A few thoughts on reading Arundhati Roy’s memoir

Difficult life

Arundhati Roy had an extremely difficult life. I feel sorry for the child Arundhati. No child should go through what she did. No child should be beaten. And no child should be beaten in place of another, just to show that the guardian is not being partial. No child should have to hear that they are a millstone around the neck of their mother. No child should have to endure the kind of neglect that Arundhati and her brother had to.

Even more difficult was her mother’s life

And yet, when you hear about the life that the abuser, Arundhati’s mother Mary, lived, then you somehow feel more sympathetic for the abuser. Or at least, have a faint sort of understanding of why she was the way she was. Her own father was extremely abusive, turning children out of the house in winter, and fracturing his wife’s skull by throwing a vase at her. No wonder, Mary Roy accepted the first proposal to come her way, to get away from this man. Later, after ditching her husband who turned out to be an alcoholic, she struggled as a single mother: with asthma, with poverty, with bring turned out of her dead father’s house by her mother and brother. Her behavior, then, is not surprising, even if it is reprehensible.

And I came to the conclusion that the problem, at the heart of all these reprehensible behaviours, is patriarchy. What if her grandmother didn’t have to put up with her abusive husband? What if May Roy had had the resources to live on her own, to make her own choices? There are two things here which are problematic: that women had to get married early and then live with their husbands and bear with them, no matter how abusive they were. And that women did not have money to get out of these situations and live on their own terms. If women neither had to get married against their wishes, nor lacked money to live on their terms, all these would not occur.

Loving our abusers

Love is complicated. We hate the people who abuse us. But we also end up loving them. Or if not actually loving them, then taking care of them, like Arundhati did. While the taking care may or may not be loving, Arundhati actually loves her mother. This she confesses, when she says that she came undone when her mother died. Not just this, she professes her love in many other ways throughout the book. How do we understand this? Arundhati herself appears confused, saying that to understand her behaviour, feelings, and justifications, we have to look around us and see how a lot of women end up loving, or at least staying with, the men who abuse them.

To me, Arundhati’s situation seems different from wives or partners who stay with or love abusive men. Because you can often choose your partner, and you can often choose to leave them, but you cannot choose your parents, and in many cases it may be impossible to leave them. Besides, even if it is possible to leave them, many of us owe a huge debt to our parents, which makes us feel guilty if we want to leave them in old age. I mean, I might question a woman who cares for an abusive partner/husband when she had choices not to, but I wouldn’t question an offspring doing that for a parent who raised them.

In most cases, mothers do love us more than partners, even if both are equally abusive. Arundhati does speak of some good things Mary Roy did for her in childhood, like encourage her to become an architect, back her in her efforts, and do everything to make sure Arundhati’s dream came true. So despite the abuse, there were also elements which inspire love from a child. Hence: Mother. Loyalty. South Asia. I do not question Arundhati’s love for her mother, even when she does.

The intensity of great writers

There is also this other thing about the quality of Arundhati Roy’s writing. Very, very intense. The anger, resentment, fire, in her are so substantial that you can actually feel them coming off of the page. Her writing is a force of nature. Something to admire, and something to aspire to as well, for a writer.

I guess, you can only write that well if you’ve had a life as difficult as Arundhati’s. No, let me rephrase that. Good writing comes in many shades. Harry Potter, for example, is good without being this angry. Boring things such as press releases also require good writing skills. So I guess I don’t mean just good writing when referring to Arundhati Roy’s writing. Apart from being good (good language and grammar, good flow, good structure, etc), her writing also has something else: a level of intensity that is difficult to bring to paper, but she does it all the same. And it is that intensity which sets her writing apart, which touches hearts and souls, and which made her so popular. Yes, that quality is certainly something to aspire to, as a writer. You hope your writing touches people, connects with people. However, I think only people who live lives that are as intense, have the capacity to write like that. If you’re an average person with an average life and you try to write like that, you fail. The writing seems fake.

We will go back to my favorite maxim: “There is one difference between truth and fiction. Fiction needs to make sense.” In roundabout way, I am trying to say that truth doesn’t need to make sense. Truth is true, and there are no justifications needed. However, fiction needs to make sense. If fiction is as senseless as life, then it falls flat and nobody buys it (like the last episode of Game of Thrones). So you need to write fiction that makes sense. But you can only write fiction that makes sense if you know the whole truth of it. Kinda counter intuitive, but I fully believe in this maxim.

I believe Arundhati Roy is able to express intensity because she has lived it, it is her truth. She even mentions it somewhere in the book. Something about her brother saying that the only piece of fiction in The God of Small Things is the dedication, where Arundhati says that Mary ‘loved her enough to let her go.’ By her own admission, the entirety of The God of Small Things is her truth, which is why it makes sense even when it is so convoluted. (Might be an unpopular opinion, but I think that is the reason her second novel doesn’t make sense. A Ministry of Utmost Happiness is not her lived truth, and thus is all over the place.)

My friend Sachi and I discussed this. Whether we want to be great writers who have lived difficult lives and transfer those experiences to paper, or whether we want to live cheerful lives and never end up becoming great writers. We both agreed that we would rather live cheerful lives and never have the need to express so much intensity. Foregoing greatness in exchange for reduced stress seems like a good bargain.

