“An old story that has to be told and retold because it challenges the meaning of progress, happiness, and civilisation itself.”
Mentioned in passing the circumstances of my picking-up Arundhati Roy’s latest, in a footnote here, her (2025) memoir “Mother Mary Comes to Me”. I guess we know her through her Booker-winning debut (1997) “God of Small Things” (which I loved) less through her (2017) “Ministry of Utmost Happiness” (still unread) and mostly by repute for her feminist, liberal, social and ecological activism-in-non-fiction-writing and speaking - “walking with” activist comrades.
An amazingly eventful life, including writing necessitated by that activism, distracting her from her long-term authorial projects. And here I am again too, writing what I shouldn’t be writing, about about a book I shouldn’t be reading, as well as two other new additions to the library of unread books - Paul Mason’s “Reds” and Mark Carney’s “Values”.
Of course’s Roy’s story is her own personal story, and that of her mother Mary - “the most unusual, wonderful woman [she] had ever known” - but the content experienced and abstracted is in itself #NothingNewUnderTheSun, ‘twas ever thus, etc. Hence her own description of her “Ministry” as that old story in need of retelling.
I didn’t do any annotation whilst reading. After a couple of distracted starts, I eventually read through in two concentrated sessions, so to pick out all touch-points I’ll need a searchable Kindle copy or maybe some ChatGPT help.
She was a fan of, and had a strong relationship with, John Berger. The Goa-inhabiting hippies feigning namaste. Salman Rushdie in passing, reinforcing my conflation of the Malabar Coast Spice & Pickle Company across both their stories? Like the butchery in Moby Dick, I smell them both. Namaste. Secularism. Funny too. Too many impressions to recall.
Apart from the deeply affecting personal human story of people and relationships - savage love and thorny grace - one of the lasting impressions, at least partly responsible for denting her global popularity as a fiction writer, was her choice of activist political causes. Very much from her notionally Syrian-Christian perspective in an increasingly Hindu-supremacist Indian context, in the even wider contexts of caste, class, gender and colonial history, those social causes she championed at great personal risk were so often in defence of minority Muslim populations, filled with strong women. Hers has to be a unique perspective for us “Western” male anglophones. Recommended if for that alone.
I shall never invoke the Buddhist namaste again without her thoughts ringing in my ears on misappropriation of the Hindu namaste as a sign of respect and gratitude free from Abrahamic monotheistic religious baggage. Oh well, roll-on true secularism.
Oh, and it’s Friday. I’m in love.
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