A conversation with Anita Rau Badami

Last September, Anita Rau Badami spoke to a small crowd at the Vancouver Public Library. She read from her new novel, Tamarind Mem, and answered questions from a warmly receptive and curious audience. It's hard not to respond affectionately to Badami who practically glows from her friendliness, unassuming intelligence and sense of humour.

Tamarind Mem is a wonderful novel with poetic, playful prose. Set between India and Calgary, the story alternates between the memories of two protagonists - mother and daughter -- trying to make sense of their past of living in various railway colonies of India, but with vastly different recollections.

Badami's debut novel has been receiving critical acclaim and she is being hailed as a promising new Canadian voice. Badami is now dealing with the fallout of all the publicity surrounding Mem and she is also working on a follow-up novel set in Vancouver.

Fortunately, Badami is set in Vancouver as well. She moved her a year ago and says she's not going anywhere. I met with Anita a few weeks after her VPL appearance. Here are some excerpts from an interesting conversation that was regularly punctuated with laughter:

Anita on her sudden spotlight of success:

It's been fabulous, the type of reception that [the book] has been getting.

You know, when you're writing for newspapers and magazines which I've been doing for the past seventeen years, you have an audience but you don't get so much, such an immediate response…. Usually it's a couple of letters to the editor, they agree with you or disagree with you or something and that's it. And then on to the next article.

On the humour in Tamarind Mem:

Oh, I'm glad you got that! People keep talking to me about the sorrow in these women's lives and I'm saying, "Yeah, but there are funny moments, you know."

On many readers' feelings of connection with the characters:

That's been wonderful. Really. That's something I think every writer dreams of, to get a sense of identification from the readers and that's really really wonderful to me.

On writing an autobiography and on memory:

I did intend to write some kind of autobiography, but I have this old-fashioned notion that an autobiography should be written by somebody who's achieved something, you know, who has something worth remembering, in that sense.

And so, feeling this way when I started to write [Tamarind Mem] as an autobiography, I thought "No, I don't think I'm ready to write a story yet about myself, but suppose I start from the truth and then wander off into fiction, I think it's more enjoyable... and more honest.

I'm interested in... the shakiness of memory, the elusive nature of the mind, and that connected up with relationships within the family which were also very strange and shifting. Because a relationship with the same person changes as you grow older, changes in a different situation, for instance if there's a tragedy in the family or some big event in the family. Things change. That's the nature of relationships. So I wanted to explore that....

On being educated in Catholic schools in India:

It is very common because … up until about 20, 25 years ago, those were the only schools which taught really good English, for instance, and gave you a good-rounded education about the world, not just about India and Indian things. The religion was left out completely. ... I don't ever remember them trying to make us Catholic.

I know the Bible very thoroughly, but not because they forced it down our throats. It was just taught as literature, so we studied it as a work of literature not a work of religion, which makes quite a difference because then you're appreciating the language and the richness and the texture and the poetry, and the symbolism, which is wonderful in itself.

On the colonial legacy of a newly independent country:

It is rather strange. The same people who grumble about British rule were the very people who wanted to hold onto some things British such as the language. But yes, there was this inclination to hold on to the colonial legacy and of course it had to do being in the railway colony, as well.

The railways were a British institution; the railways and the colonies were set up by the British and so when they left the place was just simply taken by Indians who still retained some of those Anglicized ways and manners and mixed them up with their Indian ways as well, so you had all these British kind of parties, you know... .

On identifying with the local Indo-Canadian community:

I don't identify myself with any one community. I left India [five years ago]. For me it's important to make as clean a break as possible because otherwise you're constantly dealing with these two worlds, two cultures and that can be a very very difficult experience. You become completely schizophrenic and it's not a happy state of mind to be in.

So I'd rather decide that I belong to Canada and be just part of general society... some of this fragmentation into these ethnic communities bothers me because Canada by its very nature is an immigrant society and so you have people from all kinds of ethnic communities from across the world. I mean, I like it that way, I like the mixture of communities.

On the cultural struggle of first generation Indo-Canadians:

I'm from South India, so my experiences may not be the same. However it's interesting, the first generation, the younger generation of Punjabi people who live here, they find themselves identifying with this book tremendously.

They happen to belong to the generation which is suspended between cultures. Their parents are still hanging on to their Indian culture and Indian tradition and things that they brought with them thirty years ago or forty years ago. The India that [the parents] knew, has changed completely … it's no longer the India of memory.

On being accused of being a feminist:

Well, it depends what you mean by 'feminist.' If you mean that being a feminist is that somebody expects both sexes to be equal, so long as you both have equal opportunities and the chance to make a decision about where your life is going and the opportunity to work that decision through, the fair chance to do so, then yes, I'm a feminist.

I think the idea of 'strident' feminism had its place when it was started because at that time it was needed. Women really did have a hard deal so you needed somebody who was willing to stand up and yell and shout and burn their bras....

Now there is more awareness that women have a right to be treated as equals so perhaps the need has faded a bit. I mean, there is still a need to yell and shout and scream a bit.

On sexism in the Indian culture:

The men do have a reputation for being quite chauvinistic. Really. They expect their wives to behave a certain way and they expect their wives to be the epitomy of everything that's western but at the same time they expect them to come back home and breed like rabbits and look after the house and cook up a good meal and be a good little housewife. I'm afraid those expectations still exist.

On non-Indian writers who sensationalize or misrepresent India:

It's easy to do that. [John Irving] wrote "The Son of the Circus" recently, a year or two ago. He had visited India, I think, for a day or a week and this whole book is set in India and it's got loads of the most bizarre characters. … It's completely bizarre and extremely funny.

I found it a thoroughly enjoyable read, but a lot of Indians were very, very offended because they believed he had no business writing about India. It looked like India was only full of weird, weird oddities, right.

You can't escape it, you do find these weird characters… I remember, two years ago, this fellow, a holy man from India who had ended up in London somehow -- he was rolling, literally rolling down the streets of London… [uncontrollable laughter!]

He spent the whole day rolling, in a pair of red underpants, and then when he was done rolling, a reporter asked him what he hoped to achieve by rolling and he said "world peace."

And there were two British women who thought that they might have gotten home quicker if they had just hopped onto him because they were waiting for a bus that never turned up and this man was rolling faster than any bus!

Badami will be at the Vancouver International Writers (& Readers) Festival, at "New Voices" and "India as They See It" on Thursday, October 24.

A full transcript of the interview is available at http://www.geocities.com/Paris/2270/anita.html .

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