Was Mother Mary Really About Marijuana?

After reading Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me, I felt that many articles and Facebook posts published since the memoir seem to echo her writing style, particularly her use of evocative imagery and prose. I don’t know whether this is just my feeling, or if the writers are deliberately influenced by her style. Either way, I believe the book has inspired many to engage in some kind of writing.

Her writing seems simple and easy to understand. ‘The way it is written is deceptively simple,’ says Arundhati Roy in her interview with The Week. She is a writer who will find a place in the history of both world literature and Indian literature in English in the years to come.

The story is very much a biography of both women, especially a deeper look into the life of the writer, Arundhati Roy. Mary Roy will be adored and respected for the school she founded. One of my friends has both of his children studying at Pallikoodam and is full of praise for the school’s freestyle approach to education. He told me how the school helped convince the parents of one student to let her pursue a Pastry Chef course after high school.

The visionary that Mary Roy is, she must have recognized Arundhati Roy’s calling long before she asked her to write about Miss. Mitten, her teacher as a five year old, preserved the pages. Everything she did at her school—the experiential learning methods, the free writing she encouraged in her students and her own children, loaning library books from Madras, and sending her daughter to one of the finest schools in Ooty at the time—shows how she gave her child a well-rounded development to follow her calling and prepared her to take on the world.

Or maybe the universe conspired and made things happen and fall into place so that the writer Arundhati was made, as was her destined calling.

The book’s white dust jacket has a picture of a young Arundhati Roy smoking. Because of this image, many people interpreted the title to mean marijuana, referencing the song by Paul McCartney of The Beatles. McCartney, who was sad that his band was going to disperse, had a dream where his Mother Mary, who died when he was young, came to him and said, ‘Let it be,’ which meant ‘let it happen that way.’

This is similar to the Bible, where the Angel Gabriel announces to Mother Mary that she will give birth to the Son of God, and she says, ‘Let it be with me according to your word.’ And when Jesus asks John the Baptist—who had said ‘after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry’—to baptize him, John is reluctant. Then Jesus says, ‘Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.’

It is said that McCartney later clarified he was not referring to marijuana but to his mother Mary, who came to him in his dreams when he was in trouble. Besides, to my knowledge, marijuana is called ‘Mary Jane,’ not ‘Mother Mary.’

After reading the book, I feel she might have smoked and things like that not to get inspiration for writing. Her writings are a product of her sanest best.

Fifty years after the song’s release, many Mother Mary devotees believe that the song is about the mother of Jesus and is a devotional song. Now, when you Google ‘Mother Mary comes to me,’ two search results come up on top:

• ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me‘ Book by Arundhati Roy
• ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me‘ song, ‘Let It Be’ – song by The Beatles

Upon removing the white dust jacket, there is an image of a moth on the hard red cover. Perhaps it is a representation of the ‘cold, furry moth’ in her memoir, which is presented as a metaphor for the feeling of constant, debilitating fear within her. Butterflies are diurnal, slender, and beautiful. They come where there is greenery. Moths, on the other hand, are nocturnal and stout; they come in darkness inside houses. These are two opposite poles that are so much like the two sides of protagonists of the memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me.