The Gangster in the Garden

An Anatomy of Influence in Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me

A Literary Review

When Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize in 1997 for The God of Small Things, the world fell in love with Ammu, the tragic, beautiful mother of Rahel and Estha. For nearly thirty years, literary critics and casual readers alike have assumed that Ammu was a faithful portrait of Roy’s own mother, the formidable Mary Roy. With the publication of Mother Mary Comes to Me, her first explicit memoir, Roy corrects the record. Ammu, she tells us, was a fiction. The real woman - Mary Roy - was something far more terrifying, magnificent, and complex. She was not just a character; she was a climate. 'She was my shelter and my storm,' Roy writes, and in this searing 373-page 'novel autobiography,' she attempts to map the weather patterns of a woman who refused to be contained by the laws of men or the expectations of mothers.

This is not a standard literary memoir. It does not trade in the currency of 'healing' or 'closure' that defines the contemporary western autobiography. It is, instead, a forensic accounting of a war. The war was fought in the humid, oppressive heat of Ayemenem, between a mother who had fought the Supreme Court to grant women equal rights, and a daughter who had to fight that same mother to claim her own soul.

The Architecture of the 'Remembrance Dome'

To read Mother Mary Comes to Me as a linear chronology is to misunderstand its architecture. Dr. Dharmendra Kumar Singh, in his incisive critique The Shelter, the Storm, and the Gangster, rightly describes the book as a 'remembrance dome' - a structure built not of bricks but of 'shards of light' and 'lumps of darkness.' The narrative moves in circles, or perhaps spirals, mimicking the way traumatic memory functions. We do not simply begin at birth and end at death; we loop back, again and again, to certain primal scenes.

The most potent of these scenes is the 'highway incident' (p. 68), a moment that Dr. Singh identifies as pivotal. One night, Mary Roy abruptly stops the car on a highway and orders her fourteen-year-old daughter to 'Get out.' Roy is left alone in the dark. An hour later, the mother returns. It is an act of 'extraordinary temerity' and cruelty. Yet, Roy does not frame this as a victim’s story. She writes: 'I had no intentions other than sit on that milestone rest of my life.' This sentence deserves the closest possible reading. It suggests a total collapse of the future tense. The child accepts that 'life' has ended at the milestone. There is no pleading, no bargaining. There is only a terrifying, stoic acceptance of 'the rest of my life' being lived right here, in the dark, alone.

This moment is the birth of the 'writer' Arundhati Roy. The writer is the one who sits on the milestone and watches. The writer is the one who accepts that she is an 'observing machine' rather than a 'participant' in the family drama. By forcing her daughter to face the absolute void of the highway, Mary Roy inadvertently gave her the greatest gift a writer can possess: the lack of fear of being alone. This 'milestone' becomes the vantage point from which Roy will later view the Narmada Dam, the nuclear tests in Pokhran, and the wars in Kashmir. She had already survived the end of the world on that highway; what could the Indian state possibly do to frighten her?

The 'Novel' Autobiography: Art and Lies

The scholar Brinda Bose, in her essay A Novel Autobiography, astutely points out that Roy explicitly frames this text as 'partly fictive rather than wholly true.' Roy quotes Jeanette Winterson: 'There’s no such thing as autobiography, there’s only art and lies.' Why does Roy need this disclaimer? Because the 'truth' of Mary Roy is too large for facts.

Mary Roy was literal 'gangster' of domesticity. She was a woman who, in 1986, single-handedly challenged the Syrian Christian Succession Act of 1916, which decreed that a daughter was entitled to only one-fourth of a son’s share or Rs 5000, whichever was less. She won, and in doing so, she became a pariah in her own community. Roy argues that this 'gangster' spirit - the willingness to burn down the village to save the principle - was her true inheritance. The memoir details how Mary Roy founded Corpus Christi (now Pallikoodam), a school that was less an educational institution and more a sovereign state where Mary was queen, judge, and executioner. For Arundhati, growing up in this environment was a lesson in the 'triad of self-invented principles' identified by Dr. Singh: Destruction, Generation, and Preservation. Mary destroyed her marriage to escape an alcoholic husband; she generated a new world in her school; and she preserved a fierce, almost violent independence that she passed on to her daughter like a blood virus.

This 'novelistic' approach allows Roy to eschew the 'vainglory' typical of Indian autobiographies (Singh). She does not try to present a unified, dignified family front. She presents the family as it was: a war zone. She shows us the 'savage knots' of a relationship where love and hate are not opposites, but the same emotion at different temperatures.

The Body as Battlefield: Bras, Abortions, and Bell-Bottoms

A newly crucial aspect of the memoir, highlighted by Ramlal Agarwal’s summary, is the way Roy charts her 'sensual awakenings' as acts of rebellion against the colonial/Victorian morality of her family. The book doesn't just deal with legal battles; it deals with the politics of the body. Two incidents stand out as stark markers of this conflict.

The first is the 'Bra Incident' in Delhi. During her first year of architecture school, a granduncle visits her hostel. Upon stroking her back, he realizes she is not wearing a bra. He is horrified, not just by the nudity but by the 'lack of rules' in her hostel ('no warden'). He leaves in a huff, reporting back to Kottayam that the girl is 'in bad company.' This moment perfectly encapsulates the suffocating surveillance of the Syrian Christian community. A missing undergarment becomes a moral crisis. For Roy, the refusal to wear a bra - or her choice to design her own 'bell-bottoms' - is not fashion; it is what Agarwal calls 'following her impulses, unmindful of what others thought.' It is the first step in decolonizing her own body.

