Episode 2: The Sliding-Folding School

This is the first memoir by the acclaimed Indian writer and political activist Arundhati Roy, best-known for her Booker-prize-winning novel The God of Small Things. It is the account of a remarkable and difficult childhood which was dominated by Arundhati’s formidable mother, Mary Roy.

This was a time in South India when women had very proscribed roles, and Mary Roy challenged them profoundly:
‘In that conservative, stifling little South Indian town, where, in those days, women were only allowed the option of cloying virtue – or its affectation – my mother conducted herself with the edginess of a gangster.’

Mary Roy’s achievements are extraordinary - she founded a co-educational school which challenged sexist gender roles, and she brought a legal challenge which gave South Indian women equal inheritance rights with men. But at home, as Arundhati reveals, she’s cruel and bullying; she hits her children and belittles them constantly. At 18, Arundhati left home and didn’t see or speak to her mother for seven years. But when Mary Roy died in 2022, Arundhati was distraught, and even a ‘little ashamed’ at the intensity of her loss. In an attempt to make sense of their relationship, she began to write Mother Mary Comes to Me.

In this second episode, Arundhati Roy tells the story of how her mother, who had left her alcoholic husband and is now homeless and penniless, manages to start a school, in two small halls belonging to the local Rotary Club. Arundhati and her brother become her pupils. The curriculum is somewhat eccentric:
‘Mrs Roy taught me Shakespeare, Kipling and A. A. Milne. She read me parts of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. And the opening passage of Lolita. She would slash through my compositions, mark me three out of ten, and write comments like “Horrible. Nonsense.” She taught me to write and resented the author I became.’

Read by Shaheen Khan

Produced and abridged by Elizabeth Burke

Studio Production and Sound Design by Jon Calver

Executive Producer: Sara Davies

Photo courtesy of Arundhati Roy

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4