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Mother Mary Comes To Me

Arundhati Roy is the author of the novels The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017. She is the author of various works of non- ction including My Seditious Heart, Azadi and, most recently, The Architecture of Modern Empire. She lives in Delhi.

ALSO BY ARUNDHATI ROY

Fiction

The God of Small Things

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Non- ction

Capitalism: A Ghost Story

The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and the Annihilation of Caste

My Seditious Heart: Collected Non- ction

Azadi: Fascism, Fiction, and Freedom in the Time of the Virus

The Architecture of Modern Empire: Conversations with David Barsamian

Mother Mary Comes To Me •

Arundhati Roy

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Reference in title to lyric from ‘Let It Be’ by John Lennon and Paul McCartney; extract from Pig Earth by John Berger; lyrics from ‘She Loves You’ by John Lennon and Paul McCartney; lyrics from ‘Love in Vain’ by the Rolling Stones (written by Robert Johnson); extract from ‘The Thought-Fox’ in The Hawk in the Rain by Ted Hughes, reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; lines from ‘Hosanna’, ‘The Arrest’ and ‘Heaven on Their Minds’ (from Jesus Christ Superstar) by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice; lines from ‘Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo’ by Helen Deutsch; extract from ‘Khwab ka dar band hai’ by Akhlaq Mohammed Khan Shahryar, translated into English by Shah Alam Khan.

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For LKC

Together we made it to the shore

For Mary Roy

Who never said Let It Be

The guests as they left kissed the crown of her head and she knew them by their voices

– John Berger

GANGSTER

She chose September, that most excellent month, to make her move. The monsoon had receded, leaving Kerala gleaming like an emerald strip between the mountains and the sea. As the plane banked to land, and the earth rose to greet us, I couldn’t believe that topography could cause such palpable, physical pain. I had never known that beloved landscape, never imagined it, never evoked it, without her being part of it. I couldn’t think of those hills and trees, the green rivers, the shrinking, cemented-over rice elds with giant billboards rising out of them advertising awful wedding saris and even worse jewellery, without thinking of her. She was woven through it all, taller in my mind than any billboard, more perilous than any river in spate, more relentless than the rain, more present than the sea itself. How could this have happened? How? She checked out with no advance notice. Typically unpredictable. The church didn’t want her. She didn’t want the church. (There was savage history there, nothing to do with God.) So given her

standing in our town, and given our town, we had to fashion a tting funeral for her. The local papers reported her passing on their front pages; most national papers mentioned it, too. The internet lit up with an outpouring of love from generations of students who had studied in the school she founded, whose lives she had transformed, and from others who knew of the legendary legal battle she had waged and won for equal inheritance rights for Christian women in Kerala. The deluge of obituaries made it even more crucial that we do the right thing and send her o the way she deserved. But what was that right thing? Fortunately, on the day she died the school was closed and the children had gone home. The campus was ours. It was a huge relief. Perhaps she had planned that, too.

Conversations about her death and its consequences for us, especially me, had begun when I was three years old. She was thirty then, debilitated by asthma, dead broke (her only asset was a bachelor’s degree in education), and she had just walked out on her husband – my father, I should say, although somehow that comes out sounding strange. She was almost eighty-nine when she died, so we had sixty years to discuss her imminent death and her latest will and testament, which, given her preoccupation with inheritance and wills, she rewrote almost every other week. The number of false alarms, close shaves and great escapes that she racked up would have given Houdini pause for thought. They lulled us into a sort of catastrophe complacency. I truly believed she would outlive me. When she didn’t, I was wrecked, heart-smashed. I am puzzled and more than a little ashamed by the intensity of my response. My brother put his nger sharply on that nerve. ‘I don’t

understand your reaction. She treated nobody as badly as she treated you.’ He could be right, although according to me, it was he who held that trophy. I can understand him feeling that I was humiliating myself by not acknowledging what had happened to us as children. But I had put that behind me a long time ago. I have seen and written about such sorrow, such systemic deprivation, such unmitigated wickedness, such diverse iterations of hell, that I can only count myself among the most fortunate. I have thought of my own life as a footnote to the things that really matter. Never tragic, often hilarious. Or perhaps this is the lie I tell myself. Maybe I pitched my tent where the wind blows strongest hoping it would blow my heart clean out of my body. Perhaps what I am about to write is a betrayal of my younger self by the person I have become. If so, it’s no small sin. But I’m in no position to be the judge of that.

