‘Born out of the onrush of memories and feelings provoked by her mother Mary’s death, this is the astonishing, often disturbing and surprisingly funny memoir of the Arundhati Roy’s life, from childhood to the present, from Kerala to Delhi.’
About three quarters of the way through I was suddenly overcome with emotion at the realisation that so many of these people are now ghosts.
Micky Roy. Mary Roy. G. Isaac…
This feeling is destabilising, knowing they are no longer here to defend themselves or contradict themselves or inflict further damage. Yes, ‘it’s true, it’s true’ they were frequently terrible. And yet, Arundhati writes them with indulgence. It feels like the kind of tenderness that can only arrive after the fact, when suddenly you can delight in someone’s excesses, perhaps because they can no longer wound you.
Mary Roy is both tyrant and marvel, ‘my mother, my gangster. my shelter, my storm.’ It is clear that despite everything, Arundhati adored her. The tension, between injury and devotion, animates the entire book.
What emerges is a gallery of bohemian combustible people who are perpetually trapped because ‘this is India, my dear,’ a phrase that echoes as both explanation and indictment. India here is not just a country but a structure that compresses ambition and eccentricity into something volatile. These are people too big for their circumstances. And when there is nowhere for that largeness to go, it turns inward. They cannibalise one another because what else can they do?
‘In these strange and manifold ways, this constellation of extraordinary, eccentric, cosmopolitan people, defeated by life, converged on the tiny village of Ayemenem.’
There is something brave about Roy’s refusal to neaten then into moral lessons or flatten them into heroes or villains. Instead, she allows them to remain infuriating, by preserving their contradictions.
This is not simply a portrait of difficult people, but an attempt to understand how forceful lives reverberate after they are gone. By the end, what lingers is a sense of having inhabited a house full of ghosts who refuse to be simplified.
The guests as they left
kissed the crown of her head
and she knew them
by their voices
JOHN BERGER
Leave a Reply