It has become the mother of all literary accessories.
Almost every day these days someone on my social media feed shares a picture of their copy of Mother Mary Come to Me, Booker winning Indian writer Arundhati Roy’s latest book. Also every now and then I also see a post by a man (and it’s almost always a man) announcing proudly that they will neither buy nor read the book.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
I diligently skip the reviews and interviews because I have not yet read the book. But I read the un-reviews because there is no danger of a spoiler. The haters have many reasons to hate the book they have not (and will not ) read. They hate her politics and her guts. They never liked her Booker-winning novel God of Small Things. And they complain that in the name of honesty she has eulogized but also bashed her mother who isn’t here anymore to tell her side of the story.
The Mother Mary in this memoir is Mary Roy, Arundhati’s mother, an educator and a fierce women’s rights activist. Mother and daughter had a complicated relationship.
I do not know how Roy has navigated it, but family is always a minefield for any writer. When Augusten Burroughs wrote about his chain-smoking, sexually experimenting mother who sends him to live with her psychiatrist in Running with Scissors I was both aghast and transfixed. The book became a New York Times bestseller. The rapper Eminem’s mother sued him, claiming he defamed her by portraying her as a bad mother in his lyrics.
A family memoir should neither be a mawkish eulogy nor an act of revenge but truth is a slippery slope and memory is treacherous especially when it comes to those closest to us. As Ammu, the mother, says in God of Small Things “When you hurt people they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do.” Ammu was based in part on Mary Roy.
I always tried to be careful when I wrote about my mother. Her love for saris was safe territory.
In an old family album there are black and white pictures of my mother in France in the 1960s. In one she’s sitting in a train with a box of Black Magic chocolates open on her lap. In another she’s at a restaurant in Paris, a waiter with a bow tie hovering in the background.
In both pictures she’s wearing a sari as she did all the years she lived inn Europe she once told me.
MOTHER1:
“Your mother has such good taste,” friends and relatives would marvel.
They were right but what they did not know is she was just as obsessed with matters that were far more crude. Like bodily functions. Indigestion, to be precise.
Once an aunt told my mother she had a dream about her own mother. She woke up and went around the house looking for her until her son shook her and said “Ma, look at me. I am your son.” That snapped her out of her trance. “Perhaps my time is nigh,” she told my mother worriedly. “I am getting a summons from the other side.” My mother said thoughtfully “Well, I think it might be gas.”
She was not being unsympathetic. As she aged, a good life was as much about a stomach at peace as it was about a beautiful sari.
I did not think of my mother as some kind of Goddess of Good Taste. She was just my mother who loved Hollywood actress Ingrid Bergman, Bengali singer Hemanta Mukherjee and Camay soaps. But more than anything else she swore by Isabgol or psyllium husk, the plant fibre that helps with digestion. When the country went into a Covid lockdown she was more panicked about her stock of Isabgol than about her blood pressure medication.
I once wrote about it, gently poking fun at her Isabgol loyalty. My mother was not as pleased as when I wrote about her saris.
My mother died this year. When I look at her recipe book, the pages falling apart, I miss her presence. Every time I open her cupboard and see shelf after shelf of her neatly stacked saris I feel wistful.
But what really gives me a pang is the unopened box of Isabgol sitting on our kitchen shelf. That too defined the woman she had been. The saris might have an afterlife. Perhaps someone else, someone of good taste, will love them.
But the Isabgol, unopened and untouched, feels orphaned. Like me.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW.