Read a review of Arkansas-based, Canada-born Padma Viswanathan’s debut novel “The Toss of a Lemon” here.

Q. When and how did you first start collecting these stories?
A. I interviewed my grandmother over the course of a year or so, in the mid-nineties. She would talk for a few hours, either in English or in Tamil (with my mother translating, to ensure I got the nuances), and then I would transcribe the tape. She told me a story that fascinated and bewildered me: of her grandmother, who was married as a child and widowed at eighteen with two small children. It then took me over ten years of writing to imagine myself into this world and to transform the story I had been given into a novel of my own making. The book that resulted has many emotional and narrative ties to the story my grandma told, but also departs from it in numerous significant ways.

Q. How did you research the historical and social context of this book?
A. I went to India after interviewing my grandmother. I had been many times before, but now saw the old places in a new way, populated by the ghosts of these stories she had told me. I interviewed other relatives and did a lot of reading on the particular social and political upheavals that were happening in this corner of India at that time, in contrast to the larger narrative of Independence. Six years later, with much of a draft written, I made a return trip, visiting some incredible resource centers in south India, where I did more detailed research on themes and characters that had emerged in the writing. This involved a lot of reading, as well as interviews with scholars and historians. I also revisited the places where the novel takes place, to refresh my sense memories and ask more specific questions of my relatives. Although the world I have described exists now only in a fragmentary and vestigial way, I actually saw it crumble in my lifetime. So some of the research was reconstruction of my own memories.

Q. It’s not easy to take one’s family history and put it out there, whether it’s in fiction or non-fiction form. What did you turn to for inspiration and motivation during your writing process?
A.The story exerted a strong hold on me for the ten years it took me to write this book. In the early stages, I consulted the interview transcripts frequently, looking for stories that intrigued me and writing them into chapters. As the novel began to take shape, though, I looked less and less to our family history: the book I was writing had its own logic and momentum, and that became paramount. When I had a full draft, I asked my mother to read it for me as a fact-checker, and we had wonderful discussions about it, but I was pretty clear with my family that this was, ultimately, an artistic product of which I was the author and that I would take full responsibility—including blame!—for its contents. Still, I was very relieved, when various family members—including my grandma—finally read it, that they gave it their stamp of approval, saying that in spite or because of all the liberties I had taken, I had created an authentic portrait of that time and place. Q. As someone who married into a “Tamil Brahmin” family, I was struck by how vividly you describe social mores and customs, the food, the dress, the culture. How did you deal with the challenge of writing about something that you’re so close to and yet apart from, especiallygiven that you knew your audience would include people for whom this was an entirely different cultural experience?

A.I tried to make sure that every descriptive detail of that sort also bore significance in terms of character or plot. While other Tamil Brahmins, as well as people who see this book as an entrée into a hidden world, might enjoy the details for their own sake, I didn’t want the progress of the story ever to bog down in descriptions. I hoped, also, that giving each detail this sort of “double-duty” would help to convey their meaning with minimal explanation.

Q. There are so many generalizations and stereotypes about the caste system. What did you most want to convey in the writing of this book?
A.Yes, everyone, Indian and non-, has an opinion! I’ve said elsewhere that it’s a given for me that casteism and sexism are wrong. What I’m trying to do in this book—which is, after all, literature and not polemic—is to explore the strange, often cruel, sometimes funny ways that caste was manifested in this time and place (as opposed to our own—caste has not by any means disappeared, but it certainly has transformed). I am also examining the ways in which my characters collude in maintaining the caste system. My main character, Sivakami, a Brahmin widow, and her servant, Muchami, are very much on the receiving end of caste oppressions, though in different ways. Still, they believe the system gives their lives meaning, by dictating their place in the world. I hope the story disrupts a little of what readers think about caste before starting. Writing the book has certainly done that for me.

Q. The character of Vairum is at once traditional and a breaker of convention. He is stripped of his caste by his brother-in-law and yet, gains immense social status as a businessman. He reminded me of Gora,Rabindranath Tagore’s character who is fighting against the very thing that is a part of him. Was the real “Vairum” like this or did you take the character and run with it?
A.I have no evidence that the person on whom Vairum is loosely based shared any of these inclinations with my character. All I knew was that my great-great grandmother’s son was angry and resentful toward her and acted this out at times. The rest is all invention.

