By Aarti Betigeri

Copyright theage

In other tellings, Roy returned home to find her beloved dog Dido put down, after mating with a street dog. And in yet another incident, Mrs Roy banished her from the car for a perceived transgression. Roy waited, and the car returned, and the ensuing five-hour drive home was in complete silence.

How did Roy manage? “I left when I was a teenager and didn’t see her for seven years, and when we re-met I was an adult woman, and trying to watch her from a safe distance, trying to be near her but not near her,” she says.

“So my relationship with her, as I say in the book, she was my shelter and my storm. It was never a settled relationship. And to write about her was important because I believe she’s a woman who deserves to be in literature, not just because she was wonderful but also because she was terrible. The idea that a woman could unleash all of herself, including her very obviously prickly relationship with motherhood itself, was important.”

The book traces Roy’s journey from a small-town girl, child of a single mother, to the cosmopolitan Delhi-dwelling writer and activist she was to become. Roy left home at 17, spending three days on a train from Kerala, at the very south of India, to the capital Delhi, in the north, where she attended architecture college and married a fellow student who, in the style of the early 1970s, resembled a kind of rock-star Jesus (they divorced four years later).

She later married again, to filmmaker and environmentalist Pradip Krishen, who came with two daughters from his first marriage. The pair collaborated on a couple of independent films, with the screenplays written by Roy. One won an award. “It was hilarious because that first screenplay that I wrote won my favourite award: ‘Best film in languages other than those specified in Schedule 8 of the Indian Constitution’.” Still wedged against the wallpaper, she laughs heartily at the memory.

There is a separate cast of characters: Roy’s brother LKC, her maternal uncle G Isaac – who had tried to expel the family from the house, then bitterly fought his sister for inherited assets, but is remembered fondly by Roy.