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This is the first memoir by the acclaimed Indian writer and political activist Arundhati Roy, best-known for her Booker-prize-winning novel The God of Small Things. It is the account of a remarkable and difficult childhood which was dominated by Arundhati’s formidable mother, Mary Roy.

This was a time in South India when women had very proscribed roles, and Mary Roy challenged them profoundly:
‘In that conservative, stifling little South Indian town, where, in those days, women were only allowed the option of cloying virtue – or its affectation – my mother conducted herself with the edginess of a gangster.’

Mary Roy’s achievements are extraordinary - she founded a co-educational school which challenged sexist gender roles, and she brought a legal challenge which gave South Indian women equal inheritance rights with men. But at home, as Arundhati reveals, she’s cruel and bullying; she hits her children and belittles them constantly. At 18, Arundhati left home and didn’t see or speak to her mother for seven years. But when Mary Roy died in 2022, Arundhati was distraught, and even a ‘little ashamed’ at the intensity of her loss. In an attempt to make sense of their relationship, she began to write Mother Mary Comes to Me.

In this third episode, Arundhati is sent away to boarding school at the age of 13. She misses her beloved dog Dido more than she misses her mother or brother. But when she returns home for the holidays, the dog is not there:
‘Mrs Roy had had her shot. Because she mated with an unknown street dog. It was a kind of honour killing. Dido’s kennel stood there empty. I wanted to live in it. I didn’t, of course. I would have risked being shot, too.’
Meanwhile Mrs Roy’s new school goes from strength to strength and expands into a campus of its own. The architect who designs the new buildings, Laurence Wilfred Baker, inspires Arundhati to apply to architecture school in Delhi, and so: ‘starting at the age of 16, I gradually, deliberately, transformed myself into somebody else.’

Read by Shaheen Khan

Produced and abridged by Elizabeth Burke

Studio Production and Sound Design by Jon Calver

Executive Producer: Sara Davies

Photo courtesy of Arundhati Roy

A Loftus Media production for ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Radio 4

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