Arundhati Roy on grief, memory, and her most personal book yet

Does remembrance have a language? For Booker-winning novelist, essayist, and activist Arundhati Roy, the answer is a resounding yes. On the 78th anniversary of our national independence, we connect over Zoom from Roy’s New Delhi home to discuss the imminent release of her much-anticipated memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me. Her first major work since the publication of her second novel, Ministry of Utmost Happiness, in 2017, I catch Roy in her study—books and sheets of paper spooling onto a divan behind, as her face stands lit by the amber glow of a table lamp.

“Everybody recalls memories in an internal language which involves visuals, music, the olfactory senses, perhaps a sense of fear, or pleasure, among other things,” she says. “Depending on what you do, that is, if you’re a painter, or a musician, or an architect, I think these things express themselves differently.” Her words immediately take me back to my now-lost-to-time summer vacation as a ninth grader, when the woven tapestry of her passages transported me every noon for a week to the damp, humid, fever dream of Ayemenem with twins Esthappen Yako and Rahel Ipe for company.

I somehow string a few words to tell Roy how I have spent my last few nights (and many subway journeys) reading her latest literary offering. A searing “reportage” of the life of educator and women’s rights activist Mary Roy—and the author’s mother. In uncharacteristically spare prose, the most tender sense of humour, and a grievous pathos that is as moving as it is shocking, Roy barely leaves any sea-secrets about the most fractured and fulfilling relationship of her life. And by the askance glow of her lamp, and the fluttering din of my table fan, we spend the next half-hour chatting as she tells Bazaar India about everything—from writing and remembering to AI and happiness.

Harper’s Bazaar: Two groundbreaking novels—The God of Small Things (1997) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017)—and a hundred essays later, what finally prompted you to write a memoir?

Arundhati Roy: Well, obviously, the death of my mother and also being puzzled at my own subsequent feelings of distress and grief because it was such a troubled relationship (chuckles). I am unsure of labels like memoirs. Personally, I just could not write anything else at that moment. It was almost as if the book was sitting on the road, waiting for me to write it, which is also the case with most things that I write. It comes very instinctively, and I know that this is what I have to write about.

HB: When you began writing this book, was there a specific memory you knew you wanted to start off on?

AR: It didn’t start off with memory. It started off with the present and moreover the presence of her death. That was what triggered it.

HB: What is your first memory of your mother?

AR: My earliest memories of her are what I wrote about in the chapter that recounts our time in the house in Ooty, after we left the tea estate in Assam. And obviously, as I say in the first chapter, there were subconscious memories of my parents fighting and saying, ‘You take them’ and ‘I don’t want them’ and so on. I had no idea that it was an actual lived memory till my mother informed me about it, many years after reading my first novel.

HB: Is that why you wonder, in the first chapter, about who holds true ownership over fiction?

AR: Yes, because it is very difficult to say what memory is and what is a figment of our imagination, and so on. Sometimes, memories and feelings just translate themselves into an image and become part of your work. When I wrote those passages in GOST about the children watching the parents fight, I had no idea that it stemmed from something I had seen or lived.

HB: Why do you refer to her as Mrs Roy throughout the book? Was it a creative choice to address her in third person?

AR: No, it was not. We were made to call her Mrs Roy, as I mentioned in the book. And the reason I think that I have such a fractured view of her is because, for me, she was more Mrs Roy than mother. And as Mrs Roy, she did do some incredible things, maybe less incredible things as a mother. But again, she was not really striving to be a great mother. But I think from a very early age, I recognised that public personality. And that I could not just react to her based on my personal experience of her, which was often very hard.
 

HB: Are you in the habit of keeping written notes from your daily life, or penning diaries? 

AR: Not at all (laughs). I had no problem in deciding which parts of the story together will make the story because these memories are pretty much steered into me and I don’t need a diary to recall them. The only thing that I did write down in detail was the first time I met my father when I was 25 years old. It wasn’t a diary so much, it was just an account of that meeting, which I wrote very soon after I met him.

HB: This book also felt very different from your previous works, not just because of its genre, but also because of the almost clinical nature of the prose. It is spare, yet sensuous, brimming with grief, yet so full of candour. Were these deliberate stylistic choices that you made?

AR: I didn’t want it to be a book in which I was commenting about myself or my life. It was almost like a decision to make it like a reportage from the heart. No stopping and philosophising (chuckles). I wanted to report feelings, the deepest of emotions, but with the sort of slightly clinical sense of a reporter. It is a report about the things that reporters are not supposed to write about, which is feelings, you know?

HB: Were there any challenges that you encountered during the writing of it?

