A history of trauma and reconciliation

May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month.

This memorable sentence is the start of Arundhati Roy’s wonderful The God of Small Things, and anyone who has read it knows or has assumed the novel contains the broad outlines of Roy’s own personal history. A pair of children, one girl and one boy, living in an old house in Kerala on the banks of the Meenachil River. Their divorced mother lives with them in this Ayamenem house, and their Rhodes scholar uncle lives nearby. All this was indeed part of Roy’s life.

Yet GoST is a novel, and beyond these broad strokes, reality diverges considerably from fiction. At the heart of that novel is the mother’s relationship with Velutha, a “Parayan”. Roy’s new memoir (written after her mother’s death) takes pains to point out that this did not happen with Roy’s real-life mother, Mary Roy.

Mary Roy’s own story is quite dramatic enough without a forbidden love affair. She married early to escape her own father’s rages and physical violence, and ended up in an Assam tea estate with a husband who was alcoholic. They had two children, Lalith Kumar Christopher and Susanna Arundhati. When Arundhati was a year old, Mary Roy decided to leave her husband; lacking other options, they went to Ooty where they were temporarily allowed to live in part of a rental house owned by Mary Roy’s father. Alone and isolated with two small children and no money:

My mother unloaded the burden of her quarrels and the daily dose of indignity that she had to endure onto my brother and me. We were the only safe harbour she had. Her temper, already bad, became irrational and uncontrollable.

For the next several decades, Arundhati walked on eggshells around her mother, unable to gauge her moods in advance, emotionally shattered by Mary Roy’s slashing comments to her children and others.

We grew up between shouting and silence.

But there was much more to Mary Roy than her uncontrollable rages. She was a determined feminist. As per Syrian Christian civil law, property was inherited by sons only, but she brought a legal case against that law, and in 1986, the Indian Supreme Court ruled in her favor, changing the inheritance laws for all Syrian Christian women. Christian by birth, she largely avoided religion (“We rarely went to church”).

She was also a noted educator, founding a school in Kottayam that was co-ed (unusual for the time and place), that grew to have boarders, plenty of extracurricular activities, eventually had its own campus, and became renowed. She was far-sighted and adventurous enough to hire Laurie Baker, a proponent of local materials and regional architecture, to design the school buildings, and it is likely the most unusual campus of a Kerala school today. As the school grew and prospered, her financial status improved, but her relationship with her own children grew more distant.

I say “my mother”, but once she started the school she was no longer only my mother.

Arundhati left home right after high school and, inspired by Baker’s designs and his handsome young architectural intern (“JC” in the book), she headed to the Delhi School of Architecture. While she cut ties with her family and their funds, lived in poverty, and took part-time jobs to make ends meet, she is a bit vague about her finances, saying only that she ‘managed’ and that college fees were a lot less then than nowadays.

There were relationships: “JC” during college, a relationship that continued in Goa after graduation, but later fell apart partly under the weight of JC’s mother, who

domesticated him, took the rock’n’roll out of him, turned him into a normal Indian man with a normal Indian mother who was obsessed with her son.

Later, she meets Pradip Krishen, a filmmaker who captivates her immediately. He is married with two children, says has an open marriage, and soon drifts into a relationship with Arundhati that is both personal and professional. There are other men who may or may not be lovers, but who remain supportive of her throughout the course of this novel. She writes openly about an abortion and her desire not to have children, although she is obviously very fond of Pradip’s girls.

Arundhati’s own strong moral compass is comfortable with relationships in which marriage is irrelevant, which horrifies many including her mother. Her sympathies are always with the voiceless and wronged. As one ages, though, it is often the case that events force gray shades into the strongest black-and-white compass, and so it is with Roy. As a child, there were unsavory situations of sexual harassment by older men, but she also writes about her beloved uncle who had a predilection for quite young women. She writes with pride of her mother’s fight for equal inheritance for daughters, but finds to her horror that Pradip’s parents have left their estate to him with only small bequests to their daughters. Much to her credit, she tackles this dissonance head on in the book.

It was what all Indian families do. But here was I, daughter of a woman who had fought against this all her life.

The writing in this book is more mature, calmer, with little of the dizzying wordplay of GoST. It is reflective and analytical, self-aware, occasionally dramatic, but always thoughtfully phrased, as one might expect.

Surrounded by these stories that used fear to control us, for women in Kottayam, particularly for her girl students, Mrs Roy was the hope for escape. [..] She lit their path, she showed the way. Not so for me.

The latter third of the book largely deals with Arundhati’s nonfiction writing: her long, passionate essays about Phoolan Devi (The Great Indian Rape-Trick), the Narmada Dam, India’s nuclear tests (The End of Imagination), the US invasion of Iraq (The Algebra of Infinite Justice) and other activist issues. In this book, Roy describes how she was drawn into one struggle or another (and there must have been many nonprofit causes eager to have her involved). I found this section less interesting than the earlier part of the book. The essays stand on their own, most readers are probably already pro- or con- her positions and essays, and her descriptions of why she got involved didn’t seem to add a lot to the essays themselves.

What made for unsettling reading were the many accusations of immorality and other court cases that she was slammed with — for the ‘improper’ love affair in GoST, for trumped-up charges relating to her political activism, for ‘sedition’, for contempt… which resulted in fines, lawsuits, and jail time. Her willingness to take an open stand is admirable: no one could accuse her of being timid.

The book returns time and time again to her mother, a woman of many contradictions.

She taught me to think, then raged against my thoughts. She taught me to be free and raged against my freedom. She taught me to write and resented the author I became.

It is an unflinching, deeply personal portrayal of an intense relationship.

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