Q. You have many ways of describing Muchami’s lifestyle, but you never once use the words ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’. Why is that? Was that a conscious or unconscious decision on your part?
A. It was an unconscious decision directed by literary intuition, but affirmed by research. Muchami’s sexual orientation is crystal-clear in the book, but I felt the best way to make it clear was by describing his behaviour and the perceptions and attitudes of others, rather than using an English-language label. While Hinduism acknowledges homosexuality, it exists, in texts and in society, as a multiplicity of behaviours that may be permitted or proscribed, depending on context. I thought it important to emphasize the ways in which Muchami’s homosexuality is accepted and acknowledged—no one condemns it, though many people know about it—as well as the ways in which it is, sometimes brutally, denied: Sivakami, his employer and friend, has no idea, and colludes with his family in forcing him into a marriage.

Q. What has been the response of your family? Is your grandmother still alive to hear this story? read this book?
A.Yes, my grandmother read the book last summer, and identified deeply with its emotional centers and the characters even though I warned her that I had departed in many ways from the story she told me. At one point, she was actually, physically, overcome by feelings of rejection that she experienced in childhood. She was raised by her grandmother, like the children in the book, though most of the similarity stops there: the characters and scenes are all invented, but I think her reaction—scary though it was!—speaks to an emotional authenticity. But there were some odd moments when I learned I had somehow followed the imaginative logic of the book back to some historical truths. My grandma asked me how I could have written a conversation between Janaki, the character very loosely based on her, and her husband, when the husband asks her why her grandmother raised her and not her parents. “That’s exactly how it went,” my grandma told me. “And that’s when I cried.” Another example: I had been concerned that people would think the relationship between Muchami and Sivakami strains credibility, that readers would doubt two people could be such fast friends despite the enormous gulf of gender and caste that separates them. After my grandma read the book, she told me that my great-great-grandmother, after the “real” Muchami died, had taken a ritual bath for him, something a Brahmin does only for a close relative, never for a mere servant. It was a wonderful affirmation—and I still had time to include it in the book!

Q. The subplot of Bharati, the devadasi daughter is one that emerges in the second half of the novel. Was this a part of your family history that you were nervous about exposing?
A.There are no devadasis in my family that I know about, though that storyline was inspired by my discovery that my grandmother’s father was likely unfaithful to his wife. My grandma had, understandably, stayed off that topic in our conversations, so, yes, I was nervous about including something like that in the book. It may have helped that the infidelity in the book is an institutionalized one: it was more interesting for me to have my character, Goli, take a devadasi (a sort of courtesan, part of a matriarchal system made illegal in post-independence India) than to have him simply, randomly cheat. My grandma mentioned once having known a devadasi at school, so that was additional inspiration, especially since there weren’t many in the area where she grew up.

Q. Did you plan to write such a long novel? What was your writing process?
A.God, not at all! I don’t know if I would have had the courage to start if I’d known where I was headed! Having said that, I like long books, so it’s not surprising that I would write one. I started out by selecting moments of interest from my family history and writing those into chapters. Quickly, the logic of the novel took over: when I decided Muchami was gay, for example, that necessitated some chapters for him. At a certain point, I thought I had three books, then I consolidated them into one. As I pieced the parts together, I would write material to bridge chapters and cut parts that no longer fit. When I had done most of this work, the ending presented itself with seeming inevitability. Once I had that, I revised a couple of times, and then finally felt it was ready to show an agent and publisher.

Q. Who are your writing role models and muses?
A.Salman Rushdie and his work hover, muse-like, over mine. I would never try to imitate his prose, or the structure of his novels, but there is one thing he does that I have used: 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 borrowed this technique for my book: introducing items, for instance, that have some significance for my characters, that recur in various contexts in the book until they become talismans that the reader also, in a sense, carries. I adore Laurence Sterne, one of Rushdie’s progenitors: he’s hilarious and instructive. And Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones would be my desert island book, even though it is flawed. Yes, even books I would place on an altar and worship are, much like Hindu or Greek gods, imperfect. So Borges inspires me to imaginative daring and also to forgive my own failings.

Q. What’s next for you, Padma?
A.I’m working on a second novel, under contract with Random House Canada. It’s called Losing Farther, Losing Faster, and centers on an Indian man named Seth, who lives in contemporary western Canada. Seth is a devotee of a very popular Indian guru, and, when the novel opens, he learns that his guru has been accused of a—highly ambiguous—sexual misdeed. My character has to try to come to terms with his faith in light of the accusations.