After Indira Gandhi is murdered by her two Sikh bodyguards in , India and its diaspora enter into a communal frenzy. It refers us to the politically committed charge contained in the narrative. As such, polyphonic narratives produce new interpretations of the world. To that effect, all boundaries become porous, including those of contemporary international geopolitics which, because they have been drawn according to the priorities of Nation-States, do not readily accommodate the needs of transmigratory identities.
In India, society is seen as a grid within which each caste, gender, religion, and class has its own place. Needless to say, contagion is simply not an issue in this compartmentalized world. Bibi-ji, who twenty years after her own father does manage to migrate to Canada, does her utmost to become more Indian than the Indians, relishing the authenticity of the Indian products she sells in her convenience store on Main Street.
Yet the Indianness she aspires to owes its appeal to the distance that separates her from her homeland. Likewise, when the community hears about Partition, the news is not first perceived as a direct threat since what happens in India initially seems irrelevant to these new immigrants to Canada. An Englishman, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, had been appointed in the days before independence to head a commission that would create two nations in the subcontinent — India, with a Hindu majority, and Pakistan, for the Muslims.
East Punjab, with its Hindu and Sikh majority, would remain part of India. Within this framework, Leela is an anomaly within the system because of her mixed origins, and she has no other choice but to remain an out-caste to all, a significant fact in Hindu society which is regulated by impenetrable rules of inclusion and exclusion. After moving to Canada — against her own will — she immediately strives to carve out a new home for herself:.
She would redraw maps and mythologies like the settlers who came before her [ Like them, she would make this corner of the world her own until it was time to return home.
Cultural traits are blown up, giving way to exaggerated representations of history, religion, and culture. Bibi-ji and her husband acquire a house which they name the Taj Mahal, and turn it into a Mickey-Mouse version of the latter.
You will see. Endless stories about native rebellions and British bravery. The original India is lost in translation to the goras , fascinated as they are by their visions of Indian women in terms of sati victims and child brides.
But the homeland is also lost to the desis , faintly recalled in a frozen, idealistic manner, so obsessed are they with cricket and cultural purity, and competing amongst each other to determine who is the most Indian of them all.
It is a firm policy. On Main Street we are very law-abiding citizens. Nobody carries weapons. Then whatever are you meaning, Mr. Bibi-ji glared at the principal. Several cultural registers meet and come into play in this extract. From a narrative perspective, this light-heartedness is prolonged by the fact that in the first half of the novel, the women evolve within the boundaries of a chapter devoted to each of them. They do not interact, and do not know each other, living on different continents and in different times, thus conveying an impression of international consistency, if not security.
Yet in the second half, their itineraries and their destinies become inextricably and tragically linked, resulting in death or grief-stricken madness for all those involved. Violence thus becomes a symptom of the impact between cultures as they shift from diversity to difference. The women all suffer from the Rushdian syndrome of lost homelands, as they are torn between the far-away land of their ancestors and the here-and-now of their children.
This strain put upon identity is prolonged throughout the novel by constant references to events leading to the drawing up of new national boundaries, whether it be the creation of Pakistan in , that of Bangladesh in , or the near-creation of Khalistan, a demand which reached its apex in the s.
The epitome of this fear is Leela, the multi-racial child who is so obsessed with her hybrid state that she is terrified of doorways, lines, nets, and maps, anything that echoes the interstitial dimensions of geography.
Her death on Air India flight is the tragic reminder of her lingering in non-space, since after the crash neither the Canadian nor the Indian governments conducted a state mourning for the passengers on board, and she remains, in death, a parent-less child of two nations. The recurring mention of maps, planes, phone calls, and television news accelerates time and abolishes distances.
But as technology evolves, the place becomes contaminated by the violent communal tensions that descend upon India. In , when war broke out between India and Pakistan, the battle came to the Delhi Junction as well.
The seating maps altered [ The linoleum floor between them turned into the Line of Control 4 — an unseen barrier of barbed wire stretching across it, hot lights blazing warnings as soldiers stood guard with guns cocked. Anger, hurt and loss simmered on both sides, conversation between the two factions in the Junction ceased altogether […]. The butterfly effect of world events spun throughout the novel dissolves boundaries, both temporal and spatial ones, at the same time as it erects new ones.
At the temporal level first, by suggesting that the lack of resolution of the conflicts attendant on decolonization is at the heart of contemporary global terrorism, but also at a spatial level, suggesting that the lack of concern of the First World is what throws the Third World into uncertainty and communal radicalism.
I was left with the shock of death and loss for all characters and after reading the novel I was angry at its historical injustices. At the same time, I regretted investing emotional attachments to characters who were deeply flawed. My sense of the novel's downfall lay at the heart of the characters' weakness to pride.
