Soup of Memory and Imagination

Book titles are often telling and Arundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me (Penguin, 2025) hints towards one of comfort and grace whispered in a time of trouble, as the old Paul McCartney song would have it. But Arundhati Roy is a connoisseur of irony, and her first move is to detonate the book's own title. In the dedication, we are told that the memoir is for Mary Roy, "Who never said Let It Be." In this single line of negation, Roy establishes her true subject: not a beatific vision of maternal solace, but its terrifying opposite. Roy sets out to tell the story of a mother who was not a source of peace but a 'gangster,' and a 'storm.'

Reviewed By Kazi Najmus Sakib

By all public accounts, Mary Roy was a figure of formidable and revolutionary stature. Leaving her alcoholic husband, she founded a celebrated school on little more than grit and borrowed ideas. Mary was a feminist icon who single-handedly took on the medieval inheritance laws of the Syrian Christian community of South India, waging a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court and won equal rights for Christian women in Kerala. Her school became a haven, a place where she instilled in her female students the 'spines' and 'wings' that society would have denied them, and where she raised, as Roy notes, 'generations of sweet men' by 'disabusing' them of their innate sense of entitlement. In the conservative town of Kottayam, she was a one-woman insurgency against convention.

And yet, this celebrated liberator of others was quite cruel to her own children. The memoir, in this respect, serves as a chilling indictment. Arundhati's brother bore the brunt of a rage that seemed to her to be a proxy for all the sins of mankind; he was beaten with a wooden ruler until it broke, and was told at the tender age of a teenager, "You're ugly and stupid. If I were you, I'd kill myself." The author herself was frequently told that she was supposedly a 'millstone' around her mother's neck and was branded a 'bitch' in front of the entire school for a childish mistake. Even the family dog was not spared from this tyranny; as Roy describes, her beloved Alsatian, Dido, was shot for the crime of mating with a common street dog.
This private education in tyranny seems to have provided the raw material for her fiction. Now that I'm revisiting The God of Small Things, I cannot help but see the connection between its obsessive focus on the arbitrary 'Love Laws' that govern who can be loved and the shadow of a childhood ruled by a mother's equally arbitrary whims. Similarly, the sanctuary for the broken and the marginalized in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness reads as a direct, literary wish-fulfillment of Arundhati Roy's own youth as a child 'without an address,' perpetually denied a safe home.

One of the memoir's most telling sections deals with her abrupt pivot from celebrated novelist to public enemy, beginning with her essay against India's nuclear tests, 'The End of Imagination.' Her memoir makes it clear that this was no great leap in regards to her personal life. Her subsequent essays: on the colossal fraud of the Narmada Dam project, on the American wars, on the rise of Hindu nationalism are not a departure from her art but a continuation of it. The memoir reveals that her career as a polemicist is, to some extent, the war of the nursery carried on by other means. She deploys the same scrutiny, often sarcastic, that she once reserved for her family against the pompous absurdities of national policy, a tactic that culminated in the Supreme Court of India putting her on trial for the 'criminal ramifications of sarcasm.'

Yet, to frame Roy's public life as solely a reaction against her mother is to miss the profound ambivalence that gives the memoir its power. The book's first chapter concludes with the line, "She was my shelter and my storm," and later, Roy mourns her mother as "a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject." This duality tells us that the causal chain is not a simple, linear one where private trauma produces public rage. It is a dialectic.

Roy's public defiance is not simply a continuation of her private war, but also an internalization and redeployment of her mother's own spirit. Mary Roy, after all, was herself a feminist icon who took on the patriarchal establishment. Arundhati Roy, in her turn, takes on the colossal injustices of the state. She is simultaneously fighting against her mother's private tyranny and fighting with her mother's public spirit of rebellion. She battles the 'Gods of Big Things' using the weapons of defiance she inherited from the woman who was her first and most formative adversary. Her activism is, therefore, not a mere reaction to trauma, but a deeply ambivalent inheritance.

Roy's method of using the self as a lens for social critique places her in the company of Annie Ernaux, the French Nobel winner, who has perfected a form of autosociobiography. Ernaux's entire oeuvre is a clinical, detached excavation of her own life, her working-class origins, her illegal abortion, her sexuality, her shame; to reveal the larger social and political forces that shape a generation. For Ernaux, writing is a political act, opening our eyes to social inequality. And for this purpose she uses language as 'a knife'. Roy, in a similar vein, uses the intensely personal battlefield of her childhood not merely for catharsis, but as an ethnological study of power. However, while Ernaux wields her 'knife' with the precision of a surgeon, employing a 'l'écriture plate,' Roy's instrument is a blazing torch, illuminating the emotional landscape of power with a fiery, lyrical, and impassioned voice.

In her memoir, Roy recounts a chilling episode where, after the publication of The God of Small Things, her mother confronted her about a scene Roy believed to be pure fiction, one in which the fighting parents pushed their young twins back and forth, shouting, "You take them, I don't want them." Her mother's curt confirmation, "No, it's not fiction," forces Roy to confront the unstable ground of her own memory as she writes, "Most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination - and that we may not be the best arbiters of which is which." It is a direct confession of unreliability, an admission that the ground of her own memory is unstable.

This places Roy's memoir in an interesting dialogue with Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending which is a masterclass in the fallibility of memory. Barnes's protagonist, Tony Webster, lives a life cushioned by what he believes to be a settled and accurate recollection of his past, only to be confronted in his sixties with a vicious letter he wrote as a young man, a letter whose contents he had completely repressed and rewritten in his own mind. This confrontation forces him to accept that "what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed." Roy's moment of revelation, when her mother confirms a traumatic memory she had convinced herself was 'fiction' is a real-life echo of Barnes's fictional conceit. It validates her narrative choice, suggesting that the only honest way to represent a life is not through a seamless account, but through a treacherous 'soup' from which it is made.

And so, she instructs the reader: "Read this book as you would a novel. It makes no larger claim." The late literary theorist Roland Barthes argued for the author's 'death' to liberate the text from the tyranny of its creator's intent. In this memoir, Roy seems to perform the act on herself. But does she truly abdicate her authority?

By confessing her own unreliability, she executes a brilliantly paradoxical maneuver. It is a highly conscious authorial act that, instead of killing the author, recasts her as a different kind of god: one who presides over the 'soup of memory and imagination' and serves as the sole, unassailable arbiter of its truth. In asking us to read her life as a novel, she claims the absolute sovereignty of the novelist. It is not an act of abdication, but an assertion of artistic control, allowing her to tell her story on her own terms, immune to the conventional demands for factual fidelity.