I left home – stopped going home, or what passed as home – after I turned eighteen. I had just entered my third year at the School of Architecture in Delhi.

In those days we nished high school at sixteen. That’s how old I was in the summer of 1976 when I rst arrived at Nizamuddin Station, alone, without even a working knowledge of Hindi, to take the entrance exam for the School of Architecture. I was terri ed and had a knife in my bag. Delhi was three days and two nights away by train from Cochin, which is a three-hour drive from our town, Kottayam, which in turn is a few kilometres away from our village, Ayemenem, where I spent my early childhood. In other

words, for me Delhi was a di erent country altogether. Di erent language, di erent food, di erent climate, di erent everything. The scale of the city was beyond my comprehension. I came from a place where everybody knew where everyone lived. Pathetically, I asked an auto-rickshaw driver if he could take me to the home of my mother’s older sister, Mrs Joseph. I assumed he knew where she lived. He took a deep drag of his bidi and turned away, looking bored. Two years later I was the one smoking bidis and cultivating that peerless look of bored disdain. In time I traded in my knife for a good supply of hashish and some big-city attitude. I had emigrated. I left my mother not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her. Staying would have made that impossible. Once I left, I didn’t see or speak to her for years. She never looked for me. She never asked me why I left. There was no need for that. We both knew. We settled on a lie. A good one. I crafted it – ‘She loved me enough to let me go.’ That’s what I said at the front of my rst novel, The God of Small Things, which I dedicated to her. She quoted it often, as though it were God’s truth. My brother jokes that it’s the only piece of real ction in the book. To the end of her days, she never asked me how I managed during those seven years when I was a runaway. She never asked where I lived, how I completed my course of study and took my degree. I never told her. I managed well enough.

After our brittle, tentative reunion, I returned to her, visiting her regularly over the years as an independent adult, a quali ed architect, a production designer, a writer, but most of all as a woman watching another with love and admiration – and a fair amount of

disquiet – not just for her great qualities, but the opposite, too. In that conservative, sti ing little South Indian town, where, in those days, women were only allowed the option of cloying virtue – or its a ectation – my mother conducted herself with the edginess of a gangster. I watched her unleash all of herself – her genius, her eccentricity, her radical kindness, her militant courage, her ruthlessness, her generosity, her cruelty, her bullying, her head for business and her wild, unpredictable temper – with complete abandon on our tiny, insular Syrian Christian society, which, because of its education and relative wealth, was sequestered from the swirling violence and debilitating poverty in the rest of the country. I watched her make space for the whole of herself, for all her selves, in that little world. It was nothing short of a miracle – a terror and a wonder to behold.

Once I learned to protect myself (somewhat) from its soulcrushing meanness, I even grew fascinated by her wrath against motherhood itself. Sometimes the barefaced nakedness of it made me laugh. Not the laughing-out-loud kind of laughter, but the kind that comes upon you when you are alone. When you surgically excise an incident from its circumstances and look at it dispassionately, shorn of context. As though she were someone else’s mother and as though it were not I but someone else who was the object of her wrath.

