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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.
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