“The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy (post 2): Rahel's mother, too, may have had multiple personality

When her husband’s “bouts of violence began to include the children…Ammu left her husband and returned, unwelcome, to her parents in Ayemenem…

“Occasionally, when Ammu listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch, to a better, happier place. On days like this there was something restless and untamed about her. As though she had temporarily set aside the morality of motherhood and divorcée-hood. Even her walk changed from a safe mother-walk to another wilder sort of walk. She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spent hours on the riverbank…and had midnight swims.

“What was it that gave Ammu this Unsafe Edge? This air of unpredictability? It was what she had battling inside her. An unmixable mix. The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber…

“Sometimes she was the most beautiful woman that Estha and Rahel had ever seen. And sometimes she wasn’t” (1, pp. 42-44).

Multiple personality can be multigenerational.

1. Arundhati Roy. The God of Small Things [1997]. New York, Random House, 2008.

Note (added March 5, 2019): Multiple personality begins in childhood. So, in real life, if Ammu had multiple personality, it would have been aggravated by her husband's abuse, but it would have begun during her own childhood.