As a child I loved her irrationally, helplessly, fearfully, completely, as children do. As an adult I tried to love her coolly, rationally, and from a safe distance. I often failed. Sometimes miserably. I wrote versions of her in my books, but I never wrote her. She liked those

versions, though, and embraced the character of Ammu in The God of Small Things, whom she would refer to as ‘I’ and ‘me’. She wanted to be Ammu because she knew very well that she wasn’t. When a mischievous journalist asked her whether she had indeed had a tragic love a air as Ammu did in the book, she looked him in the eye and said, ‘Why? Aren’t I sexy enough?’ She was in her sixties by then, a diva of her own making. She could say what she liked. When the book came out, she was worried about what secrets it might reveal. To be safe, she checked herself into hospital. There she read it hurriedly and was greatly relieved that it wasn’t any kind of exposé. At rst, she said she couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about. Then she studied it closely. After her third or fourth reading – she was home by then – she summoned me to her bedside. It was a bright afternoon and the light that ltered through her curtains was bordello red. Her eyes were shut. She said that she thought it was a good book. Well written. She wanted to know about a particular passage, one in which Ammu’s sevenyear-old twins, Esthappen and Rahel, remembered their parents ghting. How they grew huge, like giants, and pushed the children from one to the other, saying, ‘You take them, I don’t want them.’

‘Who told you about this? You were too young to remember.’

‘It’s ction.’

‘No, it’s not.’

And she turned to the wall.

I have never felt the weight or the sorrow of this memory. I really believed it was ction. I learned that day that most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination – and

that we may not be the best arbiters of which is which. So read this book as you would a novel. It makes no larger claim. But then, there can be no larger claim. Fiction is that strange, smoky thing that writers don’t entirely own, even if they think they do. Where does it come from? Our past, our present, our reading, our imagination – yes. But perhaps from premonitions of our future, too? How else can it be that like the characters in my second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, I, too, am now the caretaker of a sort of grave in the grounds of a sort of guest house? It’s outlandish. It keeps me awake at night. But then I ask myself: Why should we know everything?

•

In my e ort to fathom my mother, to see things from her perspective, to accommodate her, to understand what hurt her, what made her do the things she did and to predict what she may or may not do next, I turned into a maze, a labyrinth of pathways that zigzag underground and surface in strange places, hoping to gain a vantage point for a perspective other than my own. Seeing her through lenses that were not entirely coloured by my own experience of her made me value her for the woman she was. It made me a writer. A novelist. Because that’s what novelists are – labyrinths. And now this labyrinth must make sense of its labyrinthine self without her.

To bridge the chasm between the legacy of love she left for those whose lives she touched, and the thorns she set down for me, like little oaters in my bloodstream – sh hooks that still

catch on soft tissue as my blood makes its way to and from my heart – is why I write this book. It is as hard to write as it is not to. Perhaps even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject. In these pages, my mother, my gangster, shall live. She was my shelter and my storm.

FUGITIVES

A teacher was what she had always wanted to be, what she was quali ed to be. During the years she was married and living with our father, who had a job as an assistant manager on a remote tea estate in Assam, the dream of pursuing a career of any kind atrophied and fell away. It was rekindled (as nightmare more than dream) when she realized that her husband, like many young men who worked on lonely tea estates, was hopelessly addicted to alcohol.

When war broke out between India and China in October 1962, women and children were evacuated from border districts. We moved to Calcutta. Once we got there, my mother decided that she would not return to Assam. From Calcutta we travelled across the country, all the way south to Ootacamund – Ooty – a small hill station in the state of Tamil Nadu. My brother, LKC – Lalith Kumar Christopher Roy – was four and a half years old, and I was a month away from my third birthday. We did not see or hear from our father again until we were in our twenties.

In Ooty we lived in one-half of a ‘holiday’ cottage that belonged to our maternal grandfather who had retired as a senior government servant – an Imperial Entomologist – with the British government in Delhi. He and my grandmother were estranged. He had severed links with her and his children years ago. He died the year I was born.

