TALES TO TELL
Family memoir 34 years in the writing
Throughout his writing career, Ven Begamudre always had three books on the go: One that he was writing for the first time, one that he was revising, and one that he was finalizing for publication.
It took 34 years for Extended Families to reach that last stage.
“(The book) got more complicated over the years,” its writer explained during a recent interview at his downtown Regina apartment. It just started out as a simple retelling of the journal entries and some memoirs, but as it went along I started putting more stuff in.”
As a result, it’s a family history and memoir, featuring handcoloured family photographs and a narrative woven with Hindu legends, poetry, fiction and diary entries from two visits to India, one in 1977-78, when he was 21, and the other in 1988.
Published by Coteau Books last year, Extended Families is up for the Regina Public Library Book of the Year Award at the 2018 Saskatchewan Book Awards ceremony on April 28.
Venkatesh Begamudre came to Canada from Bangalore as a six-year-old with his mother Lakshmi — his father Rakosh was already here.
Growing up mostly in Ontario, Begamudre left Ottawa after finishing his bachelor of arts honours degree in public administration at Carleton University.
That’s when he travelled to India via England, keeping a journal that would inform Extended Families.
It was after that trip, in 1978, that Begamudre moved to Saskatchewan.
His friend, David Stuewe, was living here. So — after hitchhiking across Canada, looking for a place to land — Begamudre settled here, too.
“My father wrote to me, ‘I don’t know where I failed that you ended up in a godforsaken place like Saskatchewan.’ I just waited until he came to visit and he met lots of nice people here, including people in the Indian community.”
For Begamudre, it was the writing community that enticed him to stay, first with a scholarship to the Saskatchewan Summer School of the Arts at Fort San.
“Yeah, I’m glad that I stayed. I had a chance to go to Toronto or Vancouver, but I find it’s easier to live here. Life is not too complicated.”
Begamudre’s latest book begins with a prologue that, in part, reads: “Maybe I just want to see how many different ways I can write the truth.”
(Given a few far-fetched stories in my own family, tales born from tiny grains of truth, I was hooked from this point on.)
Begamudre’s great-grandfather Subbha-Rao sold all of his land to pay for two sons’ indentures to their employer. Or maybe it was to pay off their gambling debts.
“Sometimes there would be more than one version of some important detail, like how my great-grandfather lost his land,” said Begamudre.
“It’s like the story of any other family, you piece it together. It doesn’t start at the beginning and end at the end. You just have to take the stories that you hear and put them together into some sort of a coherent framework.”
There is drama as Begamudre puzzles through more than a dozen ancestors’ lives, perhaps most with his mother, with whom he had an at-times distant relationship. She lived apart from her husband and only child while teaching engineering in universities, including at York in Toronto and Clemson in South Carolina.
Her mental illness wasn’t on his radar before her 1977 stay in a Toronto psych ward. Thereafter, she returned to her home country.
Begamudre was in a movie theatre, watching The Ten Commandments during his first Indian sojourn, when his grandmother came to find him. He wrote:
“Don’t get excited,” she said. “She has set herself on fire like her own mother did.”
“Is she dead?” I was trying not to shout.
“Maybe very little life is left.” I couldn’t believe it. Not that my mother might be dead; the Don’t get excited.
“It wasn’t that difficult to write because I treated it as a literary exercise,” Begamudre explained. The book is not without humour, however. He chose to share a story called Chocolate Cake, Guava Jam, “because it’s short and it’s funny,” in which he reminisces about a Schnapps-spiked chocolate cake he ate as a six-year-old new to Canada.
After nine books and 10 Saskatchewan Book Awards nominations, Begamudre is hoping this is his lucky year.
“It’s up against some pretty stiff competition . ... One of them is by a friend of mine, David Carpenter from Saskatoon. So he’s hoping I’ll win and I’m hoping I’ll win,” Begamudre joked.
(Other authors in the Book of the Year category are Dawn Dumont, Trevor Herriot, Adam Pottle and Marlis Wesseler.)
In Begamudre’s four decades in Regina — barring occasions as a writer-in-residence in Whitehorse, Hamilton, Calgary, Edmonton and Edinburgh, Scotland, and as a visiting professor in Dallas, Texas — it was shocking to learn that the city’s newspaper of record had never profiled him.
“I don’t know, there’s lots of writers around,” 62-year-old Begamudre said by way of explanation.
“It might be because I don’t write about here, and so some people, they forget that I’m a Saskatchewan writer.
“I did write about it in some of my short stories, and I had stories about people from Saskatchewan who go travelling. Taking people travelling is a good way of introducing tension into a story. Something that would have been a minor incident back home can become a major incident …”
In advance of the book awards, Begamudre is scheduled to participate in a writers’ panel on April 26, 7 p.m., at the RPL George Bothwell branch, alongside other nominees Edward Willett, Kathleen Carlisle, and Herriot.