Mother Mary Comes to Me begins with Roy’s childhood, recalling her family’s move from Assam, India, to the hill station town of Ooty, and later to Kerala, where her mother eventually started a school. While they struggled to settle in Ooty, her mother’s older brother and grandmother tried to force them out, using inheritance laws that offered little protection to daughters.

My mother had always dreamed of being a teacher—it was what she was trained for. But during her marriage to my father, who worked as an assistant manager on a remote tea estate in Assam, that dream faded. It only resurfaced (more as a nightmare than a dream) when she realized he, like many men on isolated tea plantations, was a hopeless alcoholic.

When war broke out between India and China in October 1962, women and children were evacuated from border areas. We moved to Calcutta, and once there, my mother decided she wouldn’t return to Assam. From Calcutta, we traveled south to Ootacamund—Ooty—a small hill station in Tamil Nadu. My brother, LKC (Lalith Kumar Christopher Roy), was four and a half, and I was nearly three. We didn’t see or hear from our father again until we were in our twenties.

In Ooty, we lived in half of a “holiday” cottage that had belonged to our maternal grandfather, a retired senior government official—an imperial entomologist—under British rule in Delhi. He and my grandmother had been estranged for years, and he had cut ties with her and his children long before. He died the year I was born.

I’m not sure how we ended up in that cottage. Maybe the tenant in the other half had a key. Maybe we broke in. My mother seemed to know the house—and the town—well, as if she’d been there as a child. The cottage was damp and gloomy, with cold, cracked cement floors and an asbestos ceiling. A plywood partition separated us from the other half, where an elderly Englishwoman named Mrs. Patmore lived. She wore her hair in a high, puffed-up style that made my brother and me wonder what was hidden inside—wasps, we imagined. At night, she had nightmares and would scream and moan. I doubt she paid rent—she probably didn’t know who to pay. We certainly didn’t. We were squatters, not tenants, living among my grandfather’s old trunks filled with his lavish clothes—silk ties, dress shirts, three-piece suits. We even found a biscuit tin full of cufflinks. (Clearly, he took his imperial role seriously.) Later, we’d hear stories about his vanity (he once had a Hollywood-style portrait taken) and his cruelty (he whipped his children, threw them out regularly, and once split my grandmother’s scalp open with a brass vase). My mother told us she married the first man who proposed just to escape him.

Soon after we arrived, she got a teaching job at a local school called Breeks. Ooty was full of schools back then, many run by British missionaries who stayed after independence. She befriended a group of them who taught at Lushington, an all-white school for missionaries’ children. She convinced them to let her observe their classes when she had time off. While she eagerly learned their teaching methods—flash cards for reading, colored Cuisenaire rods for math—she was also unsettled by their well-meaning but unmistakable racism.Our lives in Ooty were difficult, especially for my mother who worked hard to support us. While she was at work, we were left with a grumpy caretaker or sometimes with neighbors.

A few months into our new life, my grandmother (the widow of the entomologist) and her eldest son—my mother’s older brother, G. Isaac—arrived from Kerala to force us out of the house. I had never met them before. They claimed that under the Travancore Christian Succession Act, daughters had no right to their father’s property and demanded we leave immediately. It didn’t seem to matter to them that we had nowhere else to go. My grandmother barely spoke, but she frightened me—she had strange, cone-shaped eyes and wore dark sunglasses.

I remember my mother, my brother, and me clutching hands as we ran through the town in panic, searching for a lawyer. In my memory, it was nighttime, the streets dark and empty. But we found one, who told us the Travancore Act didn’t apply in Tamil Nadu—even squatters had rights. If anyone tried to evict us, he said, we could call the police. We returned home shaken but victorious.

My brother and I were too young to understand the legal details, but we sensed the emotions—fear, anger, relief, triumph.

Uncle G. Isaac couldn’t have known then that by trying to push his sister out, he was setting the stage for his own downfall. Years later, my mother would gain the means and standing to challenge the Travancore Act and claim her rightful share of her father’s property. Until then, she held onto the memory of that humiliation like a treasured heirloom—which, in a way, it was.

After our legal victory, we settled more comfortably into the cottage. My mother gave away the entomologist’s fine suits and cufflinks to taxi drivers near the market, and for a while, Ooty had the best-dressed cab drivers in the world.

But despite our fragile sense of security, things didn’t improve. The cold, damp weather worsened my mother’s asthma. She would lie under a heavy pink quilt on her iron bed, struggling to breathe, bedridden for days. We feared she might die. She hated us hovering, so she’d shoo us away. My brother and I would wander off, swinging on the rickety gate at the edge of our yard, watching honeymooners stroll past on their way to the botanical gardens. Sometimes they’d stop and give us sweets or peanuts. Once, a man gave us a catapult, and we spent days practicing our aim.

