Tell It to the Trees

About the book

Tell It to the Trees is Anita Rau Badami's 2011 novel about the Dharma family, an Indian family living in a snowbound town in northern British Columbia, where a writer's death in the snow forces the family's secrets into the open. It is Badami's fourth novel, and a departure from her earlier work: where her first three books moved between India and Canada, this one stays in Canada, in the house an immigrant grandfather built in the wilderness outside a small town.

The book was published by Knopf Canada in 2011, in a 336-page hardcover. It was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2012 and shortlisted for two Canadian prizes, the Quebec Writers' Federation Hugh MacLennan Prize and the Ontario Library Association Evergreen Award. Reviewers were divided: some called it Badami's most impressive novel, others found its ending weak. Either way it is the most Canadian of her novels, and the one that speaks most directly to the diaspora experience of building a life far from home.

What happens in Tell It to the Trees?

The novel opens with a death. On a freezing winter morning, the body of Anu Krishnan is found in the snow outside the Dharma family's house, after she lost her way in a blizzard. The rest of the book works backwards, through shifting narrators, to explain how she came to die there.

Anu was a writer from the city who rented the Dharmas' back-house cottage for a year, hoping the quiet of the woods would help her write. She found the family through a university friend, and she remembered the first wife, Helen, from their student days. But Helen has died in a car accident, and Vikram has returned from India with a second wife, Suman, married in a hastily arranged match.

While the children are at school, Anu, Suman and Vikram's elderly mother Akka spend the days together over tea and stories, and a friendship grows between the two women. Anu wants to help Suman build a better life. But Varsha, still grieving her mother and terrified of losing her stepmother too, grows suspicious of their closeness, and works to keep Suman from leaving, even hiding her passport. The secrets each character keeps, and the damage done to the children, build toward Anu's death in the snow. The novel does not offer a neat resolution: the family is left damaged rather than healed.

The Dharma family

At the centre of the book is the Dharma household, three generations living in the house that the grandfather, Mr. J.K. Dharma, built in the wilderness. He moved far from everything in search of silence, and the house still carries that isolation. His son Vikram was born in Canada, yet rules the family with an anger he justifies by appealing to Indian culture, though he had never been to India before he went there to find a wife.

Suman is the newcomer, a quiet and timid woman who arrived from the warmth of India full of hope and found cold, isolation and a husband whose suspicious tirades are a daily ritual. Varsha, the teenage daughter of Vikram's first marriage, clings to Suman even as she plots to keep her, and her narration, which several reviewers singled out as the book's strongest writing, carries much of the story. Her younger half-brother Hemant adores her and is controlled by her. Above them all sits Akka, the ailing grandmother, who carries her own secrets and insists that troubles be held inside.

Secrets, silence and the trees

The title gives the book its governing image. Whenever something bad happens, Akka reminds the children to hold it in, and if a secret threatens to come out, to tell it to the trees. The trees around the house become the family's confessors, and the silence of the woods becomes the condition of its life.

That silence is the novel's subject. The family holds together by not speaking, and the same silence poisons it: a violent husband is never confronted, a frightened wife has no one to turn to, and children learn to plot and hide rather than ask for help. The BC winter mirrors this emotional life. Snow muffles sound, cold keeps people indoors, and the landscape that should offer freedom becomes another wall.

Immigration runs through all of it. Suman's loneliness is the loneliness of a new bride in a remote place, cut off from language, culture and family. Vikram's children are Canadian-born, yet live by rules imported from a country their father barely knows. And Anu, the outsider who rents the back house, shows how thin the line is between a fresh start and a fatal mistake.

ਲੇਖਕ

Anita Rau Badami was born in Rourkela, Odisha, in 1961, to a South Indian Kannada-speaking family. She worked in India as a copywriter and journalist, then immigrated to Canada with her husband and son in 1991, earning a master's degree in creative writing at the University of Calgary. Her thesis project became her first novel, Tamarind Mem.

Tell It to the Trees is her fourth novel, after Tamarind Mem, The Hero's Walk and Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (2006). The Hero's Walk won the Regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and Badami won the Marian Engel Award in 2000. She was writer-in-residence at Athabasca University in 2014-15 and chaired the Scotiabank Giller Prize jury in 2017. She lives in Montreal and is also a visual artist. Her other novels are in the Kosh, with their own entries.

Reception and legacy

The book's reception was mixed, which is part of its story. Belletrista called it Badami's most impressive novel, praising Varsha's narration as some of the best the reviewer had read, and describing the book as heartbreaking and a major achievement. The Montreal Review of Books disagreed, calling it a potentially gripping Indo-Canadian Gothic that was deflated and disappointing, with a didactic style and an anticlimactic ending.

The prizes tell the same divided story: a longlisting for the International Dublin Literary Award and two Canadian shortlistings, but no win. The novel has no film or television adaptation. It remains in print as the most Canadian of Badami's novels, and the one most often recommended to readers interested in the darker side of the immigrant family story. Badami discussed it on CBC Radio's The Next Chapter in 2012.