I don’t know how we got into that cottage. Maybe the tenant who lived in the other half had a key. Maybe we broke in. My mother seemed familiar with the house. And the town. Perhaps she had been there as a child, with her parents. The cottage was dank and gloomy with cold, cracked cement oors and an asbestos ceiling. A plywood partition separated our half from rooms that were occupied by the tenant. She was an old English lady called Mrs Patmore. She wore her hair in a high, pu y style, which made us wonder what was hidden inside it. Wasps, we thought, my brother and I. At night she had bad dreams and would scream and moan. I’m not sure if she paid any rent. She might not have known who to pay it to. We, certainly, paid no rent. We were squatters, interlopers – not tenants. We lived like fugitives amid huge wooden trunks packed full of the dead Imperial Entomologist’s opulent clothes – silk ties, dress-shirts, three-piece suits. We found an old biscuit tin full of cu inks. (Obviously he was an enthusiastic collaborator with the colonial government and took the Imperial part of his professional designation seriously.) Later, when my brother and I were old enough to understand, we would be told the legendary family stories about him; about his vanity (he had a portrait of himself taken in a Hollywood photo studio)

and his violence (he whipped his children, turned them out of the house regularly, and split my grandmother’s scalp open with a brass vase). It was to get away from him, our mother told us, that she married the rst man who proposed to her.

Quite soon after we arrived, she got a teaching job at a local school called Breeks. Ooty was, at the time, swarming with schools, some of them run by British missionaries who had chosen to stay on in India after Independence. She became friends with a group of them who taught at an all-white school called Lushington, which catered to the children of British missionaries working in India. She managed to persuade them to let her sit in on their classes when she had time o from her job. She hungrily absorbed their innovative teaching methods for primary schoolchildren ( ashcards for reading and phonetics, coloured wooden Cuisenaire rods for maths) while being simultaneously disturbed by their kindly, well-meaning racism towards Indians and India. When she was away at work she left us for a few hours with a sullen woman and occasionally with neighbours.

A few months into our fugitive life, my grandmother (the Entomologist’s widow) and her oldest son – my mother’s older brother, G. Isaac – arrived from Kerala to evict us. I hadn’t seen either of them before. They told my mother that under the Travancore Christian Succession Act, daughters had no right to their father’s property and that we were to leave the house immediately. It didn’t seem to matter to them that we had nowhere to go. My grandmother didn’t say much, but she scared me. She had conical corneas and wore opaque sunglasses. I remember my mother, my

brother and me holding hands, running through the town in panic, trying to nd a lawyer. In my memory it was night, and the streets were dark. But it couldn’t have been. Because we did manage to nd a lawyer, who told us that the Travancore Act applied only in the state of Kerala, not Tamil Nadu, and that even squatters had rights. He said that if anyone tried to evict us, we could call the police. We returned to the cottage shaking but triumphant. My brother and I were too young to understand what the adults were saying. But we more than understood the emotions at play: intimidation, fear, anger, panic, reassurance, relief, triumph.

Our uncle G. Isaac could not have known then that by trying to evict his younger sister from their father’s cottage, he was laying the ground for his own downfall. It would be years before my mother had the means and the standing to challenge the Travancore Christian Succession Act and demand an equal share of her father’s property in Kerala. Until then, she would shield and safeguard this memory of her morti cation as though it were a precious family heirloom, which, in a way, it was. •

After our legal coup we expanded into the cottage, made ourselves some space. My mother gave away the Imperial Entomologist’s suits and cu inks to taxi drivers at the taxi stand near the market, and for a while Ooty had the best-dressed taxi drivers in the world. Despite our hard-won but still tentative sense of security, things didn’t go our way. The cold, wet climate in Ooty aggravated my mother’s asthma. She would lie under a thick metallic-pink

