Mother Mary Comes to Me, Too

When I first encountered the title Mother Mary Comes to Me, my mind recalled the lyrics before supplying any reason.

“When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me…”

Surely, I assumed, Arundhati Roy was invoking the Beatles song in some way. The connection seemed obvious. What I did not yet know was whether it extended beyond the shared name.

The title lingered nevertheless. Then the book began appearing around me. On bookshelves. On Facebook and Instagram. In other people’s conversations. I remained passive while the book took the active lead. It may simply have been the algorithm doing what algorithms do. Still, it kept entering my field of vision.

Then travel happened, yet again. Somewhere between packing too much, sleeping too little and moving through airports with the misplaced confidence of someone who still believes he has perfected the process, I finally carried Mother Mary Comes to Me along. The book loitering at the edges of my consciousness became my travel companion.

Arundhati Roy’s writing has always had a way of getting under my skin. I am reminded of Bukowski’s So You Want to Be a Writer: if something within must emerge, it will eventually come exploding out. Otherwise, it may remain there and quietly implode.

To understand why Roy had returned to me now, I had to recall when she first found me, almost three decades earlier.

In the late 1990s, I was a senior medical student in Karachi, consuming medical textbooks with the dutiful anxiety required to pass examinations, yet unable to approach other books with the same eagerness. I had previously thrived on fiction. Academic medicine had apparently decided that this part of my brain was expendable.

What fiction I did read was dominated by Stephen King and J.R.R. Tolkien. One offered monsters hiding within ordinary people and places. The other offered worlds in which good, evil and several varieties of creatures coexisted in unholy alliances. Both seemed perfectly reasonable preparation for future clinical practice.

Then came The God of Small Things.

Roy brought childhood, forbidden love, caste and family hypocrisy closer to home. Alongside Márquez and his magical realism, she opened a literary doorway from the subcontinent. After medical textbooks marching towards patient management, this felt mildly subversive. Possibly therapeutic.

More than two and a half decades later, I returned to Roy through The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. I was back in Karachi by then, interestingly, although probably not accidentally. Geography has its own sense of humour, after all.

This was a larger, more political and unrulier book about people pushed to society’s edges. A graveyard became a curious commune that sat well with the itinerant observer within. The story wandered off without asking for directions. I did not always follow willingly. Yet Roy remained unmistakably Roy.

The reader had changed too. Twenty-five years of life, love and a few hard awakenings had intervened. The medical student had become a doctor, father, traveler and writer, not necessarily in that sensible order.

That was the history I carried when I began Mother Mary Comes to Me. This time Roy was writing about herself and her mother, Mary Roy.

I read slowly, never easy while moving through airports, hotel rooms and schedules designed to defeat reflection. Travel creates distance from home and, occasionally, from oneself. Especially at 35,000 feet, where nuance and ambiguity become unexpectedly good bedfellows.

Somewhere within that liminal space, the book landed like a punch in the solar plexus.

Mary Roy emerged as formidable, brilliant, loving, cruel and often impossible.

Arundhati did not tidy up the relationship for the reader.

I set the book aside several times because there is only so much maternal combustion one can process at cruising altitude.

Then curiosity, discomfort or recognition pulled me back.

Arundhati recounts harassment and molestation with disarming matter-of-factness: a trusted older man groping her, a young man pressing against her on a bus, a grand-uncle touching and commenting on her body. Her restraint makes these encounters more disturbing. Girls and women were expected to absorb them quietly.

She is equally candid about Mary Roy’s explicit sexualized insults. Arundhati absorbs the impact while another part watches and remembers, I suspect already taking notes. Her resilience feels like learning how to remain standing. Remembering carries its own cost. So does writing about someone who has shaped and wounded you, particularly when love remains entangled with the wound.

Around them sits a familiar social world where privilege, religion, class, gender and age readily collaborate. We are remarkably skilled across South Asia at living beside such contradictions while behaving as though they belong to somebody else.

Education may liberate, or teach us to defend our prejudices more eloquently. Religion may deepen compassion, or furnish moral cover for cruelty. Wealth and deprivation exist side by side. We simply learn which side not to look at.

Arundhati writes about India, yet much crosses the border without a visa. The post-colonial inheritance feels related: hierarchy dressed as culture, control as care and silence as respect. Indo-Pak echoes rather than equivalences.

That may explain why the book struck so hard. I was reading Arundhati Roy’s memoir, yet I kept finding myself in familiar territory.

Mothers. Mothering. (S)mothering.

I had written around this terrain before. In Ma. In Under the Weight of Absurdity. Care, memory, presence and absence had been recurring quietly through my work. Even Rosie, a much earlier story about my encounter with a stubborn Shetland pony, eventually wandered into the same territory. The pony, too, had led me back to my mother.

I had never placed these pieces beside one another. Writers like to imagine recurring themes are evidence of design. Often, they are merely obsessions revealing themselves slowly.

As the youngest of three sons, I had become the one on whom many of my mother’s expectations rested. My father was an artist, lost in his own mind for much of the time. That left my mother carrying most of the practical and emotional load. Care, anxiety and hope often arrived together. The distance between mothering and smothering was not always great.

Ageing has altered the dynamic further. Dependence shifts. The mother who once did most of the holding begins to need more of it herself. Tenderness, duty, guilt and fear of loss complicate the relationship in ways I am still working through.

Roy’s story remained hers. Our mothers remained distinct. But her memoir helped me recognize why I had been circling this uneasy proximity in my own writing.

And so, I returned to the title. McCartney and Roy were both writing through memory about very different mothers, both named Mary.

The algorithm may have kept putting the book in front of me. What waited inside it was another matter.

“…Speaking words of wisdom

Let it be”.

from Rambling of an Itinerant

References/Additional Reading

·       Lennon, J. and McCartney, P. “Let It Be.” Performed by The Beatles. Apple Records, 1970.

·       Bukowski, C. “So You Want to Be a Writer?” Ecco, 2003.

·       Roy, A. The God of Small Things. IndiaInk, 1997.

·       Roy, A. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Hamish Hamilton, 2017.

·       Roy, A. Mother Mary Comes to Me. Hamish Hamilton, 2025.

·       Mian, A. “Ma.” Spillwords, 2018.

·       Mian, A. “Under the Weight of Absurdity.” The Express Tribune, 2024.

·       Mian, A. “Rosie.” In An Itinerant Observer. Acacia Publishing, 2014.

Acknowledgment: Originally published in the Express Tribune: The journeys books take us on