Mother Mary Comes to Me begins with Roy’s childhood, in which she recounts moving from Assam, India, to the hill station town of Ooty, and later to Kerala, where her mother eventually set up a school. While they tried to find a foothold in Ooty, her mother’s older brother and her grandmother attempted to evict the family, invoking an inheritance law that left daughters with little protection.

A teacher was what my mother had always wanted to be, what she was qualified to be. During the years she was married to and living with our father, who had a job as an assistant manager on a remote tea estate in Assam, in northeastern India, the dream of pursuing a career of any kind atrophied and fell away. It was rekindled (as nightmare more than dream) when she realized that her husband, like ma

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