A Mother’s Specter

Ade Khan reviews Arundhati Roy’s memoir “Mother Mary Comes to Me.”

By Ade KhanSeptember 26, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

IN 2004, WHEN my mother was tumbling into lifelong illness and my father was away on a trip, an incandescent bulb came into contact with the curtain in my parents’ bedroom and burned down our entire apartment in Dhaka City, Bangladesh, while my sister and I were home alone. It was a fitting metaphor for the state of our household at the time. Amid our ashen belongings, a few things miraculously survived: an enormous encyclopedia, a couple of family albums, and a blackened copy of The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy. Today, nobody knows the whereabouts of the novel. My sister says it must be with my mother, my mother insists it lives on my sister’s shelf, and my father has never seen the book nor heard of its author. We live in four separate homes now, and the book, I suppose, stayed in those embers we last shared.

Years later, when I was in graduate school, an Australian man asked me if I had read Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, and I told him no. He insisted I must: “It’s required reading, don’t you know?” I wasn’t sure if it was required for me because I resembled Roy personally, or for the other attendees of the party as well. Either way, I didn’t tell the man that the story was a bit too close to home, in more ways than one. Although I had not yet read the book, it haunted me.

In her new memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, Roy sits down, perhaps for the first time, with all that haunts her. The opening third of the memoir unfolds with the cadence of an elder recounting her life. I imagine myself sitting cross-legged on the cool tile floor of Roy’s Delhi home, sipping cha or brandy, while she unravels stories from her childhood. Roy writes anecdotally, her sentences following tangents like the flies zigzagging in and out of the room. Early on, she sketches her capricious mother with startling precision—something I have yet to manage with my own mercurial mother. She writes, “My mother unloaded the burden of her quarrels and the daily dose of indignity that she had to endure on to my brother and me.”

We are quickly introduced to a motley crew of family: G. Isaac, her greedy Marxist uncle; LKC, her quiet and resolute brother; her blind grandmother; and, of course, the wrathfully loving Mary, her mother. They all drift into Roy’s living room as she narrates. Sometimes the boorish mother stalks in and interrupts the daughter with biting remarks, and the mood stiffens for a few pages. Roy captures the temperaments of people in her life with a realism that is at once dissimilar and entirely akin to the fantastical characters of her novels. In those early pages, I kept thinking: “Aha! So, this G. Isaac fellow is Chacko from God of Small Things!” or “Did gold-toothed Bahadur inspire Anjum’s cemetery shack in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness?”

Almost imperceptibly, the memoir shifts into something more novelistic in its middle pages. The 18-year-old Roy becomes an impish Oliver Twist when she flees her mother’s fury to forge her own life in Delhi. She sleeps above dargahs and navigates precarious situations on trains and buses. For a South Asian woman like myself, those chapters featuring a young Roy wading through the city alone read like part thriller, part horror. Eventually, the memoir settles into her adult artistic life. There’s a particular splendor in reading how an author you’ve long admired became who they are. On most occasions, as is the case with Roy, this development was incidental yet almost divinely inspired. She mentions that her first published prose came about when a magazine editor happened to pick up a draft while waiting for a friend to go to lunch.

The memoir abandons Roy’s relationship with her mother for long stretches, yet Mary never really departs the scene. There is a peculiar phenomenon that occurs in the absence of one’s mother. My mother and I were estranged for 10 years. To borrow Roy’s reasoning: “I left my mother not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.” Even once I forgot what my mother’s voice sounded like, it did not leave me. What emerged from her physical absence was a different kind of presence. In the solitude of my New York apartment, I found myself eating over the kitchen sink because I knew she hated finding crumbs on the counter. After the loss of his mother, Roland Barthes wrote: “Around 6 P.M.: the apartment is warm, clean, well lit, pleasant. I make it that way, energetically, devotedly (enjoying it bitterly): henceforth and forever I am my own mother.” Jacques Derrida might have referred to this phenomenon as maternal hauntology: the mother becomes a lingering specter through which all present experience is metabolized.

After the success of The God of Small Things, Roy’s mother beckons her daughter to her bedside. She inquires about the origins of a scene in the novel in which the fighting parents toss their children back and forth, saying to one another, “You take them. I don’t want them.” She asks, “Who told you about this? You were too young to remember.” Roy tells her mother the scene is fiction. The mother responds curtly, “No, it’s not,” and turns away. In that moment, a malignant memory reveals itself to Roy as having metastasized into her imagination. While reading the memoir, I kept reaching for my phone to text one girlfriend or another, urging them all to read it. Not only did I recognize something of our shared girlhood and grit in the young author, but I also saw their mothers in the formidable Mrs. Roy. These two women became stand-ins for every mother and daughter I have ever known.

The younger Roy devotes considerable time disabusing the reader of her mother’s abuses. This is not a defensive rationalization of her mother’s behaviors but an acknowledgment that the specter cannot be one-dimensional, for the haunting would not be so full-bodied and possessive otherwise. Roy evades puerile conclusions about the impact of her childhood as either evil or benevolent. When the writer watches a film about Phoolan Devi, an infamous lower-caste woman who allegedly ordered the shooting of 22 upper-caste men after her gang rape, Roy finds that the movie (made almost entirely by men) fetishizes the rape. Indignantly, she leaves the theater to track down Devi, befriend her, and eventually write an essay that indicts rape culture and its representation in Indian media. Reflecting on this episode, Roy acknowledges, “I recognized something of Mrs Roy in myself that day.” Her mother was known for visiting hospitals and women’s shelters, where she provided women with protection and gainful employment. As I grow older, I make an effort to be good-tempered, an antidote to my mother’s disposition, but I also find an impatient determination that I inherited from her. She, too, would have tracked down Phoolan Devi.