Absorbing the darkness of people who shine for others

On greatness and its impacts on the not so greats, perhaps this is the theme that touched me the most in the book. Mary Roy was not just Arundhati’s abusive mother, but also at the same time, someone totally opposite in public: a respected teacher and founder of a progressive school, beloved by hundreds of students. Presumably, she was not as abusive with them, Arundhati speaks of the unprecedented number of tributes that poured in after her death. Arundhati writes about this phenomenon: ‘for her to shine the light on others, we had to absorb her darkness.’ We, meaning she and her brother.

I fully understand how this happens, having lived in the shadow of someone who (aspired to be, or thought himself to be) great. My father. Who has a very public life of writing, participating in literary events, mentoring younger writers, contributing for the benefit of Nepali literature. And this. And that. It would be an understatement to say that he is a well known writer in Nepal. His ambition got him to where he is today, but that was not enough. The ‘absorption of his darkness’ by his family has contributed in equal measure to his greatness. The absorption was done mostly my mother, but also me and my sister.

What I mean here is, to be great, you have to be selfish. You have to focus fully on what you do, otherwise you remain merely mediocre. In Mary Roy’s case it was the school, she gave it all her emotions and spared none for her children. In my father’s case it was writing. Or more specifically, networking around literature. He focused fully on it, rarely attending family events such as birthdays, poojas, shraddhas, etc, often yelling at us for not understanding his ‘great pursuits’. Yes, pompous as it sounds, he did use those words for himself and his works. And also completely foregoing all housework which he heaped squarely on my mother’s shoulders.

The pursuit of greatness comes with a lot of emotions: anxiety that your goals may not be fulfilled, anger at delays, at perceptions of underperformance. All of this would be targeted at family members because outsiders of course, cannot be treated badly. And eventually, the angry way of speaking becomes a default. The higher moral ground of literature is not even needed, because anger can be invoked by anything. Bullying becomes a habit. So, coming back to Arundhati Roy and her book about her mother, this theme seems the most striking, the most honest, to me. This strange phenomenon, of absorbing the darkness of someone who shines for others, and still being able to love this person. Such is human nature. Sigh.

A human inside the monster

To me, the funniest thing was, at the end of the book, Mary Roy shouting to hospital staff to get them to do her bidding: ‘I am Arundhati Roy’s Mother!!!’ Hahaha. Shows that she was human after all, underneath that monstrous exterior.

On autobiographies

Arundhati Roy is able to be extremely honest in her autobiography, not glossing over anything. She includes things like her various relationships, the ugly sides of her family life, etc. This is the way that autobiographies should be. I don’t think I will be able to write one, ever, because I will not be able to be this honest.

I am going to detour now, into another autobiography I read, which was completely the opposite. She was a non-celebrity, a regular Nepali woman who had a writer for a daughter, which is how her book got published. I read it because I am interested in the lives of Nepali women. Let me just say that I was disappointed by the lack of honesty in the book.

In the beginning the book was quite promising, there were details of her childhood, home, lifestyle. Some things I remember: having to walk for an hour every morning to get drinking water from a shallow spring well, competing with neighbors to do so— the one who won got the water, and the one who lost had to scrape the mossy mud from the bottom of the spring and take that home to distill. I cannot begin to comprehend this kind of hardship, and on another level, living in great intimacy with the aforesaid neighbour who you compete with daily (a whole chapter is dedicated to praising this neighbour lady that she competed with every day). The writer’s favorite person was her kanchhi sister-in-law, who had the capacity to carry the largest gagri, and always got up first in the morning and brought home a large gagri of water. Such details of the timber of Nepali women’s lives are what we want to read.

And then the book devolved into chapters about the individuals in her lives, and then it became so bland that and generic that there was nothing of value. For example, there are chapters on each of her (I think ten?) children and their spouses, and then a similar number of chapters on the children of her sauta. Most of the chapters read like CVs topped with euphemistic praises. They say nothing about how the person is, looks, and feels, in real life. It says what they do, where they live, how many children they have, and then goes on to praise them in the same generic words: I encountered this praise word पुख्खली for the first time in this book, and it was said so many times that I was ready to barf at its very mention (I still don’t know what it means). And in the chapter about her husband, she states platitudes like मेरा श्रीमान सामाजिक कार्यहरुमा सधैं अघि बढ्ने, असाध्य राम्रो मान्छे हुनुहुन्थ्यो। Once again, I wanted to barf because this says nothing about what her husband was like and how he impacted her life and what their relationship was like. I understand why she would say this. It is not easy to be honest about the persons around you. But then, I wonder what is the value of autobiographies such as these, or at least, these sections, which reveal nothing. (Of course they have value, as contributions to increasing the corpus of women’s writings, but you can’t help wishing that the content was stronger and portrayed women’s lives in more detail and honesty).

All of this I was only saying to illustrate the point that if you want to write an autobiography, you need to be prepared to be brutally honest, in a way that Arundhati Roy is, sparing no details. That is an act of great courage. And such works have great value because they help us reflect on and understand our own lives, and the world around us. I am pretty sure it is not easy to confront these difficult emotions, and so I find the book commendable.