Award-winning author Shobha Rao will come to the Wisconsin Book Festival to discuss her most recent book, “Indian Country,” but something else is on her mind as she returns to Madison for the first time in years as a writer.
Rao will come to Central Library, 201 W. Mifflin St., this Saturday Oct. 25, where she will talk about her multi-layered book “Indian Country.” The most recent title from Rao is a murder mystery of sorts; she describes it, but it also delves into concepts of migration, identity, memory, and our relationships to land and water. The book follows the story of Javani and Saran, a couple from India who move to Montana after the latter accepts a job in the United States to dismantle a dam.
“What I tried to do with ‘Indian Country,’ which is new to me, is write a layered book,” Rao said. “On the surface, it’s about a young couple from India who don’t really want to be married to each other, but they end up married because of various circumstances.”
On a deeper level, “Indian Country” is about memory, land and water, Rao said. The three are intertwined through time, with memories being grounded in the longevity of water and land. 
Our lives may be temporary, but Rao refuses to believe that memories and impact simply fade at the end of life.
“Waters carry human memory. It’s a conviction that I came to in my thinking around disenfranchised people and displaced people, and how there are so many forces in the world that we cannot control,” Rao said.
Further layering of the book comes in with its title. Its name pulls from the Indian Country in the synonymous descriptor used by Native Americans for their ancestral homeland, communities and efforts. It takes from the character’s being Indian, but it also is inspired by Rao’s own upbringing in Indiana.
Rao and her family immigrated to Indiana when she was 7 years old. She didn’t know much English, but within the first few weeks at school, a classmate asked her, “What are you?”
She, with very little English, said she was Indian. The classmate followed up by asking her what tribe she was from.
“I didn’t know anything about Native American populations in the Americas, but that question and confusion originated over 500 years ago with Christopher Columbus mistakenly insisting that he landed in India and naming the Indigenous Indians,” Rao said. “That kind of stayed with me and haunted me.”
But the book is only one component of Rao coming to Madison. Rao has ties to Wisconsin from her childhood, where she would visit Milwaukee with her family. Later, as an adult, she stayed in Madison for a couple of months during a transition in her life. She had a friend living there working on their post-doctorate, so she crashed there for a while.
Rao remembers her experience in Madison as healing.
“I have really fond memories, and I’m so excited about coming back, being in a better place in my life and encountering it in a different way,” she said. “I have really lovely memories of Madison, even though they were from maybe, gosh, 15 plus years ago.”
Wisconsin also had a formative impact on Rao’s understanding of the American landscapes through Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books. The first book Rao read in English was “Little House on the Prairie.”
“It’s really a really amazing sort of a bit of a homecoming for me, considering that the ‘Little House’ books made such an impact — and Laura Ingalls Wilder has been such a complicated force in my life,” Rao said. “
While that particular title is set in Kansas, Ingalls hails from Pepin and centered her “Little House in the Big Woods” on her family’s time in the village. Rao is thinking about possibly renting a car to head to Big Woods while she’s in Wisconsin.
Rao will be at Central Library on Saturday, Oct. 25, from noon to 1 p.m. in the Lower-Level Program Room. It is free to attend; no registration is required.
