Gurjinder Basran

Gurjinder Basran is the award-winning author of four novels: Everything Was Goodbye, winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and a Chatelaine Magazine Book Club pick; Someone You Love Is Gone; Help! I’m Alive!; and The Wedding. A Simon Fraser University Writer’s Studio alumna hailed by the CBC as one of “Ten Canadian women writers you need to read,” Basran lives in Delta, BC, with her family.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The novel’s title, The Wedding, sets the stage for the reader in that this is a book about a lavish week-long modern day Indian wedding. Within the first few pages of the novel —that read like a guest list and a wedding invitation– the reader is invited to witness the secret lives of the wedding party, guests and event staff as told through their unique perspective. Weddings are always full of drama and in that spirit this novel delivers heaps of family drama, necessary comic relief and even a love triangle that keeps the readers guessing “will they or won’t they” get married. Unlike most wedding stories, this isn’t your boy meets girl, romantic comedy, it’s an episodic novel, that when taken together, not only delivers a picture of a wedding but also a portrait of an immigrant community. The Wedding is a love story about family and community and all the ways we need to love and be loved, and the title is meant to evoke the idea of love and the happily ever after we hope comes next.

What's in a name?

With fifteen different narrators, I had no shortage of characters to name so some were chosen with more purpose than others. The bride’s name is Devinder, she goes by Devi, which is meant to sound a lot like the Diva she turns out to be. The groom is often referred to by his family nick name “Baby.” It’s very common in Indian families to have funny nicknames that conjure some physical characteristic such as the case with the family friend Sonia, who is sometimes called “Mottu” to refer to her childhood chubbiness. The groom’s father, Satnam, has fallen into religion and mysticism and thus has a spiritual name and the bride’s grandmother, Darshan, the all-seeing, and all-knowing matriarch’s, means sight.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

I think she’d be pretty surprised. I was an angsty teen of the 80s. I listened to new wave, wore black most of the time and my prize possession was my Walkman and my second hand Fleuvog shoes. Though my first three books have some of that sad sensibility, this novel is sheer joy and stems from a really honest respect for my traditional Punjabi community, something which I am sad to say, my angsty teenage self didn’t have.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Writing beginnings and endings are the easy part for me, the challenge has always been connecting the dots. For this novel, I knew I wanted to start with a wedding invitation being delivered as a way to set the context for all that would happen next. I also knew that it should end with the wedding itself, but writing the middle from fifteen different perspectives and nineteen chapters proved harder than I expected. I wanted to give the reader the chance to orbit the week of wedding events, the unique lives and backstories and still feel like they were on a journey towards the wedding. This required a lot of changes and re writing on my part to make sure all the characters were linked and that every switch to a new voice or perspective made sense and offered the reader a new piece of information, or some gossip that got them closer to the big day.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I have a fingerprint on every character, in part because I draw from my real life to inform theirs. I live in a diverse community that has a high population of Punjabi Sikhs and I love using that cultural tension in my writing. That tension is on full display in The Wedding; the characters grapple with love, tradition, religion, social media, modernity and cultural expectations.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I’m influenced by what’s happening around me including news, pop culture, and even my family. When I was writing my last draft of The Wedding, I was also helping my sister with her son’s wedding planning. But once I have a story idea, music becomes a huge source of inspiration for me and in a way serves as a way to sustain my world building. Every book I have written has a playlist and if readers are curious, they can find The Wedding playlist on my website. It’s a fusion of Punjabi and pop culture hits that serve as a soundtrack for the book.

Visit Gurjinder Basran's website.

--Marshal Zeringue