Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me ( Scribner, Sept 2025) is the most vulnerable book she has written. She first became known to the world in 1997, when her debut novel The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize and was translated into dozens of languages. Instead of following it up with another novel, she turned to the front lines of India’s deep-seated conflicts: standing with villagers in the Narmada valley protesting dam-induced displacement; exposing mass graves and disappearances in Kashmir; spending time in Maoist-controlled forests of central India; and walking through Delhi’s graveyards with ( transvestites) and the homeless. She opposed India’s 1998 nuclear tests, chronicled the rise of Hindu nationalism, and dissected the sweep of global capitalism, making her one of India’s most visible and polarising public intellectuals.
Roy now faces the possibility of prison. In June 2024, Delhi’s Lieutenant Governor cleared the way for her prosecution under India’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, a law used to detain people for years without trial. The case stems from a remark she made at a conference in 2010, when she said Kashmir had “never been an integral part of India.” That single sentence, spoken fourteen years ago, has been revived in Modi’s India to charge her under anti-terror legislation.
And now she has turned inward, to the figure who made and unmade her: her mother, Mary.
Roy was born in Shillong in 1961, a hill station in the Khasi Hills of northeast India, once a centre of the colonial tea trade. Her father, Rajib Roy, a Bengali tea planter, was unreliable and absent. When Arundhati was two, her parents divorced. Mary took her children, Arundhati and her brother Lalith, back to Kerala.
In Kerala, in her ancestral home Mary found herself homeless. Under the Travancore Christian Succession Act, Syrian Christian daughters had no equal right to inherit. Facing hostility from her own family, she left again, moving the children to Ooty in Tamil Nadu, to her father’s house. There too, the law denied daughter’s inheritance and her brothers pressed their claim. Mary was ordered to vacate.
Roy remembers the panic of that day: she and Lalith running in the dusk as their mother searched for a lawyer. A blur of fear, small hands clutched, the sound of doors shutting. Mary found an advocate who argued that the Travancore law did not apply in Tamil Nadu. They stayed. It was a reprieve. Later, Mary would take the case all the way to the Supreme Court and win, securing inheritance rights for Christian women in Kerala.
A single mother with no security, in Kottayam Mary founded a school —Corpus Christi, later renamed Pallikoodam—to support herself and her children. Abandoned by family and community, let down by tradition, and solely responsible for Arundhati and Lalith, she turned her frustration on the children, sometimes cruelly. Arundhati remembers being left by the roadside. Her dog shot. Lalith called ugly and stupid. She herself dismissed as thin, dark, wrong—the opposite of what a Syrian Christian girl was meant to be (New Yorker). She has said: “One half of me was taking the pain, the other half was taking notes” (FT). It was the beginning of her doubleness: the child who endured and the writer who recorded.
Arundhati was a student in a school where her mother, the founder, raging and with nothing to lose was unafraid of spectacle. When boys mocked girls about their changing bodies, Mary called an assembly and held up her own bra. “This is a bra. All women wear them. Your mothers wear them. Your sisters will too. If it excites you so much, you are welcome to keep mine.” It was outrageous, humiliating, liberating. For her daughter it was another reminder that in Mary’s world, discipline and rebellion were the same thing.
Mary was brilliant, original, often severe. Roy writes of her childhood: “My knees were full of scars and cuts—a sign of my wild, imperfect, fatherless life.”
The school Mary built still stands. Originally called Corpus Christi, renamed Pallikoodam, it remains one of Kerala’s most respected progressive schools. Arundhati has said she is not only her mother’s daughter but a product of that school and her mother was proud of that. Her mother had unmade her with cruelty but also made her, showing her that survival depended on justice and fire.
At 16, after a terrible row, Roy left Kottayam and did not return for years. She enrolled at the Delhi School of Planning and Architecture, lived in hostels and rented rooms, worked underpaid as an architect, wrote scripts, appeared in experimental films, and fought poverty. She has said she left in order to go on loving her mother—staying would have destroyed her. But she also learned that, like her mother, she could survive without support. She too could fight systemic injustice.
In 1997 Roy published The God of Small Things. It returned to Ayemenem, the village of her childhood, and told of caste, forbidden love, and family fracture. It won the Booker Prize, sold in millions, and was translated worldwide. Overnight she was famous. Mary Roy checked herself into hospital to read it, afraid of what it might reveal. Success for Arundhati came with dread, “as though someone is being beaten in the other room” (New Yorker).
Roy refused the role of career novelist. Instead she turned to essays. The End of Imagination opposed India’s nuclear tests. The Algebra of Infinite Justice dissected global capitalism after 9/11. An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire explored imperial violence in everyday life. Listening to Grasshoppers charted the rise of Hindu nationalism. Capitalism: A Ghost Story revealed how corporations remade India. Later these were gathered in My Seditious Heart.
The New Yorker called the essays “dispatches of fury and precision.” They made her India’s most polarising intellectual: charged with sedition, denounced in Parliament, honoured abroad.
In 2017 she returned to fiction with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Set in Delhi and Kashmir, it sprawled across graveyards and war zones.
Mary Roy lived to see all this. She admired her daughter’s brilliance but never openly celebrated her success. In later years she continued to run Pallikoodam in Kottayam, the school she had built from nothing, while keeping her sharp independence. She died there in September 2022, aged 89. At her funeral, former students remembered her as fierce, uncompromising, original—the same qualities her daughter had turned into literature.
Now Arundhati Roy has written Mother Mary Comes to Me. “I didn’t want my mother to destroy me, but I didn’t want to destroy her either,” she says (FT). The Guardian called it “brave and absorbing,” Mary Roy “shelter and storm.” The Financial Times praised its candour. Vogue India called it “the book Roy has been writing all her life, without yet knowing it.” Vulture described it as “a rebel writer’s first revolt—against her mother—and her latest, against silence itself.”
The book will resonate to everyone living on a border - of language, culture, geography.
I was born in Guwahati, close to Shillong where Roy was born, the hills binding the two cities. Like her, I grew up moving, never rooted. My father’s army postings took us to Shimla, Chandigarh, Bangalore, Delhi, then to Bhopal, my mother’s home, and to Aligarh, my father’s city. With each move I learned a new language but belonged to none.
My father was from Aligarh, a Muslim city, educated at the university founded by my ancestor, a Begum of Bhopal, where he turned toward right-wing Hinduism. He married my mother, a Muslim from South India whose family traced its roots to tribal Afghanistan. Through her I had cousins in Pakistan. We travelled everywhere, but like the children of lovers, us siblings —more witness than participants in their gilded lives of rose gardens and officers’ messes, abandoned but loved ultimately enriched as we learned that each life has a duty to create its own beauty.
At the Jaipur Literature Festival, when people asked where in India I was from, I had no answer. I said Trinidad, and for the first time it felt like relief. When Roy asked in an essay, “Is India Indian?” (The End of Imagination), I recognised myself.
Not belonging, I have come to see, is not only wound but gift. To live on the margins allows all writers and thinkers to connect with those who live outside belonging. In journalism or in fiction, the struggle is the same globally: to witness, to make visible, to fight for those living on the margins.
It cannot compare myself to Roy as a writer. That would be absurd. But I can say her book echoes with everyone who has lived at the edges, divided, half-belonging. I hope she wins the Nobel Prize not only for herself but for all who have turned pain into words. She would be carrying us with her.
