Padma Viswanathan is a fiction writer, playwright and journalist from Edmonton, Alberta. Her writing awards include residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Banff Playwrights' Colony, and first place in the 2006 Boston Review Short Story Contest. She received her Creative Writing MA from Johns Hopkins and her MFA from the University of Arizona, and lives with her family in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
The Toss of a Lemon was published in the New Face of Fiction program in 2008.
In a fiction debut to rival The God of Small
Things,
Padma Viswanathan gives us a richly detailed and intimate
vision of an India we've never seen.
Inspired
by her family history, Padma Viswanathan brings us
deep inside the private lives of a Brahmin family as
the subcontinent moves through sixty years of intense
social and political change. At the novel's heart
is Sivakami, a captivating girl-child married at ten
to an astrologer and village healer who is drawn to
her despite his horoscope, which foretells an early
death - depending on how the stars align when
their children are born. All is safe with their daughter's
birth, but their second child, a son named Vairum,
fulfills the prophecy: by eighteen, the child bride
Sivakami is a widow with two young children.
According
to the dictates of her caste, her head is shaved and
she must don the widow's white sari. From dawn
to dusk, she is not allowed to contaminate herself
with human touch, not even to comfort her small children.
She dutifully follows custom, except for one act of
rebellion: she insists on a secular education for her
troubled son. While her choice ensures that Vairum
fulfills his promise in a modernizing India, it also
sets Sivakami on a collision course with him. Vairum,
fatherless in childhood, childless as an adult, rejects
the caste identity that is his mother's mainstay,
twisting their fates in fascinating and unbearable
ways.
The Toss of a Lemon is heartbreaking and exhilarating,
profoundly exotic and yet utterly recognizable in evoking
the tensions that change brings to every family's
doorstep. It is also the debut of a major new voice
in world fiction. <TOP>
Book Reviews and Quotes
Praise for The Toss of a Lemon
"Her narrative, refreshingly, is free of anachronism, and she has a pleasing way of engaging the reader's senses… Of a piece with the recent works of Vikram Seth, and reminiscent at times of García Márquez - altogether a pleasure."
-Kirkus (starred review)
"What Viswanathan does remarkably well is give the reader a closeup of India's history, culture, politics and landscape through the domestic lens of one family. This is a rich, sensual book that uses life itself as its plot… Reading it is an experience of immersion. You feel as though you are right there in all the teeming detail of life as Sivakami and her family know it. There is a whole world here between two covers."
–National Post
"With its rich and complex background and often sharp insights, The Toss of a Lemon is a valuable and evocative work."
–Elaine Kalman Nave, author of Robert Weaver: Godfather of Canadian Literature (Ottawa Citizen)
"Astonishing. Brilliant. Beautiful… Like the very best novels, at its core, The Toss of A Lemon teaches us about ourselves."
–January Magazine
"Lovers of Rohinton Mistry and Vikram Seth will want to get a hold of this Brahmin family saga involving early marriage, early widowhood and clashing values."
–The Vancouver Sun
"The Toss of a Lemon is a captivating novel that in relating the story of one Indian woman and her family tells the story of a changing society. Precisely and deftly written, constantly interesting, morally serious yet sympathetic - I challenge any reader to start reading this book and give up on it. The Toss of a Lemon joins the company of great novels on India."
–Yann Martel
"The Toss of a Lemon is a glorious feat, as boisterously written as it is wholly engrossing. It's about love - and cruelty - and how each reverberate across the generations in one family. And it is that rare thing, a novel that manages to be both epic and intimate at the same time."
–Peter Orner, author of The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
"In this, her debut novel, Padma Viswanathan performs a wondrous balancing act of words. She sustains a vivid sense of the moment while spanning decades, brings unforgettable individual characters to life while recounting a saga of generations, and lays bare the inner worlds of those characters while evoking an entire nation in turmoil. Rich with sensual detail, The Toss of a Lemon is the story of a community centred on tradition during an era of upheaval and change. Above all, it is a moving and deftly drawn portrait of a family."
–Alissa York, Giller-nominated author of Effigy
"The Toss of a Lemon gives readers the rare opportunity to enter the life of a Brahmin widow, to live her norms and routines and rituals as they have been lived by countless women over thousands of years. Padma Viswanathan's remarkable achievement is to capture the slow, stately pace of an 8,000-year-old culture and yet keep her story moving briskly. I closed the book indebted for this immersion in a world I could not have otherwise entered."
–Shyam Selvadurai, author of Funny Boy
Excerpt
Thangam
1896
The year of the marriage proposal, Sivakami is ten. She is neither tall nor short for her age, but she will not grow much more. Her shoulders are narrow but appear solid, as though the blades are fused to protect her heart from the back. She carries herself with an attractive stiffness: her shoulders straight and always aligned. She looks capable of bearing great burdens, not as though born to a yoke but perhaps as though born with a yoke within her.
She and her family live in Samanthibakkam, some hours away by bullock cart from Cholapatti, which had been her mother's place before marriage. Every year, they return to Cholapatti for a pilgrimage. They fill a pot at the Kaveri River and trudge it up to the hilltop temple to offer for the abhishekham. These are pleasant, responsible, God-fearing folk who seek the blessings of their gods on any undertaking and any lack thereof. They maintain awe toward those potentially wiser or richer than they - like the young man of Cholapatti, who is blessed with the ability to heal.
No one in their family is sick, but still they go to the healer. They may be less than totally healthy and simply not know. One can always use a preventative, and it never hurts to receive the blessings of a blessed person. This has always been the stated purpose of the trip, and Sivakami has no reason to think this one is any different.
Hanumarathnam, the healer, puts his palms together in a friendly namaskaram, asks how they have been and whether they need anything specific. They shyly shake their heads, and he queries, with a penetrating squint, “Nothing?” Sivakami is embarrassed by her parents, who are acting like impoverished peasants. They owe this man their respect, but they are Brahmins too, and literate, like him. They can hold up their heads. She’s smiling to herself at his strange name: a hybrid of “Hanuman,” the monkey god, and rathnam, gem. The suffix she understands; it’s attached to the name of every man in the region. But no one is named for the monkey!