From Harjot Singh's listlessness and "disappearance" long before he actually decided to leave his family because of his wounded pride of not being able to land at the shores of Vancouver once arriving by the Komagata Maru. To his daughter, Sharanjeet Bibi-ji Kaur, who privately resents her station in life and her duties, unhappy to be obedient to her mother or selfless to her sister, Kanwar.
But this attitude is not entirely due to her spoiled upbringing, but rather an internal pride, vanity, and materialistic ambition that drives her to steal her sister's marriage prospect, Khushwant Pa-ji Singh and eventually her niece's own son, Jasbeer.
Leela Shastri Bhat is ostracized by her grandmother, Akka, and her father's relatives because she is considered a "half-breed," a daughter of a Punjab, Hari Shastri and an English woman, Rosa Schweers. And rather than accept her genetic fate and cultural liminality, she loathes her own grey eyes, fair skin, and "White" culture.
Instead she prides herself in becoming the wife of a prosperous and prestigious man, Balachandra Balu Bhat, who comes from a well known Punjab family and high caste, and submerges herself in adhering to Indian traditional practices. Leela, opposite of Bibi-ji, resents being pulled from her home in India to Vancouver, fearful of becoming yet again, nameless.
Yet, though she suffered racial cruelty from her Indian grandmother, she fails to understand and accept her son's choice in marriage to an English woman. These and other characters provide a backdrop to the cruelty and harshness of the warring factions of the Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh people, which led to The Partition of India with its Hindu majority and Pakistan with its Muslim majority.
Violent acts of brutality by government and militant groups climaxed to the eventual killings of pilgrims at the Golden Temple. This act in itself prompted the assassination of Prime Minister, Indira Ghandi, which then led to vengeful killings of Sikhs throughout India.
Perhaps it was Badami's intent to situate her characters at the "wrong time in the wrong place," but also to propel them forward into devastation and loss due to extremely wrong choices that stem from deeply rooted pride and discord. The book is without resolution. It is merely a haunting reminder of the brutality and injustice of war, the interconnectedness between people, their actions, and their consequences, and the cost of life for the sake of land, name, autonomy, and religious freedom, where moderation seems to be the best answer, though rarely used.
It's a novel of extremes, but then again, extremity is at the heart of this book's subject and a lesson of tempering it, is still yet to be learned. At each node of this net there hung a gem, so arranged that if you looked at one you saw all the others reflected in it. As each gem reflected every other one, so was every human affected by the miseries and joys of every other human, every other living thing on the planet.
When one gem was touched, hundreds of others shimmered or danced in response, and a tear in the net made the whole world tremble. As tensions between the Hindus and Sikhs escalate in India, all of the women are affected. Thankfully, they cannot know to what extent their families will have tragedy rained down upon them as the tensions give rise to the massacre at the Golden Temple and the assassination of Indira Ghandi; and eventually climax in the bombing of Air India Flight Badami skillfully writes not only well-developed characters here.
Impressive, and highly recommended. By Anita Rau Badami What began as a somewhat hopeful book, quickly and devastatingly spiralled into a travesty. Home Groups Talk Explore Zeitgeist. Have you checked out SantaThing , LibraryThing's gift-giving tradition? I Agree This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and if not signed in for advertising. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.
Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? The ambitious, defiant Sikh Bibi-ji, born Sharanjeet Kaur in a Punjabi village, steals her sister Kanwar's destiny, thereby gaining passage to Canada. Leela Bhat, born to a German mother and a Hindu father, is doomed to walk the earth as a half-and-half.
Leela's childhood in Bangalore is scarred by her in-between identity and by the great unhappiness of her mother, Rosa, an outcast in their conservative Hindu home. Readers will be grateful that nothing stopped Badami from telling tales. She is warm and intense with a throaty and unfettered laugh which punctuates our talk. My husband and I were travelling back to Delhi after our honeymoon.
From our bus window I saw a Sikh man set on fire, then thrown over a bridge. I wanted to humanize the facts, to give life and shape to the dry bones of history and to the randomness of reality. She achieves her intention, linking the lives of three women whose fates are entwined by love, chance, and ultimately, the cycle of violence. The story spans over half a century, from the years leading up to the partition of India and Pakistan in to the explosion of the Air India flight.
The narrative moves seamlessly between the personal and political; this is a novel in the truest sense, where issues are explored to their depths through freshly imagined characters and a compelling story. We live side by side with Bibi-ji, the most brash and beautiful of the three heroines, who grows up poor and fatherless in Panjaur. The smell invades her days, spoiling her relish of rice and dal, and poisons her dreams.
Once settled in Vancouver, Bibi-ji meets the pale-eyed Leela, who becomes her new neighbour. On the way to the airport from India back to Canada a young taxi driver hands Leela a slip of paper with his name and address.
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