AR: There were two things I did not want. I don’t think that Mrs Roy or any of the characters in the book are people that you can make up your mind about. You can’t make up your mind about her, even I can’t make up my mind about her. And the challenge hence was: Can I present her in a way where you cannot just package her and make little sketches of her? Because she’s so wild! So that was a challenge, from the start. The other thing was, from the very start, I did not want this to become some famous person’s memoir where I was presenting myself in some sort of a good light. I just had to be absolutely brutal about myself, otherwise it was not worth doing. But there were some ways in which this book just never let me stop and just kept me moving, letting the story, the things that happened and the feeling just report themselves as they were. The process never allowed me to pause and be a psychotherapist to myself.

HB: Tell me a little bit about the title. Is it a song that’s close to your heart?

AR: Well, as you can tell from the book, The Beatles—not just their music, but their soul—is so important to me. It was rock and roll music that gave me the spine to walk out of home when I was that young with no insurance, or money. But there was something about their music which made me reckless enough to do it and to do it happily, instead of some terribly tragic suffering sort of way. I had to look for as much humour and as much fun as I could along the way because there’s no point in doing these things otherwise. After all, it was my choice to leave. And that choice came because to stay would have been worse. So I had to make the best of it. The Beatles was very much a part of my heart and so when I decided to leave, I listened to She’s Leaving Home over and over on a loop. It’s ironic that this line from Let It Be is the title of this book. My brother and I were laughing about it because the book is going to be launched in Cochin in Mother Mary Hall on September 2, and my brother is going to sing Let It Be. And we laughingly said that, this is a third Mother Mary. She’s not the Mother Mary the hall is named after. She’s not the Mother Mary in the Let It Be song either. She’s Mother Mary number three!

HB: What do you think has been your biggest inheritance from your mother?

AR: (Pauses) A very active middle finger.

HB: Your characters, across your oeuvre, are often driven by a constant search for home and belonging. Do you feel you have finally found your home?

AR: So a home is different from a house, of course, as we know. I don’t think that I’ll ever be a person who has a permanent home...I’ll always be unsafe in that way. I’ll always be on the edge of things, and I’ve always not known what’s going to be tomorrow, because that’s the way I’ve chosen to live my life. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I just don’t feel like I have a home. I don’t know whether I need it either. I have a house and I have a place to keep my dogs and books. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, but it’s all right. I think I would panic if there was a sense of permanence attached to my current house from tomorrow. Especially given the politics of this country now and my place in it, to be attached to things like a home, would be to lay yourself open for some serious punishment. So the best thing is to travel light.

HB: How do you feel about writers today turning to AI to churn out increasingly massive bodies of work?

AR: Well, I do have the sense that we are poised on the edge of the twilight of a world that’s ending and a new world that’s beginning. And we will not know the coordinates properly of that new world for another year or two. But I feel that while AI can obviously stand in for research and journalism in good ways, and in terrible ways too, what I worry about is if AI becomes more booted up and enhanced, is human intelligence going to just start going down? Are people just going to forget how to read and write? I don’t know. But as a writer, personally, when I write something, I don’t primarily see it as a product that needs to be perfected and put into the market for consumption. For me, there is no pleasure whatsoever in using AI for my writing, because the whole pleasure of being a writer is to write. It’s not to create something which other people consume and then say, ‘Oh wow! This is great’. The process of writing is far more important to me than the final product and how it’s received. I’m lucky that somehow because of my work, which I have worked hard for, I have the economic capital to sit and do my work the way I want to do it. And because I earned it, I use it to live the life of a writer, not an AI writer.

HB: You have spoken extensively about the radical potential of happiness in times of crisis. Given the times we live in, how do you manage to retain your sense of humour and hold on to joy?

AR: I don’t know if I have a manual that I can share about this, but I think that from the time I was pretty young I knew I was a child who did not belong. None of the protections, usually afforded to children, were there for me —not even my mother. So I learned very quickly that there’s only so much sympathy that people can feel for anything or anyone and that you’re not going to get by on people’s sympathy. So you better step up and figure out how you’re going to live your life. And I spent, I think, a lot of time trying to translate terrible things into funny things, just for myself. Growing up not knowing who my father was, I could easily have turned it all into a tragedy for myself but I chose to look at it differently. In the book, when I visit a Syrian Christian lady with my mother, I say that Mrs Roy is not fighting just for the right to equal inheritance, but also the right to not be a perfect mother, and most importantly not be a bore like you! (Both laugh) It’s true! That is not a life I want.

All images: Karan Kumar Sachdev

This article first appeared in the August-September 2025 issue of Harper's Bazaar India


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