By Anita Rau Badami, 2006
Anita Rau Badami is an author I keep coming back to.
Years ago I read Tamarind Mem in a book club and remember no details, only that it was gripping, beautifully told story. Last year I was so impressed by the discussion of The Hero’s Walk on Canada Reads on CBC Radio that I read that book in two days. In my opinion, it is a much better novel than The Illegal, the book that won.
I found this bestseller by Lawrence Hill to be an overwrought potboiler I was unable to finish it. It’s not surprising the book won, because Clara Hughes (a person I greatly admire) was defending it. “Clara Hughes never loses,” one of my book club friends said.
My experience with The Hero’s Walk made me eager to read more by Badami. This book, like the other two novels I have read by her, does not disappoint. They all have engaging characters and beautiful language.
Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? begins as a a fairy tale. For the sake of family honour, a homely older sister must be married off before a younger sister. Unfortunately for the older girl, all of her suitors fall in love with her more beautiful sibling and want to marry her instead. The younger girl is dying of boredom in a backward village in the Punjab and longs for a more exciting life.
She finds that life when she is swept off her feet by a one-eyed man she flirts with through an open window before he even has a chance to meet the homely older girl. He has come home from Canada to look for a bride, and their meeting through the open window is the beginning of a long, passionate, loving marriage. The family salvages its honour by finding a local husband for the homely daughter.
Even before the arrival of the one-eyed suitor, the family had a Canadian connection. The father of the girls, whose names are Kanwar and Sharan, had been a passenger on the Komagata Maru, the ship turned away from landing in Canada even though all the brown passengers on board were British subjects. As the novel begins the father has taken to his string couch, constantly harking back to this rejection. Sharan’s dissatisfaction with life in the village is fed not only by her father’s unhappiness but also by the presence of another family whose father sends presents of lavender soap and nylon stockings from Canada between visits home.
Sharan, now called Bibi-ji, is living in Canada with her husband, now called Pa-ji, when the whole village disappears during the partition of India and Pakistan. For years Bibi-ji searches for her family, and finally discovers a niece, her sister’s daughter, living in Delhi. Nimmo was a small child when her father and brothers disappeared and her mother saved her by hiding her in a bin full of grain. She vaguely remembers her mother’s clean lavender-scented feet dangling in the air but does not even recall her family’s name. The family connection is proven to Bibi-ji’s satisfaction by Nimmo’s possession of a post card in her sister Kanwar’s handwriting.
Bibi-ji and Pa-ji become pillars of the Indo-Canadian community in Vancouver. Their home is open to all Sikh newcomers, and their restaurant the Delhi Junction is a meeting place for the wider Indo-Canadian community. All that mars the couple’s happiness is the absence of children, and when they connect with Bibi-ji’s niece, they foster her older son and bring him to Canada to give him opportunities. In spite of abundant love, the boy does not fit into the school system in Canada, does not become the lawyer, doctor, or engineer he was supposed to, and is a disappointment to both his Indian and Canadian parents. Feeling his birth parents have abandoned him, the boy is truly at home in neither the Canadian nor Indian world. He finds a sense of belonging as a convert to Sikh nationalism, and begins studying at a religious school in India. Bibi-ji comes to feel she has committed a terrible sin in stealing her sister’s life and her sister’s grandchild.
The story is told through the intertwined lives of three women—Nimmo the niece, Bibi-ji her aunt, and Leela, the daughter of a Brahmin father and a white mother. Marriage gives Leela a sense of belonging as one of the Bhats of Bangalore, and she has difficulty adjusting to life in Canada. She and Bibi-ji become best friends, and sharing gossip with Bibi-ji certainly helps Leela acclimitize. She has an epiphany when she is able to give the right answer to a stranger who stops and asks her for directions.
Nimmo, the traumatized niece, lives in fear and anxiety. Coming from a family and a village that have disappeared, she knows from early childhood how politics and history can tragically change the course of an ordinary person’s life. While others are sure that people won’t turn on neighbours who have been friends for generations, in her bones she knows otherwise. Because they must wear their hair and beards long, devout Sikh men are easy targets for violent expressions of prejudice. The women are not so easy to pick out, and are often left to deal with the aftermath of violence.
Events in India tragically affect the lives of all three women, including the two who live in Canada.
After the storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar by the Indian government, after armed Sikhs have been occupying it, and the killing of many innocent pilgrims, Indira Ghandi’s Sikh guards assassinate her. The assassination is followed by widespread slaughter of Sikhs, to which the police and government turn a blind eye. The Indo Canadian community is torn apart by events in the home they have mostly tried to leave behind, decades-long friendships are rent asunder, and moderates within the Sikh community become the objects of terrorist threats and, in some cases, murder. The story that began as a romantic fairy tale ends with the Air India bombing.
The song of the nightbird is audible only to those who are about to die. It is audible to far too many people in this story. These ordinary people trying to go about their ordinary lives do not experience the good deaths of the very old dying in their own beds. They experience brutal violent deaths born of ancient hatreds and the complicity of powerful people.
There are some hopeful aspects to this sad story. One of Nimmo’s non-Sikh neighbours warns her of the approaching mob. A very old man finds his way home. He may be the eternal wanderer, or just possibly he may be one of Nimmo’s long-lost brothers.