In Delhi, Arundhati Roy gives friends and family a peek into her memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me

A day before Arundhati Roy released her memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, to the world, an intimate gathering of family and friends was invited to celebrate the new book at the Oddbird theatre in New Delhi on August 27. The guest list was so carefully curated that Roy, in her opening remarks, commented that many of them would actually find themselves in the pages of her book.

The evening gave the author, publishers and those close to her a chance to meet and reflect on Roy’s life, her complicated relationship with her mother and the current political climate.

Taking the stage at the dimly lit venue, Roy read out excerpts from her book — about how she left her mother in Kerala and arrived in Delhi by train in 1976, naive and with a knife in her bag — as the audience sat mesmerised. In conversation with Manasi Subramaniam, the publisher of the book, Roy shared anecdotes about how her mother checked herself into the hospital to read The God of Small Things, Roy’s first novel, to find out how her daughter had portrayed her in the book. “My mother is someone who deserves to be in the pages of literature and history. She deserves more than a hagiography, as some of the wildest things about her were not the nice things,” Roy said about writing the book.

Roy was nostalgic, unabashed, and at ease the entire evening. When an audience member’s phone rang, its ringtone piercing through the small theatre, Roy sang along “she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah”, the lyrics to the Beatles song that was the ringtone.

From members of her family, that include filmmaker Pradip Kishen and her cousin, journalist Prannoy Roy, to personalities from the world of filmmaking like Sharmila Tagore and Mira Nair, and friends from the Narmada Bachao Andolan and the publishing world, it was an eclectic mix of people cheering on as Roy let her book out into the world.

jaideep.deobhanj@thehindu.co.in