Interview with author Anita Rau Badami

CL: Are any of the characters from the book particularly close to your heart?

ARB: I love Nimmo. I really love her. She came most easily to me. She's such a fearful woman, and just when she thinks that she has conquered fear, that she might have left her traumas behind, everything just comes back to haunt her, and I really felt for her.

CL: The book is very much tied up in history. How did this affect your writing process? Did you find it stifling?

ARB: Yes, it was. I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn't writing a history book, that it was fiction with a historical backdrop, that the characters were the most important things in the book, more so than the history. And sometimes I'd get really stuck because a historical date wouldn't allow me to do something or write something that I wanted to write, because it couldn't possibly have happened at that particular point in time. Bibi-ji couldn't have gone from here to there because at that time there weren't any planes, for instance...all kinds of little details, historical details, started bogging me down.

And the research threatened to overwhelm me -- because it wasn't just research on the Punjab that I had to do. I'm not Punjabi -- for me, Punjab is as much of a foreign country as it is to somebody who has grown up in Canada. I lived in southern India, but I didn't know that much about Punjab except schoolbook history. I had to find out about Vancouver, right from the 1930s to the 1990s. I came to Canada only in 1991, so I had no idea what kinds of shows were happening on TV, what people wore, I didn't know whether they chewed gum in 1932 -- I didn't know anything, so there was a lot of research that I needed to do, a lot of books to wade through and just keep in my mind, even if I didn't use it.

CL: Did you ever have to go back and change things?

ARB: Yes, many times. I rewrote the whole book about four times, I think. The whole book.

CL: I was looking on Amazon.com at reader reviews of Tamarind Mem [Badami's first novel], and one interesting comment that a few people said was that there were too many Indian words in this book and they didn't know what all these words meant. Also, in the U.S. the book was marketed as Tamarind Woman. I found that interesting. Do you feel like you're excluding people by using that language?

ARB: No, I don't think so. If the book demands that I use that language, I use it, and let people get into the story in any way they can. For the most part, the words that I put in are either words that are unimportant except to give texture to the language, or words that are easily understood from the English context. They're usually explained in the very next sentence, or something that the other person says in the dialogue. So if the reader is reading the book carefully, he or she should not have a problem.

CL: And how did you feel about the publishers wanting to change the title?

ARB: I did not want to change the name. But they informed me that they didn't think readers would be able to understand two foreign words -- tamarind and mem. I pointed out that the book had been published with that name both in Canada and in Britain, and readers didn't seem to have a problem, and that's why the book had been written -- so you read it, and find out why it's called what it's called. And I was given the option of, I think, one of the title options was Sweet and Sour Woman, and I thought, that sounds like Chinese cooking. So I just gave up after that.

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