When I discovered Padma Viswanathan’s  debut novel The Toss of a Lemon I was excited at the chance of reading a novel set in Tamil Nadu in South India. There are very books in English that weave the history of Tamil Naduy and The Madras Presidency (under the British Raj) in their narrative.  The one book that comes to mind is David Davidar’s House of Bue Mangoes, which in some ways was influenced by Vikram Seth’s successful saga: The Suitable Boy.

The Toss of a Lemon is a multi-generational saga that revolves around Sivakami, who gets marries at 10 years and becomes a mother at 14 years and a widow  by the time she turns 18. The novel and the central character are based on the personal stories of  Padma’s great-great-grandmother. It took Padma years to produce this 600-page novel and was published in 2008.Here is a Q&A that I did with Padma via phone and email.

KB: What does the title The Toss of a Lemon mean?

PV: The title refers to an incident early in the novel. Sivakami, my central character, is married to an astrologer, Hanumarathnam, who has predicted his own death. He is hoping, however, that the birth of a son might change his fate by altering his horoscope. Hanumarathnam wants to calculate his children’s horoscopes himself but needs the exact birth time to be able to do that. Since he’s not permitted in the birthing chamber, though, he gives the midwife a lemon, and tells her to toss it out the window the moment the baby’s head appears. Hanumarathnam waits in the garden beside the house. The first child is a girl and he calculates her horoscope, which has enormous significance in the novel, but doesn’t affect her father’s fate. The second child is a boy, and also a breech birth. The midwife, seeing a bum instead of a head, hesitates to toss the lemon. She eventually does, but the time Hanumarathnam uses to calculate the horoscope is inexact. Worse, the resulting horoscope, instead of averting his death, confirms it. Much of the rest of the story proceeds, in some way, from those two tossed lemons.

KB: As a child brought up in Canada how did you react to the stories that your grandmother related? Did you find the raw materials culturally alienating or shocking like for example child marriage and the complex caste system? Or, did it connect with you in some historical or cultural way?

PV: Both versions are accurate, in a way! I visited India many times while I was growing up and as a young adult, for as long as 4 months at a time, often in rural areas and in relatives’ homes where much—about people’s values, or the way the caste system was enacted—was as it had been for centuries. So although I’m staunchly opposed to casteism and sexism, I am close to many people who feel differently from me, including my grandmother. I also understand that these matters, while distant from me, are inextricable with my own history and my family culture. It is this understanding—and this affection—that gave me an “in” when I began to write the book.

KB: What methods or literary device  did you use to refrain from coloring the narrative with your observations or reactions?

PV: I didn’t refrain: the novel is entirely composed of my observations and reactions! Sorry…  I think what you’re asking is how I wrote a novel about people whose beliefs are so different from my own, and even potentially abhorrent to me, without seeming to judge them. This was very important to me: portraying this world from the inside, seeing my characters’ relationships and decisions as they would have seen them. It’s easy for us, from the vantage point of a different era, to think that our value systems and ways of living are best, but I really enjoyed the imaginative challenge of getting inside the skins of characters like Sivakami, a Brahmin widow who denies herself all physical contact, despite the emotional consequences for her young children, and Muchami, her servant, a homosexual man who is also Sivakami’s staunchest ally and closest confidant. Both are firm defenders of the caste system, though both are, in different ways, on the receiving end of its oppressions. The contradictions, the tragedies and the often inadvertent comedy I discovered in investigating this world and creating these characters were far more interesting than any pat judgments I might pass.

KB: What kind of a relationship did you have with your grandmother? How did she trust you with all the information?

PV: I’m very close with my grandmother, and, when I finally asked her to tell me about our family history, the stories poured out. Neither of us knew, when we first started sitting together to formally record her memories, where I was headed with this project, but I suppose she trusted me implicitly. I did assure her, because she was worried that some of the things she told me were controversial, that I would keep the tapes and transcripts of our conversations under lock and key for twenty-five years. I think she had wanted one of her grandkids eventually to make a formal record, and she told me, some years after we finished, that, since passing on the stories, which she did in incredible detail, she had begun forgetting them. She knew I had them, so didn’t need, any longer, to retain them herself.

KB: Writing is a lonely pursuit and writers need space and time to write. What was the experience like for you?PV: My temperament craves solitary time to fiddle around with my ideas and live in my head. That’s probably a necessary quality in a writer of books. It is hard to clear that space out of the business of life, which always makes contrary demands, but I have managed, at least for stretches of time, courtesy of grants, awards, and now a book advance, that have let me take periodic breaks from jobs such as teaching and freelance journalism. Childcare is now another must, and my parents have come on board for that, looking after our kids during the academic year.

KB: What kind of reactions have you had from your readers to the book?

PV: I get a couple of letters a week from readers who have been moved by my story, which is enormously gratifying to me, both that they have loved it and that they made the effort to let me know! Some are Westerners with no personal or cultural connection to the world of the story, and many have told me that they found themselves in the uncomfortable position of sympathizing and even identifying with characters whose lives and worldviews could not be more different from their own. I find that very flattering: I think it is in that kind of discomfort that real insight arises and I would like to believe that my story challenges and transcends a number of received ideas, about child brides, about widows, about India’s narrative in the early 20^th century.

Many Indians have also written to me, some to say that the story brought back stories and sense experiences from their pasts. Occasionally, I have gotten a letter to inform me that I got something wrong, and it becomes clear that the “mistake” arises from regional or even familial distinctions. One of my uncles by marriage, for example, while very complimentary about the book as a whole, told me that I that widows cannot go to the cremation grounds as my character Sivakami does. When I asked my grandma about this, she said, “Oh, no, that’s true in his district, but not in ours….” all of 300 miles away!

Someone else criticized my choice of names, saying I should have done my research better: Brahmins of that era, this person said, would never have a name such as “Thangam.” Well, that was actually my great-grandmother’s name, one of the few I transferred directly into the book! I was expecting such criticisms, because I think Indians often do not appreciate how profoundly diverse our country is, how imperfect our knowledge, and how often what we believe to be a cultural regulation is confounded by individual idiosyncrasy. That particularity was, in fact, one of my motivations for writing the book.

KB: Who are some of the writers that have inspired you?

PV: The contemporary author of greatest importance to me is Salman Rushdie. He has been an enormous influence on me as a writer, though no one would guess that from my prose. Midnight’s Children breaks my heart over and over. On a technical level, the one element of Rushdie’s (Ann Marie MacDonald also does this in Fall on Your Knees; so does Faulkner, in a different way) that I admire is the way he creates an image, rotates it, inverts it, and puns on it, until it becomes equally a visual and a verbal metaphor, infused with humor and pathos.  I think it’s a wonderful way to sew a narrative together and have tried it on in The Toss of a Lemon.

KB: What are you working on next?

PV: I’m working on a second novel, under contract with Random House Canada. It’s called Losing Farther, Losing Faster, and takes place in contemporary western Canada. The story centers on an Indian man named Seth, a devotee of a very popular Indian guru. He became a devotee in the course of comforting a friend through the death of the friend’s wife and son in the Air India bombing of 1985. The story actually hinges, though, on a highly ambiguous sexual misdeed committed by Seth’s guru. Seth must come to terms with his faith in light of that revelation. And there are a few other mysteries, which will be revealed in time…