Book Review: Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

Finally, the read was over. And as always, when I finish a book that moves me, a longing lingers—to linger a little longer with its pages, to sit a little closer to its voice, to listen just a while more.

Mother Mary Comes to Me—Arundhati Roy’s autobiographical work that pivots around her relationship with her mother—is not merely a story of one woman. It is an intimate excavation of a bond many of us share, often unsaid, often untold. In our nation, mothers have been placed on pedestals so high they can barely be reached. Isn’t that an irony? Expected to be ever-available—emotionally, physically—yet weighted down with burdens that rarely allow them to be so.

But Mary Roy was no ordinary mother. As her daughter writes, she was a ‘gangster’—fierce, unflinching, and capable of fighting battles most would not dare to enter, battles perhaps only a mother could take on.

Since I came of age, people—strangers in both familiar and unfamiliar places—have often asked if I was related to Arundhati Roy. Perhaps it was the similarity in our names, perhaps a resemblance in our faces. And each time, I felt a shy resistance to even let such an imagination take root. To me, she has always been something untouchable—someone I never wanted anything to soil or diminish. I wanted her to remain as I imagined her: unblemished, untarnished, the purest form of nature. As vocal, as emotional, as temperamental, as broken as I sensed she was, even before I knew much beyond the headlines she so often stirred.

And yet, ironically, I never sought to study her life, never wished to unearth the personal details. Which is why this book felt like a first glimpse into her inner world—the source of her immense strength, her inheritance of resilience. To my surprise, I found myself recognizing uncanny similarities between her story and my own. Though unrelated in any way, the parallels felt almost fated. Who knows?

Roy writes with the same raw honesty with which she fights. Her battles are never for the sake of a cause alone; they are fought because they tug at her heart. This book emerges from that same urgency. She could not have left these words unwritten—for in them lies her attempt to heal the vast silence her mother left behind.

What all we do, after all, for a mother’s love.