The Current - Arundhati Roy: My mother and I were like two nuclear powers

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

Her mother Mary's death left acclaimed Indian writer, author of The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy feeling "unanchored in space with no coordinates," even though she'd often been a target of Mary's wrath. Roy talks to Matt Galloway about her new memoir, "Mother Mary Comes to Me," revealing their fraught relationship, and how her mother's trailblazing character influenced Roy's writing.

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she writes that she felt heart-smashed, unanchored in space with no coordinates. And that is despite the fact that while she was alive, Mary had often tormented her daughter. As a child, Arandate was the frequent subject of her mother's rages and criticism. She left home as a teenager and didn't talk to Mary for the next seven years. Later in life, Arundate became a Booker Prize-winning author for the book, The God of Small Things, and an outspoken political critic, and eventually the two women reconnected. Now, Arundate Roy has written a memoir, chronicling that relationship and how it influenced the writer she became. That book is called Mother. Mary comes to me.

Arundate Roy joins me in our Toronto studio. Good morning. Good morning. What a real pleasure to have you here. Thank you for being here. Thank you. The first chapter of this book is titled Gangster, like not like Al. Capone gangster, but this is a gangster move. Why did you want to write about your mother, Mary Roy, the gangster? Well, because I think that she oughtn't to belong to me alone. I thought I should share her. And because despite everything that happened, she's one of the most remarkable women that I know.

More than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject. I mean, fair to say that if I had let her break me, obviously I would not have written this book. And obviously I would have had a different view. But I didn't let that happen. I left when I was very young, even though I could see that she was at least in public,

a remarkable person. And there was that lightness. And then there was the darkness, which my brother and I had to co-examined. with. Tell me about, I mean, she was a remarkable person. She was a teacher. She opened this progressive school, which became her life's work in many ways. Tell me about what she accomplished because she was a real force. So she came from this very small, very closed, tiny minority community in South India called the Syrian Christians. And then she married, as she always said,

to get away from her very cruel father, she married the first man. who asked her to marry him, who was from Bengal. And she went off with him, had two children, and then realized that he was addicted to alcohol. So she left. And she was about 31 or something or 32 with two young children, my brother and me, no money, a degree in education. And she came back down south, really broke, really ill.

She had terrible asthma. And while she was in that state, her older brother, and mother came and tried to evict her from this little cottage that we were squatting in, basically, which belonged to her cruel father who was dead by then. And that's when she realized that there's a law called the Travon Co-Christian Succession Act, which basically gives a girl a fourth of her brother's share, or $5,000 of pittance, whichever is less. Essentially, the women don't have the right to inherit anything.

You know, within a few years, she returned to Kerala. She started a little school in which my brother and I studied. But then gradually it became a very successful enterprise. And once she was settled as a person in that town, she challenged the Travancourt Christian Succession Act. And she won equal inheritance for women from the Supreme Court. How do you understand the strength that ran through her? There's a fire that's kind of at the center of that.

Yeah, I don't think we can never understand these things. There are in certain people. I know that a lot of it came from anger, from being humiliated. And from, as the book is, of course, Mother Mary comes to me from the Beatles song, Let It Be, but it's dedicated to my brother and to my mother who never said let it be. So she had a sort of headstrong, combative spirit. And even while all the humiliation that she suffered, she downloaded. to me and my brother. And yet, even as a very young child, I could see the process of where that anger came from, even though I was, and he was the object of her wrath. So while I was taking the hits, I was also protective of her. She was, I mean, she was your mother, but she was often awful to you. You write about the soul-crushing meanness that she had towards you, that your very existence, you say, seemed to enrage her. Tell me about what happened. You were six years old and you're on a plane trip with her.

I think what happened was that she went off to live on this remote tea estate in Assam, where my father was an assistant manager. She had her son, my brother, and very soon after that, I came along. And she told me many times that she had tried her best to abort me because she didn't want another child. And of course, as an adult now, I can sort of. of understand. She felt so trapped and awful. So she sort of raged against the idea of motherhood in a way. I mean, this incident that you're asking about was she had an older sister

who was, you know, in some ways, the perfect Syrian Christian woman. She had a perfect marriage and perfect children and a perfect whatever. And my mother, the younger sister, was broken in every way and her old sister asked her to go to madras to look after her children my cousins for a while because they were traveling and my mother's sister's husband was a pilot and he had access to these free air tickets so we came back on a plane i mean we'd never been on a plane obviously and um i asked my mother why how how how how how how how how how how how how how are you both sisters because your older sisters so much thinner than you? Because my mother, she was a severe asthmatic and she was on steroids.

