TORONTO — Anita Rau Badami poured herself into her latest novel: her worries, her passions, even her love of gardening, passed on through generations.
Badami’s first book in 15 years, “Asha in Her Garden” teems with aspects of the celebrated author’s life, reshaped into fiction.
As in her previous books, Badami started with a character. In this case, it was Asha, an ambitious matriarch who has taken charge of her life in response to a childhood in which she had no control.
But more than a character, the writing process began with a conundrum.
“And it also started with a problem that I had at that point in my life, and which probably explains why it took so long to write this book,” Badami explained, seated at a table in her publisher’s downtown Toronto office.
“I felt that I had lost my landscape, my sense of place, and just all of a sudden I didn’t know where I was writing out of.”
Badami burst onto the Canadian literary scene in 1996 with her best-selling debut novel “Tamarind Mem.” Her follow-up, “The Hero’s Walk,” came out in 2000 and won the Regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Years later, it was picked as a finalist for “Canada Reads” on CBC.
Before “Asha,” all of Badami’s books were set between India and the western half of Canada: Vancouver, northern British Columbia and Calgary.
But by the time Badami set out to write this book, she had been living in Montreal for nearly a decade and still felt unmoored and unattached to the city.
At first, to accommodate her feeling of placelessness, she planned to set the book in Asha’s hospital bed. The “landscape,” Badami said, was Asha’s “body, her thoughts, her memories.”
“That’s where it began, actually, and then it changed mightily.”
In storytelling as in life, Badami said, the confines of a hospital bed were limiting.
And so Badami set the story in Montreal, which she would ultimately have to get to know. She learned French and started walking the city streets, as Asha’s husband Suresh does in the book (though when asked if she talks to strangers as he does on these walks, she responded with a decisive “no”).
Badami’s characters, too, struggle with the idea of home. They uproot their lives in India to move to Montreal, at first renting and then purchasing the house with the titular garden.
That garden, Badami noted, shares a striking resemblance to her own.
There’s a massive, 120-year old maple tree at its centre, but otherwise it’s filled with flowers.
“A pollinator’s paradise,” Badami called it. “It’s just buzzing and humming and it’s beautiful.”
Both Badami and Asha used their gardens to ground themselves in the feeling of home. It becomes a place of safety and stability — of rootedness. That safety is threatened in the novel’s climax, in an event also pulled from the author’s life.
Gardening is a lifelong passion of Badami’s, one she inherited from her family: her grandmother would pilfer rose cuttings from a nearby botanical garden when Badami was a girl; her mother was a biologist who passed her love of botany on to her kids.
“To prevent us from getting bored and quarrelling with each other, the three of us siblings, my mom used to take us into the jungle or wherever we were and identify plants — the botanical name and the common name — and make us draw it or make pressings of leaves and flowers,” she recalled.
When she lived in Vancouver, she had a small garden on her patio. Her move to Montreal afforded her more space.
These days, she feels settled in Montreal, where she’s now lived for more than 20 years.
Still, she knows everything is transient, even things that seem eternal. To that end, “Asha in Her Garden” is bookended by the demise of the century-old maple tree.
“There is a sense of the impermanence of my life versus the seeming rootedness of the tree’s life,” Badami said. “But then of course that is not true either, anything that is living is not permanent. It’s just there for a little bit of time and then it’s gone.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 19, 2026.
Nicole Thompson, The Canadian Press
