Read my Q&A with Padma Viswanathan here.

No, it’s not a book of recipes and she’s not the sister of the much-maligned Kaavya. “The Toss of a Lemon” (Harcourt, Sept. 2008) is Arkansas-based and Canada-born writer’s first novel. And what a beautifully-wrought, political, social, and at times heart-wrenching work it is—ten years in the making.

The Toss of a Lemon begins in 1896 in the caste-organized village of Cholapatti in Tamil Nadu and carries us to 1958 where the strictures of caste have broken apart amidst the new economic and political framework of post-colonial India, specifically South India.

In the opening scene, ten year old Sivakami (a character based on Viswanathan’s great-great grandmother)and her parents are on a pilgrimage to “her mother’s place” and decide to pay a visit to a young healer and astrologer Hanumarathnam. While making Sivakami’s astrological chart, the healer announces that their stars happen to be in alignment – “He blinks rapidly, the lamplight making him look younger than his twenty-one years. He takes a breath and looks at Sivakami’s father. ‘I have never looked at, nor ever proposed to any girl before now. Please … consider me.’” There’s only one small glitch. Hanumarathnam’s horoscope predicts that he will die in the ninth year of marriage–unless his first-born son’s horoscope matches his.

Sivakami’s parents are optimists and the two are subsequently married “like everyone else, at an auspicious time on an auspicious day in an auspicious month.”

At the heart of The Toss of a Lemon is a horoscope. It dictates the destiny of Sivakami, who is widowed at age 19, the mother of one girl and one boy and the inheritor of her husband’s family home and properties. It also dictates the destinies of Sivakami’s children: Thangam, a quiet beauty whose skin gives off gold vibuthi, or dust, with healing properties—a result of her father’s alchemist experiments—and Vairum, a math genius with “irises nearly black yet strangely brilliant, diamond sharp” and a skin condition (vitiligo) which makes him an anomaly in the Brahmin quarter early on in his life.

There’s a memorable description of Sivakami early in this book: she “carries herself with an attractive stiffness: her shoulders straight and always aligned. She looks capable of bearing great burdens, not as though born to a yoke but perhaps as though born with a yoke within her.” Indeed, though strict Brahmannical traditions call for Sivakami to shave her head, wear white, and to not contaminate herself with human touch between dawn and dusk, she is also a rebel who chooses to raise her children in her husband’s ancestral home (instead of returning to her natal village and living with her brothers). Helping her in this herculean task is Machumi, a non-Brahmin villager and closeted gay man, who manages Hanumaranthnam’s land properties and business. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →