Although she's now 39 and a mother of a 14-year-old son, Anita Rau Badami laughs uninhibitedly like a young girl, causing heads to turn in London's Groucho Club where we are taking tea and discussing what will surely rank as one of the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction, the Ammayya - grandmother - in Badami's second novel, The Hero's Walk, winner of the Canada/Caribbean section of the Commonwealth Prize.
Badami is Indian but for the past 11 years has lived in Canada. The narrative of her novel shifts between the two countries, and the horrendous grandmother is the matriarch of a shabby-genteel Brahmin family, marooned in the past, a finely-tuned engine of selfishness and cunning, whose idiosyncrasies are so extreme she must be based on a real person I suggest. More laughter.
"People tell me that I have a neurosis about my own grandmother which is why I keep creating these creatures. But what's life without a horrible character or two?" Life in all its horribleness and humour - and the juxtaposition between the two - is what interests her. The title, The Hero's Walk, appears at first sight to be ironic, as the eponymous hero, Sripathi Rau, appears to have failed in every aspect of his life - as son, father, brother, husband - even in his job as copywriter in a fifth-rate advertising agency in small-town southern India.
"Of course he is not a hero in the conventional sense. The book actually started with this fascination I had for mythological heroes or people of mythic proportion, those grand heroes of yore that you find in every mythology, in every culture. They're larger than life.
"They manage to triumph over all kinds of odds without problem or they're so foolish that they hurl themselves into trouble. But for most people, life itself is a challenge, from the beginning to the end. And I started thinking that each one of us is heroic simply to be able to survive with hope intact and with a reasonable amount of dignity.
"Who in this world is completely good or completely bad? I don't believe that there is anybody who is completely any way. It's just a little step this way or that way that makes you evil or wonderful or stupid. But I think each one of us is a combination of all three - there are moments when you miss your step.
"It's just small things, small gestures in life, that make you a bad person or a good person and hopefully, by the end of it all, you find the decency in yourself to find that flaw and perhaps redeem yourself in some small way."
Redemption for Sripathi Rau is offered via his granddaughter Maya, the seven-year-old child of the daughter he rejected when she married a Canadian and who, on the death of both parents in a road accident, is brought back to India to live with her eccentric maternal family. From these tragic beginnings, Badami has built a story which builds and bubbles with laughter that finally explodes like the flooded sewers that act as a deus ex machina in the final pages.
Although Badami read English Literature in Madras, it wasn't until she arrived in Calgary, 10 years later, that she enrolled in a creative writing course.
"My husband was an engineer but he hated it. After we'd been married six years, he decided to reinvent himself and do a masters in environmental science." And Canada? "In India, it was a difficult thing to do to just quit a good job and go back to school."
Calgary was just "picked out of a hat".
The couple had met in Bombay and the marriage was semi-arranged. "It was set up by a great aunt of mine, but she was my husband's grade-school English teacher for many years." By that time, she was working as a copywriter in an advertising agency.
"We both had the option of just not liking each other and backing out. But as it happens I like men who are tall, and he was - because I used to like wearing heels but now I've become more sensible. It's a ridiculous reason I know. And of course I liked people who read a lot and had a sense of humour."
While her husband was studying, Badami had the problem of what to do in this new, unfamiliar environment.
"Almost as soon as I arrived in Canada, I decided to sign up for a creative writing course. I had never thought of such a thing - it doesn't exist in India. I used to be a journalist in India but in Canada I didn't think it right for me to become a journalist again. I didn't know anything about the culture, the people, the society, it was a blank. I didn't want to work for newspapers, I didn't want to do advertising, but I needed to do something connected with writing - it's been my passion and my profession and I couldn't imagine not writing."
In the meantime, she was being introduced to ordinary Canadians through two part-time jobs: library assistant and sales assistant in a china shop. ("I got very good at laying out tables with fancy things on them and convincing people to blow $400 on some dinner plate or a teapot or one of those Royal Doulton figurines.")
"In retrospect, both jobs were perfect for a writer: you don't have to think and you meet people; the psychic energy is intact for the writing. And the creative writing was my sanity. I was writing short stories and having such a good time. The professor who was running the course said my short stories were getting too long to be short stories any more, and was I interested in writing a novel? So I thought, why not? He told me about a masters in English literature that allowed you to write a work of fiction as your thesis."
THE first year was devoted to theory and post-colonial literature and proved a revelation, her degree in Madras having been firmly rooted in traditional English literature.
"I was introduced to a whole raft of new writing. And that was one of the reasons why I was so encouraged to write my own stuff. I read Margaret Attwood for the first time, believe it or not. I didn't start in any order. Cat's Eye was the first one. Then I read Michael Ondaatje's Running In The Family, then I caught up with the rest. Then there was Carol Shields - at that point, she hadn't written The Stone Diaries, but there was a lovely collection of short stories - and Rohinton Mistry's short stories had just come out. There were so many and I had a lovely time, thinking each one is so different, so I can write something different as well." In the second year, she had the option of writing a creative piece and "then theorising my own novel - it was quite bizarre".
She has always written in English, although it is not her first language (she speaks four languages). "This is a choice I made very early on. I like it because it'sIt's got all these holes in it, where you can draw out strings from other languages, other idioms, metaphors, logic from other languages can be inserted into English in a funny kind of way and that adds a strange texture to the language. And it is the most illogical language you can imagine and - because of that illogic - you can do all kinds of things with it.
"My sister lived in California and she likes to talk on the phone.We'd have these huge quarrels over something we'd both remembered completely differently, so that started off this whole train of thought about memory.
"At the same time, I was reading a whole lot of stuff about subjectivity and genre - one of the subjects I was studying, autobiographical subjects and memoirs, the line between that and fiction." Indeed Tamarind Mem, the thesis that became her first novel, is written in the first person, but from two perspectives, a mother (in India) and a daughter (in Canada).
"Memory is so labile, it changes from person to person, and I thought it the perfect vehicle to explore the kind of state I was in, which was hanging between two worlds. I'm living here but my history is there, and my memories are there and my past is there in India. But I'm also building a past here, in Canada."
The Hero's Walk is much more traditional in construction, Badami explains. "It was necessary to have quite a conventional novelistic structure because it echoes the way these people lead their lives." Like Badami herself, the family communicates in English, but it's a form of Indian English which has a curious time-warp feel about it. Badami plunders its arcane vocabulary and grammar with gusto, sometimes bringing farce and tragedy into close proximity, although she is aware of the dangers.
"This is a very conventional family, bound by tradition and prejudice, the way that they even preserved the rotten sofa, even covered in plastic, for goodness sake, so the language had to echo the mindset of these characters. They are ridiculously anachronistic and everything around them is changing - even the matchmaker is using a computer, for God's sake."
Is she not worried about alienating an Indian readership by appearing to mock a way of life that still exists in India to some degree? "I'd like to think that most people see the absurdity of life around us and take it all with a big dose of humour and I think they appreciate it because it isn't done with malice, it's done with warmth and affection. Because that's how I feel. I can't help but notice the absurdity of things that happen there and the only way you deal with it is to laugh at it."
As for winning the Commonwealth prize, she says it's astonishing and lovely. "You hope that somebody is going to read it and like it and you don't dare expect anything more. But I think also that the people who read literary fiction now, what touches them more than say the exoticism of the book, is its familiarity.
"The books that I love the most are the books in which I can identify with the characters completely - even though their names are strange and different, it doesn't matter. The feelings are the same - the universality of those emotions are the same for people all over, and that's what I relate to."
The Hero's Walk, by Anita Rau Badami is published by Bloomsbury (£15.99 in the UK)