The journeys books take us on

August 30, 2026When 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. Speaking words of wisdom.

Let it be”Surely, I assumed, Arundhati Roy was invoking The Beatles song in some way. The connection seemed obvious. It was also, as I would discover, entirely my own creation.

I am a storyteller, after all. 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. 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. Through Estha and Rahel, Ammu and Velutha, Roy brought childhood, forbidden love, caste and family hypocrisy uncomfortably close to home. The story moved through memory, its language inventing rules along the way.

Alongside Márquez and other South American writers, Roy opened a literary doorway from the subcontinent. After medical textbooks in which every sentence marched 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 time there was Anjum, a hijra living in a Delhi graveyard; Tilo; Kashmir; political violence and people pushed to society’s edges. The graveyard became a curious commune. That sat rather well with the itinerant observer within.

The novel refused to behave itself. Characters multiplied and the story occasionally wandered off with no intention of 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, traveller, and writer, not necessarily in that sensible order. That was the history I carried when I began reading Mother Mary Comes to Me. This time it was not fiction.

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. At its centre were Arundhati and her mother.

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 distasteful memories from her life of elderly men in the family behaving inappropriately with her, of similar incidents on a bus involving a stranger. The restraint makes these encounters more disturbing.

Girls and women were expected to absorb such experiences without inconveniencing the structures that enabled them. She is equally candid about the explicit insults Mary Roy hurled at her. The language is startling, particularly coming from a mother.

Arundhati absorbs the impact while another part watches and remembers. I suspect that part was 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 deeply familiar social world.

Underprivileged children exist within considerably privileged families. Religion, education, class, gender and age coexist and, when required, 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 from and about India, yet much of what she describes crosses the border without a visa. The details differ, but the post-colonial inheritance feels related: hierarchy dressed as culture, control presented as care and silence mistaken for respect.

These are Indo-Pak echoes rather than equivalences. That may explain why the book struck so hard. Although I was reading Arundhati Roy’s memoir, its adjacency to my own writing was uncanny.

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. Roy exposed a pattern I had apparently been circling for years.

Her story remained hers. Our mothers remained distinct. I had simply recognised a recurring thread in my writing that I had not appreciated before.

And so, I returned to the title. Paul Mc. Cartney’s Mother Mary and Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary emerge from entirely different places.

The connection I had confidently assumed remained elusive. Yet after travelling through Roy’s words, and then backwards through some of my own, the two continued to resonate. Some connections are intended.

Some are discovered. Others are created by readers who may need them to exist. I still cannot fully explain what I sensed when I first saw the title.

Perhaps it was the algorithm. I am less convinced that it was random. Let it be.

The writer is a physician, researcher, innovator, and freelance contributor. All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer. Pages.

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