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Books by Harry Vandervlist Just five years back, Anita Rau Badami was a newly-graduated University of Calgary student. The former journalist from India's eastern coast had a diploma, a completed MA thesis in creative writing, and a useful piece of advice from writer-in-residence Ven Begamudre, who suggested: "Penguin Books might be looking for new fiction." It seemed audacious for an unknown writer to submit her first work to such a major publisher, but it worked. Penguin published the manuscript, and soon Badami was touring North America, reading from her best-selling debut novel Tamarind Mem. Speaking by telephone from Vancouver, where she lives with her husband and son, the 37-year-old writer looks back on her abrupt success as a huge surprise. It certainly confirmed her belief in the importance of "the right moment." Badami returns to Calgary this week to read from her second book, The Hero's Walk. The new novel follows seven-year-old Nandana, an orphaned Canadian girl sent from Vancouver to live with her grandparents in Toturpuram, on the shore of the Bay of Bengal. It's a story of reverse migration, from the new world to the old, and Badami presents it through a complex series of shifts in time and narrative focus. "The first draft was a straightforward, fairly linear narrative, which I don't like," Badami explains. "I like playing with the structure a little bit, and thought it would be interesting to have the child's voice like this little thread of noise giving you a warning of what was likely to come." The Hero's Walk portrays a Canadian girl bewildered by India, but it also captures an India bewildered by change. That's something Badami sees each time she visits. "All of a sudden everything is changing at such an incredible pace, at least in urban India. Every time I go back there I find people of a certain generation are just too confused and puzzled by the change that's happening around them so fast. They try to resist, but you know, very soon they just give up." Resistance sure does seem futile in the novel, as old prejudices and even old buildings come under siege. Demolition debris surrounds the stately but decrepit house of Sripathi Rao, Nandana's grandfather. The sea itself seems to be surging at the gates. Then in a crucial scene, water overflows into the old house, bursting the septic tank. Who wouldn't be horrified to find that yesterday's waste-products have returned to haunt them in the middle of the night? For the characters, it's a humiliating nightmare; for Badami, it's a pungent metaphor for a family who find "all their notions and preconceptions and prejudices, all drowned in shit water, mostly." Honouring the past is one thing, the episode seems to say, but sometimes a good unsentimental spring cleaning is in order. In The Hero's Walk, the old ways sometimes turn rigid, imprisoning characters and isolating them from one another. Eventually the old have to "give up," as Badami puts it, and learn from the young (in this case, Sripathi Rao's Greenpeace-type activist son), just as the old world can learn from the new. There's not much of the new world in The Hero's Walk, where Vancouver makes only a brief appearance. Badami does plan to set future work in Canada, however. After Tamarind Mem, she began working on the story of a character who flees the partition of India in 1947, seeking refuge in British Columbia. None of that material fit into this book, though it may find its way into a future novel, perhaps even the "epic," spanning about 100 years and several countries, that Badami's had in mind for a while now. "I don't know if that will be novel number three, but it is in the works," she says. "It just needs the right moment." Badami's many-languaged childhood has its benefits Badami's railroad-worker father moved the family all over India, and this brought linguistic challenges. As a child Badami was faced with learning English, Bengali, Hindi and Kannada. Now she's grateful. Why? As a writer, Badami feels it's important to have as many languages as possible. "It helps you think laterally, it adds texture when you translate a phrase from some other language into English. It adds different rhythms." Translating "idioms and phrases and images" into English creates exciting textures in her prose. And then there's "the fun element – I like that too." Think about that, next time some politician makes a big deal about learning two languages.

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