Anita Rau Badami returns with first novel in 15 years exploring family, dislocation

Anita Rau Badami's fifth novel, Asha in Her Garden, took 15 years to arrive — and the wait reveals itself in the depth of what she built.

Originally, Badami envisioned a story confined entirely to the interior: a comatose woman named Asha Mohan lying in a hospital bed, conversations unfolding between her and a ghostly figure called The Hag. The landscape would exist only in memory and mind.

The finished novel expanded vastly. It became what Scottish author Ian McEwan calls a "whole-life novel" — one that follows central characters from early years through the present day. Chapters shift perspective across half-a-dozen voices, spanning 63 years and two continents. The Hag remains, but she no longer anchors the entire narrative.

Badami, who moved to Canada in the early 1990s to study at the University of Calgary, says the novel emerged from a profound sense of rootlessness that struck her eight or nine years ago. Born in India, she eventually earned her Master of Arts in creative writing at the University of Calgary. Her debut novel, Tamarind Mem, came from her thesis in 1997. She has lived 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," Badami said in a phone interview from her Montreal home. "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."

The story is not autobiographical, though overlap exists. Badami explored questions that define her own life: "What happens to people like me who come from an entirely different culture to this country? 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."

What began as a narrative inside a comatose woman's mind became a story about shifting family dynamics, expectations, and the relationships between husbands and wives, mothers and children, and immigrants and their new homes.

Badami faced substantial challenges crafting a whole-life novel, partly because she regularly expanded and condensed the manuscript as she wrote. Covering major historical events across a lifetime — and across two countries — added complexity. Asha in Her Garden touches on Indira Gandhi's "Emergency" in 1975, among other turning points.

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