It’s taken me a while to get to the 2023 Miles Franklin Award winner, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens (Ultimo Press 2022) by Shankari Chandran, but I’m so glad I did!
This is a stunning, immersive, wide-ranging novel with all the readability that its cute title and cover suggest, while exploring deep and powerful themes of race, ethnicity, aging, grief and learning to live with loss, national identity, self-determination, territorial sovereignty, family violence, ambition, desire, friendship, elder wisdom, racial abuse, discrimination, genocide, torture, the erasure or rewriting of history, family, language, war, archaeology, dispossession, stories and who gets to tell them, appropriation, control, courage, determination, the media, the military, politics, human rights, tradition, education and resilience. Truly this book covers so many weighty and important topics but it is also incredibly wry, witty, poignant, sardonic, funny and eminently accessible.
Cinnamon Gardens is a nursing home in Sydney populated and managed by mostly the immigrant community, with an emphasis on Sri Lanka’s Tamils, and it is the history of these people that drive the multigenerational and multilayered story. But Cinnamon Gardens is also a home for those who, in their later years, long to come together with people, language, traditions, food and habits that they remember from their childhoods. It is populated by elders who are variously wise, talented, educated, kind, brave, recalcitrant, sneaky, jealous, proud, secretive and helpful. A bustling kitchen feeds the residents the flavours of their youth; a beautiful garden grows the herbs and vegetables they love to eat; and a team of health professionals keeps them all busy with a varied choice of activities to keep their minds and bodies moving. It seems like the perfect prototype for a home for the aged – full of visiting young people, encouraging the residents to be independent but also providing whatever care is required, and placing an emphasis on respect for the elderly, by listening to their needs and wants, and providing for them whenever possible.
But of course it has its detractors. Local citizens who don’t understand the model, who are puzzled by the ‘strange food’ and the clash of religions, small-minded people who think that white is right and that everyone else should go back where they came from (while conveniently ignoring the fact that everyone in Australia except for First Nations people have originally come from somewhere else).
The ongoing current problems in the novel of discrimination, criminal damage and assault are mirrored by passages from the past that detail the horrors suffered by the Tamil people and the terrible conflict of Sri Lanka and other colonised countries.
There is so much to adore about this novel that it is hard to encapsulate it all in one review. Such a worthy winner of the Miles Franklin Prize. I think what I loved most was Chandran’s ability to always provide two sides of the coin, to adamantly express the opinions of one character or groups of characters, and then to just as vehemently oppose them through the voices of other characters, making the arguments for both sides in an eloquent and comprehensible fashion. Choices made under the circumstances of war – contemptible choices that we would not consider in an ordinary, peaceful life – are also explored and unpacked so that we, as readers, can see why the characters made the choices they did at the time, under great duress.
Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens has the pace, urgency and brutality of a crime novel, the endearing warmth and passion of a romance, the utterly beautiful structure at a sentence level of a literary novel, the factual detail and research of an historical novel and the poignant compassion and empathy of any great read. It is both tragedy and comedy.
The character of Ruben is particularly well-drawn, and the main protagonist Maya is an unforgettable woman.
This is a novel that will stay with me for a long time. It is designed to make us think, question and re-evaluate, to demand equality and human rights, to defend and respect our elders, to think outside the box, to shun prejudice, to reward courage and hard work and determination, to value history, to question history, to reconsider our privilege and our opportunities, and to promote empathy and acceptance towards those who are different. Humans are fundamentally human, long before they are gendered, racially divided, intellectually separated or removed by class, status and wealth. This book reminds us of our similarities and urges us all to think more deeply and reflectively about our personal standards of tolerance and compassion. Most migrants (all migrants – all people) are comprised of substantially more than the tip of the iceberg seen by others. We all have complicated families and complex histories, we all hold traumas and brokenness, we all nurture dreams, we all carry guilt and resentments, and we all want the basics of happiness – to be homed, safe, fed and protected.
I highly recommend this novel to anyone who has yet to read it. It will entertain you and keep you on your toes, it will make you think and want to understand, it will confront your fears and challenge your opinions, and it may very well change your perspective.