quilt on a high iron cot, breathing great, heaving breaths, bedridden for days on end. We thought she was going to die. She didn’t like us standing around staring at her and would order us out of her room. So, my brother and I would go o to nd something else to stare at. Mostly, we swung on the low, rickety gate at the corner of the triangular compound, watching newlywed couples on their honeymoon holding hands and walking past our home on their way to romance each other in Ooty’s famous botanical gardens. Sometimes they stopped and talked to us. They gave us sweets and peanuts. A man gave us a catapult. We spent days perfecting our aim. We made friends with strangers. Once one of them grabbed my hand and marched me back into the house. He told my mother sternly that her daughter had chickenpox. He made me show her the blister on my stomach, which I had been showing o to anybody who cared to examine it. My mother was furious. After he left, she smacked me hard on my cheek and told me I was never to lift my dress and show my stomach to strangers. Especially men. It could have been her illness, or the medication, but she became extremely bad-tempered and began to hit us often. When she did this my brother would run away and only come home after dark. He was a quiet boy. He never cried. When he was upset, he would put his head down on the dining table and pretend to be asleep. When he was happy, which wasn’t often, he would dance around me boxing the air, saying he was Cassius Clay. I don’t know how he knew who Cassius Clay was; I didn’t. Maybe our father told him.

I think those years in Ooty were harder for him than for me

because he remembered things. He remembered a better life. He remembered our father and the big house we had lived in on the tea estate. He remembered being loved. Fortunately, I didn’t.

My brother started school before me. He went to Lushington, the white people’s school, for a few months. (It must have been a favour to my mother from the missionaries.) But when he began to call local children like ourselves ‘those Indian children’ she pulled him out and enrolled him in Breeks, the school that she taught in. When I turned ve, she put me into a nursery school (for Indian children) that was run by a frightening-looking Australian missionary called Miss Mitten. She was a cruel woman with freckles on her arms. She had a slit for a mouth. No lips. She made it clear that she didn’t like me. Our classroom was a shed on the edge of a patchy meadow where a few thin cows with prominent hip bones grazed.

On days when her asthma was really bad, my mother would write out a shopping list of vegetables and provisions, put it into a basket and send us into town with it. Ooty was a safe, small town then, with little tra c. The policemen knew us. The shopkeepers were always kind and sometimes even gave us credit. The kindest of them all was a lady called Kurussammal, who worked in the Knitting Shop. She knitted two polo-neck sweaters for us. Bottle green for my brother. Plum for me.

When my mother became completely bedridden for a few weeks, Kurussammal moved in with us. Our edgy lifestyle came to an end. It was Kurussammal who taught us what love was. What dependability was. What being hugged was. She would

cook for us and bathe us outdoors in the bitter Ooty cold with water she boiled in a huge pot on a wood re. To this day my brother and I need to be almost boiled to feel properly bathed. Before she bathed us, she combed the lice out of our hair and showed us how to kill them. I loved killing them. They made a satisfying sound when I squashed them with my thumbnail. Apart from being a lightning-quick knitter, Kurussammal was a superb cook. She specialized in producing food from almost no ingredients. Even boiled rice with salt and a fresh green chilly tasted good when she put it on our plates.

Kurussammal’s name meant ‘mother of the cross’ in Tamil. Her husband, who visited us often, was Yesuratnam (‘Jesus jewel’, ‘jewel of jewels’). He had a goitre on his neck that he hid with his woollen mu er. He, like us, always smelled of woodsmoke. Eventually my mother grew too sick to hold down her job. Even the massive dose of steroids she was on didn’t help. We ran out of money. My brother and I grew undernourished and developed primary tuberculosis.

After a few more grim months of ghting on all fronts, my mother gave up. She decided to swallow her pride and return to Kerala, to Ayemenem, our grandmother’s village. By then the heat of her quarrel with her mother and brother had cooled. Even if it hadn’t, she was out of options.

I was heartbroken about leaving Kurussammal. But I would meet her again a few years later, when she moved to Kerala to live with us.

THE COSMOPOLITANS

As our train crossed the border from Tamil Nadu into Kerala, the land turned from brown to green. Everything, including the electric poles, was smothered with plants and creepers. Everything glistened. Almost all the people who slid past the train window, both men and women, wore white and carried black umbrellas.

My heart sang.

And then sank.

