“My publisher,Robert Watkins,says it’s a Trojan Horse,because you think you’re picking up a quirky,cute novel about eccentric characters in a nursing home,” Chandran said. “And then you get to about page 20 and you’re like,holy shit,it’s really not. This is not what I was expecting.”
The novel is set in the eponymous Sydney nursing home owned by Maya Ali and run by her daughter Anji. Several of the Tamil residents and employees are still traumatised by their experiences in Sri Lanka,and the home is being targeted by local racists. When one of Anji’s white friends makes a discovery about the home’s early days and takes legal action,it unleashes a torrent of hostility.
Chandran said readers had different reactions depending on their perspectives. Anglo Australians “tell me that they’re glad they continued to read it because it did make them uncomfortable,it was confronting. And at the same time,they wanted to see questions of race,identity and racism articulated in front of them on the page. And they wanted to have the opportunity to reflect on it and to think about their own part in that.
“And people of colour who’ve read it,their reaction is different. They read it and then reach out to me and say that this is everything we’ve ever thought and lived and felt and experienced but have not wanted to say out loud.”
She said those people think they will be characterised as ungrateful migrants who have received refuge in Australia – “a wonderful country” – and are wanting to interrogate those issues of race,identity and racism. She also wanted to explore in Chai Time “why we as a community of intelligent,kind,respectful people find it so hard to have a conversation that is intelligent,kind and respectful about something as important as this”.
The judges saidChai Time at Cinnamon Gardens “reminds us that the personal is often political,and that unaddressed trauma of the past haunts us in the present. It treads carefully on contested historical claims,reminding us that horrors forgotten are horrors bound to be repeated,and that the reclamation and retelling of history cannot be undertaken without listening to the story-tellers amongst us”.