'Many Brahmins are examining our very mixed legacy'

Sivakami, married at 10, is widowed at 18, with two children. In the late 19th century, like other Tamil Brahmin widows, she wears white and shaves her head. In the next 60 years she ventures out of her home only three times. Though she considers herself to be a law-abiding Brahmin widow, she performs one rebellious act: She moves back to her dead husband's home to raise her son and daughter.

In Padma Viswanathan's acclaimed first novel The Toss of a Lemon, we not only read Sivakami's story, but that of her restless children and her grandchildren. It is also a novel full of unpredictable characters including a gay Brahmin man who becomes Sivakami's confidant, though he is a servant in the household.

Viswanathan, who grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, lives with her husband Geoffrey Brock and their children in Arkansas.

In the following interview, Padma Viswanathan discusses her semi-biographical novel The Toss of a Lemon with rediff India Abroad's Arthur J Pais.

You had no plans to be a writer, right?

I finished a sociology degree at 20 and was working in policy research, but feeling dissatisfied. I fell into social action theatre, creating theatrical pieces, often interactive, intended to stimulate dialogue on social issues. This was fun and rewarding, but agit-prop necessarily oversimplifies and I grew uncomfortable.

That led you to writing?

First there were plays. I joined a novice playwrights' circle and wrote the first scene of my first play, a comedy called House of Sacred Cows. I felt as though I'd been whapped, gently, on the forehead by the heel of a giant hand: This is what I was meant to do! It was such a relief, finally, to discover my vocation. The play was commissioned, miraculously, for development and production and I started research for my novel shortly thereafter.

What was the process of getting a publisher like?

Oddly smooth! I became friends with the wonderful Sri Lankan-Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai (The Cinnamon Garden) at the MacDowell Colony, an artists' retreat in New Hampshire. He heard me read from my novel there and generously offered to introduce me to his agent, Bruce Westwood. By the time the book was ready to show, I was living in the US, and so also approached an American agent. But the Westwood Agency won me over. Bruce is legendary in Canada; they represent many writers I had long admired, and they were passionate about my book. Once Bruce and his assistant Carolyn Forde were on the task, all went quickly.

I believe the book was auctioned?

We had several bids in Canada within weeks. When Bruce showed the book to American publishers, we got a preemptive bid from Ann Patty at Harcourt USA within a week. It has also been sold internationally.

Who are the writers that have influenced you most and what have you taken from them?

The most important contemporary author in my personal canon is Salman Rushdie, though no one would guess that from my prose. Midnight's Children and Shame break my heart over and over. The one element of Rushdie's writing that I have tried to imitate is the way he creates an image, rotates it, inverts it, puns on it, until it becomes equally a visual and a verbal metaphor, infused with humor and pathos. Canadian writer Ann Marie MacDonald, who I admire intensely, also does this in Fall on Your Knees. I also adore Laurence Sterne: he involves his readers by playing with them, and if he alienates others, that's a chance he's willing to take. No writer should try too hard to please. And Jorge Luis Borges's Ficciones would be my desert island book; it pretty much contains all the fictional lessons and enjoyment I would ever need.

What would be some of the best experiences have you had reading Ficciones?

I love the book. Still, it is flawed, which is reassuring: Even books I would place on an altar and worship are, much like Hindu or Greek gods, imperfect. Borges inspires me to imaginative daring and also to forgive my own failings.

What inspired your novel?

The novel is based very loosely on stories my grandmother told me about her grandmother, and the context is the lead-up to a mid-twentieth-century exodus of Brahmins from Tamil Nadu to other parts of India and the world because of the anti-Brahmin movement.

You have said that writing The Toss of Lemon was an education.

Hearing my grandma's story in her own words and parsing its meaning as I transformed it into fiction was deeply educational.

Did you plan to write the 600-plus pages of a novel?

[Chuckles]. I would have felt very daunted to write it had I ever thought it would be so long. But it kept on growing.

You grew up knowing hardly any Tamil. Yet your book is so deeply rooted in Tamil culture and in the Tamil Brahmin culture.

