Retelling Grandma's Tales

Is it the NRI’s quest to know one’s roots? Is it the natural curiosity to ferret into the past? Whatever may be the driver, captivating works of fiction have been produced when writers delve into their own family history. Canada-based playwright Padma Viswanathan has been similarly inspired and marks her fictional debut with a strong family saga set in a Tamil village. A “blend of observed and imagined details”, the book is a sympathetic narrative that has evoked immense response even in milieus and contexts far removed from the novel’s setting. Viswanathan tells Chitra Narayanan what inspired this effort.

In recent years, there has been great debate about NRI authors writing on India, versus Indian authors writing about the milieu they live in. The allegation is that NRI writers tend to exoticise. Your take?
Honestly, that seems more a concern for critics — and perhaps journalists trying to stir up a bit of controversy — than for writers themselves! But if we want to engage this question, we might say that the worst writers, of any nationality or origin, are those that use some form of sensationalism, such as exoticising, to attract readers, whereas the best speak their particular truth. NRI writers might see India differently from Indian writers, but that seems to belittle the diversity among writers in both categories. I cannot tell Aravind Adiga's, or Amit Chaudhuri's, or Arundhati Roy's stories, much as I love their work, but none of them is trying to tell my stories either. Also, many writers, including those I just mentioned, move away, even for a time, from the “milieu they live in”, even if these moves are only within India. It's one way to get perspective on your subject, often necessary in order to make it accessible to others. As Hemingway said in A Moveable Feast, “Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan.” So maybe, in Bangalore, you can write about your grandmother's village, just as in your grandmother's village, you can write about New York. 
 
Why did you decide to set your story in a Tamil village? And that too in a period starting a century ago? How big a challenge was this? How much of research did you have to do to get the milieu and context right? How many trips did you make to India just for the writing of the novel?
The Toss Of A Lemon is based on stories my grandmother told me about her grandmother. It was a story that captivated me and kept me engaged through years of research and writing. Although I visited India often while growing up, I made two dedicated research trips toward the writing of this book, each for half a year.

In the first, before I began the writing, I revisited and stayed in the places where it would be set and did further interviewing and background reading, which gave me sufficient material to get started. The second trip was after much of the novel was written, when I was researching details I couldn't have known in advance, about how land transactions happen, for example, or about the minutiae of devadasi practices. First novels are traditionally less far-reaching, but I am glad I didn't know that when I began! It was an enormous challenge, which is why it took me so long (10 years) to write the book: I had to sink, imaginatively, deep inside the research in order to create my characters, their thoughts and actions. 
 
While the story itself, which captures the changing dynamics within a family and the shifting equations — both within the family and outside in society — has a universal connect, do you think the setting and the fact that it is centred around one caste, and its strange peccadilloes, would deter a lot of readers? When you wrote, who was your target audience?
The setting and its strangeness don't appear to have been deterrents — quite the opposite! I think many readers, like me, read, in part, to enter other worlds, whether these are psychological, geographical, or anthropological in their distance. Call this exotic if you like (my publisher did, in the best sense!), but even a book that is about your own place and time has to be surprising and revelatory — otherwise, what's the fun in reading it?
 
While I was writing, my target audience was myself, in part because I had no idea whether anyone else would be interested! I tried to write the sort of book I most like to read, detail-rich and character driven, with a strong, narrative thrust. Even now, though I have come to know my readers through their letters and my appearances, and am very touched by their love for my book, I think it would be folly to write to imagined external expectations. Rather, I still write to amuse myself and to propose multiple and complex answers to whatever questions are troubling me, and hope that others will be entertained and drawn in by the results.
 
In your story, a lot depends on astrological forecasts — whether it is Sivakami's husband's death or her daughter's marriage? What is your personal view about living life based on chart reading?
I don't even know my children's astrological signs, let alone any other details of our horoscopes, so there's your answer! As much in my story depends on how my characters view their horoscopes as on the horoscopes themselves: while many of the horoscopes appear to be accurate, there is always the question of the degree to which my characters are in fact determining their own destiny, even when they may be shaping that destiny to conform to astrological predictions.