Do you mind if I begin at the end?  I was driving away from Sophie’s Coffee, where I had just had a lovely conversation with YA author Padma Venkatraman, when I realized my first question had revealed my own bias about her new book, Climbing the Stairs.

Don’t worry, dear reader, I loved the book.  It gives you a glimpse of India’s campaign for independence through the eyes of a young woman, Vidya, who is fighting for her own independence—for the chance to finish her education rather than getting married.   A stunning act of violence forces Vidya to move to her grandfather’s house, where strict hierarchies are preserved between the men and the women—to the point where women are not even allowed upstairs.  And upstairs is where the library is.  (Are you beginning to see where the title comes from?)  Naturally, I sympathized with Vidya’s struggle for permission to use the library.   But I had some doubts about it, as you can see by the way I began our interview.

Emily Brown: When I’m reading historical fiction with young, strong female characters, I’m torn because part of me wants them to prevail and be able to make choices and have power, and the other part of me feels like, is that realistic?  In the past, would women have had those choices? Did you struggle with that at all?

Padma Venkatraman: It was not an issue at all because my mother is essentially Vidya.  It’s not exactly her life story, but my mother actually lived in that sort of horrible environment in which she was not allowed to go upstairs to the library, but she fought for it and she’s now a lawyer in India at the age of 70-something, so it tells you a lot about the person she was and the struggle she had to go through.

I think to me, strong women have always prevailed in history.  And maybe not many, maybe only the very, very, very strong, but they have.  I’ve done a lot of research on women in science and mathematics.  Often very few of them actually succeed, but many of them, without a formal education, still have managed to do incredible things that we don’t recognize and we don’t know of today, because history is written by Western white men who erase [what women and minorities have done].  People say the victors write history; I think the victors erase history.

So there you have it.  Whether it was because the book was set in the past or because it was set in India (Where does my idea of India come from anyway?  Bollywood knockoffs?), I thought its portrayal of an empowered young woman was unrealistic.  But the book is based on family history and a personal experience of Indian and Hindu culture.

A number of the agents that Padma queried when she’d written Climbing the Stairs were skeptical about its marketability, and Padma says she’s observed a tendency in people to dismiss the book as “yet another book about a girl growing up in India and having a hard time.”

But this isn’t a Cinderella story that pits an angelic heroine against an evil environment.  It’s a tale in which each character has good and bad traits, and each culture has good and bad sides.

One of the “good sides” of India is the influence of Hindu philosophy. As a reader, you can’t help but notice the way religious holidays mark the passage of time and evolution of the main character.

PV: Just today I was asked, did I weave that theme in consciously?  I didn’t, and it came out in my book anyway, and now I know that, and I really want to make sure that it is not done in a heavy-handed way … because my culture is so misunderstood for its religion.  People think that Hinduism, thanks to Indiana Jones, is a culture where we eat children.  And this is the culture where we worship the Buddha, who talked about peace and love no less than Jesus Christ or anybody else, and we try to be vegetarian, for goodness sake!

Padma says that for her the most important issue in the book is the nonviolence/violence dichotomy.  The book takes place at a time when two great conflicts were going on: the Allied powers’ obviously violent war against the Axis, and India’s nonviolent campaign for independence from the UK.

The convergence of these two historical events forces the characters to ask themselves, is violence ever necessary?  Padma started the book when she was asking herself the same question–she had to, because she was considering becoming an American citizen at a time with the US was going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

PV: One very strong feeling that I have is that every human being is good and bad.  To me, the most important theme in Climbing the Stairs is peace and nonviolence in the sense that I think everybody has peace inside themselves.  I think everyone has violence.

If you look at the book, you have Mahatma Gandhi and Hitler, both who lived at the same time.  You know which one is good and which one is bad.

One step below that, you see the British, who were doing something very correct, who were fighting on the correct side in World War II, and yet, on the other hand were doing horrendous things—which don’t really come out in Climbing the Stairs completely—horrible, nasty things to the Indians, which they don’t really accept and the world doesn’t really know of.

Go one step down to India.  You look at India and you see this fantastic nation doing this marvelous, marvelous thing, to have the courage to say we are going to fight nonviolently for our independence.  And yet within Indian society, you have caste, which is a very violent custom.

You go one step down and say, alright they have caste.  What about the highest caste?  Is everybody happy there?  No.  Within the highest caste, which is supposed to be dedicated to peace, you have an extreme amount of violence of the men against the women.

And what happens when you take the women?  Are they happy?  Are they peaceful?  Are they nonviolent to each other?  No.

What is the next level down?  The next level is the self.  And if you go down to the individual, I wanted every individual in the book to have the violence, the peace, both.  The nice side and the not nice side.

And at this point, Pamda quizzed me on one of the characters.  No joke.  For those of you who haven’t read the book yet, I won’t give you my answer (it included a lot of “ummmmmm” and other incomplete sentences), but let me just say that she has definitely thought this through.

***

If you look “Venkatramen, Padma” up in the OSL catalog, you’ll only find one book: Climbing the Stairs. It’s not actually the first book Padma has written.  While working as an Oceanographer (that’s right—she has a phD in Marine Science), she wrote a number of stories and columns that teach science through stories, and published them under the name T.V. Padma.