We made friends with strangers—sometimes too easily. Once, a man noticed the chickenpox blister on my stomach (which I’d been proudly showing off) and marched me home. He scolded my mother for letting me wander around sick. After he left, she slapped me hard and warned me never to lift my dress for strangers—especially men.

My mother’s illness, or maybe the medication, made her short-tempered, and she began hitting us often. My brother would run away and only return after dark. He was quiet, never cried—when upset, he’d lay his head on the table and pretend to sleep. When happy (which was rare), he’d dance around, shadowboxing, calling himself Cassius Clay. I don’t know how he knew who that was—maybe our father told him.

I think those years in Ooty were harder for him than for me because he remembered better times. He remembered being loved.

I didn’t.My brother remembered our father and the big house we used to live in on the tea estate. He remembered being loved. I didn’t have that same memory.

My brother started school before I did. He attended Lushington, the school for white children, for a few months—likely a favor from the missionaries to my mother. But when he began referring to local kids like us as “those Indian children,” she pulled him out and enrolled him in Breeks, the school where she taught. When I turned five, she sent me to a nursery school for Indian children run by a stern Australian missionary named Miss Mitten. She was a cruel woman with freckled arms and a thin, lipless mouth. She made no secret of disliking me—she once said she could see Satan in my eyes. Our classroom was a shed beside a patchy meadow where skinny cows with sharp hip bones grazed.

On days when her asthma was severe, my mother would write a shopping list, place it in a basket, and send us into town. Ooty was a safe, quiet place back then, with little traffic. The policemen knew us, and shopkeepers were kind, sometimes even extending us credit. The kindest was a woman named Kurussammal, who worked in a knitting shop. She knitted two sweaters for us—bottle green for my brother, plum for me. When my mother was bedridden for weeks, Kurussammal moved in with us. Our unstable life settled. She taught us what love, dependability, and hugs felt like. She cooked for us and bathed us outdoors in the freezing Ooty cold, using water she boiled in a huge pot over a wood fire. To this day, my brother and I prefer scalding baths. Before bathing us, she combed lice from our hair and showed us how to crush them—they made a satisfying pop under my thumbnail.

Kurussammal was not only a fast knitter but also an incredible cook, making delicious meals from almost nothing. Even plain rice with salt and a fresh green chili tasted wonderful when she served it.

Her name meant “mother of the cross” in Tamil. Her husband, Yesuratnam—”Jesus jewel” or “jewel of jewels”—visited often. He had a goiter hidden under his woolen scarf and always smelled of woodsmoke, like we did.

Eventually, my mother became too ill to work. Even high doses of steroids didn’t help. We ran out of money, and my brother and I grew malnourished, developing tuberculosis.

After months of struggle, my mother gave up. Swallowing her pride, she decided to return to Kerala, to our grandmother’s village, Ayemenem. She had no other choice.

Leaving Kurussammal broke my heart, but I would see her again years later when she moved to Kerala to live with us.

As our train crossed from Tamil Nadu into Kerala, the landscape shifted from brown to green. Plants and vines covered everything, even electric poles. The world glistened. Most people outside the train windows wore white and carried black umbrellas.

My heart lifted—then sank.

We arrived in Ayemenem uninvited and clearly unwelcome. The house we appeared at belonged to my grandmother’s older sister, Miss Kurien, then in her 60s. She had wavy gray hair cut in a pageboy style and wore stiff, papery saris with loose blouses. My mother promised we’d stay only until she found work. Miss Kurien, who prided herself on being a good Christian, reluctantly agreed but made her disapproval obvious—ignoring us while doting on other visiting relatives’ children.

My grandmother lived there too. Her vision had deteriorated due to conical corneas, and she was nearly blind.She wasn’t blind, but she always wore dark glasses—even at night. There was a ridge across her scalp, and sometimes she’d let me trace it with my finger. On occasion, she’d allow me to braid her thin hair into a rat’s tail before bed.

Each evening, she’d sit on the veranda playing her violin. I was too young to judge her skill, but as dusk settled and crickets chirped, her music made the nights feel even more melancholy than they already were.

Life in Ayemenem felt precarious, like teetering on a ledge where any moment we might be pushed off. The adults fought often, their quarrels shaking the whole house. At the first shout, I’d escape to the river—my sanctuary. It made up for everything else that was wrong. I spent hours along its banks, growing familiar with the fish, the worms, the birds, and the plants, as if we were old friends.

Excerpted from chapters two and three of Mother Mary Comes to Me, published in September by Scribner.
In this story: Hair and makeup by Deepa Verma. Produced by Aliza Fatma.