Mother Mary comes to Me : Arundhati Roy (3.5/5.0)

 

4 min read

Arundhati Roy's mother was not a nice person. This was despite the fact that she might have been a good person, who did a lot of good for the society. She was mean, petty, vindictive and treated those close to her in the worst possible fashion. Her watching from a distance, as her brother was being evicted from the only home he knew, was classic bollywood villain style. To use the author's own terminology - her mother operated like a gangster in the small town in Kerala where she eventually settled.. Like most gangsters, all the way upto The Godfather, she had a tragic backstory which possibly made her the way she was. 

When I was reading VS Naipaul's biography, by Patrick French, I was overcome by a sense of deja vu (or the equivalent of having read this somewhere). Of course I did, because his most famous work A House for Mr. Biswas was based on his life or rather the life of his father. A similar sensation will come over a reader as they read this book, having already read Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things. This time I was aware beforehand, as most of us are, that GOST was based on a fictionalized twist in her mother's life story.

Mary Roy grew up in a privileged, anglicized syrian christian household ruled by a tyrannical patriarch. To escape, she married the first man who proposed to her, a quintessential planter in Assam. This was not very helpful as the guy turned out to be a hopeless alcoholic and in Mary Roy's terms a 'nothing man'. She left him and moved with her children to a family owned ramshackle house in Ooty, from where her mother and brother (an Oxford Rhodes scholar) try evicting her. Why they do this is not explained very clearly in the book, specially as Mary Roy subsequently depends on her mother and brother to support her family. This turbulence in Mary Roy's life  means that her children grow up with an extremely insecure upbringing. This is not helped by Mary Roy's own brusque behaviour with the children.

From this background Mary Roy starts a small school which eventually becomes the legendary Pallikoodam school in Kottayam and establishes her as one of the most respected and feared people in that town. She also challenges the norms of Syrian Catholic community in Kerala and fights for the daughter's share in family inheritance. She wins a spectacular victory in the Supreme Court. It is possible that for a single woman to make a mark in the patriarchal society of a small town she had to be a gangster.       

In many ways the author's own life has echoes of her mother's life. Arundhati Roy also, in a sense,  ran away from home. On top of her insecure and 'on the ledge' childhood, she also had a desperate hand-to-mouth vagabond  existence in Delhi. This phase of her life would have been tragic but can be viewed, as it turned out well in the end,  as a sex  and drugs (rock and roll - not sure ?) youthful adventure. While Mary Roy directed her energies making things and changing the world, Arundhati Roy's rebelliousness has taken a different route.  The combination of her literary success and  resulting earnings gave her the freedom to become a full time rebel for all seasons. An international champion of the oppressed, more comfortable opposing things than proposing solutions, like an Indian Greta Thunberg. Like the proverbial apple that doesn't fall far from the tree she has become a gangster in her own right.

In writing this book, the author book has tried to be as honest as possible, her relatives have specially been given the full benefit of her honesty. Her own personal life is not as clearly explained as theirs. Her instinct of running away from anything that approaches a regular stable (boring ?) personal relationship is not addressed. Her own class privileges and biases might have been glossed over as well. These minor points aside  I think this memoir is an good read about the lives of two interesting women.

Spy Catcher : Peter Wright (4.0/5.0)

 

2 min read

The word spy, specially a British spy, invariably evokes images of James Bond. You are thinking fast cars, glamorous women, assassinations. This book tells us that the reality is much more mundane and also far more sinister.

Peter Wright's father worked on radio technology directly with Marconi. From that privileged background somehow he meandered into poverty, working on a farm to landing at Oxford and eventually  starting  his life as a scientist for MI5 working on gadgets, specially radio devices. Eventually he rose up the ranks to be the assistant director.

This book is an overtly frank memoir of his times in the british secret services. On release, the book was banned in England, but not scotland.

The first thing that the book lays bare is the sheer scale of the govt snooping in Britain. It was not episodic or targetted but pervasive. The british intelligence services tried to plant listening devices in as many embassies , hotels conference rooms as possible. For e.g. when a former colonial state was negotiating its independence it was par for course for their british counterparts to expect MI5 to get a transcript of the other side's internal discussions. Things like breaking and entering also seem to be standard operating procedure.

The book spends a significant amount of time discussing the Cambridge Five and the impact of that scandal on the british intelligence services and their relations with the US intelligence services  CIA and FBI. The author makes the explosive claim that his boss and MI5 head Roger Hollis was also a soviet spy. He , strangely enough, seems to have shared his suspicions of his boss with the Americans. This should provide some perspective to those who think that their office environment is toxic.

Largely the picture of the intelligence services that emerges from this book is less James Bond and more petty office politics - a la  The Office. 

This is an OK read , the rating I have given is more for the explosive nature of the contents in the book.   

The Covenant of Water: Abraham Verghese (5.0/5.0)

4 min read

I wanted to say that Abraham Verghese's magnum opus 'The covenant of Water' is probably one of the best Indian novels in English for this year. Then I realised that the book was actually released in 2023. It's amazing that I didn't hear of this book for two years - mostly down to the fact that it was not shortlisted or even longlisted for Booker prize ! Instead, the book got its publicity from being Oprah's book of the month sometime in 2023. Oprah has declared it to be in the her top three all time favourite books. Thanks to my book club for picking this one a few months back.   

The book starts in the year 1900. A twelve year old girl in the southern Indian kingdom of  Travancore  travels on water to a church away from her own village. It's the day of her marriage, she is to be the second wife of a forty year old landowner and a mother to his two year old son. Over the course of the book this girl from an impoverished background is transformed to big ammachi, the matriarch of the five hundred acre Parambil estate. The book is as much about three generations of ammachi's family as it is about Parambil and the families that own and serve it.

In the second chapter suddenly we are in Scotland and checking if its the same book that we are reading. Digby, a dancing girl's son overcomes obstacles and becomes a doctor and comes to practise in colonial Madras. He is adjusting to the new sights and sounds of Madras and also the customs and hierarchies of the colonial white society in the city. There is also a Swedish doctor who has devoted his life to caring for leprosy patients.

Over the next sixty odd years , the story of the Parambil family mixes with that of these doctors and other myriad characters to produce this nine hundred page tome. The cast of characters includes several generations of  ammachi's family  including her children, grandchildren as well the various kochamma's, communists, naxalites, estate owners and opium eaters. There is also the mysterious affliction which affects a lot of the Parambil men. They are unable to navigate even shallow bodies of water and several of them die by drowning in shallow ditches. 

Kerala, specifically the princely state of Travancore figure features as a major motif in the book. The author has done an exemplary work of evoking the rural catholic Kerala from the turn of the twentieth century. This includes the people, the customs, the food, the courtyards and kitchens to their caste  prejudices. In the deep background India is getting its freedom.

With any such 'Kerala' English book the comparisons to Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things  are inevitable. The books are similar in how they describe the physical beauty and touch upon the political landscape of Kerala, specifically caste discrimination. This book, by the strength of its size is both more detailed in the way its evokes the landscape  and broader in its scope. There could be possibly five to six GOSTs within this book. Though I think the characters in GOST were  sharper and came in all shades, many more of them in darker hues. In this book we struggle to identify any mean, bad or ill intentioned people at all.    

Actually the author and book that this book most reminds me of is Vikram Seth and the Suitable Boy. While the story lines are completely different it is similar in the sense of a wonderfully written, multigenerational, early 20th century story. Vikram Seth along with V.S Naipaul and Rohinton Mistry have been the trinity of my Indian authors who write in English. ( All NRIs....hmmm). I can't think of any reason why Verghese is not right up there- will have to read more of him to confirm.