The memoir’s title, Mother Mary Comes to Me, confirms the mother as a phantasm. While the daughter mythologizes the mother, the mother dismisses the daughter’s childhood memories as fictitiously exaggerated. Both fashion self-protective memories until an insurmountable distance is achieved between each other’s realities. In reading the passages where Roy describes being estranged from her omnipresent mother, I recalled a recurring nightmare I used to have when my mother and I were separated: I am trying to save her from a pirate ship, but I am always too late because she is in the middle of the ocean and I am on the shore. Whenever I get close to the ship in a rickety kayak, my arms sore from rowing, a gargantuan octopus emerges to stop me. No matter what strategy I try, I always fail to save her. Then, one night, I awake in a cold sweat, realizing my mother is actually the ringleader of the marauders.

The memoir’s most complicated relationship is not between Roy and her mother but between Roy and her motherland. Roy’s mother is a stubborn and unchanging figure, but India, as it catapults itself into fascism, becomes a progressively harder pill to swallow. When Roy first arrives in Delhi as a college student, the city offers a solace that her mother never did. Unlike her mother, Delhi shelters her. But after a while, the capital begins to betray her. She writes, “Today Delhi is a nightmare city full of guards and surveillance cameras.” I wonder which constitutes the more inimical mother—the one whose nature you have always known or the one who changes slowly into something unrecognizable? Roy describes her mother as a kind of gangster, but the Indian government soon becomes the more ruthless goon.

Mary’s lifework was a school in Kottayam, Kerala. Her daughter describes it as her third child, a place that churned out generations of sensitive young men and revolutionary young women. Mary grew her campus with a deliberate focus, but after the success of this seminal project, she began a political campaign. She challenged the Christian Succession Act of 1916, a discriminatory law in the former Travancore state of India that limited Syrian Christian women’s inheritance rights. Mary Roy’s landmark Supreme Court case in 1986 resulted in a decision that declared the act unconstitutional, ensuring that Christian women in the region could inherit property equally.

In 1997, upon winning the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things, Roy gained national attention. Like her mother, Roy was not content with this “gilded cage” but set her sights on politics. She wrote about the regional perils of nuclear armament, the greed of dam development at the expense of entire Indigenous peoples, the erosion of secularism under Hindutva, the occupation of Kashmir, and all kinds of “unmitigated wickedness.” (In India today, any dissent against the government or against Hindu supremacy amounts almost to treason.) Roy insists, “The more I was hounded as an anti-national, the surer I was that India was the place I loved, the place to which I belonged. Where else could I be the hooligan that I was becoming?” She further explains: “I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I travelled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-writer.”

Just as the mother-daughter position is a conjoined one, so is the traitor-writer. As George Orwell once put it, “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties.” Roy urges us to confront the political realities of our age. Even her ornate fiction is imbued with political tendencies (in 2017’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy writes, “It was peacetime. Or so they said”). The essays that span the long years between her first and second novels set the stage for this memoir—she ventures into the jungle, hunting the snake, trying to grab it by the head and look it in the eye. She affirms that the role of activist is not separate from that of artist. “To me ‘writer-activist’ sounded a bit like a sofa-bed,” Roy observes. Her resolve, readers now perceive, stems from her mother—a result of both Mary Roy’s harsh upbringing and her public advocacy for women. Once one has confronted the mother figure, however messily, all other creatures that lurk in the bush seem far less intimidating.

Last week, I attended a conversation between Arundhati Roy and Harvard professor Imani Perry at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The opera house was packed with people of all kinds, and I amused myself with the thought that the Australian man had been right: Roy is required reading. The author commanded the audience like a rehearsed comedian, her punch lines perfectly timed. Slowly, a kind of melancholia washed over me between the laughs. For so long, I had aligned myself with the daughter of an unrelenting mother. But the gray-haired woman before me reminded me so much of my own mother—in her hilarious obscenities, in her vivid recollections of her past, in her genius. I fell into a familiar well of sadness as I wondered what my mother could have been if circumstances had allowed.

Sitting in that packed theater, I also noticed many young women in the audience. It took me back to college, to the girl I was falling in love with, who used a photo of Arundhati Roy as her computer wallpaper. It was a picture of the author as a young woman, in an orange tank top and black shorts. Her hair is tied high, and one can almost feel the Delhi heat on the back of her neck. Her brows are furrowed. A cigarette stands erect between her lips. She’s working at an architect’s table with ferocious concentration. Her arms are twiggy but strong. Art swirls all around her. I never asked the girl I love why this photo of Roy, college-aged like us, was her wallpaper. It seemed self-evident to me that she saw a bit of herself in this focused, sexy, graceful young woman. She, too, had left her small Indian town for an education far away. At certain angles, when my curls coil just right, I can convince myself I have a little bit of Roy in me as well. And when my mother entertains her friends in her sunbaked living room and analyzes her mother, I am sure she is as witty a storyteller.

Mother Mary Comes to Me reminds us that the mother-daughter binary is ultimately moot. It’s just a continuum. We are all mothers and all daughters, and we are all doing our best to raise one another. Some are trying more than others. Is that not solidarity? As I left the theater, I heard a millennial woman loudly proclaim to her friend: “If her mother was so shit and she turned out okay, maybe we’ll be alright.”