Arundhati Roy's empowerment thanks to and because of her mother

MadridArundhati Roy (Shillong, 1961) says that if she didn't constantly live in a mixture of feelings and sensations, she couldn't be a writer. It's the same constant contradiction that characterized her relationship with her mother – a relationship that was "dark, brilliant, and brave" all at the same time – since she was the one who encouraged her to write and at the same time got angry at how she wrote. The Indian author, world-renowned for The god of small things, the novel with which he won the Booker Prize in 1997, has been published Mother Mary comes to me, a book of memoirs that the publishing house Ara Llibres has translated into Catalan as My refuge and my storm.

Roy remembers that, when she was little, she saw through the peephole in the door how her mother beat her brother for getting "mediocre" grades in school, and, in contrast, she applauded her for her excellent results. "I think there's someone in prison in another room or that Palestinians are being murdered in Gaza," she reflects, implying that she can't have moments of happiness. It's a kind of price to pay for having a "sense of conscience" that led her to "think about the world," and that in a meeting with journalists in Madrid, she admits that, in large part, she learned it from her mother. But not only that. "It also comes from my own upbringing," she points out.

Roy left home at 16 because of the tortuous family relationship. Her admiration for her mother for her innovations in education and her fight for women's rights contrasted with a "gangster-like aggression." "I saw how all of her unfolded – with all her genius, eccentricity, and radical kindness; her militant courage, her lack of mercy, her generosity, her cruelty; her way of mistreating others, her nose for business, and that mischievous and unpredictable character."

The work was born from the impact that Roy herself felt after the shock of her mother's death in 2022, and she admits that it is a "way of talking to her" and, at the same time, of "sharing her with the world." This need stems from the impossibility of speaking, because every time she tried, being asthmatic, "I blamed myself for having an attack and having to go to the hospital." That's why she doesn't know what she would think of the book – "I never knew what my mother would say at one moment or another," she says – but she doesn't care either. "My mother wasn't horrible. Basically, she had a personality, and quite a bit of it. Forgiveness isn't an ingredient in this story," she makes clear.

Roy is wary of a "certain tendency" in Western tradition to blame the mother, which prevents people from growing and, in turn, weakens the feminist movement. Deep down, the author is proud of having "survived" – "I could have failed, gone to prison, become a drug dealer" – and of having written the book of her life without judgment. "I've achieved things because my mother encouraged me and because she didn't," she adds. The lesson Roy leaves behind is that empowerment is just that, and so is accepting seemingly simple conclusions like "there are things in life that won't be resolved" or "there are moments when we won't have the answer."