Interview with author Anita Rau Badami

CL: Are there any questions you still have about your new book?

ARB: Would Bibi-ji have told Leela about the possibility of an attack on her flight, if she had sat down to think about it? That's one of the questions that I often ask myself. If I were Bibi-ji, would I have allowed my anger to overwhelm my sense of decency, my sense that this is a friend who's getting on a flight that might not be a safe one? Also -- this is a question that actually triggered one version of the book, that still exists buried in this book -- if I was one of the characters and if I knew that somebody I loved deeply was about to do something terrible, commit some kind of crime that could affect hundreds of lives, would I keep that knowledge to myself, or would I give up that person to the police? It's a question I ask myself often. What would I do if I was in that position? And I don't know.

CL: Who are some authors you consider yourself influenced by?

ARB: It's hard to say who influences me as a writer. I can tell you a few authors from a long list of authors I love reading. There are a few authors I really admire for their style or for the ideas in their books, or the characters. It varies. One of my favourites is Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. I love Cat's Eye and Surfacing by Margaret Atwood, and I admire A Handmaid's Tale -- I can never imagine myself writing that book, but I truly admire it. I love V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas. I just read a book by a woman named Marilynne Robinson, an American woman. This book was written about 20 years ago -- it's called Housekeeping. I loved that book. So it's quite a range of writers -- there are many more on that list. If I find a book that I love and that I'm willing to read again and again, it goes onto a shelf next to my bed.

CL: How does your writing process work?

ARB: I've started to plan everything. My first book [Tamarind Mem] was completely unplanned -- I didn't know what I was doing. It just kept flowing -- a flood of thought, I suppose. After that I found that it's easier if I have a general idea of where I'm going with the book, where the characters are going. Sometimes the voice just comes automatically. The first page, the first time I sit at my desk to write the new book, I know who's going to be telling the story. But each book demands a different process.

The book that I'm thinking about right now -- I haven't really started writing it -- I find that it's fun to plan each chapter in complete detail, because I need to know what's happening in each chapter in order to reach a particular ending. I know what the ending is, I know what the beginning is, but I need to plan every chapter to make sure that that ending is achieved. And I know that that has to be the ending, that I can't reach a different ending. So it [my writing process] changes from book to book.

CL: Was there anything else that you wanted people to know about the book?

ARB: Well, one of the things that I tried to address in this book is the ways in which very ordinary lives can be affected by larger things like politics and history and destroyed by those same forces. It's a huge tragedy, and something that seems to be happening all over the world, right now, all the time -- every time you open a newspaper, watch the news, there's something similar happening somewhere else in the world.

CL: Do you think those same ordinary people can change any of those things?

ARB: Yes, I think so. They are the ones who vote for our governments and who vote them into power -- they can also vote them out of power.

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