We arrived in Ayemenem uninvited and manifestly unwelcome. The house whose doorstep we appeared on with our invisible begging bowl belonged to my grandmother’s older sister, Miss Kurien. She would have been in her sixties then. Her thin, wavy grey hair was cut in a style that used to be called a pageboy. She wore starched, papery saris with big, loose blouses. Miss Kurien was far ahead of most women of her time. She was single, held a master’s degree in English literature and had taught at a college in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). She had a home of her

own. She had savings, a pension, and all the sagacity and singlemindedness of an unmarried working woman who knew she had to take care of herself. It’s unlikely she could have foreseen how many others she would have to look after, too.

My mother assured her that we would stay only as long as it took for her to nd a job. Miss Kurien, who prided herself on being a good Christian, agreed to let us stay, but made no e ort to hide her disapproval of us and our situation. She did this by ignoring us and showering her delicate a ections on other relatives’ children who visited her. She gave them gifts, played her piano and sang to them in her quavering voice. Even though she made it clear that she did not like us (which made us not like her), she was the one person who helped us out and gave us a roof over our heads when we most needed it.

My grandmother lived with her, too. Her conical corneas had deteriorated and she was almost blind by then. She still wore her dark glasses. Even at night. She had a ridge that ran across her scalp – her famous brass-vase scar. Sometimes she let me run my nger over it. And sometimes she allowed me to braid her thin hair into a rat’s tail before she went to bed.

Every evening she would sit on the veranda and play her violin.

She was an accomplished violinist and had taken music lessons when her Imperial Entomologist husband was posted in Vienna. When her tutor told him that his wife had the potential to become a concert-class violinist, he stopped the lessons and, in a t of jealous rage, smashed the rst violin she owned.

I was too young to tell how well she played, but as darkness fell in Ayemenem and the sound of crickets swelled, her music made the evenings and the very dark nights more melancholic than they already were.

My uncle G. Isaac lived in an annexe attached to the main house. At rst, I was terri ed of him. I only knew him as the tall, fat, angry man who had tried to turn us out of our home in Ooty. In Ayemenem, though, I began to see him in a new light. He seemed more interesting and less intimidating. I grew to love him after he began to take my brother and me down to the river and teach me to swim by making me paddle in circles around his stomach.

G. Isaac was one of India’s rst Rhodes scholars. His subject was Greek and Roman mythology. At the dining table he would suddenly say things like ‘Isn’t it wonderful to have a god of wine and ecstasy?’ Everybody would look at him blankly. And he would tell us about Dionysus, or whoever his god of the day was.

After teaching for a few years in a college in Madras, he gave up his academic career to return to his roots and start a pickle, jam and curry- powder factory with his mother. It was called the Malabar Coast Products. They ran it out of the Imperial Entomologist’s family home in Kottayam town which was a short bus ride away. (This was the house that would become the centre of the dispute when my mother challenged the Travancore Christian Succession Act.) G. Isaac, notwithstanding his keen interest in inheritance and private property, was a Marxist. He said he had given up his career to start a factory to promote small industry and

generate local employment. Fed up with his nonsense, his Swedish wife, Cecilia, who he met in Oxford, left him and returned to Sweden with their three young sons.

•

In these strange and manifold ways, this constellation of extraordinary, eccentric, cosmopolitan people, defeated by life, converged on the tiny village of Ayemenem.

The hot, humid climate suited my mother better. Her asthma, although it remained severe and chronic, improved a little. While she tried to work out what to do with her life, she home-schooled my brother and me. Everyone else mostly ignored us, except occasionally G. Isaac when he was in a good mood.

Life in Ayemenem was like living on a ledge that we could be nudged o at any moment. Even Kochu Maria, the cook, would tell me that we had no right to be living there. She would mutter and grumble about the shamefulness of having fatherless children living under the same roof as decent people. Every few days the Cosmopolitans would quarrel. When they fought, the whole house shook. Plates would be smashed; doors broken down. It was hard to keep track of the relationship between G. Isaac and my mother. Sometimes they were the best of friends and then, suddenly, without warning, mortal enemies. Most of the ghts were, unsurprisingly, about money. About how my mother was not contributing to household expenses, not earning her keep. G. Isaac took care not to include my brother and me in those quarrels.

