Anita Rau Badami’s first novel Tamarind Mem, also published under the title Tamarind Woman south of the Canadian border, first came out in 1996, a year the critic Coral Ann Howells describes as the peak of a new wave of writing in Canada, “with new multicultural novels being published by the big international presses, symptomatic of the shift in Canadian fiction away from national to international focus and marketing” (209). This year saw not only the publication of a significant new novel, entitled A Fine Balance, by a fellow Indian-Canadian writer Rohinton Mistry, but it was also in 1996 that books by other prominent Canadian authors of various ethnic backgrounds appeared. Among these authors there are Janice Kulyk Keefer and Guy Vanderhaeghe, the latter actually winning the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction in English the second time that year, as well as Yann Martel, who had yet to win the Booker Prize with a later novel. Incidentally, probably the best known Canadian writer living today Margaret Atwood also published a new novel Alias Grace that year.

While an eponymous literary foremother is recreated in Atwood’s early poems collected in The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Badami’s narrator in the first part of her book holds conversations, mainly real ones, with her biological mother. The mother’s own life story recounted in her words in the first person unfolds in the second part of the novel. Either part of this double narrative is further duplicated as Kamini, the daughter does not only reflect on her present in Canada where she has come to pursue further studies at a university in Calgary, but she also narrates the familial past from her childhood to the point of leaving her home in India. Told in the first person, both sequences are narrated by Kamini in the past tense. Her mother, Saroja’s part is also twofold and similarly alternates between the past and the present since she recalls her life experiences to an audience of first three and then four women travelling with her in a Ladies Only compartment of a train, which allows her to receive and add present comments on the past. Saroja uses present tense forms on both time levels providing a sense of immediacy, which is more restrained in Kamini’s part perhaps because of being more closely autobiographical.

In this novel of several narrative threads arranged in two main parts, taking place in two different countries and narrated by two women belonging to two different generations, one might expect the events and ideas to form easily identifiable binaries. However, it will be demonstrated that in spite of the novel’s being embedded in definitely recognizable spaces and cultures, especially where India is concerned, there are more similarities between the two lives than their narrators would be willing to acknowledge.

Story-telling plays an essential part in both women’s lives. There is hardly anybody among Kamini’s relatives and acquaintances who does not tell her a tale. Some of them have to do directly with her practical education such as her ayah’s (or nanny’s) tales populated with all sorts of scary monsters to prevent her from any wrongdoing or later her mother’s pieces of advice about the proper behaviour or dress-code for girls handed out to her during her baths. In this novel based on psychologically realistic observations, the stories always fit the child’s life and correspond to her level of understanding the world. Their barber’s story of a mysterious beauty whose whereabouts are unknown after her escape from a nawab’s (a Muslim ruler’s) harem sparks Kamini’s imagination and she believes her friend’s mother hidden in her purdah to be the one. All these stories play an important role in situating the little girl in a web of relationships as well.

The most important stories, however, are based on memories and come from her relatives and relate to her family background, her roots, thus shaping her identity. Like a true Bildungsroman, Kamini’s narrative of her childhood begins, not surprisingly, with a birth, not her own though, because she cannot recall that but her sister’s, which prompts reminiscences of her aunt about Kamini’s mother’s birth, both events having taken place in the same ancestral home, the house of Kamini’s maternal grandparents in Mandya, southern India. These memories become mixed with details of, and comments on, other events from the life of the family and India’s history, like in another Indian-born migrant writer Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children. “‘The year you were born, the whole country collapsed’”, says the aunt referring to Kamini’s birth and the Indo-Chinese war of 1962 (Badami:14). Although Badami openly acknowledged her indebtedness to the writer when saying she was a part of the tradition that began with Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the tradition she calls the post-colonial-immigrant school
(http://www.bookbrowse.com/biographies/index.cfm?author_number=779), unlike Rushdie’s
book foregrounding questions of historiography, Badami’s novel examines human relationships against the rich texture of life in India, where references to important moments in the history of the country offer the chronological data.

The moments when Kamini sits on her father’s lap to listen to his stories each time he returns from his journeys of work as a railway engineer are especially precious for her like his presents: these stories unconsciously serve the purpose of bonding between the two of them. It is also in this manner, from memories turned into stories told by her other aunt, her father’s sister that Kamini learns about her father’s ancestral home she can never actually see: it only exists in tales because the whole village is gone now as it has probably been washed away by the sea.

