It was in 1996, when I was Senior Editor with The Indian Express, that the tenth anniversary of the annulment of the Travancore–Cochin Christian Succession Act of 1916 and 1921 was commemorated. Mary Roy, the headmistress of Pallikoodam and the mother of a future Booker Prize winner, had by then become a household name in Kerala and beyond.

She was the woman who dared to take on the combined might of the Syrian Christian community and who succeeded in persuading the Supreme Court to strike down an archaic law that "discriminated" against daughters in matters of inheritance.

At that time, Mary Roy stood at the zenith of her popularity. She was hailed as a crusader for women's rights, a pioneer who dealt a mortal blow to the dowry system and gave daughters equal rights in property. The media narrative, repeated ad nauseam, was that her case transformed the lives of Syrian Christian women in Kerala. And yet, I was not convinced.

I had watched the system from within, as someone born and brought up in Kerala, married according to its customs, and a witness to countless arranged marriages in which dowry was an integral component. When I wrote my column for the Express edit page, I argued that the judgment did not, in fact, benefit the women as was being propagated. On the contrary, it harmed them. The perception that the Supreme Court ruling ended the dowry system was, I insisted, utterly fallacious.

When I got married, the impugned Succession Act was still in force. Dowry was a legal and integral part of marriage negotiations. I did not demand a dowry, but my wife was given one. In Malayalam, dowry is called stree-dhanam, literally meaning the "woman's wealth," or her share of her father's property, given in cash.

At that time, cash was far more practical than the vague promise of a share in property many decades later. After all, what use would it be if, suppose, her share turned out to be one-sixth of a small house perched on a five-cent (approx 2178 sq. ft.) plot of land—something neither divisible nor saleable without acrimony? In contrast, a cash dowry, though frowned upon today, provided the couple with an immediate and tangible asset with which to begin their life together.

In those days, the decision to marry—where, when, and on what terms—was not taken by the couple but by the elders of the two families. Of course, after they had seen each other. The bride and groom were not even required to be present at the negotiations.

At the meeting, the bride's father would announce the dowry he was giving, and the groom's father would seek the permission of the assembled elders to accept it. The handing over of the money was a solemn transaction, witnessed by both families and friends, and later recorded in church registers. On two successive Sundays, the marriage announcements were read out in both churches, complete with the amount of dowry agreed upon.

It was not hush-hush, not underhanded. It was a legal contract. And crucially, the law gave the woman the first claim on her husband's property should the marriage collapse. In our case, we built a house in Kerala with the dowry and the money we borrowed and saved. The house and the property stand in my wife's name.

The Succession Act also provided that if a father died without dividing his property, the daughter could claim either her share or ?5,000, whichever was less. When the Acts were passed in 1916 and 1921, it was a substantial sum. My own mother, who got married before Independence, would proudly recount that she received a dowry of ?150, besides gold jewellery, which was respectable at the time.

Until these Acts were enacted, Syrian Christians had followed Hindu customs, which denied daughters any right to intestate property. The land would be inherited by the male members of the parents' family. Seen in that context, the law was progressive for its time. The real problem was that the ceiling of ?5,000 was never revised. The legislature should have indexed it to inflation. Had it been raised periodically, the law would have continued to serve its purpose. Today, the equivalent of ?5,000 from 1916 would be at least ?1 crore, if not more.

The dowry system did not end with the Mary Roy case, far from it. Even today, though giving and accepting dowry is illegal, few arranged Christian marriages in Kerala take place without it. What changed after the Supreme Court judgment was that women lost the legal recognition of dowry as their property. If a marriage breaks down today, the woman cannot reclaim her dowry. This was the point I made in my column.

My wife, under the new regime, could have claimed an equal share of her father's intestate property. But she had already received her share in the form of dowry. To claim again would have been unethical. She voluntarily refrained, as did her sisters. In practice, the judgment harmed women because it delegitimised dowry without destroying it.

Not everyone appreciated my argument. A few days after my piece appeared, my boss, Swapan Dasgupta, handed me a rejoinder from Mary Roy herself. In it, she dismissed me as a "Male Chauvinist Pig (MCP)." Swapan suggested I publish a toned-down response, excising the insult. Instead, I published her letter in full—with "MCP" emblazoned in the headline.

This week, when I read Arundhati Roy's memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me (Penguin, Pages 374, ?899), I was amused to discover that Mary Roy routinely called her son, Lalith Kumar Christopher Roy, the same epithet. "From the time he was only six or seven years old, for even the smallest mistake or slip-up she would call him a male chauvinist pig." In retrospect, I was flattered. I was in the same league as her own son.

I have read all of Arundhati Roy's works—her fiction, her essays in newspapers and magazines, and her polemics in the New York Times. I could have skipped portions of her memoir because I already knew many of the family secrets she reveals, courtesy of my late brother-in-law, CI George, a basketball player and chemist who was close to her uncle, George Isaac.