As soon as the shouting began, I would ee. The river was my refuge. It made up for everything that was wrong in my life. I spent hours on its banks and came to be on intimate, rstname terms with the sh, the worms, the birds and the plants. I became close friends with other children (and some adults) in the village. I picked up Malayalam quickly and was soon able to communicate with everybody quite easily. They inhabited a di erent universe from mine. Most of them worked in nearby paddy elds and rubber plantations, or in the large compounds of landowning people, picking coconuts or working as house-help. They lived in mud and thatch-roofed houses. Many of them belonged to castes that were considered ‘untouchable’. I didn’t know much about this horror at the time because everybody in the Ayemenem house was too busy ghting with one another to bother about indoctrinating me.

One young man who lived in Ayemenem but worked in Kottayam in the Malabar Coast Products became my most beloved friend. We spent a lot of time together. He made me a shing rod out of a culm of bamboo and showed me where to nd the best earthworms to use as bait. He taught me to sh, he taught me to stay still and be quiet. He fried the tiny sh I caught and we ate them together as though we were feasting at a banquet. He was the inspiration for the character called Velutha – Ammu’s lover in The God of Small Things. Had I been sixteen years old instead of six, who knows, if I got lucky, he might well have been mine. He was the kindest, most handsome man I had ever seen.

Within months of being in Ayemenem, I turned into a part of

its landscape – a wild child with calloused feet who knew every hidden path and shortcut in the village that led to the river. I lived outdoors and went home as seldom as possible. In the non-human category, my closest companion was a striped palm squirrel who lived on my shoulder and whispered in my ear. We shared secrets. She wasn’t my pet. She had her own life, but chose to share it with me. She would disappear often because she had things to do. At mealtimes she would appear, perch on my plate and nibble at my food. She loved pineapples most of all. She was constantly watchful, eternally alert to every possibility of looming danger. She taught me things.

Squirrel survival skills were an asset for anybody attempting to navigate the ledge-life in Ayemenem.

‘I LOVE YOU DOUBLE’

My mother unloaded the burden of her quarrels and the daily dose of indignity that she had to endure on to my brother and me. We were the only safe harbour she had. Her temper, already bad, became irrational and uncontrollable. I found it impossible to predict or gauge what would anger her and what would please her. I had to pick my way through that mine eld without a map. My feet and ngers and sometimes even my head were often blown o , but after oating around untethered for a while, they would magically reattach themselves.

When she got angry with me, she would mimic my way of speaking. She was a good mimic and made me sound ridiculous to myself. I clearly remember everything about every instance she did that. Even what I was wearing. It felt as though she had cut me out – cut my shape out – of a picture book with a sharp pair of scissors and then torn me up.

The rst time it happened was on our way home from Madras

where we had been for two weeks. Her older sister, Mrs Joseph, had asked if my mother could look after her three children while she and her husband were away on holiday. (The same Mrs Joseph whose house I would years later ask the auto-rickshaw driver in Delhi to take me to.) My mother agreed. She must have felt that she would – at least nominally – be earning her keep while she was there.

Unlike the quarrelsome Ayemenem Cosmopolitans, Mrs Joseph had a proper husband, who was a pilot for Indian Airlines, proper children and a proper house with servants. Mrs Joseph was acutely conscious of the fact that in these matters she had succeeded where her siblings had failed. She was good-looking, with a high, smug voice that matched her starched, ironed saris and her neat hairstyle. She had a tight, knowing smile and always sounded as though she were con ding in the person she was talking to. There was no resemblance at all, neither physical nor temperamental, between her and my mother.

When Mrs Joseph came back from her holiday, the sisters had a terrible spat about something. We returned to Kerala the next day by plane. My aunt’s pilot husband had a quota of free tickets.

