Mary Roy, the indomitable fighter who lived on her own terms

Mary Roy, the acclaimed educator and hardboiled activist who passed away on Thursday at the age of 89, was a survivor who learnt a great deal from the rough and tumble of life.

Life had dealt her a bad hand ever since she was a child, but instead of wallowing in misery and self-pity, she made good, overcoming odds that kept getting stacked against her for most of her life.

She succumbed to age-related illnesses (she was asthmatic and also suffered from arthritis), but when she was alive, she was never the one to go away — she remained indefatigable in her pursuit of justice and equality, and relentless in her quest to reclaim her place in the world.

Feisty, and endowed with an incredible instinct for self-preservation, she would always get up and get going, no matter how many blows life threw her way. Steadfast in her aim to change her life, and the lives of other women like her, she was not the one who would buckle, give in, always facing hard times head on.

Before she established herself as a crusader for women’s rights, the goings — as a child with a monster father, as an adolescent struggling to choose the right vocation, and later as a single mother after she walked away from a bad marriage — were a tough row to hoe.

But instead of getting cowed down by adversities, she learnt to leave behind the hurt and penury of her past, and went on to fight the many fights. To live. With dignity. With her head held high. And to give to her children — Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy and her brother, Lalith Kumar Christopher Roy, referred to as LKC in the line of dedication in The God of Small Things (1997) — what she had been denied herself: Better education, happiness, a good life, and, above all, freedom.

Mary was born into a Syrian Christian family. The life of her mother, Suzanna Isaac, was a veritable tragedy. PV Isaac, her entomologist father who had trained in England, had made her life hell by beating her every now and then. Ayemenem, the village which is the setting for The God of Small Thing (a fictional chronicle of what Arundhati and her brother suffered as children in a house where their mother and her two children were not wanted), is not a fictional place, but modelled on Aymanam in Kerala’s Kottayam district, where Mary lived, first with her grandfather, mother and siblings, and later with her daughter and son in the 1960s.

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As a four-year-old, Mary would see her mother, standing in the living room, dressed in white, with blood flowing from the wounds on her head, inflicted by her father with curtain rods. Why did he beat her? “For no reason at all. He was a wife-beater by nature. He did not drink, he did not smoke, but he womanised in a frenzied manner. At the age of 7, I can remember his excitement as he stalked new prey,” Mary wrote in her essay, ‘Three Generations of Women,’ in In A Space of Her Own: Personal Narratives of Twelve Women, edited by Leela Gulati and Jasodhara Bagchi (2005).

Mary received her early education from the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Delhi, where her father was posted. When she turned 12, he bought a cottage in Ooty (Tami Nadu). She was taken out of the boarding school in Madras, where she had been studying, and enrolled in the sophisticated Nazareth Convent School in Ooty.

It was here that, on a cold winter night, her father, in a fit of anger after a row with her mother, thrashed her violently and pushed her out into the night. Mary had joined her mother and together they went back to Kerala to live with her grandfather, and his nine children and scores of grandchildren.

In 1951, when Mary was 16, her father beat her up too, along with her mother. By then, her brother George Isaac, a graduate from Madras Christian College, had become financially independent and was earning ₹200 per month through tuition. He held his father’s both hands and calmly said, “No! Never again! Never again are you going to beat your wife or any of your children.”

The entomologist found it hard to believe what his ears had heard. After this episode, he streaked out of the house, and out of their lives, and never came home again: That was the last Mary ever saw of her father.

Like her mother, Mary, too, was unlucky when it came to marriage. She had met her future husband, Rajib Roy, who had a well-paying job in a jute mill, when she was working as a secretary in the office pool at Metal Box Company in Calcutta, after completing her graduation. When he asked her to marry him, the 22-year-old Mary agreed, largely because she saw the marriage as her escape from her hardscrabble existence:

“At that time, what mattered most was that he could provide an escape from the hell that was life in my own family. So, I said yes to his proposal though I loved him not,” she wrote in the essay.

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She couldn’t expect anything from her mother, who had been beaten into subjugation, and was so scarred by the experience that she remained indifferent to everything. But Rajib turned out to be an alcoholic. Refusing to be stuck in a bad marriage, Mary left her husband, with two children — five-year-old Lalith and three-year-old Arundhati — in tow.

At 30, she had to begin her life anew: As a single parent. As if raising her children through tortuous conditions, and bouts of chronic asthma and acute financial distress, was not enough, she had to face rejection by her family, friends and society.

Having married outside of her community, rare in those days, and having become a near-widow, she had to face double ostracism from her conservative community.

“A divorced woman was a joke—never, ever do I recollect a word or gesture of sympathy or concern,” she wrote.

The only friend she had in those days was another divorcee similarly struggling with her job and her three children. After they parted ways, Rajib kept getting married and divorced, but legally, he remained married to Mary, who never asked for a formal divorce, choosing not to spend money ‘to declare him bigamous,’ which also allowed her to stay away from of the “blah-blah of courts.”

If her relationship with her father and brother George — whom she sued soon after the death of her father, to get equal share in the property including the Ooty cottage — was complicated, Mary had strained relationship with her mother and daughter: she did not speak to her mother for 10 long years even though they lived in the same town.

Arundhati, on her part, stayed away from her mother for six long years. In 1961, Mary started teaching to support the family and returned to Kottayam to start Corpus Christi High School, which later changed its name to Pallikkoodam — school in Malayalam.

Having presided over its affairs for over five decades, she continued to be an active part of the school management till very recently. She had come to know about the Travancore Christian Succession Act of 1916, under which a daughter was eligible only for a quarter of the son’s share or Rs 5,000, whichever was less, after her brother George had threatened her to vacate the Ooty cottage, where she had been living with her children.

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After she filed the plea, the Supreme Court gave the landmark judgment, striking down the Act and giving Christian women an equal share in family property. The verdict, which came to be seen as a milestone for gender justice in the country, also became a high point of Mary’s journey as an activist. The SC had ruled in her favour as early as in 1986, but she had to wait for another 25 years for the final verdict: a decree from a Kottayam sub-court.

Even though the school she had founded became the oasis for the education of her community, especially women, her suffering as a woman who had stepped beyond the limits of what the society defines as ‘decorum’ did not end.

Once her school had decided to perform the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber for its Annual School Day. The whole town rose as one to protest against the whittling down of male prerogatives: Christians, district Collector, the priests, Marxists and her own family.

The district collector imposed a ban on the performance. Not to accept defeat, Mary challenged the ban in the Supreme Court. The Court, in an interim order, ruled that the school could do one more performance. This didn’t go down well with the Christian priests and bishops who joined in a chorus: ‘Break her legs! Tie her with chains like an elephant! Blood will flow down this road! We shall shatter the school buildings!’ But Mary had had her way.

Mary loved her children, who were aware of the social nuances from an early age. And, that’s the reason she chose to set them free. When Arundhati raised her red flag and demanded independence from her as she turned 18, Mary let her go. She gave the same treatment to her son, Lalith, when he declared his intention to marry, as well as his independence.

She was not being a harsh mother. She was a woman who had been hurt so often that she knew she would be hurt once again if she used the soft option, and so would they. After she turned away from both her children, people blamed it on her ‘hard heart’. Few could understand that she could do it because she had tremendous depth of courage.

Mary had suffered enough in her life. But she wanted to shield her children from those sufferings. And, through education, many others. Arundhati Roy acknowledged her debt to her mother by dedicating The God of Small Things to her: “For Mary Roy who grew me up, who taught me to say ‘excuse me’ before interrupting her in public. Who loved me enough to let me go. For LKC, who, like me, survived.”