. Roy grows infirm—hospital stints, oxygen lines, psychotic breaks—the daughter becomes caregiver and historian. There are flare-ups, like smashing a chair in a spasm of anger, followed by a discipline of fidelity: organizing a memorial Grove, declining to inherit domination along with property, and choosing commemoration over conquest. The house remains a stage, but its script changes from edict to negotiation.

If you navigate difficult love, this chapter offers a map: refuse the false choice between devotion and truth-telling. Practice both. Build alternative structures—rituals, memorials, trusts—that let care survive power. The hardest part is the simplest: to look steadily at someone’s greatness and harm at once, and to keep acting in a way that widens dignity for others.

The school grows from two rented Rotary Club halls into a hillside campus that remakes a town’s habits. It is not just an educational facility; it is a social lever. Through coeducation, rigorous care, and Laurie Baker’s architecture, the school turns pedagogy into civic engineering—changing how boys look at girls, how classrooms breathe, and how a community sees itself.

Pedagogy as feminist practice

Mrs. Roy borrows tools from missionaries—flash cards, Cuisenaire rods—while rejecting their racial condescension. She insists on coeducation in a place suspicious of it. She stages audacious small lessons: bra-demonstrations that strip boys of the entitlement that hides in giggles; bathing lessons and toilet cleaning as civic education; discipline that is tough but often tender for students, if not for her own children. You watch norms shift because rules are embodied, not preached.

Grassroots economics and governance

The school is built like a cooperative. Parents place caution deposits—interest-free loans—to buy motta kunnu. Reputation, initially buoyed by missionary connections (Mrs. Mathews), attracts boarders and fees that sustain growth. Governance is messy—trusteeship fights, public controversies like the Jesus Christ Superstar episode, and confrontations with officials like the Kottayam collector—but the result is resilient independence. A founder’s stubbornness becomes institutional spine.

Architecture as ethics

Laurie Baker translates values into form. He fits buildings to the slope, spares trees, and uses techniques that serve both budget and climate: filler-slab roofs that sip steel and celebrate terra-cotta, rat-trap brick bonds that trap air for insulation, and jalis that pour light while keeping heat away. Open classrooms, an open kitchen, and a sunken stage turn the school into a theater of shared life. Form and function become pedagogy—everyone can see, speak, and be seen.

Space that educates

You can feel how space teaches. The sunken stage makes performance ordinary. Open walls broadcast lessons across rooms. Boarding turns classmates into siblings—Mrs. Roy’s bed becomes a policy of care when a child is sick or scared. Architecture here is not neutral; it is a moral choice to distribute dignity and delight. (Note: Baker’s methods anticipate later sustainability discourse and counter the alienation of high-modernist school design.)

If you build institutions, this chapter shows how to braid pedagogy, economics, and architecture. Start with uncompromising values. Fund locally and transparently. Let design make ethics visible. And be prepared for governance to be as dramatic as any classroom—the point is not to avoid conflict, but to channel it into durable, fair practices.

Ayemenem is not backdrop; it is a character that tutors a child into attention. Rivers, fish, a striped palm squirrel that loves pineapples, and paddy-field friendships form a refuge when home is not safe. From this place, the narrator learns how caste and class script intimacy and danger—and how the world’s violence walks into your room through newspapers and rumors. Leaving this place for Delhi becomes both escape and strategy, a way to keep loving by making distance.

The river as teacher

The Meenachil River offers lessons in solitude and skill—fishing, swimming, and the language of small lives. Kurussammal, the steady nanny, teaches lice-combing patience; G. Isaac, the eccentric swimmer, teaches risk and grace. Across caste and class, a friendship with a paddy worker (a seed of Velutha in The God of Small Things) shapes the narrator’s ethical sight. Place gives her a sensorium; it also exposes her to the costs of crossing lines.

Politics intrudes early

The Naxalite beheading printed beside the new Bakelite phone lodges terror in a child’s mind. The Emergency’s sterilizations and bulldozers reshape Delhi’s map and the narrator’s thesis on urban dispossession. In 1984, columns of smoke over the city, and the phrase when a big tree falls, teach how euphemism oils the machinery of murder. Childhood, here, is an apprenticeship in noticing how state violence makes itself normal.

Migration as method

Leaving for the Delhi School of Planning and Architecture is a calculated move. Architecture promises quicker earnings than literature and a community of misfits who share food, songs, and drafts. Names are shed—Susanna becomes Arundhati—as anonymity allows self-authorship. Cheap rooms and trade-fair gigs pay tuition; harassment and scams teach streetcraft. The city’s rough freedom becomes a forge for confidence and craft.

Learning to belong elsewhere

In Delhi you meet Golak from Odisha, Carlo the Italian mentor, JC (Jesus) the architect. You squat, you draft, you listen to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, and you discover that counterculture can cohabit with fierce pragmatism. Reinvention is not a clean break; it’s improvised, communal, and paid for in late nights. If you’ve ever left home to survive, you’ll recognize the paradox: distance allows devotion; risk grows into a kind of rootedness you carry with you.

