"Mother Mary Comes to Me" Arundhati Roy

“I remember thinking that no matter how long and hard we fought, in India no woman of any religion, class, caste, or creed would ever feel safe enough to sing to the stars at night on a lonely highway while her buffalo took her home.”

--Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

There is danger in not writing a blog right when the book is finished. Some books are forgettable, and if I spend any time away from them, I not only forget what was written but also how I felt. Mother Mary Comes to Me is not one of these.

Last year I started reading Salmon Rushdie's Knife, a memoir of the time leading up to and in the aftermath of the assassination attempt against him. I had never read anything of his, although his notoriety made me curious about his most famous book and how prolific a fiction writer he is. I was pleased that Knife was so well written, and I should return to finish it.

Arundhati Roy's memoir has that same flavor, in that I've never read anything of hers and now I'm curious to read more. The God of Small Things has been on my reading list for a long time. After reading her memoir, and even more than Rushdie, I am in awe of her talent as a writer and kick myself for putting off reading her debut novel for so long. Unlike Rushdie, she has not written so much fiction and is more known in her country for her essays, but like him she has stirred up anger and has had her life threatened.

I think the best way to describe how talented Roy's writing is is to provide an analogy with my own work. I’ve been teaching linear algebra at the college level for more than a quarter of a century, and over that time I’ve worked hard to make the course efficient and cohesive. Too many mathematics courses feel like a grab-bag of topics, loosely connected and lacking a storyline. Too many biographies are written the same way—episodic, with anecdotes that accumulate without ever quite adding up to a whole.

After many years of revision, my linear algebra course has become spare and directed. Each topic feeds into the next, and by the end of the term everything converges into a unified understanding of discrete dynamical systems and the role linear algebra plays in making sense of them. Nothing is included that doesn’t contribute to that final picture.

This memoir shows the same discipline. What first appears to be episodic is in fact carefully structured. No anecdote is wasted; each one contributes to the larger arc, and in the end the narrative resolves into something complete and purposeful.

Of course, the book is about her mother Mary Roy and their relationship, but it also tells the story of Arundhati's life, how she came to writing through working in various media, including film, and how she came to champion underrepresented peoples and places and used her essays to tell their stories, even as those in the majority and in power did not want those stories to be told.

Her descriptions of the Kashmir reminded me of countries or regions like Argentina where an entire generation or group faces systematic violence, often sanctioned by the government, creating desaparecidos, devastating to those left behind and much more common across the world than I once understood. We are seeing this play out in the U.S. now with violent abductions of supposed undocumented aliens, and I wonder when we will start talking about our own desaparecidos. 

Reading Mother Mary Comes to Me after Melissa L. Sevigny's Brave the Wild River made me see the Colorado River and India’s Narmada Valley as parallel histories, most probably repeated many times and all over the world. The botanists, Clover and Jotter, in Brave the Wild River traveled through the Colorado River Valley inhabited by Havasupai, Hualapai, Paiute, and Navajo communities much of which would later be submerged by reservoirs created by dams like Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam. Roy writes from the other side of the globe about the Narmada River, where the Sardar Sarovar Dam displaced Adivasi communities whose villages, fields, and sacred places were drowned in the name of development. In both cases, rivers that sustained human life for centuries were redefined as engineering problems to be solved, and living cultures were rendered invisible, thought of as obstacles to progress and then drowned as the waters rose. These recorders of history, Clover, Jotter, and Roy, documented worlds on the verge of erasure in the name of progress.

Mother Mary is one of those books that I have thought back on many times in the month since I finished it, and I hope my mind returns to it frequently in the future.