Booker Prize Winner Arundhati Roy Recalls The Hilarious Reply Of A Delhi Airport Security Guard
At the launch of her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy shared a light-hearted anecdote that left the audience in splits. Recalling an encounter at Delhi airport, she said that a security guard, while checking her ID, looked at her name and remarked: “We also have one Arundhati Roy in Kerala, always in trouble.”
The audience burst into laughter, and so did Arundhati Roy, who shared the story at St. Teresa’s College in Kochi. The incident. Arundhati Roy has been celebrated for her literary brilliance, yet often targeted for her outspoken political views.
The event marked the formal introduction of Roy’s first work of memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, which launched on September 2 in Kochi.
Publisher Penguin Random House had announced the book in July, calling it an “intimate and inspiring” account of the writer’s formative years, shaped profoundly by her mother, women’s rights activist Mary Roy.
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Mary Roy, who passed away in September 2022, was a pioneering educationist and a relentless campaigner for women’s rights, best remembered for winning a historic Supreme Court judgment in 1986 that granted equal property rights to Syrian Christian women in Kerala.
Arundhati Roy’s memoir draws deeply from this personal history. “I have been writing this book all my life. Perhaps a mother like mine deserved a writer like me as a daughter. Equally, perhaps a writer like me deserved a mother like her,” she said.
Mother Mary Comes to Me will be simultaneously published in multiple countries, including the UK (Hamish Hamilton), the US and Canada (Scribner), Germany (Fischer), France (Gallimard), Italy (Guanda), Spain (Alfaguara/PRH), the Netherlands (Park Uitgevers), Sweden (Bromberg), Finland (Otava), and Norway (Pax).
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Manasi Subramaniam, editor-in-chief of Penguin Press, Penguin Random House India, called the book “a visceral and unflinching account of personal and political awakening,” filled with “heart and nerve, humour and pathos, and the raw edges of love.”
Arundhati Roy first shot to global fame with her debut, The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Booker Prize and established her as one of India’s most celebrated writers.
She followed it up with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) and a series of searing political essays, including The End of Imagination, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, and The Doctor and the Saint.
Now, nearly three decades after her literary debut, she turns the lens inward with her first memoir, one that is deeply personal yet inevitably political, given her mother’s legacy and her own position as a writer who has never shied away from dissent.