Read this chapter as a guide to reading your own places: what did your river, street, or rooftop teach you? And if you must leave, what skills—friendship, thrift, watchfulness—will you pack to remake yourself without becoming unrecognizable to your own heart?

Roy’s creative life is an apprenticeship across mediums: architecture, film, and prose. She learns the logistics of sets and schedules, the choreography of images, and the stamina of revision. Collaboration expands reach but multiplies points of failure; solitude reduces friction but demands self-trust. Out of this tension comes a body of work that is both practical and visionary—culminating in a novel built to be “the opposite of a screenplay.”

Film as school

On the shoot of Massey Sahib in Pachmarhi, she learns script breakdown, staging, and the granular math of storytelling. Bargad begins with high hopes—prosthetics, thousands of extras, period sets—and collapses when bills go unpaid; a landlady sells sherwanis, ivory razors, and rickshaws in Jama Masjid. You grasp how fragile the material archive of cinema is, and how failure has cultural as well as financial costs.

Small budgets, big truth

In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, a scruffy Doordarshan-funded film, proves that tiny budgets can protect honesty. The architecture students’ Hinglish breathes, characters have nowhere to hide behind gloss, and a state broadcaster’s prime-time slot carries the film into millions of homes. A big budget would have ruined them—because it would have demanded sheen that erases texture. Collaboration, when aligned (with Pradip’s camera, Golak’s chaotic haircuts, Sanjay’s steadiness), plays like a band.

Culture clash and censorship

Electric Moon reveals how foreign productions can become petri dishes of colonial hangovers—British senior crew, Indian bosses, racialized friction on set. Outside, bureaucrats demand cuts that “do not show India in a proper light,” weaponizing patriotism to police satire. The lesson: collaboration magnifies risk—political, cultural, interpersonal. You must decide, project by project, whether the multiplied resources are worth the multiplied fault lines.

A novel that refuses the camera

After years of collaboration, Roy seeks the solitude to think alone. The God of Small Things begins as one image—twins pressed to a car window as a sky-blue Plymouth floats past a Communist procession—and grows into an architecture of memory: ricocheted time, river-saturated language, and interiority that resists filming. She prints drafts with her own money, reads them aloud, chisels sentences, and, through Pankaj Mishra and agent David Godwin, finds a world audience. Fame follows, but the emphasis remains on craft: sculpting smoke into form.

If you are building a creative life, treat this chapter as a manual. Apprenticeship matters—learn logistics and language. Budget is a moral choice—sometimes small keeps you honest. Control is not vanity—it can be fidelity to a vision the market would simplify. And voice, finally, is plural; it emerges from carpentry and compromise, but also from the courage to be alone when necessary.

Success arrives like weather—sudden, ungovernable, charged. The Booker changes social geometry and makes money available for the first time. Roy responds by treating money as a tool, not a trophy: she shares with collaborators, supports Pradip and the girls, and funds an anonymous trust for journalists, lawyers, teachers, and filmmakers who refuse corporate or state capture. This is not sainthood; it’s strategy to keep independence alive around her.

Giving without performing

The motto—Give. And forget about it.—pushes against the spectacle of philanthropy. Sharing is done in solidarity, not as patronage. Structures are small, temporary, and accountable, echoing Laurie Baker’s architecture—minimalist, context-specific, and resistant to grandiosity. The risk is real: family expectations, public scripts of benefaction, and the invisible guilt of privilege stalk every gesture. The remedy is transparency without theater.

Writing as intervention

For Roy, prose is a lever against power. Her critique of Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen names the ethics of representation—staging a living woman’s rape without consent is a moral crime disguised as “truth.” Her journeys with the Narmada Bachao Andolan turn “development” into faces and drowned fields; her essay The Greater Common Good dismantles the Big Dam’s pseudo-economics. In Kashmir and Dandakaranya, she walks with those called separatists or Maoists, providing first-person witness that challenges national myths.

Lawfare and endurance

The state and its allies respond with lawfare: obscenity cases around The God of Small Things, contempt for mocking judicial propriety on Narmada, and the theater of a day in Tihar. The Parliament-attack prosecutions—S. A. R. Geelani’s ordeal and Afzal Guru’s hanging—become case studies in how legal process becomes political spectacle. You learn a dissenter’s toolkit: know the law, document rigorously, gather solidarity, expect delay, and keep writing.

Memorials as counter-inheritance

Grief becomes making. With Golak, Roy repairs her mother’s house so completely it becomes like the Ship of Theseus—same identity, new substance. She builds a Grove: bamboo, orchids, a granite trough with an oxygenator, fish, and a stone marked B E L O V E D—refusing lineage inscriptions for “Dreamer Warrior Teacher.” Ashes go to river and sea. Memory is made public, ecological, and playful, not proprietary. In a country obsessed with inheritance, this is a quiet revolution.

If you are negotiating fame, dissent, or loss, this closing arc offers practice: use resources to widen independence, use language to complicate power’s story, and use memorials to convert possession into shared care. The point is not purity; it is persistence—keeping air moving through rooms that power wants sealed.