The youngest of six daughters raised by a widowed mother, Meena is a young woman struggling to find her place in the world.  Originally from India, her family still holds onto many old-world customs and traditions that seem stifling to North American women.  She knows that the freedom experienced by others is beyond her reach.  But unlike her older sisters, Meena refuses to accept a life dictated by tradition

Heartbreaking and beautiful, Everything Was Good-bye is an unforgettable story about family, love, loss and the struggle of living in two different cultural worlds.

I wonder, and I’ve asked this question before, (maybe of Mohammed Hanif after reading Our Lady of Alice Bhatti) how do women like Meena remain optimistic about love? Knowing the world around them, how could they trust men?  Why don’t their mothers ever confess their misery to their daughters and help them avoid it?

Meena is, in many ways, a contradiction. She is observant, aware of the limitations put on her, and paralyzed by the incongruence of her dreams and the expectations of others yet she has enough hope that she dares to imagine a different life for herself. I wouldn’t say she is optimistic of her chances in love, she knows that the odds do not favour her but she is hopeful and idealistic in the way that so many people are. She chooses hope and faith when the realities of her life make life impossible to bear. She wants to be the exception rather than the norm. To her mother, and her sisters their misery is not misery, it is just the way life is for women and since they have not experienced anything different and don’t share Meena’s desire for “more” they accept their life and make the best of it.

The family had a grandfather clock that was too large to do anything but play sentry over their living room. The clock clicked like a metronome until month end when if finally fell silent.  You say the silence was a reprieve for the characters yet someone always wound the clock and restarted the noise. You don’t say why?  Why not leave it silent and have a longer reprieve?  It’s as if they know that the passage of time is inevitable so it might as well be noisy and annoying too.

The ticking clock represents the inevitable predictabilities of their lives. At times, it’s an unbearable reminder that life keeps going on in the same manner it always has and at other times it serves as a distraction from that which it measures. They could lose themselves in the predictable routines of their lives and at times forget themselves, forsake what life should have been in exchange for getting by and getting through.

The mother in the story “was repeatedly singed….cremating her life inside herself.” Is it because she couldn’t think of anything else to do?  What is she honoring by treating herself this way?

The mother behaved the way a widow was expected to behave. She was raised with a set of expectations and values that for most would be untenable. She believed that her worth was defined and attached to her marriage and the loss of her husband was the loss of her position, her freedom and her status within the community. Whether she agreed with this mattered less to her than doing what was expected of her.

Meena says “I don’t think I could ever outrun myself.”  Why do humans always seem to feel like they must bring everything with them while they’re alive?  Is this the antidote to knowing they can’t take anything with them when they die?  It’s almost funny.

I think most people believe that there are certain characteristics of their person that are unchangeable. Perhaps this makes them feel solid and safe, a certainty that otherwise doesn’t exist in life.  Meena believes this about her culture as almost an extension of herself.  When she says that she can’t outrun herself, it is her biography and ancestry that she wishes she could pull away from. But if she did pull away from it, what would remain and who is she apart from who she was told she was and the collection of values and morals that frame her entire identity.

Meena describes her mother as “illiterate in two languages” after watching her turn the pages too swiftly to be reading in the Sikh sacred book.  Yet the mother exercises a profound authority over all but one of her six daughters.  Please explain the basis for such power.  It doesn’t seem to be respect and it also seems to be too heavy a burden for love.

As the only parent, the mother figures as a force in the girls’ lives. The feeling that keeps them bound to her and her expectations are a complicated mix of love, guilt, pity, compassion and respect. How could they disobey or disappoint someone who has already been so disappointed by life? None of them wants to damage her this way or cause her any more suffering, so much so that they choose to suffer instead.

Within the community and culture, respect for your parents, and your elders is paramount. As it says in a passage of the novel, sometimes respect and obedience are mistaken for love.

Meena equates spoiled food to the beginnings of love.  Can you blame her?

Not at all. Things do sour quickly for her and she’s always so overwhelmed by everything she feels and wants that she hardly knows how to differentiate love, infatuation and lust.

“The perpetual exhaustion of not knowing what to do.” All of the characters seem to be suffering this way except for the one that seems to have experienced the smallest life.  Meena’s mother seems to know exactly what to do which is to obey tradition. In a way, this is also the easiest path because one doesn’t have to do anything but follow.  Would you agree — and if not, please tell us why not?  What is the fabric that binds these characters?  They have all come to a new world but still live in fear of it.

I don’t agree that following tradition is the easier route. I do believe that Meena’s mother struggles, but she is of a generation that is taught to accept what they are told and suppress their own ideas.  Her life as a widow required a certain mental toughness and strength and she does the things she needs to do to get by, but by no means was it easier.  For the reader, her struggles would be less obvious than the struggles that Meena and her sisters face. Since they have been exposed to different ways of being, they are torn between traditional values and their modern sensibilities. Meena’s mother simply does what she believes must be done but I think behind her matter of fact veneer she too wishes that life was different. She just doesn’t believe it can change. All of the characters in the book struggle with what is expected of them versus what they want and who they are.

There are things that always make their way into books. One of them is death.  A reader is moving happily along through a story when suddenly they realize, before it happens, that “somebody has to die” and it’s not even a murder mystery.  It’s almost as if death provides a kind of authenticity.  Why?

Absence and death were certainly threads throughout this entire story. Meena experiences a great deal of loss from the early loss of her father, her sister, her lover and even her sense of self. As a child, after seeing her mother’s love for her father expressed in mourning, she comes to misinterpret absence and longing as love and mourns her losses, holding them so close to her that she can never move beyond them. The death is the ultimate loss and is meant to force her to accept that the nature of life and love is inevitable loss. Hence, the title of the novel. If we know that everything we love will eventually be gone, can we find a way forward or are we destined to relive our pasts and mourn all that was lost.

You are right in noticing that “death” shows up in many books, whether it is thematic or literal, and I think it’s because stories are an extension of life and contextualize how we perceive ourselves. From the beginning of our lives we all want to know that we matter and we all wonder about our origins and what happens when we die…it’s no wonder that death is a theme in many stories.

Do you think every author writes his or her own story first?  How much of this story is yours?

I think that most writers use real life to inform their fiction and how much is real can range from transcribing conversations we hear on the bus to using our own biography. This novel was actually an evolution of some personal stories I had written about my own youth. Meena’s biography is similar to my own. Like her, I am the youngest of six daughters raised by a widowed mother and I did struggle with identity and cultural expectations. In a manner of speaking, there is a bit of me in all the characters. I like to think there is a bit of everyone in everything and that’s why we read – to understand ourselves and our world.

What advice would you have to give young marriageable woman?  Is it different for the women that live in Canada versus the old country?

I would tell them not to think of themselves as “marriageable” woman.  Marriage isn’t and needn’t be a right of passage. It’s a decision not an assumption. Woman should be valued for what they say, what they do and what they contribute not what they look like, what they wear or who they marry. Women, wherever they are, must challenge how society portrays and perceives them.

What’s next for your readers?

I’m in the early stages of writing another novel.

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