The second, far more traumatic incident, is the 'Abortion in Pachmarhi.' While working on a film set with her then-husband Pradip, Roy realizes she is pregnant. Pradip, focused on the production, cannot help her ('unable to disturb the shooting'). Roy takes a train to Delhi alone, where she undergoes an abortion without anesthesia because there is no one to sign the consent form. This harrowing detail is presented with the same 'merciless directness' (Singh) as the highway scene. It reinforces the book’s central theme: that the woman artist must ultimately save herself. The men in her life - whether the alcoholic father, the 'imperial entomologist' grandfather, or the distracted husband - are unreliable. The only reliable thing is her own threshold for pain.

The 'Uninvited Guest': Mary at the Book Launch

There is perhaps no better metaphor for the 'occupation' of the daughter by the mother than the incident at the launch of The God of Small Things. As Agarwal recounts, Mary Roy organized the launch in Ayemenem, inviting the legendary poet Kamala Das. But true to form, Mary 'wrecked it too.' While Arundhati was giving her presentation - her moment of triumph, her Booker-winning arrival - Mary sat in the front row 'talking with Kamala Das,' effectively drowning out her daughter.

Roy writes: 'She planned the launch and then wrecked it too. She presented me and, in the same breath, undermined me.'

This is the 'gangster' in action. Mary Roy could not bear to be a spectator, even at her daughter’s coronation. She had to be the protagonist. This scene is tragic, but in Roy’s hands, it becomes comic and deeply revealing. It shows that Mary stood 'above the law' of social niceties. She was a force of nature, and one does not ask a hurricane to be polite during a book reading.

The Political is Personal: From Annie to the Naxalites

Perhaps the most significant contribution of this book to Roy scholarship is its mapping of the political onto the personal. Roy is famous for her support of the Naxalites, her opposition to the Narmada Dam, and her critiques of Hindu nationalism. Critics have often dismissed these as the 'posturing' of a celebrity. Mother Mary Comes to Me dismantles this critique. It shows that Roy’s sympathy for the 'dispossessed' was born the night her mother kicked her out of the car. 'I was an error-ful child,' she admits. Having been an outcast in her own mother’s house, she naturally gravitated toward the 'error-ful' citizens of the Indian state.

The memoir traces her journey from the 'quiet heroine of Massey Sahib (1985)' to the scriptwriter of In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989) and Electric Moon (1992). As Dr. Singh notes, these early works were not just career moves; they were 'episodes of self-liberation.' They were the first attempts by the daughter to speak a language that was not her mother’s. Yet, in a cruel irony, the language she found was still shaped by the mother. The 'fury' of Roy’s political essays - the 'passion incarnadine' that Bose identifies - is indistinguishable from the fury of Mary Roy. The daughter left home to escape the mother, only to find that she had become her.

This is most visibly demonstrated in the controversy over the book’s cover, which features a photograph of Roy smoking a 'bidi' or cigarette. As Dr. Singh notes in his section on 'Polemics: Smoke and Mirrors,' this image is a deliberate provocation. In the Indian context, a 'good woman' (especially a mother or daughter) does not smoke publicly. By placing this image on the cover of a memoir about her mother, Roy is engaging in a final act of 'cultural materialism.' She is signaling that she and Mary were 'bad women' - and that their 'badness' was the source of their power. It is a visual rejection of the 'sanctified mother' trope that dominates Indian literature.

The Problem of the Single Witness

However, a rigorous critique must also acknowledge the book’s central flaw: the problem of the 'Single Witness.' Brinda Bose hints at this when she calls the book a 'buy-one-get-one-free deal' where the 'Me' is an equal player against 'Mother Mary.' By centering the narrative so exclusively on this dyad, Roy renders other figures - specifically her brother, Lalit, and her estranged father - as 'satellites.' Usefully, Bose notes that the book 'moves away from Mary Roy to an account of the many less-travelled paths Arundhati takes in her own life,' suggesting at times that the mother is merely a prop in the daughter’s play.

The memoir claims the authority of the 'only witness,' which is a literary strength but a historical weakness. We never hear the brother's version of Mary. Was Mary a 'gangster' to her son? Or did the son experience a different, softer mother? By silencing these other voices, Roy creates a 'hermetic' text. It is a closed loop of two 'fighter-women' where no one else can truly enter. This makes for compelling drama, but questionable history. The reader is forced to trust the 'novelist' Roy implicitly, even when she admits she is dealing in 'lies.'

A Requiem of Resolution

Despite these blind spots, Mother Mary Comes to Me stands as a landmark text. It is, to use Dr. Singh’s phrase, a 'requiem of resolution.' It resolves the central mystery of Arundhati Roy’s life: Where did the fire come from?

The answer, it turns out, is simple. The fire was inherited. It was passed down, like a torch or a curse, from the woman who 'never said Let It Be.' Mary Roy may be dead, but in these pages, the 'gangster' lives. She occupies the text just as she occupied the daughter - totally, terrifyingly, and triumphantly.

For the reader, the experience is not comforting. It is, to quote Roy, like 'breathing for her.' It is an act of resuscitation that leaves us gasping for air, grateful that we survived the storm, and awestruck by the woman who caused it. It is 'essential reading' (Rating: 9.5/10) because it accomplishes what few memoirs do: it makes the reader 'unsafe'. It strips away the sentimental idea of 'Mother India' or 'Mother Mary' and replaces it with something far more terrifying and real: a woman who breathes for you, fights for you, abandons you on a highway, and then drives back to get you. It is a testament to the fact that, for Arundhati Roy, love was never a 'given' - it was a 'taken.'

'In these pages, my mother, my gangster, shall live.'

And indeed, she does. Not as a saint, but as the storm that cleared the path for the writer to emerge.