Mother Mary Comes to Me begins with Roy’s childhood, in which she recounts moving from Assam, India, to the hill station town of Ooty, and later to Kerala, where her mother eventually set up a school. While they tried to find a foothold in Ooty, her mother’s older brother and her grandmother attempted to evict the family, invoking an inheritance law that left daughters with little protection.
A teacher was what my mother had always wanted to be, what she was qualified to be. During the years she was married to and living with our father, who had a job as an assistant manager on a remote tea estate in Assam, in northeastern India, 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 traveled 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 20s.
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 floors 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, puffy 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 whom to pay it to. We, certainly, paid no rent. We were squatters, interlopers—not tenants. We lived like fugitives amid huge wood 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 cuff links. (Obviously my grandfather 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 first 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 off from her job. She hungrily absorbed their innovative teaching methods for primary schoolchildren (flash cards for reading and phonetics, colored wood Cuisenaire rods for math) while being simultaneously disturbed by their kindly, well-meaning racism toward Indians and India. When she was away at work, she left us for a few hours with a sullen woman and occasionally with neighbors.
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 find a lawyer. In my memory it was night, and the streets were dark. But we did manage to find 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 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, 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 mortification 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 cuff links 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 off to find 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 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 chicken pox. He made me show her the blister on my stomach, which I had been showing off to anybody who cared to examine it. My mother was furious. After he left, she smacked me hard 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 favor 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 five, 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. (She said she could see Satan in my eyes.) 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 traffic. 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 fire. 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. 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 chile 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” or “jewel of jewels.” He had a goiter on his neck that he hid with his woolen muffler. 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 fighting on all fronts, my mother gave up. She decided to swallow her pride and return to Kerala, to Ayemenem, our grandmother’s village. 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.
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 60s then. Her thin, wavy, gray hair was cut in a style that used to be called a pageboy. She wore starched, papery saris with big, loose blouses. My mother assured her that we would stay only as long as it took for her to find a job. Miss Kurien, who prided herself on being a good Christian, agreed to let us stay, but made no effort to hide her disapproval. She did this by ignoring us and showering her delicate affections on other relatives’ children who visited her.
My grandmother lived with her too. Her conical corneas had deteriorated and she was almost blind, but she still wore her dark glasses. Even at night. She had a ridge that ran across her scalp—sometimes she let me run my finger 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. I was too young to tell how well she played, but as darkness fell and the sound of crickets swelled, her music made the evenings and the dark nights more melancholic than they already were.
Life in Ayemenem was like living on a ledge that we could be nudged off of at any moment. Every few days the adults would quarrel. When they fought, the whole house shook. As soon as the shouting began, I would flee. 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, first name terms with the fish, the worms, the birds and the plants.
Excerpted from chapters two and three of Mother Mary Comes to Me, published in September by Scribner.
In this story: hair and makeup, Deepa Verma. Produced by Aliza Fatma.