Due to this mixture of fact and fiction, the question of veracity is openly addressed by various characters in the book: memories “‘are pictures we create in our hearts. ... And each of us uses different sticks of chalk to colour them’”, says one of Kamini’s aunts (Badami:71); “The past changes in the context of the present”, remarks Saroja (Badami:254); “Memories were like ghosts, shivery, uncertain, nothing guaranteed, totally not-for-sure”, comments Kamini (Badami:73). All of these people are distanced from the remembered experiences by time, and usually by space as well. Kamini is already an adult living in Canada far away from her homeland when narrating her reminiscences, thus experiencing the typical conditions of an expatriate, in whose life both time and space create disruptions and distortions. However, several other people in India also raise the same question at various times, the question whether anything in the world is a fact (Badami:66), which puts the issue of veracity onto an epistemological level and raises the novel above its immediate concern with growing up as a girl in India.

In striking contrast to her life in India bustling with people and their stories, there is hardly any human presence in Kamini’s Canada. Her mother repeatedly uses a stereotypical phrase when calling her daughter’s unfamiliar home in Calgary “that Calgary North Pole place” (Badami:2), its main features being the freezing cold, the snow and isolation emphasized by Kamini too.

On the other hand, Kamini gradually provides a growing number of details of the Canadian landscape. Just like in her narrative of India teaming with images of vegetation, depictions of smells and tastes, she comments on the same aspects of her new environment. In this sense, Kamini’s identity remains the same but she can also make concessions by bridging her experiences gained at home and those acquired later in her alien, new country of settlement, thus trying to overcome her sense of displacement. She finds the distant mountains, probably the Rockies, around Calgary similar to the Eastern Ghats in India and the sprouting dandelions remind her of the besharam plants in their Ratnapura house (Badami:137). This is an effort to make the un-homely familiar, with which Badami continues the tradition of much immigrant writing and art by migrant artists from Susanna Moodie and Paul Kane to Michael Ondaatje and Shani Mootoo.

Another small sign of possibly growing some roots in Canada while retaining and re-enforcing her Indian identity can be when Kamini, while babysitting for her neighbour, spreads out her mother’s postcards to Claire, the little child and they “cook up wild adventures for the travelling mommy” (Badami:58). She also entertains the girl with stories about their relatives and servants, recreating the atmosphere of her own childhood in this foreign land and reviving her old tradition of oral storytelling. Arguably, however, this situation is a universal childhood experience, but because it recalls so many similar previous situations in the novel embedded in an Indian context, it is possible to relate it, too, to the tradition of the Indian oral narrative.

Yet loneliness and isolation both from the ancestral home and the host country, characteristics of the expatriate’s experience (Kanaganayakam:205-6), prevail in Kamini’s life, which is still predominantly concerned with coming to terms with her past, especially her mother’s behaviour. She still feels neglected and overpowered by her saying: “Ma still wanted to win every argument, she would never-ever change” (Badami:3) or “I waited for her to interpret the silences between my words, to sense my loneliness, to say, ‘Why don’t you just come back home, I need you, I am getting old.’ I would drop my work and catch the next flight back” (Badami:15). This wish to return home is in contrast with Kamini’s desire expressed some years before leaving India: “I had to get away from my mother. As quickly as possible. [...] I stayed awake till two-three o’clock in the morning, my one ambition being to finish school and get out of the house, away from Ma” (Badami:122). The ambiguities of the relationship are resolved in Canada when Kamini gains some critical distance from it in time and space and is able to re-evaluate her earlier one-sided view:

Ten years ago I felt a simmering resentment against my mother.
I believed that she had wronged Dadda with her rigid anger, her
unkind words. I refused to acknowledge the years that Ma had
spent being a good wife [...]. How bored she must have been. [...]
Perhaps Dadda was to blame for the person Ma had become. He shut
her into rooms from which there was not even a chink of escape.
(Badami:147)

A statement like this is indicative of her maturity resulting from her growing self-knowledge and knowledge of others.

In a novel where one of the subjects is the experiences of growing up, it comes as no surprise to find nursery rhymes such as “Baa-baa black ship / Have you any oon? / Yessir, yessir theen bags phull” (Badami:230). It is a familiar piece but not when spelt like this. An easy explanation for the unusual spelling might be that this is how a child learning a language mishears the unfamiliar words. However, the rhyme is cited in the second part of the novel narrated by the mother, who does speak English properly. What is reproduced in the rhyme here is the way the uneducated but snobbish Linda Ayah teaches Kamini and her sister what she believes to be the right language in an educated, high-caste family to counterbalance Saroja the mother’s “careless Hindu ways” (Badami:230).

