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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 fourth episode, Arundhati is studying architecture in Delhi. She still goes home in the holidays, and her mother has become an influential public figure:
‘She began to speak out in public about the trauma she had endured as a child and young woman. She spoke of her father’s violence towards her. Mrs Roy publicly said she married the first man who proposed to her to get away from her father…’
At home, though, Mrs Roy becomes increasingly volatile. She screams at Arundhati, calling her ‘whore’ and ‘prostitute’.
‘At the end of the holidays, I returned to Delhi and I wrote and told her that I loved her but wouldn’t be coming home again and I would no longer need money from her. Her responses were so insulting that I stopped reading them.’

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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