For me, it was not a, you know, thin and fat was not a judgment or anything. It was just curiosity. An observation. An observation. And my mother just turned on me in a rage and mimicked my baby way of speaking. And so in the book I say that I felt like, you know, shit. me out of a picture book and torn me up and I just sort of swirled away like water down a sink and disappeared but then in a little while she turns around and says you know I'm your mother

and your father and I love you double and so there's always this constant you know unexpectedness of what was going to come flying at you which is why you know very quickly in my life I learned that the safest place is the most dangerous. And I grew up to be a person that does not trust safety and therefore often blows it up myself. What did writing give you in that context? You say in the book that as a child, it's all you ever thought you would be as a writer,

that nothing made you forget the world like reading did, nothing else filled you up, nothing else emptied you out. What did writing give you? This dark part of my mother also had another side, which was that she is the one who introduced me to literature, to reading. Even while we were living in this little village on the river, we would get a kind of carton of about 200 books or something every few months. And she encouraged me to read.

And to me, in that village, there was no sort of shop or TV or telephone or anything. You know, it was just the river and the fish and the birds. And then there was literature, you know, which transports you to another. space. And she also, as a teacher, encouraged me to write, not mimicking what I read, but to try and write about what happened to me, what happened to you yesterday or whatever it was. And before we came to Kerala, we were in this little town called Uti, where I had a very cruel Australian missionary teacher called Miss Mitton. She'd keep telling me, I can see Satan in your eyes, which maybe whatever it was.

So I remember my mother saying right about what happened in your class today. And I wrote, I hate Miss Mitton. And whenever I see her, I see rags and I think her knickers are torn. And that was, I think, my first essay. So my mother taught me how to sort of let the blood flow in my veins. by writing about what happened. But then she raged against the writer I became, not because of what I was writing,

but the fame and the, she was proud of me as her student, but she's a little edgy about the daughter being famous or a Booker Prize winner or whatever. The writer you became won the Booker Prize. I mean, the God of Small Things is, when you were writing it, you say, it was the thing that you weren't supposed to be writing.

You were involved in other things, you were working in screenplays and films and interested in architecture. And then there's this other thing that is kind of simmering away in the background. Well, what happened was that I left home when I was 16 to join the school of architecture because I got very interested in architecture because of the architect who was designing my mother's school, but also because I realized by the time as a teenager that I needed to do something where I could support myself because I knew that I could not last. at home for long. So I joined the School of Architecture. I worked and I paid my way through

college. Then I worked in cinema as a screenplay writer, but I longed to not say just exterior day, you know, river. I wanted to describe my river and almost like I wanted to write this stubbornly visual but unfilmable book, like an anti-screenplay that was visual. And I said I was writing the thing I wasn't supposed to be writing because I had written a proposal for another film, which was also accepted by this production company. And I was supposed to be writing that screenplay. But I just couldn't do it because this book was writing itself. So I was writing what I wasn't supposed to be writing. Did you know when you were writing it that it was great? No, no, no. I didn't at all. Other people knew. People read it

and immediately, I mean, where they're fighting over the book, the money's coming at you, and the tsunami is beginning. No, but that happened, like, almost, it took me almost four years to write it, and by the time I finished it, I felt like a lunatic in the basement, you know, who had written something, and I didn't know whether anybody would even understand. I thought this would be, like, you know, read by 200 people. You know, it was about this little village. Even Delhi was so far away, and I didn't think that anybody.

would be that interested in what was going on in this little village where I grew up, you know. Hey there, I'm David Kahn. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you got to know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighborhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401. Check out, this is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. What was it like when a lot of people were really interested in it?

