Book Review: Dr. Khaleel Ashraf

I just finished Arundhati Roy’s "Mother Mary Comes To Me", and what a remarkable book it is!

I have always admired her writing - loved both The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, but this may be her finest work, and it is not even fiction. Her real life seems more compelling and dramatic than anything she could have invented, although her fiction has clearly been shaped by many of these experiences. The book is a testament to the extraordinary power of human language. At a time when we are increasingly anxious about artificial intelligence taking over language and creative expression, it is refreshing to encounter writing of such emotional depth and originality. In my case, I listened to the audiobook on Audible, narrated by author herself, which made the experience even more intimate and powerful. The book contains countless unforgettable lines. Two have stayed with me. She describes her deeply complicated relationship with her mother, a woman she respected, adored, loved, resented, and perhaps even hated, sometimes all at once. She writes: “She was my shelter. She was also my storm” In another passage, she captures both her longing for affection and the impossibility of expressing it: “How much I wanted to hug her! But how do you hug a porcupine? I couldn’t hug her even over the phone.” These sentences demonstrate what great literature can do: compress an entire relationship, with all its love, pain, contradiction, and history, into just a few words! They also reminded me of something Javed Akhtar once said when asked about artificial intelligence and art. His answer was that real art emerges from lived experience; from genuine love, heartbreak, suffering, struggle, and loss. Artificial intelligence may imitate the patterns of art, but it cannot live the experiences from which true art is born. It is therefore no surprise that Arundhati Roy has become such an extraordinary writer. Her life has been filled with intense, complex, and often dramatic experiences. Readers of our generation may feel a special connection to her story because it unfolds against the backdrop of modern India, its political transformations, and her own evolution as an activist and public intellectual. She has a remarkably clear-eyed view of Indian politics. Neither the Left nor the Right (particularly the Right) seems to like her - a sign that she is asking the right questions and following her own independent, righteous path. She was feted soon after her winning Booker prize as a "shining star" of India and she could have chosen the easier path taken by many celebrities in India as just another sycophant but she opted the harder path, always on the side of the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed. An absolutely fantastic book. Strongly recommended.