Roy’s Memoir

In the early aughts, when I was in college, Roy’s long-form essays were a frequent feature in the Outlook magazine. Vinod Mehta’s trust in her made her a household name, and he, too, fondly wrote about this association in his memoir. Sometime in 2015, her introduction to Navayana’s edition of Ambedkar’s ‘Annihilation of Caste’ again mesmerized me. Since then, I haven’t read much of Roy. So, after all these years, reading her memoir, I suddenly got reminded of her felicity with the English language. It is little wonder that she could romanticize the Maoists, indict the Neo-cons as murderers, and so thoroughly ruffle the Indian State during the first decade of the millennium. While I never bought into the logic of her arguments, there was little doubt about one fact: she was one of the bravest voices to take on the Indian State.

In the memoir, she takes on a similar task. Instead of the State, it’s the memories of her mother that she addresses here – with irritation, exasperation, angst, sadness, and love. Her recollections of a life lived between Kerala and Delhi—both places I too call home—along with her relationships and her evolution as a political activist, all rendered in luminous prose, made this book an utterly gripping read. Her early-day struggles in Delhi, the challenge of finding affordable accommodation, college romances, and her dealings with NIUA and other institutions  – the phase of her life where, in her words, she was ‘Fatherless Motherless Homeless Jobless Reckless’ resonated.

On Kerala:

I couldn’t think of those hills and trees, the green rivers, the shrinking, cemented-over rice fields with giant billboards rising out of them advertising awful wedding saris and even worse jewellery, without thinking of her.

The Kerala monsoon always made me feel that God was speaking to us directly, with no intermediaries

When she met her first husband, Pradip Krishen, he was already married and a father of two daughters:

He told me quite frankly that both he and his wife were in relationships with other people, but they had no intention of leaving each other. I acted as though I were in relationships with at least ten other men, and he was just another notch in my gun. Lies, of course. A 22- year- old ’s pathetic defence mechanism.

 
On the possibilities of loving more than one person, something that my hopelessly romantic friends fail to comprehend:

In the pages that follow it might be confusing for readers who are searching for conventional declarations of love, coupledom, marriage, divorce, separation and love affairs to understand how I lived (live) my life. I often don’t understand it myself. I have stopped trying. The truth is that from the time I met Sanjay and Pradip, I have loved them both. In very different ways. We have hurt one another terribly and made up again. We have protected one another, backed one another, worked with one another. We have been one another’s siblings, parents, children, friends, refuge –  depending on who needs what and when. We ’re tangled up and nothing can untangle us.

Roy, on John Berger and the art of ‘listening’

As though my words were rain, and he was the earth. He absorbed everything, gathered every drop, missed absolutely nothing. His listening eyes were lakes in the high mountains. It was love, there ’s no other word for it. I don’t think that stillness, that quality of attention, is even pos-sible in digital- age humans, who suckle on mobile phones from the moment they’re born. It ’s a generational thing. Lost for ever, I believe.

And finally, this, on children being scolded for not ‘winning’:

On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room. If you pause to think about it, it’s true, someone is.

Postscript: In 1990, Mary Roy was planning to stage a version of the 1970 rock opera ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ that was set to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. The kids, parents and the community were all set for it when the then Kottayam District collector ‘banned’ the programme in the pretext of it possibly hurting Christian sentiments. Mary Roy took him on and got an anticipatory bail order issued in her favour, which she framed in her office for the rest of her working life. Yesterday, while attending a book launch at the IIC, the very same collector sat next to me and we chatted. In the conversation, he mentioned his Syrian Christian roots, spoke about Onam, and finally pointed towards the book that he was carrying – Abraham Verghese’s ‘The Covenant of Water’ and praised it. I didn’t mention the book that I had just read and finished. It would have been bad manners. No?

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