No animals were harmed during the making of The Toss of a Lemon (Random House Canada, $34.95), but one human’s feelings were at least temporarily bruised. On reading a particularly heartbreaking chapter from Padma Viswanathan’s intricate family saga, the first-time novelist’s aged grandmother took to her bed, feeling upset and perhaps even betrayed.

“I was like, ”˜Oh my God, what have I done! Stop reading, Grandma! Don’t read any more!’ ” confesses the Edmonton-raised Viswanathan, reached at the Fayetteville, Arkansas, home she shares with poet Geoffrey Brock and their two children. “You know, she’s in her 80s, and she was bedridden after reading that chapter.”

The problem, she adds, is that her debut is based on stories that she coaxed out of her grandmother, promising not to make them public for at least 20 years. Note, however, that her book is merely based on those stories; it is not a history of the Viswanathans. Nonetheless, it’s so rich in the atmosphere of her grandmother’s childhood that the latter experienced some difficulty telling fact from fiction.

“It was very interesting to watch her reading the book,” Viswanathan explains. “I warned her that it was fiction, that I’d departed in a thousand ways from what she’d told me, but still she identified so closely with the emotional centres of the book that she kept substituting the names of real people for those of its characters.”

As time went on, however, The Toss of a Lemon received a positive review from its most respected critic. “She wanted to read to the end, and ultimately she said that I’d captured the sense of how their lives were lived,” says the author.

Set in the state of Tamil Nadu during the tumultuous years of India’s push for independence from British rule, the book begins by chronicling the lives of Sivakami—widowed at 18, as her astrologer husband had predicted—and her two children, son Vairum and daughter Thangam. Impatient with the rules of their Brahmin caste, Vairum epitomizes the spirit of 20th-century India. In contrast, Thangam is a placidly beautiful woman, although she has the disconcerting habit of shedding golden dust. Rather than fight tradition, she marries a spendthrift civil servant, and dies much too young, worn out by despair and her tenth, fatal pregnancy.

But caste is as much a character as any of these individuals: as Viswanathan explains, The Toss of a Lemon was a way for her to explore the stratified social order that her grandmother mourned, her parents rebelled against, and she never knew.

“If I was going to write the book that I wanted to write, I had to enter the minds of people for whom caste was a given—not only members of the Brahmin caste, but other castes, like high-caste non-Brahmins, who might even be wealthier than Brahmins but still resentful of the ways in which they were barred from privileges that Brahmins enjoyed,” she elaborates. “Also people of the servant or agricultural classes who were defenders of the caste system. As a North American, freethinking, antisexist, antiracist young person, I had to become sympathetic to the way they saw the world without compromising my own moral stance. It was an enormous educational process, for me, to try to imagine what it would feel like to see the world that way. But I was always aware of my relief that I don’t have to live within that system.”

Caste doesn’t enter into Viswanathan’s next book, but moral issues certainly do. Set in an unnamed Western Canadian town, the manuscript she calls Losing Farther, Losing Faster—after a line from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art”—involves a character named Seth, his sexually corrupt guru, and the fallout from the 1985 Air India disaster.

“Faith and religiosity: these are questions I’ve definitely grappled with all my life,” Viswanathan says. “And now I’m living in the States, where religion is much more present and mixed with politics than I ever thought it was in Canada. I’m pretty sure that’s brought these issues to the forefront of my thinking. But perhaps you also have to leave home to write about home.”