Isaac, whom Mary Roy fought in the courts, was a man of paradoxes. He "was one of India's first Rhodes scholars. His subject was Greek and Roman mythology. His Swedish wife, Cecilia, whom he met in Oxford, left him and returned to Sweden with their three young sons" when he abandoned his lucrative foreign job to start a pickle factory in Kottayam, more to provide employment to locals than to make money. He became a "nothing-man," the same phrase Mary Roy used for her estranged husband. Arundhati had to support him for many years after his eviction from the ancestral property following the Court order.

The memoir is rich with such portraits. Arundhati's grandmother, who tried to evict Mary Roy and her children from their property in Ooty, "was an accomplished violinist and had taken music lessons when her imperial entomologist husband was posted in Vienna." These details give texture to the family history, making the reader realise that Pallikoodam was not born in a vacuum but in a family with its own peculiar mix of brilliance and dysfunction.

Aymenem and the Meenachil River, which Arundhati evokes with lyrical precision, are not strangers to me, either. My brother-in-law's house stood on its banks, and I have eaten fish caught with his rod from those waters. Early last year, I visited a doctor-relative whose house was on another motta kunnu (bald hill) close to Pallikoodam. I even stopped by the road to take a photograph of the school at dusk. The steep hill prevented me from going down, but the sight alone was enough to confirm that Arundhati's descriptions rang true.

My encounters with Arundhati in person were equally memorable. My late friend, J Sri Raman, once organised a seminar in Delhi under the banner of Journalists Against Nuclear Weapons (JANW), where she was the star speaker. There were journalists from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

She unequivocally condemned both the Indian and Pakistani nuclear bombs. The next day's Times of India report, however, carried only details about her hairstyle and clothes, ignoring her fiery speech. Of course, they also carried a picture that highlighted her curly hair and her "beautiful neck" adorned with a chain and pendant.

We both were speakers at the Kerala Literature Festival in Kozhikode. I took a photograph of her there, more as a record of the occasion than out of star-struck admiration. Truth be told, I was never as taken by The God of Small Things as my Chief Editor, HK Dua, was. Recuperating at Escorts Hospital after heart surgery, Dua read it in the ICU between bouts of sedation. On discharge, he gifted the book to the Malayali nurses who had cared for him, instructing them to read it in turns.

The most arresting element of her memoir is Arundhati's portrait of her mother. It is unflattering, at times brutal. "My mother conducted herself with the edginess of a gangster," she writes. She called her daughter a "bitch" and a "prostitute." When she joined the college of architecture in Delhi in 1976, she herself "dropped my first name, Susanna. Starting from then, I gradually, deliberately transformed myself into somebody else." It was a rite of passage for her.

And yet, for all the vitriol, Arundhati cannot escape her mother's shadow. "Quite often, I found myself wishing I were her student and not her daughter," she admits. Pallikoodam, which began with just seven students—"including my brother and me"—remains the defining institution of her life. She even remembers her classroom "where a few thin cows with prominent hip bones grazed."

Mary Roy may have been domineering, eccentric, even cruel. But she was also indomitable. She left a drunken husband, raised two children, built a pioneering school, and fought both the Church and the state.

When an IAS officer, piqued by her refusal to admit his recommended candidates, sent police to arrest her and confiscate the record of a "blasphemous play," she stood her ground. That officer later joined the BJP and became a minister, showing no discomfort with the party's tolerance of "church-burning, missionary-murdering, and Jesus statue-smashing by vigilantes on the Hindu far right."

For all the good things she has written about her mother, I cannot forgive her contradictions. Mary Roy fought for equal inheritance rights in court, yet in her own will left almost everything to her son and some things to her own helpers. Arundhati was given the Laurie Baker house only through her brother's generosity. Anyway, beneath the daughter's anger lies admiration. Mary Roy may have been impossible to live with, but she was unforgettable.

The Roy family saga is one of contradictions. The grandmother who played the violin in Vienna, the Rhodes Scholar uncle who abandoned everything for a pickle factory, the father who died in obscurity after a stint in Mother Teresa's destitute home, the mother who combined ferocity with vision, and the daughter who won the Booker Prize but still battles her ghosts.

What emerges from Mother Mary Comes To Me is not just a family memoir but a chronicle of grit. Arundhati's life mirrors Mary Roy's in its turbulence and determination. Both women broke moulds. Both paid heavy personal prices. Both were called names—Mary Roy by her peers and her daughter by the Indian state and the media.

Behind the conflicts and harsh words lies the unmistakable story of two women—mother and daughter—who, despite their differences, drew on the same well of strength.

Mary Roy challenged conventions and built something lasting from adversity, while Arundhati Roy turned her experiences into a voice heard across the world. Their journeys were not easy, but both showed that determination can transform even the hardest trials into unexpected triumphs.