Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens
By Shankari Chandran
Ultimo Press, 2022, $25
Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens reflects contemporary Australia, with its migrant community, its sexism, its racism, its rotten Labor Party politics, White Australian stupidity, sadness, tragedy, but also solidarity, compassion and humanity.
Shankari Chandran writes with a delicate touch that only an author with a migrant background could achieve — able to see our warts and all. Chandran, a Tamil writer based in Canberra, won the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award for the novel.
The book tells the story of Tamil couple, Maya and Zakhir, who migrate to Australia with their twin babies to avoid certain torture and death at the hands of the Sri Lankan government, during its war on Tamils fighting for a separate homeland.
With the help of a rich friend, expelled from his family for under-achievement at Oxford University, the couple move into a dilapidated nursing home in Western Sydney. The suburb is called “Westfield” but it could be Parramatta, Blacktown, or Mount Druitt.
The daily lives of elderly residents in an old people’s home the western suburbs of Sydney may not sound like the beginning of an exciting read, but the story is so well written, the reader is drawn in, wondering what on earth is going on at the Cinnamon Gardens Nursing Home.
Each chapter — flipping between the present and the past — describes the background story of the residents, the white Australian and Sri Lankan doctors, as well as the family, their close friends and children.
One story of how the Labor Party treats an aspiring candidate no longer seen as credible illustrates vividly illustrates the mainstream Australian political landscape.
As well as painting suburban life as lived by migrants, the reader is exposed to the horrendous treatment of Tamils by the Singhalese-dominated government during the war. This war was similar in many respects to the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians but received very little publicity here.
About 70,000 Tamils were murdered after being herded into a “no fly zone” on a small strip of land on the east of the island and then bombed by the Sri Lankan Army in May, 2009.
The Australian government played a dreadful role, returning many Tamil refugees back to Sri Lanka, to prison, torture or death. The Chinese government armed the Sri Lankan Army as they wanted to build a deep sea-water port on Tamil land.
The book describes a very interesting history of the Tamils, their early civilisation and religion before the Buddhist conquest of Sri Lanka.
Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens also illustrates how nursing homes could be run by a caring and diligent staff, sensitive to the different needs of residents — migrant and non-migrant.
The book is written with such humour and irony and is so enjoyable it will be hard to put down. We need these stories to be told.