Feeling of being lost and without a home is central to her character's narrative and headspace

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Author Anita Rau Badami’s original vision for her fifth novel, Asha in Her Garden, was very different from what it would become.

Initially, the story of mother, wife and immigrant Asha Mohan was meant to be told from “a character who did not have a landscape.”

It was all to take place in Asha’s mind and memories as she lay comatose on a hospital bed. Conversations would take place between Asha and a ghostly, supernatural figure called The Hag.

The Hag does appear in the finished version of Asha in Her Garden, but the landscape expanded greatly. The story became what Scottish author Ian McEwan once called a “whole-life novel,” where central characters are followed through their early years to present day. Chapters are told from the shifting perspectives of half-a-dozen or so characters in a story that spans 63 years and two continents.

It has been 15 years since Badami’s last novel, 2011’s Tell it to the Trees. Early in a phone interview with Postmedia from her home in Montreal, the author says she has “no idea why it took so long.”

But the initial spark for the novel came to her eight or nine years ago when Badami began to feel a profound sense of rootlessness in her life. Born in India, she moved to Canada in the early 1990s to study at the University of Calgary. She eventually earned her Master of Arts in creative writing and her thesis project became her 1997 debut novel Tamarind Mem. She has been living in Montreal since 2002.

“I had this weird feeling of being suspended without a place to call my own, this weird feeling of dislocation that was so savage and thorough I just felt I was afloat,” says Badami, who will be part of a Wordfest event on Oct. 26 at Calgary’s Memorial Park Library. “So I started thinking about a woman of Asha’s age who might be wondering about her own history and who was going to be responsible for carrying her memories and her history forward, because her history is shared by her children.”

The story is not autobiographical, despite some clear overlap with Badami’s life. But the feeling of being lost and without a home became central to her character’s narrative and headspace.

“What happens to people like me who come from an entirely different culture to this country?” Badami says. “My whole family history, my ancestry, is rooted in India but I have a full life here. I’ve spent longer in Canada than in India. For the longest time, I had just decided that this was my home, this is where I live and this is where I’m going to die and I had come to terms with that. But, that year, I have no idea why I started feeling so shaken out of this complacency, the feeling of being rooted here now. So Asha became the character who was going to carry that feeling rather than that exact story.”

What began as a narrative inside a comatose woman’s expanded to a tale about shifting family dynamics and expectations that explores the relationships between husbands and wives, mothers and children and immigrants and their new homes.

Part of the reason the novel may have taken so long is because it was often in flux, with Badami regularly expanding and condensing it as she went along. Part of the challenge of a “whole-life” novel is how to cover the major historical events that occur over a lifetime, which is even more difficult when it takes place in two countries.

Asha in Her Garden does touch on some. That includes Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency” in 1975 that suspended civil liberties and censored the press in India. It leads to Asha’s husband, an ambitious journalist named Suresh, to abandon his profession and agree to move to Canada with his young family where he will harbour regret and dissatisfaction with his professional life in his new home.

But even this period in India’s history is only referred to in vague terms and told only as a way to explain Asha’s desire to bring her family to a new country, a decision that is also fuelled by a harrowing family tragedy. Uprooting her young family will have long-lasting and unexpected consequences.

The novel begins and ends in 2023, with Asha approaching her 70th birthday in Montreal as a cherished backyard maple tree that has shaded her garden for decades is scheduled to be cut down.

Asha is a complicated protagonist who is strong-willed and not always kind. She has a complicated relationship with her two adult children, including her seemingly near-perfect artist daughter, Anjali, and a first-born son named Dilip, who spends much of the novel as a chronic screw-up.

While Badami didn’t plan to put so much focus on the mother-son dynamic, it becomes a central theme of the novel. Even a fairly minor character named Horacio, Dilip’s low-level drug-dealing acquaintance, has major mommy issues. Badami, who is the mother of an adult son, clearly had fun writing the character of Dilip. In one of the book’s most darkly funny passages, a dog-sitting gig for the rich mother of a friend goes disastrously wrong in every possible way for Dilip.

“I love Dilip,” Badami says. “I love what a klutz he is and the trouble he gets into without meaning to be a bad person.”

In her previous novels, including Tamarind Mem, 2001’s The Hero’s Work and 2007’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?, Badami explored characters that straddled cultures and generations. The immigrant experience is a common theme in CanLit. Badami says she doesn’t set out to fit into a specific stream of fiction, but acknowledges there are universal themes in the stories of newcomers to Canada.

“I don’t think of that when I’m starting a book but I’m glad to be a part of the CanLit scene,” she says. “I’m glad that my voice one of the many stories that are being told here. But I don’t think of that when I’m writing. For me, it’s primary about these people whose lives I’m inhabiting as I write the book. At some point, you just forget everything else. It is only about the story and the people in it and the life they are leading and their stories. That’s it.”

Asha in Her Garden is now available from Knopf Canada. Anita Rau Badami will appear at Calgary’s Memorial Park Library on Oct. 26 at 7 p.m. for a Wordfest event.

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