I mean, I use that word tsunami. That's kind of how fame came at you, right? Yeah, it was literally almost overnight, and I was amazed and happy, of course, but also as a pretty spiky character, you know, because I had sort of lived, you know, literally on nothing for so long and I thought about things. And so when all these, well, white folks were being so interested and I was very worried about being patronized and, you know, some colonial thing would happen. And they would be like, I love India and I love, you know, masala and all this.

I just was like, I'm not up for that. So I, I, I, David Godwin, this agent from London kept calling and saying, Don't sign anything. Don't sign anything. I'm coming. And I thought now if he comes and says all this to me, I'm just going to say no. But he came in and he said, look, I don't know anything about India. I've never been here before. I didn't know whether Arundati is the name of a man or a woman. But when I read this book, I felt like someone had shot some heroin up my arm. So I said, oh, okay, you can be my agent. Oh my goodness. And then it just went off on its own, the book. Did you come to, I mean, not regret writing the book, given the fame, but you talk in the book about your relationship with money, for example, that you get a lot of money and the easiest thing is to give it away to other people. It's a book that changed your life, but do you wonder about whether that was a good thing?

Of course, I wonder, not about writing it, but you know what happens to a person and especially a person like me who was always, not always, but I had by the time, I wrote the god of small things, I had a pretty strong political views about things. And suddenly I could feel this pressure on me to become this commodified, glittering little sequence, you know, sequin moving from one literature festival to another. That person is that you describe it in the book. They wanted me to become that person.

And even when I won the Booker Prize, I remember I could literally see the gilded cage, you know, inviting me to come in and sit down. And I was a little bad mannered up there on the stage and when people were saying, what's your next book? And I said, I don't know if I'll write another book. And I won't write a book just because I won a prize. I'll write it if I have a book to write. And the kind of attention that's focused on you,

it separates you from your friends, from your lovers, from your sweethearts. It makes you, it blows up your personal life in a way which is so hard to take, you know. And then the money, I wanted to share it. But, you know, even that is quite a dangerous enterprise. You can't just throw it around. But so it took me a long time to figure out how to use this money politically.

And of course, all this came to an end, all this dilemma, because just a few months after I won the Booker, and there was all this adoration of me, Sometimes it wasn't about the book. It was about just being this Indian woman and, you know, this national pride thing was happening. And then within months, the extreme Hindu right won the elections came to power and conducted a series of nuclear tests. And the public language, the permissible public language in the country just changed. Overnight.

I mean, people were just saying the most vile things about and the strutting. and the idea that you're a nuclear power, and it's a Hindu power sort of thing. And people surprised me, you know, artists and writers, all of them joining this. And I was in the public eye at that point, and I realized that keeping quiet was as political as speaking out. And I wrote my first political essay

called The End of Imagination, where I spoke about, what does it do to your imagination, to your collective imagination, to have these weapons that can just, and highlight the earth, even if you don't use them, what does it do to you? And that's why I called it the end of imagination, which, of course, kicked me off my pedestal and... Smash the gilded cage.

And I was pretty relieved, you know, because I'm not made for that. People changed how they referred to you. You were no longer the novelist. You were an activist. I was an activist. I was an anti-national. I was, you know, go to Pakistan. Why are you here and all this stuff.

I'd heard you say that you never accepted the added term of activists because it reduces what writers used to be. It is our job to be unpopular. What does that mean? You know, I was rather surprised when I started writing about this dark tunnel that India was entering, you know, whether it was nuclear weapons, whether it was the building of these huge dams, whether it was the displacement of communities, whether it was privatization and corporatization. and I would write about them and people would be like now you're an activist. I said historically writers have written about these things. But now in this new world where a writer and their books are commodified and supposed to make people comfortable in some ways, the discomfort that my work was causing made people say that's a separate thing from writing, you know?

And so I'd say, well, writer-activist to me sounds like a sofa bed, you know, whatever. You know, but why is it not writing, you know? It went on for 20 years, you know, going into the forest, walking with the comrades, the guerrillas fighting, you know, mining and indigenous people being, having their villages burnt. And I was like, but this is what writers are supposed to do. why is it so hard for you to understand that? Because of the risk, presumably, that it puts people in, right?