It is not only through episodes like this that the novel gives the impression of India being a post-colonial, multi-cultural society, labels used to describe Canada too. The same impression is re-enforced by Kamini’s mixed education: the informal made up from the local lore and the family sagas and the formal one provided in Christian convent schools. But Kamini is so preoccupied with coming to terms with her past that she does not yet notice that the culture of her mother country and that of her country of settlement are both hybridized (Pirbhai:391). As she sees it the question of following English ways and securing an English education becomes another buffer zone between her parents.

From the mother’s narrative it appears that following the age-old traditions prescribing roles for women, her family gave her away in an arranged marriage disregarding her excellent abilities and ambitions to become a doctor. After her marriage, Saroja lives wherever her husband is transferred by the railways and has to set up a new home again and again. Therefore, she also has problems focusing her memories and like Kamini, she chooses to organize them around homes they occupied without following a strictly chronological order. The lack of such an order and the blending of stories into one another can again be related to the traditional, often circular structure of Indian orature permitting diversions as Ashcroft et al. explain it when describing the similarly non-linear structure of Rushdie's Midnight's Children (Ashcroft:181). Saroja is quite aware of the difficulties involved in organizing her experience when she openly addresses the problem in a postmodern, metafictional mode:

what is one to do with a life like mine, scrawled all over the country,
little trails here and there, moving, moving all the time, and never
in one fixed direction? [...] It is as if I live within a series of dreams.
As long as the dream holds I know where I am. I try to fix myself
in one place, a single context. Perhaps, in my childhood home, [...].
(Badami:155-6)

Loneliness and rootlessness are not exclusively the sources of her daughter’s anxiety but hers as well deriving from her existence as a “Railway memsahib” (Badami:155) being on the move all the time. She also lives an isolated life but in her case the main reason is her dysfunctional marriage, the silence that separates her from her husband: no matter how much she talks, there is no meaningful communication between them; they live according to the duties allotted to them by social conventions. She, too, comes to terms with her past when she remorsefully admits:

A person grows on you like an ingrown nail. You keep cutting and filing
and pulling it out, but the nail just grows back. Then you get used to
the wretched thing, you learn to ignore and even become fond of it.
Same with Dadda. His quiet became part of my noise. If he had not been
so silent would I have babbled on? Can you clap with one hand? Which
means that I cannot put the entire blame for our life on him.
(Badami:243).

The novel ends with both narrator-protagonists’ defiant self-assertion. After her husband’s death and children’s departure to live their own life in the States and in Canada respectively, Saroja sets out to travel by train, to do what her husband did and denied his wife. While travelling and fulfilling a lifelong dream of hers, Saroja deliberately violates a set of rules established by her husband for such occasions. Her loneliness is also dispelled, even if temporarily, as she tells her life-story to an attentive audience of women. Here is storytelling again as a means to assert one’s identity. She also admits that although it is painful for her to live without her daughters, they have to leave and make their own lives and “build [their] own memories” (Badami:263). This is the impulse that wins in spite of her occasional advice for Kamini to get married, inadvertently repeating her own mother’s ideas as Hagar Shipley does in Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel (13) when she encourages her sons with words her father used, the father she had a troubled relationship with.

Without admitting it, Kamini turns out to be just as sharp-tongued and obstinate as her mother has always been, hence the title of the novel: “In my younger days, when I was a Railway wife, the servants called me Tamarind Mem for my acid tongue” (Badami:260), remarks Saroja. Kamini becomes the one who fulfils her mother’s dream to study, to become a scientist, a wish she was denied by her family because she was a girl. However, these instances of self-assertion occur when Saroja is at the end of her life, while Kamini can, perhaps, close a chapter of her life and open up new possibilities not necessarily because she is in a different country but because time has passed and the choices of this new generation of women have multiplied. In this novel where two lives and two countries are juxtaposed, instead of discovering irreconcilable binaries, the reader is surprised to find striking similarities, which make it into a representative work of our increasingly transnational era.



Bibliography

Ashcroft, B. et al. 2002. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
Badami, A. R. 1996. Tamarind Mem. Toronto: Viking.
BookBrowse Retrieved 2 Nov 2007
http://www.bookbrowse.com/biographies/index.cfm?author_number=779
Howells, C. A. 2005.Writing by Women” The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature. Eva-Marie Kroller
(ed.). Cambridge: CUP, 2005:194-216.
Kanaganayakam, Chelva.1996. Exiles and Expatriates. New National and Post-Colonial Literatures: An Introduction.
Bruce King (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon, 1996: 201-14.
Laurence, M. 1964 ;1989.The Stone Angel. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
Pirbhai, M 2004. To Canada from ‘My Many Selves’: Addressing the Theoretical Implications of South Asian Diasporic
Literature in English as a Pedagogical Paradigm. In: Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy and Canadian
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