Survivor

I just finished reading another book by one of my great favorite writers, Arundhati Roy.  Mother Mary Comes to Me is autobiography, telling what it was like to grow up in India in the care of a mother who provided life lessons embedded in nightmares.  The story is an excellent example of how some children endure horrific life conditions and yet seem to arrive at adulthood with functional personalities supporting often successful and rewarding lives. 

Roy left home as a teenager, unable to support her mother's continuous abuse.  She got herself through school to a degree in architecture, but it still took her many years to climb out of poverty.  She spent four years writing her first novel, The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize and made her wealthy.

Beyond recounting her personal story Roy also provides a first-hand account of India's  history which cannot be found easily in journalistic reports.  Roy lived through Ghandi's era and the following genocidal clashes of Hindus and Moslems, and the rise of the current authoritarian Hindu state under Narendra Modi and the BJP.

In the face of those challenges Roy became an activist supporting resistance against giant dams which displaced vast numbers of rural people, as well as reporting about the on-going persecution of the Moslem population of Kashmir, about which she wrote another of her popular novels.   Roy, like her mother, has also been a champion of women's rights in India.  That and her political  activism has made her the target of constant threats and governmental persecution.  In spite of that, when she could live in ease in any part of the world, she continues to live and work in Delhi.

As I wrote in one of my previous posts about Arundhati Roy, 

"Americans don't pay a lot of attention to what is going on in India,  but we make that choice at our own peril."