Travel To Kottayam: Retracing The Life Of Arundhati Roy

The road into Aymanam in Kottayam is a familiar one for many Malayalis. For me, it felt like a pilgrimage. I wasn't just entering a backwater village; I was chasing the echoes of the well-awarded author Arundhati Roy - her words, which shaped my imagination; her defiance, which stirred my conscience; and her silences, which unsettled my heart.

The longing had lived in me since the late 1990s, when I first opened her Booker-winning tome The God of Small Things as a village girl in remote Wayanad. Roy's molten language and piercing grief struck me like lightning. Her novel painted a vivid picture of Kerala's lush rivers and plantations, but also caste, gender, and forbidden love. Back then, the thought of travelling to Aymanam felt impossible. Life carried me elsewhere, but the desire lingered like a half-forgotten song.

First sight of a rebel

Years later in New Delhi, obsession met reality. At Jantar Mantar, amid protestors, I saw her - Arundhati - unadorned, radiant in her simplicity. I didn't speak; I only watched, sensing beauty and danger all at once. Soon after, I saw her again in Chennai, and through activist circles met others in her orbit, including advocate Prashant Bhushan, filmmaker Sanjay Kak, and activist GN Saibaba.

Eventually, I found myself at her Delhi home. She opened the door herself, and for me, it was a true fan-girl moment. I was then directing a documentary film; she offered comments and we spoke briefly of Mahasweta Devi. But what left me awestruck was her library - book-bricked walls spilling over with spines and margins scribbled on.

Later, life shifted to Dubai. Activism receded, but Arundhati's voice never left me. Her essays against war, mining, dams, and surveillance became my companions. She walked into storms others avoided.

The call of a mother

When Mother Mary Comes to Me appeared, I devoured it. This was Arundhati writing about Mary Roy, her formidable mother who fought in courts for women's inheritance rights, built schools, and raised her children with stern resilience. The memoir rekindled my longing to walk into Kottayam, to see the school Mary built, to touch the river that flowed through The God of Small Things. And so, on September 10 - three years and nine days after Mary's passing - I went to the city.

A looming shadow

Kottayam is a town of literacy and rebellion, but to me it whispered one name: Mary Roy. In the 1960s, she challenged the Travancore Christian Succession Act that denied Syrian Christian women equal inheritance. The Supreme Court's verdict in her favour changed history, but came at the cost of ostracism. She built up her children with rejection as fuel, raising Arundhati and her brother, Lalit Kumar Christopher Roy, in a crucible of rigour and rebellion.

She was no saint.“Shelter and storm,” her daughter called her. Reading the memoir, I felt the weight of that contradiction: a mother who taught her kids language enough to express themselves and wings to fly, but then clipped them with her sternness.

Echoes of estrangement

In her memoir, Arundhati recalls her mother's cutting words:“Out from my house, out from my car.” They were not just commands, but expulsions that echoed throughout her life. When I read that, it struck like an echo from my own past. My father, during the darkest days of my divorce, chose society's gaze over my peace. His words mirrored that rejection, casting me out not with blows, but with the absence of support.

Perhaps that is why I feel such kinship with Arundhati. Like her, I learned that parents are not flawless beacons of unconditional love. They can be both storm and shelter. I never romanticised parental love - it is not always tender or forgiving. Parents are humans, carrying their own wounds, egos, and flaws. To accept that truth is to stop overthinking, to stop dressing pain in the costume of romance. Estrangement leaves scars, but it also forges a different type of strength - the kind writers often carry into their words.

Walking through Kottayam

I walked slowly, searching for ghosts. The Meenachil River, languid and brown, carried reflections of history. It was here that Velutha and Ammu's forbidden love, detailed in The God of Small Things, unfolded.

At erstwhile Corpus Christi, now Pallikoodam, the school Mary founded, the walls still echoed with her headmistress authority. Former students recalled her as terrifying, brilliant, and unforgettable.

The town itself had changed. Rubber plantations gave way to gated villas. Old Syrian Christian mansions stood aloof, with carved verandahs. It was in these very households that Mary waged her battles.

Revisiting old tales

Every corner in Kottayam felt haunted by Arundhati's Booker-winning novel. The abandoned house of Ayemenem wasn't just fiction - it was childhood reimagined. The smell of jackfruit, the buzz of cicadas, the red laterite soil - all came alive.

Kerala is lush, but it is also brutal. Its greenery conceals inequalities Mary fought against and those her daughter exposed in prose the world could not ignore.

Daughter of defiance

At her book launches, even while speaking of her mother, Arundhati turned the conversation to Gaza and Palestine. That refusal to indulge in self-celebration is not performance. It is inheritance. From Mary, she drew the courage to be unpopular, to be called difficult, to stand alone for justice.

A return to roots

Tracing her footsteps also felt like reclaiming my own roots. My grandparents once lived in Kottayam before migrating to Wayanad. Estrangement from my father, migration away from Kerala, and longing for return - all braided into this journey.

It was not literary tourism. It was a reckoning. To know Arundhati's Kottayam was also to confront what I had lost and what I still carried.

The small things that remain

The journey left indelible images: Mary's stern portrait at her school, the hum of the Meenachil at dusk, children reciting in crisp English, the silence of an estate road where fiction became flesh.

Arundhati called her novel The God of Small Things. I understand that more deeply now. History is born not in monuments but in quarrels with parents, in riverside silences, in words spoken in anger. Mary's lawsuit was monumental, Arundhati's Booker Prize historic. But the truths that shaped them were small, domestic, intimate.

Chasing Arundhati's roots was not to find monuments, but to follow the whispers. To stand at the intersection of public rebellion and private pain. To realise that the stories that move the world are born in houses where mothers shout and daughters leave - only to return in sentences. To accept that parents are humans, not infallible, that love can be storm and shelter, and that some of the strongest legacies come from surviving their very human flaws.

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