When Anita Rau Badami was little, her head swirled with a strange mixture of stories. Traveling through India by train with her railway-engineer father and family, she entertained herself with Enid Blyton books and the adventures of Biggles and William. During the day, convent schools inspired her with stories of resurrection and redemption. At night, her mother spun tales from traditional Indian mythology. And if there were corners of her mind left unmoved, there were always the ayahs – the servants to the family – to thrill her with warnings of spirits and goblins.


Trains and stories resonate strongly in Badami’s first novel, Tamarind Mem (which booksellers will hear about from Badami herself at Monday’s CBA author breakfast). Having “virtually lived life in a train” during her youth, Badami, a native of eastern India and now a resident of Vancouver, found a powerful symbol in the Indian train system and its satellite communities of lifelong workers. “I was trying to use the idea of trains,” explains Badami, “which travel out and come back to a station and collect people and move out again, and link that to lives: you go out into life, you gather people, acquaintances, memories, everything.”

Though the novel’s narrative reflects Badami’s own “gypsy” upbringing and the “mishmash” of various cultures that helped shape her development and free her from national boundaries, Badami disavows too autobiographical a connection with her characters. “This might be a naive idea, a silly idea,” she says, “but [I believe only] a real person who’s really achieved something, somebody great, deserves to write an autobiography.”

In conversation, Badami is a mixture of awkward hesitation and unswerving purpose; one detects a shy intent to please. As she narrates the story of how she arrived in Canada, the 34-year-old former journalist (with more than 150 articles in Indian newspapers and magazines to her credit) interrupts her lightly accented speech with the occasional “Do you know what I mean?” and “Or am I just being silly?” She recalls that before leaving India five years ago to join her husband halfway around the world in Calgary, he had described to her a country vastly different from their homeland, where winter nights tested new depths of cold. On the day in March that she was to board the plane, however, he had sent her good news: the terrible Canadian winter was finally ending. It was warm!

Badami says when she stepped off the plane in a thin sweater and cotton shoes, she found a “spring” day of 10 below, and remembers being struck by the feeling that it would be years before she would be able to understand and write about her new home.

So she enrolled in the University of Calgary’s creative writing degree program, and began writing about India, launching into the stories that would eventually form the basis for Tamarind Mem. While pursuing her degree, Badami considered the idea of having the stories published in a collection. “But all my short stories have dozens of characters,” she says. “I come from a country where there’re almost a billion people. Every time you stick your head out the window, you hear or see at least a dozen people.” In the end, it was one of Badami’s course advisers who suggested she weave the stories into a novel.

Writing about her home country – even though it was thousands of miles away at the time – seemed natural to Badami, but she recalls being asked by someone from her writing worskshop during that first year in Calgary why she wasn’t writing about Canada. “I feel you have to live in a place, breathe it in, get it into your bloodstream,” she says. “The first novel I wouldn’t have been able to set entirely in Canada, because it would [have meant] writing on the surface.”

Upon completing her master’s thesis (the manuscript for Tamarind Mem), Badami cast all coyness aside and mailed a copy to Penguin, with a letter stating that she’d like a reply within six weeks, or she’d send it elsewhere. “[It] was kind of presumptuous,” she remarks in hindsight, “but I was in that weird mood where you’re busy writing, trying to finish something. Having done with it, I didn’t care what anybody thought.” Penguin responded within the time limit, and the draft underwent two serious structural revisions over the next six months. The details and colour of the Indian content received only light editing for Canadian readers, which pleased Badami. “I thought it was unnecessary to explain every single foreign word,” she says; “some of it is there for the sound of it, the rhythms, or the colours.”

Badami snorts at the label “ethnic writer,” even while acknowledging that the title of her book – named for the sour-tasting tamarind and the Hindi word for a married woman of upper class – and its cover will lend an exotic spin to Penguin’s national marketing plans. Her description of Tamarind Mem’s narrative structure, meanwhile, romps cheerfully past any number of cultural touchstones: “There’s a collection of very, very old Indian folk tales that Aesop’s Fables took a lot from. And those stories are like those Russian dolls that open and there’s another one and there’s another one. Like them, my stories start with somebody telling a story and coming to a point where a question can be answered only if a second story is told, and that [story] opens at the end to a third story, and so on. There’s a train of stories within stories, and somewhere at the end there’s a conclusion. If that.”

Looking back now on that distant day in Calgary when her classmate challenged her choice to write about India, Badami shrugs: “Now I feel I’ve got a better sense of Canada, I feel I’m ready to explore.” She says her next book will be told from the point of view of a character who flees Indian Partition and moves to a B.C. logging town; 50 years later, he and his daughters attempt to understand their identities as citizens of both the old and new worlds. “I’m curious,” says Badami “to explore how that feels: a man who feels he’s teetering at the edge of two places.” Like her characters, Badami’s position may seem precarious, but she is confident that the power of the imagination can efface the tensions between ethnic and writer, here and there, Indian and Canadian. “Once you’ve got the place in your system, in your bloodstream,” she smiles, “your imagination takes over.”