Let it be

Arundhati Roy's new memoir, "Mother Mary Comes To Me" led me to ponder my own relationship with my

To say that I’ve been reading Arundhati Roy’s new memoir, “Mother Mary Comes To Me,” would be an understatement. I have been devouring her words like a tiger on fresh kill.

So enraptured am I by Arundhati’s recounting of her tumultuous relationship with her mother that I am now listening to the audiobook because it is read by the author herself. I didn’t want to miss the peaks and valleys of her sentences, the words on which she rests, if only for a second more. I especially liked hearing her say the word “because,” in her educated Indian English accent. The anticipation of the why became that much greater when she paused before telling us.

The world first came to know of Arundhati (Apologies, Ms. Roy, but I feel I know you well enough now to call you by your first name, and that, too, with the Bangla pronunciation: Orundhuti.) in 1997 when she published her debut novel, “The God of Small Things.” She became the first Indian writer to win the prestigious Booker Prize and made all of India, a nation that she would in later years come to harshly criticize, proud of her literary accomplishment.

We are a mere year apart in age, but I wanted to be her when I grew up. I followed her career closely as she began writing essays, many of them polemics that were overtly activist in nature; as she became a heroine for feminists fighting for change in my homeland. She was smart, wickedly witty and beautiful with wild curls and eyes that could transport you to another world.

Her latest book was widely anticipated. It was a memoir, after all, but also because her mother, Mary Roy, was no ordinary person. Mary Roy founded a school that developed national acclaim and later filed a legal case against her family that went all the way to India’s Supreme Court and resulted in the end of an inheritance law that discriminated against women.

But perhaps people like me were so eager to read Roy’s memoir because in my opinion, nothing she has written since “God of Small Things” has ever been able to match its artistry. And so, I dove in heart first to read this deeply detailed and intimate tale of a most unusual woman and her equally nonconventional family. I use those adjectives because even though Arundhati and I grew up in the same India of the 1960s and ‘70s, my childhood could not have been more different than hers. My relationship with my mother might have been unimaginable to young Arundhati and Mrs. Roy, which is how Arundhati addressed her.

Mrs. Roy was Arundhati’s “shelter and her storm.” I thought of my mother only as my shelter; never my storm. And while, perhaps, she was never the latter, to say that she was solely the former does not seem right anymore.

Mrs. Roy, though a sickly person suffering from asthma, lived a long life. Fierce and formidable, Mrs. Roy spoke words of wisdom but could never just let it be. She was 89 when she died in 2022.

My mother, Kalyani Basu, (born Ray) was a simple woman who preferred always to let it be. She died in 2001 three months shy of her 69th birthday. But really, she died 19 years before that when she suffered a stroke so severe, that by all accounts, she should not have survived. But she did, though half her body was paralyzed, her face, contorted and her speech, slurred. She lost her cognitive abilities and at times, I faced a woman who looked like my mother but was no longer so. She was no longer the person who had raised me, comforted me, blanketed me with love. She had been the most patient person I had known but after the stroke, she became belligerent like a spoiled child not getting her way. She had always put herself last in our family. Now she was first. She had been my moon whose quiet glow showed me the way. But now she was like the sun around whom we, the planets, orbited. I strained to look deep inside her to see if I could find my mother.

Years later, after my parents moved back to Kolkata and had settled in their flat on Ballygunj Circular Road, I would visit for weeks, sometimes months at a time, especially when Alzheimer’s took hold of my father and deteriorated his health. By then, my mother had become dependent on me. We had switched roles and I was the one telling her what to eat, what to wear, what to do.

I haven’t fully reckoned yet with Arundhati’s vivid descriptions of her mother’s “soul-crushing meanness” and abuse. How Mrs. Roy kicked her out of the van and left her by the side of the road. How she had no qualms about striking Arundhati or beating her brother. How Arundhati was often the target of Mrs. Roy’s rage. How Mrs. Roy mimicked her.

“I felt myself shrinking from my own skin and draining away, swirling like water down a sink until I was gone,” Arundhati writes in the book.

And yet, she confesses that she would hardly be the writer she is without her mother: “She taught me to be free and raged against my freedom. She taught me to write and resented the author I became.”

I cannot pretend to understand Arundhati’s complex and clearly, very troubled relationship with her mother. But I know this: I, too, would not be a writer had it not been for my mother.

After the stroke, my mother needed around-the-clock attention and I put my scholastic plans on hold to help take care of her. It was 1982 and MTV had just gone on the air. I sat with my mother, lying in the hospital bed we installed in my parents’ bedroom on the top floor of our late 1960s split-level house, watching the same music videos over and over again. Video killed the radio star.

Days turned to weeks and weeks turned to months. A friend suggested that I should perhaps try writing part time for the Florida Flambeau, a small, feisty newspaper that was a beacon of the old journalism adage: Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

I had never considered a career in journalism until then. My dream had always been to join the diplomatic corps or work for a United Nations agency and to that end, I had planned on pursuing a higher degree in political science or international relations. But from the moment I entered the newsroom, I was smitten. How wondrous to have a job that required me to converse with all sorts of people and then write about them. I, like Arundhati, took to the pen to try and right the many wrongs of the world.

I thought about the twists and turns of my life as I plunged into Arundhati’s book and read about hers. I was never a believer of fate or destiny until the day that I considered myself old enough to take stock of my years. And then I was that believer.

Arundhati took me back to the India of my childhood. Of simple things like black Bakelight rotary dial phones, roadside chai stalls, the smell of bidis wafting through narrow galis and coconut palms swaying in the monsoons. I, too, relished a hot afternoon spent in the cool of a cinema hall, escaping our uncomfortable existences without electricity or refrigeration. It is, after all, the small things that occupy a big part of our hearts.

This week, as I finished listening to Arundhati read her book, after I had already read her book, I found myself:

Listening to the Beatles on an eternal loop.

Wondering if I would have been a good mother.

Being defiant.

Longing to smoke a bidi.

Wrapping myself in one of my mother’s saris, nearly six yards of hand-woven cotton. I swear it still bears her smell, these 24 long years later.