However, most writers and reviewers are treating Climbing the Stairs as her first book.  I asked her how she felt about that.  She said that her previous projects felt more like play, but writing a novel—now that’s another thing entirely.

PV: For a very long time writing was like a hobby, an escape from science … a way to keep in touch with India and to reach out to the people of my new country … This is the first time I took myself seriously as a writer.  After you make the big sacrifice, the humongous commitment [necessary to write a novel], you see yourself in a different way.  Before I said I was a scientist and writer, then a writer and a scientist.  Now I say I am a writer.

So before she was a full-time writer, Padma was an oceanographer.  But before she was an oceanographer, she was a reader.  In fact, she told me about a particularly vivid reading memory from her childhood.  It happened when one of her Aunts came to visit, bringing gifts for her and her cousin.

PV: So this aunt comes down, and she gives this other cousin of mine this huge box, and she gives me this tiny, tiny package, and acts as though she’s giving me something wonderful.  Now in America, everybody opens their presents at once, but in India you don’t do that, because it is considered very bad manners to show interest in your present and not in the person who gave it to you, so you say thank you and then go and open it somewhere else.  So we said thank you and went to the other room and tore them open, and she had this fantastic game!  And I had a book.

And I open the book, and it doesn’t even have any pictures.  And I remember feeling so upset and then thinking that I had to pretend at least that I was interested and excited.  So I went on the veranda and I sat down and I opened that book, and I thought I was going to just pretend to read it.

I remember that moment so well, I remember the place, I remember the way the light was forming, I remember everything, because I was half way down that first page when I made the best discovery of my life, which was that there were pictures in my head far, far—with all due respect to all the Caldecott winners—far better than anything in any book.

I’m really looking forward to hearing Padma speak on Oct. 8.  She’s like those teachers in the movies who make everything interesting by being interested in everything.  You can imagine her pointing to anything in the room–a wooden chair, a folded napkin, an unusual shadow–and using it as an example for something more complex.  She sees the world in layers.

She’s also one of those talkers whose tangents are just as interesting as her main points.  For example:

PV: I hate [that phrase] “black or white.”  It’s full of racist implications.  In my mother tongue you would never say black or white for good or bad.  For us, actually, white is the color of mourning, so when a woman is pregnant, she gets a black and gold-embroidered sari because it’s a celebration, and when she’s widowed, the color of mourning is white.  But in the language itself, there’s no connotations [of good or bad] associated with either the color black or the color white.

Speaking of tangents, did I mention that Padma was considering becoming an American citizen?  Do you know what helped her make up her mind?  Libraries.  But not NPR.  Let her explain:

PV: You know I hate NPR?  Because I wrote them a “This I Believe” about public libraries, but it was too political, I guess, becuase they never aired it!  I tell every librarian, “You know what?  I wrote a piece about public libraries and I said that I became a citizen because of public libraries and I told them why and they didn’t put it on because they either thought I was being flippant or too political.”

EB: Well, that’s unfortunate, but I’ll be happy to include that in our interview.  We’ll get the word out to some people, that you love libraries!

To read more about Climbing the Stairs, visit the website, which includes teaching tips and topics for further study.  Padma Venkatraman will speak at RIEMA’s annual dinner on October 8, 2009, at Chelo’s Banquet Room in Warwick.

The Plot: Mrs. Pidgeon introduces her second-grade class to poetry by bringing in poems her mother wrote. The unnaturally wise Gooney Bird Greene helps the other students compose haikus, couplets, and limericks and encourages everyone to wear two-pony-tail-hats (a.k.a. underwear) on their heads to warm the brain. But the humor is tempered by concern for Mrs. Pidgeon’s mother’s health.

The Good: It’s remarkable how, with a few dashes of dialog, Lowry characterizes each kid in the class perfectly and memorably. I’m always surprised that I can keep Tyrone, Malcolm, Felicia Ann, and Keiko straight. I know it’s not me; it’s her.

The Bad: The physical format of the books has changed! The others had large, welcoming pages, in the tradition of the original The Stories Julian Tells, by Ann Cameron. I’m sorry to see the Gooney Bird books get shrunk from a “transitional” reader to regular chapter book size.* I also felt that this book had that second-installment-in-a-trilogy feel. Although it’s actually the fourth book in the series, it depends on an emotional connection to the characters–particularly Mrs. Pidgeon’s mother–that was established in earlier books.

Who Should Read it:Fans of Gooney Bird, obviously. Plus anyone who’s looking for creative ways to bring poetry into the classroom or address the death of an older person.

Who Shouldn’t Read it: Anyone who does not want their students to come to school with underwear on their head. And anyone who just read Love That Dog, by Sharon Creech, because this covers similar emotional and curricular territory. Comparisons are inevitable. I think I prefer Love that Dog. But I prefer the first Gooney Bird book, which teaches storytelling, to Love that Dog–if that makes it any better.

*However, it occurs to me that the shrink is good news for kids who are ordered to read a book that is at least 100 pages. Gooney Bird is So Absurd is 105 pages long. The others clock in at about 75.

Part II of the Interview is coming soon!