For Shankari Chandran, home isn’t always where you happen to be standing. It can’t be pinned down to a set of coordinates. Sometimes, you won’t find it on a map. The Miles Franklin award-winning author and human rights lawyer, 49, is telling me about a high school project conducted by her daughter in which she asked three generations of women in her family where they considered home to be.
“My grandmother thinks of home as Ceylon, which is a word you don’t hear any more,” she laughs. “My mother thinks of home as Sri Lanka. I said London because it had given me my husband and children and a job in social justice that I am so passionate about. She pauses. “I am very attached to certain places in my life.”
Chandran, whose new novel, Safe Haven, was released last month, wants to walk near the intersection of Burlington Road and Rochester Street in Sydney’s Homebush. This neighbourhood was once shaped by colonial-era land grants and beyond a cluster of shops – a biryani corner, a bakery – mynas flit between low-slung, cinderblock apartments and grand Victorian manors.
I know she’s attached to this place because of how precisely she’s attuned to its rhythms: where to find Sri Lankan groceries, who serves good kottu roti. That would be the Bluemoon and, stopping in before our stroll, Chandran, who’s disarmingly generous, orders me an extra serve. This place, she says, inspired the Blue Lotus, a cafe that recurs in Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens. The 2022 novel follows a group of elderly Tamil residents in a western Sydney nursing home and skewers the foundational myths of this continent with a quiet rage and lyricism. It famously won Australia’s premier literary award, making Chandran one of the first South Asian writers to do so.
“I don’t ever think I won the Miles Franklin,” she says, eyes flashing. “I think we won the Miles Franklin. My parents and all their sacrifices won it. My husband and all of the shit he has to put up with when I am writing. Generations of Chandrans won it. I have a publisher who fights for me, an agent who for 10 years couldn’t get me anywhere. But she stayed with me – and she won it. We won it together.”
Chandran, who speaks with fierce intelligence and candour, contradicts the individualistic idea of the artist as propelled entirely by their own talent rather than the labour of others. Her parents, a neurosurgeon and a GP, migrated from London to Australia in the late 70s. “Like all Tamils from that generation, we came to Homebush,” she says. We meet briefly at a house that belongs to her cousins, where vines curl around pillars and tropical plants thrive in the garden. Here, she tells me, her aunty and uncle housed every sub-unit of her family clan when they arrived in the country.
“In western thinking, duty is seen as a burden,” she says. “My husband says to me ‘you will be happier if you stop trying to please your parents’. And I say ‘I get that, but also what kind of Sri Lankan are you?’ If you are a Hindu, like I am, then none of this actually matters. What matters is that I need to be the best version I can be in all areas of my life. If I don’t write another book, so be it. But if I can raise my children properly, that is wonderful.”
At the Bluemoon, we marvel at bars of Pears soap, a drink called Tang, objects that evoke homeland in miniature, instantly recognisable to South Asian diasporas. In Chandran’s books, places are always present. Histories are inscribed on the body. Chai Time features a character called Ruben, skin etched with war scars. Safe Haven revolves around a Carmelite nun, Sister Fina, equally marked by the past, who survives a boat that sinks, carrying Tamil asylum seekers fleeing violence. She arrives in Port Camden, the site of an offshore detention centre, before settling in a country town called Hastings. There she befriends a local, Louisa, and forges a maternal bond with Cash, her son.
Safe Haven opens with the story of a 14-year-old boy, Kannan Puveendran, who is detained at Port Camden and dies by suicide. As a writer, Chandran’s gaze is unflinching. She’s unafraid to witness the ways bodies suffer. But in a country that reduces migrants and refugees to either their trauma or virtue, she also creates worlds that are expansive, in which beauty and brutality are always intertwined.
“It’s important to remember intergenerationally that we also receive wisdom and joy,” she says.
We’re walking now, Chandran pulling her puffer jacket around her, her gait quick and steady en route to her favourite sweet shop. She points out the primary school where her father teaches Hinduism, where laughing schoolkids dart around the basketball court. We’re talking about the conditional nature of citizenship in Australia.
“For me it comes down to ‘are we confident enough to recognise that we have deep-seated insecurities about our national identity?’” she says. “And that as a result of how this country was formed, we need to assert this sense of ‘you are the migrants and we are the owners.’ We can either make good on that lie or have the confidence to dissect it at every level.”
When she was writing Sister Fina – a nun who becomes a pillar of the community – she was critiquing the trope of the “good” asylum seeker. “I thought I will play what you think you need in order to like us,” she says. “To lure the reader in so that their emotional tone settles, and they can see the other things [I] want them to see.”
What does she want them to see? “To sit in the horror and shame of our detention centres,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “And to think about why people would leave their homes in a way that wilfully jeopardises their children’s lives. I want you to remember who we are, what it means to be Australian – you can welcome strangers into your homes, you can respect them, you can love them and you can fight for them.”
Migrants too, I say, can internalise the country’s cruel border logic. Chandran agrees. “I think it comes from the fact that we don’t want to be associated with the people ‘over there’ because we came the ‘right’ way, have respectable professions. There are Australians of all kinds and we allow them emotional complexity, to be that, have that.”
In Chandran’s books, characters are always entangled. In Chai Time, Anjali, who is Tamil, is married to a white man called Nathan. Louisa’s friendship with Fina runs so deep that when she is at risk of deportation, she leads a national campaign for her to stay. Her work is deeply concerned with what we owe each other, how we can appeal to our better selves.
Chandran heads into the sweet shop to buy rasmalai, balls of paneer soaked in rosewater, and we walk in the direction of her car, parked near Strathfield library. Although the Miles Franklin has been an honour, she admits she’s getting tired. She’s juggling her job, as the head of sustainability at Super Retail Group, with her writing obligations. She’s working on screenplays. Her Audible Original, Unfinished Business, is out in print later in the year. Then there are plans for her new novel.
“If I know what I am going to write about, my compass is set,” she says.
When she talks about story, it’s not in the abstract. Stories, she says, will test her, insist on her commitment.
“If I am dishonest, the story will leave me,” she smiles. “It will say, ‘actually you are not worthy of the truth.’ But if I commit to honesty, then the story and I will work together.”
Safe Haven by Shankari Chandran (Ultimo Press) is out now
