Shankari Chandran is an expert at making sense of chaos. Her soon-to-be-released novel, Chai Time in Cinnamon Gardens was written while working as a lawyer and raising her four children.
“The time that I can give to my writing life is limited and often squeezed around the commitments of family and my other job,” she says. “It looks like exhausting chaos.
“I have learnt to write whilst standing in queues at Coles, while sitting in the car waiting to pick up a child. I have post-it notes exploding from my handbag. I have a notepad by the side of my bed, so I wake up in the middle of the night and go, ‘Ah! That’s what’s going to happen.’”
Chandran received both philanthropic and government funding that enabled her to work part-time in order to devote more time to writing her latest novel. The result is a novel which draws on Chandran’s own Tamil ancestry to explore the effects of loss, dispossession and the search for home in the Sri Lankan diaspora. Her host of characters, led by family matriarch, Maya, all live in and around a fictitious Australian nursing home, Cinnamon Gardens.
The name of the nursing home is borrowed from a suburb of the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo where Chandran’s grandparents lived when she was a child. “I have memories as a child going to spend summer holidays with my grandparents in their home in Cinnamon Gardens,” she says.
That experience mirrors the one that inspired her to set the novel in a nursing home. For many years Chandran’s uncle has run a nursing home in Western Sydney that houses residents from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds, with a particularly large population of Sri Lankan Tamils. One of them is Chandran’s 95-year-old grandmother.
“I would take my four children with me [to visit her] …and she’s a wonderful storyteller. If she tells you a story about today, or something that happened yesterday, she will begin that story five decades ago.
“I would take my four children with me [to visit her] …and she’s a wonderful storyteller. If she tells you a story about today, or something that happened yesterday, she will begin that story five decades ago.
“And in the process, our children who have no physical connection to Sri Lanka, are forming in their minds a connection across generations and across continents to this place, and to these people that they’ve never known. And in doing so they are forming a connection to their culture to a cultural identity, to a shared sense of home, to a shared sense of heritage, to a shared sense of history.
“So, I thought what a beautiful place of community and what a beautiful place to set a story.”
While the novel is set in a nursing home, Chandran traverses time and place to explore the effects of the Sri Lankan civil war on the diasporic community now living in Australia.
Chandran says: “I wanted the novel to be a Trojan Horse.
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“What I want for this novel is for Western readers to think to themselves, ‘This sounds delightful’… and then I think by page 10 you realise it’s more than just lovely, it’s an exploration of some of the darker and deeper themes of life in Australia, and life in Sri Lanka.”
The matriarch of the novel, Maya grew up in Jaffna, in the northern region of Sri Lanka in the face of escalating violence. After moving her young family to Australia, her love of language and storytelling help to keep her afloat as she attempts make sense of her new home.
Chandran is familiar with the power of words. As a South Asian writer, she is acutely aware of the need for the truth-telling and the sharing of stories from within minority communities.
“When I started my writing journey, that literary and cultural landscape was very different. It was very white; it was very lacking in representation and it was very closed.
“It felt like the gatekeepers to publishing were operating on the basis of an unconscious bias, they were operating on the basis of a particular, white-centric notion of what it means to be Australian.”
It felt like the gatekeepers to publishing were operating on the basis of an unconscious bias, they were operating on the basis of a particular, white-centric notion of what it means to be Australian.
The rejection of stories that centred characters and experiences perceived as being ‘un-Australian’ led Chandran to whitewash one of her earlier novels in order to get it published; changing her to a “white and hot” one.
That experience left Chandran feeling “devastated and confused” about her value as an author. It was only when she joined a community of writers that included South Asian authors, that she felt inspired to reclaim her place as a writer of inclusive Australian stories.
She quotes writer, Toni Morrison:
“I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. I claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.”
Chandran says that Morrison’s words and her writing community helped her to realise that her stories are fascinating.
“I would like to centre those stories and tell those stories as they are for what they are.
“Australian stories are stories written and told by Australians. I am Australian, and therefore my stories are Australian.”
by Shankari Chandran, published by Ultimo Press is available from bookshops and online from January 5 2022.