I mean, this has put you in grave danger. I don't think it's about the risk. I think it's about, you know, about making people uncomfortable. But there are, can I ask you just about the real risks? I mean, in the book you talk about going to jail very briefly, but you're facing risks now. The government has threatened terrorism charges for comments that you've made about Kashmir back in 2010.

And there is this cloud that kind of exists. I don't know if it's above you, but certainly around you. And I just wonder what that's like to live with. It's not just me. You know, there are my very close friends who are all in prison, these book tours and these events that I do. In a way, it's a way of creating a constituency, a literature of people who read as those who protect you in some ways,

because that's really all I have. Otherwise, it's not just me, as I keep saying, there are so many people who, and my book has stories about them, who have been killed, who have been jailed, who have been smashed in some way by what's going on. And that, you know, the business that's happening in the U.S. today started in India in 2014. I mean, came to a peak in India in 2014, but before that, the mass killing of Muslims, all of that that started in Gujarat under Modi's rule in 2000. And so the point is that you do have to find ways of continuing to write. Although you can't be childish about it, you can't pretend that you can just say what you like because you can't anymore. At the same time, if you don't address it, then you put yourself in prison.

They don't put you in prison, you put yourself in prison. And that is the worst kind of prison for someone like me. Your mother never asked you to back down in terms of what you wrote. She didn't have a leg to stand on on that one, you know, because she never backed down herself. No. I mean, your book begins and it ends with her death. And you talk about how you felt almost embarrassed or shocked by the intensity of the response that you had to her death. What was that about?

Yeah. That was because, you know, I mean, the one person we haven't spoken about so far is. my brother, who, together with me, actually endured that violence and that darkness. And for him, it was unredeeming because her public battles were so much about women. And so not as a daughter, but as a woman, there was something redeeming there for me. In some ways, it's hurtful for him to see my ambiguity towards her, because for him it's clear that And he says this, you know, I don't understand. I don't understand why you're so upset.

She treated nobody as badly as she treated you. And I say, well, I think it's you who held that trophy. So there is something humiliating about being so upset about somebody who did a lot of terrible things to you. And yet she said she loved you double. And yet she said, so that's what I mean. I know that she was just. of damaged person who could not express love even if she felt it. And sometimes it came out very destructively. And I think the difference also between my brother and me is that I just fled.

You know, when I was 16, I moved to Delhi and by the time I was 18, I stopped going home, I stopped taking money. So when I remet her after a while, I remet her as an adult, as an equal. And for a long time, the tension between us was that she knew that if anyone could stand up to her or put her down, it was me. And I knew that I would never do it because I loved her and respected her too much. So one of her students in her school asked me, what was your relationship with your mother like? And I said, well, it was the very respectful relationship of two nuclear powers. Her headstone says, dreamer, warrior, teacher? Yeah, when she died, the thing is that because of this conflict with the church, because of the inheritance law, but also because of the fact that she married outside the community and divorced, she didn't have, we didn't know what to do, like what was the funeral we were supposed to have, apart from the fact that she was such a figure by then, she had educated generations of students, love was pouring in from feminists, from her students.

So then I decided that I would design what I call a grove instead of a grave for her, full of living things like a little trough with frogs and fish and water lilies and all the things that she loved. And there's a sort of slab, old stone slab that slants into that trough. And without even debating in much, my brother and I decided we would say dreamer, warrior, teacher, but not mother because those were not the story. stripes that she fought for in her life. This is a remarkable book. It's an incredible story. Can I just ask personally, Lou, what are you working on now? What are you thinking about writing now?

You're never supposed to ask writers that, but I'm going to ask that anyway. Well, you can ask that. I mean, one of the strangest things that someone told me was the reason that I love your writing is because you write is they've already killed you. And so, but I mean, I do sort of just write and I, I empty myself. I don't have, you know, little storage banks. It all comes out.

Where I have other things stored up to write. I'm not like that. So I'm completely blank, completely empty. I don't know whether I'll write another book or whether I'll do something else. I don't know. I don't like to know. I think that's a kind of freedom also. We'll look forward to whatever you do.

It's a real pleasure to meet you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Erin Dati Roy's new memoir is called Mother Mary. comes to me. She is remarkable. One of those people, you can't quite believe you had the opportunity to talk to. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name's Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.