We hadn’t been in a plane before. Once we were seated, intending to conduct a reasonable, adult conversation as should be conducted by co-passengers on an airplane, I asked my mother how, if Mrs Joseph was her real sister, was Mrs Joseph so thin? My mother turned on me in a rage and mimicked me. I felt myself shrinking from my own skin and draining away, swirling like

water down a sink until I was gone. Then she said, ‘By the time you are my age you’ll be three times my size.’ I knew I had said something terrible, but I wasn’t sure what. (I was too young for ‘fat’ and ‘thin’ to be value judgements.) It was only years later, when the incident played over in my mind as it often does, and when I managed to think about it clearly without dwelling on my own feelings, that I nally realized how hurtful what I said must have been.

The steroids my mother was on had made her suddenly gain weight. She had developed a typical cortisone moon-face. Her striking, ne-featured face had disappeared behind pu y cheeks and a double chin. She must have been feeling forlorn and hopeless after her visit to her slimmer sister’s perfect home. Her triumphant career was still ahead of her, but there was no sign of it then. (In time she would embrace her size and shape. And she would teach her girl students to do that, too. In her fties she modelled a bathing suit for a fashion show in the school and showed the children how to sashay.) My question to my mother about her thin sister would have felt like vinegar on an open wound. Careless words from a careless child. So, she turned on me and mimicked my six-year-old’s way of speaking. And I turned on myself. I remember the air in the plane – there wasn’t any. I remember the colour of my dress. Sky blue with polka dots. A perfect handme-down from my perfect cousin with straight hair and big doe eyes. I saw that the dress didn’t match my knees, which were full of scars and cuts – a comprehensive logbook of my wild, imperfect, fatherless, pilotless life on the banks of the Meenachil River

in Ayemenem. I staged an imaginary competition with my perfect cousin, which I won hands down. She had a pilot father. And lovely hair. But I had a green river. (With sh in it, with the sky and trees in it and at night the broken yellow moon in it.) And a squirrel. I looked at my feet and saw that they didn’t belong in the sandals they wore.

It was a horrible plane full of horrible people in a horrible sky. I wanted it to crash and for all of us to die. I especially hated the spoiled children with doting parents. I was all for collective punishment. But in a while my mother said, ‘I’m your mother and your father and I love you double.’

And then the plane was all right. The sky was all right. But my feet were still strangers to the sandals they wore. And there were still some unresolved issues:

If I was going to be three times her size, I would need three seats to sit on. So, three free tickets.

Double. Triple. A maths class. A sum to solve.

What is double-love divided by triple-my-size multiplied by free tickets divided by careless words? A cold, furry moth on a frightened heart. That moth was my constant companion.

I learned early that the safest place can be the most dangerous. And that even when it isn’t, I make it so.

Years later, when I was in my thirties, a grown woman and a published novelist, I visited a friend who had just got married. The happy couple cooed and baby-talked to each other all day, for days. On the third day I nearly ran out of their house into oncoming tra c. I didn’t know what had upset me so much. It’s

only now, as I write this, that I think I understand. They had done nothing terrible – it was me. My old friend the cold moth had paid me a visit unannounced.

(Still, it would be nice for people like me if baby-talking adults came with a statutory warning.)

THE SLIDING-FOLDING SCHOOL

After that unhappy trip to Mrs Joseph’s home in Madras, we returned to our precarious life-on-the-ledge in Ayemenem.

But then, Redemption came.

It appeared in the stern shape and form of a middle-aged British lady who wore shoes and owered dresses. Mrs Mathews was one of the missionaries who had befriended my mother in Ooty. They had remained in touch and had hatched a plan.

Together, in 1967, they started a school in Kottayam. I was seven, my brother eight and a half.

They rented two small halls that belonged to the Kottayam Rotary Club, which the club members used only in the evenings. The school began with seven students including my brother and me. It sounds simple enough, but my mother couldn’t have done it alone. It was Mrs Mathews’s presence – white, virginal Christian missionary – that won the con dence of the rst few parents who enrolled their children in the new school. Without her, it’s