5 Questions with Shankari Chandran
Shankari Chandran was raised in Canberra, Australia. She spent a decade in London, working as a lawyer in the social justice field. She eventually returned home to Australia, where she now lives with her husband, four children and their cavoodle puppy, Benji.
She is the author of two previous novels, Song of the Sun God and The Barrier.
No.1
Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is such a sprawling novel; an intergenerational saga, if you will. I’d like to ask how it began, both as a project and in publication.
As a project, it started with my visits to my own Ammamma, who lives in a nursing home in Western Sydney. It’s a warm and loving place where many of the residents are Sri Lankan Tamil, as are many of the staff. The residents know each other from “back home”, as they say. When we go to visit my Ammamma, we run into our cousins and friends who are visiting their Ammammas and Appappas. In any one resident’s room, there will be up to four generations of families, talking, laughing, fighting, listening and learning. We’d take Ammamma for a walk along the corridors and as we pass the rooms of other residents, she will tell us their stories as well as hers.
This storytelling helps her keep her memories alive, and it passes these memories down to us as part of our own history. I thought this nursing home was a beautiful place of community and it would make a beautiful place for a novel. Chai Time is about many things, but it also began life as a project about race, what it means to be Australian and who gets to decide. For years I knew I wanted to explore those ideas, through fiction. But I really only felt ready to do that in 2019, after improving (I hope) as a writer, and by growing in confidence, simply as I mature (age?) and care less about the things I’ve allowed to hold me back.
I figured Chai Time would be my last novel as my previous manuscript had not found a publisher, and my previous published novel had not sold many copies (despite my parents’ best efforts). Both projects were optioned for TV and one is in development, but I felt it was time to stop trying to be an “author” after Chai Time. But this gave me a really different mindset in the writing—I wrote as though no one (except my family and book club) was going to read it. This helped me write without any self-consciousness; I wasn’t writing for a reader or a publisher. I was just writing to make sense of the way we experience racism, the way the concept of race is talked about in Australia and the way it isn’t talked about in Australia. I wrote freely and honestly.
No.2
The titular Cinnamon Gardens is a nursing home, initially run by Sri Lankan Tamil immigrants Zakhir and Maya, who eventually pass on leading duties to their daughter, Anjali. Beneath this narrative are flashbacks to events during the Sri Lankan civil war, as well as present-day secrets and latent trauma, told through five perspectives. There is even a sub-plot critiquing the whiteness of the Australian publishing industry. Will you tell us more about your rich world-building process?
There are a few worlds in this novel, thank you for valuing them all.
1. The nursing home is based on the one my Ammamma lives in, so I built Cinnamon Gardens from that beautiful place, and then gave myself creative licence to give it more (more gardens, more food, more quirky routines, and most importantly, more characters with complex, intersecting histories). I also allowed myself to give it more darkness because that is the very nature of the themes of this novel.
2. Sri Lanka: creating Sri Lanka in the past and in the final months of the war was not hard this time because my first novel, Song of the Sun God, explores this context in detail. In that novel, I was determined to adjudicate the genocide of the Tamil people more fully, because it will never be adjudicated by a national or international court. It was important to me to ‘get the detail’ right so that I could not be accused of making up any part of that terrible history. Also, Sri Lanka is the lived experience of my family and community (although not my lived experience). From childhood, I have been the privileged recipient of their stories. Chai Time’s world draws on that world.
3. Australia: this world was the hardest to create even though it is based on my lived experience. Initially (before I put hands to laptop), I was crippled by self-doubt. The enormity of the topic overwhelmed me—and although I previously said that I felt more confident and ready to think about, explore and expose my own thoughts on race, I also initially (and throughout the first half of the writing) felt as though I wasn’t clever enough or wise enough to do it justice, to honour what I’ve seen and what people have suffered, with the right words.
Eventually, I just did what Emily Maguire always tells me to do: just show up everyday and do the hard work. I stopped thinking about what the novel was trying to say, and wrote down what I was seeing.
The first 50,000 words (of the first draft) was still really hard work, full of anxiety and even an unhealthy amount of indifference to some of my characters. At the end of it, I took a break from the manuscript for five months, wrote many other things, and came back to Chai Time, ready to write and ready to fight. The last 50,000 words was fuelled by rage, grief and hope, as the world descended into the pandemic, Asian hate, George Floyd’s murder, greater focus on the systemic racism faced by First Nations people in Australia, the disproportionate pandemic-related suffering of people of colour and the tearing down of statues. I watched the news and I thought about the First Nations mothers who are fighting for justice for their children who have died in jail. I thought about everything my First Nations clients and friends have told me about their histories, the way they challenge power and the way they survive and thrive. I researched this and its intersection with the way colonisers across the world and across time have done the same thing, over and over again. [From there] the last 50,000 words came hurtling out. I built the world I was seeing and angered by. I built the world I still believe we can improve.
No.3
Who or what inspired you while in the process of writing Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens?
I was inspired by:
First Nations families and activists
I read and re-read a lot of African American and British literature/essays (James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Tayari Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Reni Eddo Lodge, Layla F Saad, Riz Ahmed and more).
In Australia, I particularly like the political commentary of Ghassan Hage. The Final Quarter was essential viewing, as well as Incarceration Nation.
On a personal level, my parents inspired me during the writing of this novel, because they moved to Australia just a few years after the White Australia Policy ended, and they created a better life for us here, despite the racism and adversity they faced. They continue to live with courage and generosity.
No.4
In a profile in SBS, you were quoted as saying “I have learnt to write while 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.” What would you say to another writer who wants to write a novel while juggling as much as you do?
We all juggle so much. We’ve set ridiculous expectations for ourselves but that’s a whole other conversation. I think this is particularly so for women writers who are mothers, especially if they (like most writers) are basically doing this gig on the side, while holding down another job that pays for everything that needs to be paid for.
The way the world undervalues unpaid labour and artistic labour is a constant frustration (of mine), and it is also a gendered problem.
So what I would say to another writer is:
Write. Write every day if you can, even just a bit (honestly, this is part of my daily self-talk. “Shankari, just keep writing.” It’s right up there with “Shankari, don’t panic, you can do this.” Set very small targets and take any and every moment to write. The great writers who have mentored me (consciously or via podcast), all say you need to do the hard work, show up and just keep writing.
Value your work. Whether it’s paid or unpaid, published or unpublished, every word is important, and the process of writing is work. Joyful and meaningful and hard work.
No.5
As far as your writing goes, how do you define failure and how do you define success?
Failure: if I didn’t try.
Success: if I did try and I put some words on a page.
I had to de-link notions of success from the outcome of publication or books sold, because I can’t control that outcome and if I think about that too much, it undermines my ability to write anything at all.
So success has to be about what I can control—the effort and courage with which I try.
Cinnamon Gardens Nursing Home is nestled in the quiet suburb of Westgrove, Sydney – populated with residents with colourful histories, each with their own secrets, triumphs and failings. This is their safe place, an oasis of familiar delights – a beautiful garden, a busy kitchen and a bountiful recreation schedule.
But this ordinary neighbourhood is not without its prejudices. The serenity of Cinnamon Gardens is threatened by malignant forces more interested in what makes this refuge different rather than embracing the calm companionship that makes this place home to so many. As those who challenge the residents’ existence make their stand against the nursing home with devastating consequences, our characters are forced to reckon with a country divided.
Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is about family and memory, community and race, but is ultimately a love letter to storytelling and how our stories shape who we are.
Get it from Ultimo Press here or at all good bookstores.