Category: Sanjana Nair

“Mother Mary Comes to Me” by Arundhati Roy

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In this raw and honest memoir, Arundhati Roy chronicles her tumultuous relationship with her mother, Mary Roy. She narrates her and her brother’s dysfunctional childhood against the highly conversative Syrian Christian background with a fearless mom who is, in equal measure, both a tyrant who constantly terrorizes her children while also being a social empath and fierce leader driven to demand equal rights for the women in her community.

The multiple characters in Mary Roy’s life are described so vividly, you almost know them or of them in your life — characters that span the good and bad, the light and the fury in human nature. As an example, she describes her dad, Mikkie, who spends time doing nothing, absolutely nothing, his entire life. There is something endearing and tender about a human soul who is free-spirited and finds the world of no use to him, and who the world finds no use for as well. However, for Mary Roy, her husband’s non-engagement with life except for constantly drinking himself to a stupor made her even more enraged and bitter with the men in her life, given her experience of her father’s anger and violence towards her mom as well as her brother’s vindicative inheritance battle against her playing out in public.

While Mary eventually won the inheritance battle in court – she was fighting for equal inheritance rights in the Syrian Christian community and ended up changing the Travancore law through a Supreme Court ruling – all of her life’s misery resulted in her having a terrible temperament towards those around her. Her kids, in particular, bore the brunt of it, causing them to fear her and live lives of perpetual distrust, trepidation, and disquiet. Thus, the mother who was a trailblazer, an embodiment of courage and perseverance, was also the reason why Arundhati was scarred for life.

Arundhati decides to leave home at 16 after a terrifying encounter with her mom’s wrath where her mom smashes plates and glasses almost injuring her.  (Her nickname for her mom, quite appropriately, is “the gangster.”) Arundhati enrolls in architecture school (her mom referred to the fees she had to pay as “the mills around her neck,” even though they were subsidized), falls in love, and ends up marrying a wonderful, kind architect.  For once, all seems to be well in her life — a loving husband, and a good career. But she has been so scarred by her mother that she finds reasons to leave – any normal relationship unsettles her, in particular, the loving relationship her husband has with his mother, which causes a rift between the couple. She cannot undo her memories of her brother being beaten to a pulp for not coming with all A+s, and she cannot process a normal parent-child relationship without pain and disdain. She ends up leaving this safe place as well.

She is currently separated from her director husband for pretty much the same reason – not sure of safe places, unsure of families with no fights or fury, uncertain of unconditional loving relationships. Time and time again, she refers to herself as “a moth with cold wings ready to fly when the scene is too safe or unsafe.” When her mom is ailing, she often goes to meet her, but she does so like a moth who prepares a path through the spiderweb for it to slide out just in time so that it does not get tangled in the web of her mother’s wrath.  The book brilliantly describes the messiness of their lives, the different shades of gray in human relationships (despite Mary’s inheritance fight with her brother, the warring duo end up becoming each other’s best friends, giggling like little children at her death bed), and the inseparable nature of her mom’s identity in her own. When her own brother is baffled of her inconsolable grief at her mother’s death, knowing that she was treated by far the worst of them, she accurately summarizes Mary Roy — “the gangster” — as her shelter and her storm, her compass as well as her cross.

Like Mary Roy, my mom, Rajalakshmi Nair, died of a lung disease last year. The mention of the need for oxygenator, bipap, oximeter, Creatinine level monitors, the constant blood tests, etc., brought me back to my mom’s last few years. The scare of my mom getting COVID (like Arundhati’s mom, she was the only one at home who didn’t get it), the constant load-shedding in Kerala causing the oxygenator to turn off, the need for a generator to make sure there is always oxygen all the time, the long slow ceremonial baths, the feeding of mushed rice and vegetables with spicy pickle, all of this that Arundhati describes so poignantly in her book was exactly what I experienced. Like Mary Roy who fought to the end, my mom, who was slated to live for two years after her diagnosis, lived for another seven.  At the end of her time, lying in the last CCU admission tied down with the ventilator and a do-not-resuscitate directive, she asked the nurse who was attending to her about the interesting hairpin she was wearing and if the nurse could get it for her and all of us girls ( this includes literally every girl in the vicinity). She truly lived large.

