The art of cultivation

Asha in Her Garden
by Anita Rau Badami

Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2026 
$36.00 / 9780735274341

Reviewed by Alexander Sallas

*

It isn’t recent, this idea that Canada’s unity lies in its failure to unify. 100 years after Donald Smith—later Lord Strathcona—drove the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway into the ground at Craigellachie, BC, and stitched together the country from sea to sea, the novelist-cum-poet-cum-critic Robert Kroetsch declared that Canadians cannot agree on a shared meta-narrative and that the lack itself becomes constitutive. “This very falling-apart of our story is what holds our story together,” he insisted in “Disunity As Unity: A Canadian Strategy.” “Unity is created by the very debate that seems to threaten the unity.”

That was in 1985. The Conservatives had just come to power after some sixteen years of Liberal rule, and the Constitution had recently been patriated without Quebec’s assent. No wonder national unity remained an open question. It was in this context that Kroetsch diagnosed our paradoxical condition and gave it a name: “postmodern country.”

Canada, he argued, embodies the literary age marked by what Jean-François Lyotard called the “obsolescence of the meta-narrative apparatus of legitimation” in The Postmodern Condition. Where older nations might still imagine themselves through founding myths or shared historical destinies, Canada possesses no such conventional story. Rather, Kroetsch argued, Canadian identity stabilizes itself by instability, by disagreement over what—if anything—defines it. Consequently, in much of the country’s fiction, there exists “a tension between, on the one hand, the desperate need to count, to list, to catalogue… and, on the other hand, the terrible modern suspicion that the counting is being done in a slightly mad dream” (as he wrote in “The Canadian Writer and the American Literary Tradition”). Meaning emerges through fragmentation, not despite it; the system that promises coherence simultaneously undermines it.

* * *

Enter Asha in Her Garden. The novel—Anita Rau Badami’s fifth—tells a sprawling immigrant story that spans two locations—Bangalore and Montreal—and sixty-three years—1960 to 2023. Divided into four parts, it begins with the elderly Asha Mohan in her adopted Canadian home, then returns to her childhood and early adulthood in India, gradually revealing the experiences that shaped the complex woman we first encountered. Alongside narration from Asha, we hear from others in her orbit, including her compassionate daughter, Anjali; her free-spirited son, Dilip; and her wealthy landlord-turned-mentor, Madame Josephine Anastasia Brard.

Guarded, imaginative, prickly, sentimental, superstitious: that’s Asha. She’s also got a fatalistic bent and, on the first page of the novel, admits her negativity is because “the worst possible scenarios have shaped my life always.” Her pessimism arises, in other words, as a survival strategy, one which she has developed through decades of uncertainty.

And her garden—“her precious place”—becomes the setting where that uncertainty can be controlled. After all, flowers bloom when they are planted correctly. Trees grow when they are cared for. Seasons may change, but they follow recognizable patterns. Against the unpredictability of grief, migration, violence, and family disappointment, Asha tends to her own small world in which she can impose order.

Why the fixation? From a young age, Asha learns that the world cannot be trusted to preserve what she loves. At seven, she receives a treasured doll with “chocolate eyes” from her uncle after breaking her arm in a fall, only for it to be stolen by a jealous cousin. The incident may appear minor compared with the larger tragedies that follow—including the death of Asha’s two-year-old son, Gautam, in a car accident—but Badami understands that we often define emotional wounds, particularly those sustained in childhood, by the meanings we attach to them rather than their apparent size. Seen in this light, Asha’s discipline and practicality become forms of self-preservation.

That history lends her a toughness that doesn’t fit comfortably into familiar expectations of femininity. Asha’s ambitious, pragmatic, decisive. Her husband, Suresh, initially seems the more suitable authority figure: a respected journalist, broadly admired, socially accomplished. Yet when political violence disrupts their lives, Asha is the one who adapts most forcefully. She hustles and finds work in Montreal, while meek Suresh, with his fondness for long ambling walks, half-heartedly follows her. (He later finds a financially rewarding albeit intellectually vacant pseudonymous career as a writer of “soft-porn books.”) It’s to Badami’s credit that this reversal of domestic roles grows naturally from the characters’ personalities rather than coming off as a sop to identity politickers.

In the novel’s best scene, Horatio, a drug dealer and former friend of Dilip, assaults Asha—and he does so in her garden, threatening the fragile order she has spent decades creating. Violent, yes, but more than that, the scene carries emotional weight because Badami (whose 2006 novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award) has wisely invested time in establishing Asha’s attachment to the place. She shows Horatio’s humanity, too: rather than reducing him to a plot device, Badami lingers on his immediate remorse. There are no simple characters in this novel.

* * *

More than a place of personal refuge, Asha’s garden represents the immigrant’s attempt to cultivate continuity in a life defined by rupture. Caught between two worlds—to borrow a trendy academic term, she occupies a “liminal space”—Asha embodies a paradoxical desire for new roots. But can one ever discard one’s history? Badami’s answer is no. India persists as a living force that continues to shape Asha’s habits, relationships, and sense of self long after she has settled in Montreal. Much like Kroetsch’s conception of Canada, then, Asha’s search for identity becomes her identity. Her garden never resolves the tension between old world and new; instead, it provides a refuge in which the contradiction may be lived. In that sense, Asha in Her Garden dramatizes Kroetsch’s insight: coherence may be achieved by learning to inhabit fragmentation rather than resolving it.

I want to make a formal observation. When Badami narrates inner voices, she introduces stylistic deviations—such as fragments and comma splices—thereby relaxing the syntactic discipline expected of narrated prose: “Asha will have to ask Suresh about it, he’ll know”; “He refused to be intimidated, he was merely doing his job, but the owner of the newspaper was.” The effect is to suggest that no grammatical regime secures a coherent account of experience; the inner world’s perspective exceeds the outer world’s mediation. Badami, in other words, refuses the formal structures that would stabilize experience into a single, authoritative account.

The technique falters, however, when it collides with the novel’s large cast of characters. Presumably to keep readers oriented, Badami occasionally inserts reminders that feel more like the narrator addressing the reader than a character thinking naturally—for instance, “when neither she, Asha Mohan, nor her husband, Suresh Mohan”, “Leyla’s studious young son Ferhad (he who had promised his mother an entire building for her business”). In such moments, the needs of exposition overwhelm the illusion of interior consciousness.

Still, these are minor distractions in a novel of considerable intelligence and emotional depth. Asha in Her Garden tells an immigrant story, but more than that, it explores what it means to build a life in a country whose own identity remains unsettled. If Kroetsch was right that Canada coheres through disagreement rather than consensus, Badami suggests the same is true of the self. Like Asha’s garden, identity may be something continually cultivated in the uncertain ground between memory and belonging.

[Editor’s note: the publication date of Asha in Her Garden is August 11, 2026.]

Alexander Sallas is a writer and scholar. His first book is forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press. The former Senior Editor of the Literary Review of Canada, he has published extensively and is a recipient of a National Magazine Award. In 2025, he was named one of Canada’s Top Emerging Leaders under 40 by The Peak. [Editor’s note: We’re pleased to publish the review of Aniti Rau Badami’s novel; it’s his first for BCR. Welcome aboard, Alexander!]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster