In her first novel in 15 years, Anita Rau Badami explores family dynamics and cultural divide in Asha in Her Garden

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Author Anita Rau Badami’s original vision for her fifth novel, Asha in Her Garden, was very different from what it would become.

Initially, the story of mother, wife and immigrant Asha Mohan was meant to be told from “a character who did not have a landscape.”

It was all to take place in Asha’s mind and memories as she lay comatose on a hospital bed. Conversations would take place between Asha and a ghostly, supernatural figure called The Hag.

The Hag does appear in the finished version of Asha in Her Garden, but the landscape expanded greatly. The story became what Scottish author Ian McEwan once called a “whole-life novel,” where central characters are followed through their early years to present day. Chapters are told from the shifting perspectives of half-a-dozen or so characters in a story that spans 63 years and two continents.

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It has been 15 years since Badami’s last novel, 2011’s Tell it to the Trees. Early in a phone interview with Postmedia from her home in Montreal, the author says she has “no idea why it took so long.”

But the initial spark for the novel came to her eight or nine years ago when Badami began to feel a profound sense of rootlessness in her life. Born in India, she moved to Canada in the early 1990s to study at the University of Calgary. She eventually earned her Master of Arts in creative writing and her thesis project became her 1997 debut novel Tamarind Mem. She has been living 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,” says Badami, who will be part of a Wordfest event on Oct. 26 at Calgary’s Memorial Park Library. “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, because her history is shared by her children.”

The story is not autobiographical, despite some clear overlap with Badami’s life. But the feeling of being lost and without a home became central to her character’s narrative and headspace.

“What happens to people like me who come from an entirely different culture to this country?” Badami says. “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. For the longest time, I had just decided that this was my home, this is where I live and this is where I’m going to die and I had come to terms with that. But, that year, I have no idea why I started feeling so shaken out of this complacency, the feeling of being rooted here now.