That was the “gangster” in my house —  a wonderfully kind, loving one.

Sorry, Arundhati, can’t help but use your line: “ByeO Mummy, I will be seeing you.”

Mother Mary Comes to Me
Author: Arundhati Roy
Publisher: Scribner
Publication Date: Sep 2025

Contributor: Sanjana Nair

“Why Fish Don’t Exist” by Lulu Miller

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I wanted to share a new read I enjoyed — Why Fish Don’t Exist. It is a memoir by Lulu Miller, an NPR science reporter. I stumbled upon this book after a few lukewarm reads recently. During one of her field assignments, Miller learns about a late 19th century taxonomist, David Starr Jordan, whose diaries reveal his lifetime focus and zeal to identify, name, and classify fish. Much of Miller’s book is focused on Jordan’s life and work and how it has inspired her own.

After 20 years of grueling work, Jordan’s lab, with all his named specimens, catches fire in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and his work is instantly ruined. Right after the incident, he was seen sowing a needle with the name tag into the first fish he recognized, and he rebuilt his entire body of work from the ground up.

Jordan is known to have named one-fifth of all the fishes in the world. He spends his entire life meticulously creating boundaries and clean edges on a species where none exists (as per Darwin’s definition of the word), and as an extension of his work, becomes one of first proponents of eugenics attempting to build a perfect human society. (As fate would have it, scientists later discover that the category Jordan was studying all his life was nonexistent — all fish do not have a common ancestor.)

Jordan was also the first president of Stanford university and was, in fact, suspected to have played a role in killing one of its founders! His life reads like a Shakespearean play with passion, drama, love and intrigue. 

In the book, Lulu Miller, through Jordan’s life, explores our need to classify and bucketize the world and how, in the process, we lose the subtleties and richness of existence. Limited by language, and the inherent need to rank and file and make sense of the world, leaves us stunted of its inconceivable breadth.  Part existential, part hopeful, Miller explores Jordan’s life in all its complexity, with grace and poignance, as well as her own.

Here are some quotes from the book that capture its essence.

In response to the question of “What are we here for?” that Miller asks her father when she was eight and going with him on a nature walk, her father, who was a man of science and similar to David Starr Jordan in spirit and in “seeing the grandeur,” responds with these:  

We are specks, flickering in and out of existence, with no significance to the cosmos.

And …

He informed me that there is no meaning of life. There is no point. There is no God. No one watching you or caring in any way. There is no afterlife. No destiny. No plan. And don’t believe anyone who tells you there is. These are all things people dream up to comfort themselves against the scary feeling that none of this matters and you don’t matter. But the truth is, none of this matters and you don’t matter.

But still, her father advises:

While other people don’t matter, either, treat them like they do.

Here is an excerpt from Jordan’s diary. His scribbles shed light on his obsession, his desperation, the near-muscular effort to restart when his lab burns down destroying all his work:

“Happiness comes from doing, helping, working, loving, fighting, conquering,” he writes in a syllabus from around the same time, “from the exercise of functions; from self-activity.” Don’t overthink it, I think, is his point. Enjoy the journey. Savor the small things. The “luscious” taste of a peach, the “lavish” colors of tropical fish, the rush from exercise that allows one to experience “the stern joy which warriors feel.” Toward the end of the book, he quotes Thoreau — “There is no hope for you unless this bit of sod under your feet is the sweetest to you in this world — in any world” — and then he sends his readers off with a rousing dose of carpe diem. “Nowhere is the sky so blue, the grass so green, the sunshine so bright, the shade so welcome, as right here, now, today.”

And finally, here is an astute summation of Jordan by the author, which I found very insightful:

Whatever the case, it works for him. He loses a wife, and wins another quickly. He loses a fish collection, and rebuilds a bigger one. He is promoted to higher and higher offices. The awards and medals start clattering in, for teaching, for ichthyology, for contributions to higher ed. An odd alchemy of delusion right before your eyes. Little lies transmuting into bronze, silver, gold. Forget millennia of warnings to stay humble; maybe this is just how it works in a godless system. Maybe David Starr Jordan is proof that a steady dose of hubris is the best way of overcoming doomed odds.

Why Fish Don’t Exist
Author: Lulu Miller
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: April 2020

Contributor: Sanjana Nair