We went to India quite often. I got tremendous help for this book from some of the members of my family in India. I also had to do a lot of research to find out more about the social and political context.

What do your parents do in Canada and how did they feel about your choice of a career?

My father taught economics at a community college and my mother was a managerial accountant. Both retired when I had children to help with our kids and let us write! So that gives a sense of how enormously supportive they are. It cannot have been easy for them to see me choose a path that is so financially and otherwise uncertain, but they taught me independence of mind, and I hope that, ultimately, their reward is that I am doing work I love. They are as important in our children's lives as my grandma has been in mine, long before she told me the stories that inspired The Toss of a Lemon.

I know a writer who likes to revise her books in a coffee shop. Where do you work best, and what are your working hours like?

I can only write in the mornings and only in relative isolation. At my home in the Ozarks, I have a custom-built, chartreuse-painted attic study. The door has a very high knob. My son was a toddler when we moved here, and I didn't tell him where I worked until he was old enough not to try to find me! My parents stay with us during the academic year, looking after our children four mornings a week as well as giving us myriad other forms of help. After I descend to give my kids lunch and my parents a break, I let mundane details crowd in and don't try to write any more.

How is it to work with another writer in the same house?

My husband and I have often worked in the same room [he is a poet and literary translator], and I enjoy that, but I never write in cafés: I don't want to be subject to anyone else's choice of music while I'm writing, and I love eavesdropping so much that I get distracted by other patrons.

How long did you work on the book?

I had to fully engage my family and community's privilege and hardships, and their resultant values and moral burdens. It took me over 10 years before I had the novel I wanted to write: I learned how to write by writing it.

What do you want readers to take away from your book?

I don't think literature can or should ever preach, but I hope that my book inspires readers to be compassionate, toward themselves and others. I know that the world I describe will be very foreign to most readers, including Indians, but the story is, at its heart, that of a parent who makes the best choices she can for her children and must live with the consequences. This is a universal story, and one I see in a new way now that I am a parent myself.

How about the choices your characters make?

My various characters make dubious or hurtful decisions, but I hope that the story makes their actions intelligible, and that readers are encouraged, as a result, to greater curiosity about people in their own lives with whom they might disagree. I know that's the effect good books tend to have on me: They push me out of my comfort zone and toward something like insight.

Is it true that your grandmother fell ill when she had the stories from the novel read to her?

My grandmother was moved by the book and emotionally convinced by what I had written. An earlier interviewer suggested she felt betrayed: That was a complete misinterpretation. There is one part in the novel that caused a sort of adverse reaction: The episode where the children are taken back to their grandmother's house by their neglectful father -- an incident that, as far as I know, I completely invented, though my grandmother and her siblings were, in fact, raised by her grandmother because their parents couldn't or wouldn't keep them. When my grandmother read that episode in my book, it brought back those long dormant feelings of neglect and rejection, so much so that she took to her bed, alarming me! I begged her to stop reading at that point.

Did she stop reading?

No, for she soon recovered and insisted on continuing. Even though she had not undergone the exact ordeal the children in my book suffer, she felt their emotions, and this was typical of her reaction to the book. Though I had warned her that it was fiction, and departed in many ways from the stories she had told me, she still identified deeply with its emotional centers.

What did she think of the novel?

In the end, she gave me her hearty approval: she felt I had treated all my characters fairly and with compassion, and that I had accurately represented how they lived back then. Other family members also have read it, and none has suggested that I was out of line in writing what I did. I was relieved, considering I had to put aside all fear of others' reactions to write candidly.

How do you think the Brahmin community in Tamil Nadu will react to The Toss of a Lemon?

I think many Brahmins are in the process of examining our very mixed legacy, especially as we leave the places where we originate. I hope my book assists in some of that soul-searching, as well as letting outsiders learn about the strange, cruel, beautiful and funny aspects of our culture. More than anything, I'm proud that my grandmother found it an engrossing and compelling read, and I hope other readers will feel the same.