How will we now remember Mary Roy?

I started writing this on September 1, after I devoured Arundhati Roy’s memoir. And then paused because I had to race to first write, then rewrite, an 8,000+-word profile of billionaire-podcaster-entrepreneur-investor Nikhil Kamath for Newslaundry and The News Minute. Once that was done and dusted, I mulled over whether I’d have anything different to say from the countless reviews published in the interim and the many discussions around it, online and offline.

But yesterday, re-reading my draft, I felt I still did. So, here goes:

A benevolent dictator.

That’s the descriptor I coined for Mary Roy years after leaving her school. It was handy when people asked what she was like, when I had occasion to mention I studied in “Arundhati Roy’s mother’s school”. After reading Mother Mary Comes To Me, I feel Mrs Roy – or MR, as we referred to her – may have bristled at her school being identified thus.

While the world was agog with anticipation about reading Arundhati Roy’s new book, I was looking forward to reading a book about Mrs Roy. An honest, intimate portrayal, I imagined, like no other about her. I was right but in the most unexpected ways. I have to reconcile the image I used to have with the one that I am now acquainted with, where one does not negate the other. Only then, does the whole emerge.

But first, I want to gather my own memories of how I remember Mrs Roy. As a journalist, I hesitate to add this but in this particular context, where I have to burrow into memories that are three decades old, my caveat, to borrow from Arundhati, is that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination – we may not be the best arbiters of which is which”.

I remember I was scared of her, of incurring her wrath in any way. I think almost all of us, students and staff, were. You could not be sure what might provoke her rage, only that you did not want to. Arundhati refers to the cult around Mrs Roy and there was a sliver of truth to this – she did not brook defiance. Not that I tried.

At Corpus Christi, later Pallikoodam, we felt we had much more freedom than the average Indian school student, yet it was ruled by the diktats of one individual. I realised these contradictions only when I was an adult.

We did not have uniforms. Boys and girls were encouraged to mix (in the healthiest way) - or rather, it was compulsory to. Classroom seating split by gender was anathema. We were not supposed to be shy about our bodies, wrapping them up in towels at the swimming pool. This was a directive from Mrs Roy herself, that towels had to be left in the changing room. It was typical of her. An incident Arundhati mentions in her book, where a 60-something Mrs Roy sashayed onto stage in a swimsuit in the school auditorium to disabuse us of being conscious of our bodies, was one I was witness to. When I joined college in Chennai, I realised that many Malayalees delightedly reduced Mrs Roy to this – to them she was the school principal who wore a swimsuit on stage. Not the woman who took the fight for equal inheritance for Christian women in Kerala all the way to the Supreme Court and won.

Tuitions were banned – they were a crutch, she said. When some of us broke that rule in tenth standard with the boards looming, we were suspended from class for weeks. In our tuition- and coaching-obsessed country, I cannot imagine this upside down turn of events anywhere else.

If she felt something was not up to the mark, she could shout at you, enraged. If she decided something, that was the law of the land ie our school. A classmate told me years later that when he first joined college, it felt oddly liberating that there was no “voice from above” telling him what to do. For the first time.

That was the dictator.

Ours was a small school, with about 30 students in each class and no sections, so everyone sort of knew everyone else and MR wrote comments in every student’s report card. So it was no wonder that she made it her business to call me to her office one day to ask why I had not signed up for extra swimming classes by the Australian coach who had come on board. “You are growing like a weed,” she shouted. I don’t remember whether I gathered the temerity to tell her anything at all, let alone the truth that extra classes were an extra expense in an already expensive school. But she seems to have known. She insisted that I join – and waived the charges. Later, when it seemed as if I may have to switch schools because of the additional expense of boarding when my parents were transferred out of Kottayam, she waived the tuition fee.

That was the benevolent dictator. She always knew best.

She was an icon and an iconoclast. An institution builder who challenged other institutions. She dared to be unconventional in the most conventional of Syrian Christian towns. She insisted her students give equal attention to theatre, kathakali, music, environmental issues and athletics as academics, in a state where engineering and medicine were constantly held up as the only career options. She made it compulsory for boys, too, to learn how to sew a button. She promoted Malayalam and learning in the mother tongue when it was fashionable to speak exclusively in English. She could convince people like Atul Kumar to come all the way to Kottayam to direct school plays.

But now I had to reconcile all of this with Arundhati’s version of her mother. That Mary Roy was all of what I wrote but she was also deplorably cruel and tyrannical to her own children. One of the most difficult passages to read describes Mary Roy beating her small son in the privacy of a locked room till the ruler broke. This was the same Mrs Roy who banned corporal punishment in her school long before it became the norm and, later, the law. Other such incidents abound, from the awful destiny Arundhati’s pet dog meets to how one of her members of staff who worked closely with her would shed tears remembering how terribly Mrs Roy treated her. There can be no rationale, no justification for these inhumane actions.

Arundhati addresses this dichotomy often, how it was as if the two siblings had to absorb the darkness so that MR could shine her light on the rest of us, her students and her school. (Her writing, I have to add here, is sublime, vintage Arundhati, the superlative, unique prose of God of Small Things, not her essays since – I’m mentioning it as a “btw” because that has been said everywhere but I can’t not mention it).

There are those among Mrs Roy’s students, fellow alumni, who feel Arundhati should not have written this, all of this. But I disagree – it’s her story to tell, too. And one that needed some kind of catharsis, perhaps, considering how tumultuous their relationship was. I don’t know if it gave her that, but as another critic pointed out, she’s now got the last word. To the thousands of Arundhati Roy fans, who will know Mrs Roy only through Arundhati’s eyes and words, she will now mostly be the monster mother of a brilliant daughter who emerged the bigger person. Yes, Mrs Roy was surely that. But she was not only that.

Which makes part of me feel that Arundhati should have written and published this unvarnished version before Mrs Roy died. From everything else she has written in her book I know this was unlikely, impossible. But maybe that would have been more of a fair fight? 

Maybe that would have torched their relationship permanently and maybe she didn’t want that – to wage one final battle, add to all the scars she evidently still carries.

And yet, I keep thinking about this choice that she deliberately made.

What do I wish? I wish I could hear Mary Roy’s story in her own words, too. 

But that, now, will never be.

PS: Among the other reviews/critiques I enjoyed, here’s Amrita Dutta’s which expresses some of the other discomfiture I felt while reading.

This article was originally published on Substack.

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