Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me – front cover photo by Carlo Buldrini
The global launch of Suzanna Arundhati Roy’s memoir of her mother, Mother Mary Comes To Me (MMCTM), took place on Sept 2 at Mother Mary Hall of St Teresa’s College in Kochi. Ms Roy came down from New Delhi with a host of friends and admirers, publishers and editors, to ensure that the book would take off on its world-wide exposition from Kochi, her home ground, so to speak. Her last launch from here was of the Malayalam translation of The God of Small Things (TGOST) by Priya A. S. from an open air site on the Marina close by.
Arundhati Roy in green saree and red choli – Feb 3, 2011
On that occasion Ms Roy arrived looking distant and stately in a lovely blue-green saree, the colour of the river Meenachal, wearing a trim red choli with a necklace of black string attached to a pendant of square metal secured to a fragment of nondescript red fabric. On this day, fourteen years later, she arrived in a floppy red top over blue jeans, relaxed and ready to mingle with the crowd gathered to celebrate her literary presence in the city. It was the middle of the Onam season and the roads were crowded but those who wanted to meet her arrived an hour and a half in advance of the slated 6:30 pm event to find the venue three-quarters full. There were more than a thousand attendees, with the overflow from Mother Mary Hall necessitating the setting up of a second hall to accommodate the crowd. Former students of her mother’s Pallikoodam School were there in strength as a special contingent.
Arundhati Roy in red top and blue jeans at Mother Mary Hall, Sep 2, 2025
The audience was a diverse mix of people, young and old, along with friends, family, movie stars, and publishers. It was organised by DC Books and Penguin Random House India. The event bore the typical marks of an Arundhati Roy event, filled with emotion, wit, and political discourse. “Almost everyone that I love is gathered in this room. That’s a pretty dangerous thing, given our government,” laughed Ms Roy.
Arundhati Roy with her mother Mary Roy
Ms Roy identified the origin of the book to a time after her mother’s death on Sept 1, 2022 – “I was walking in London one day with my agent, and I said to him that my mother was my shelter and my storm.” He turned around and said “So when are you writing this book?”
In a way, Ms Roy had been writing this book all her life; whether she was spending her fatherless childhood in Kerala or going to college in Delhi – her mother was an inescapable presence in her mind. She went away at age eighteen and gradually discovered who she could be and flowered in her multitudinous ways far from the critical eye of her mother. But she had been taking notes all the while, as writers do. And here after a difficult journey she was ready to present to public gaze the persona of her mother and her own relationship along with the myriad battles she fought along the way, mirroring several that caught her mother up in a different storm 2,600 kms away.
Israeli airstrikes destroy buildings in the Gaza Strip. Photo: © UNRWA/Ashraf Amra – more than 64,000 Palestinians have been killed, half of them women and children; the total Israeli death toll has risen to nearly 2,000
But Ms Roy noted that the troubles of the world constantly knock on our doors for desperate attention; she made special mention of the horrors of the war in Gaza, linking the ongoing suffering there to the feeling that “someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in another room” when she receives recognition. She emphasised that her awareness of the crisis isn't triggered by guilt but by a genuine understanding of the interconnectedness of suffering: “Wherever you look, things are happening, and you can't just think of your own story,” she said.
