From the Publisher
Set against the tumultuous backdrop of a fragmenting Punjab and
moving between Canada and India, Can you Hear the Nightbird
Call? charts the interweaving stories of three Indian
women - Bibi-ji, Leela and Nimmo - each in search of a resting
place amid rapidly changing personal and political
landscapes.
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. Years after Rosa's shadowy death, Leela has learned to
deal with her in-between status, and she marries Balu Bhat, a man
from a family of purebred Hindu Brahmins, thus acquiring status and
a tenuous stability. However, when Balu insists on emigrating to
Canada, Leela must trade her newfound comfort for yet another
beginning. Once in Vancouver with her husband and two children,
Leela's initial reluctance to leave home gradually evolves.
While Bibi-ji gains access to a life of luxury in Canada, her
sister Kanwar, left behind to weather the brutal violence of the
Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, is not so fortunate. She
disappears, leaving Bibi-ji bereft and guilt-ridden.
Meanwhile, a little girl, who just might be Kanwar's six-year-old
daughter Nimmo, makes her way to Delhi, where she is adopted,
marries and goes on to build a life with her loving husband,
Satpal. Although this existence is constantly threatened by
poverty, Nimmo cherishes it, filled as it is with love and
laughter, and she guards it fiercely.
Across the world, Bibi-ji is plagued by unhappiness: she is unable
to have a child. She believes that it is her punishment for having
stolen her sister's future, but tries to drown her sorrows by
investing all her energies into her increasingly successful
restaurant called the Delhi Junction. This restaurant becomes the
place where members of the growing Vancouver Indo-Canadian
community come to dispute and discuss their pasts, presents and
futures.
Over the years, Bibi-ji tries to uncover her sister Kanwar's fate
but is unsuccessful until Leela Bhat - carrying a message from
Satpal, Nimmo's husband - helps Bibi-ji reconnect with the woman
she comes to believe is her niece - Nimmo. Used to getting whatever
she has wanted from life, Bibi-ji subtly pressures Nimmo into
giving up Jasbeer, her oldest child, into her care.
Eight-year old Jasbeer does not settle well in Vancouver. Resentful
of his parents' decision to send him away, he finds a sense of
identity only in the stories , of Sikh ancestry, real and imagined,
told to him by Bibi-ji's husband, Pa-ji. Over the years, his
childish resentments harden, and when a radical preacher named Dr.
Randhawa arrives in Vancouver, preaching the need for a separate
Sikh homeland, Jasbeer is easily seduced by his violent
rhetoric.
Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? elegantly moves
back and forth between the growing desi community in Vancouver and
the increasingly conflicted worlds of Punjab and Delhi, where rifts
between Sikhs and Hindus are growing. In June 1984, just as
political tensions within India begin to spiral out of control,
Bibi-ji and Pa-ji decide to make their annual pilgrimage to the
Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest of Sikh shrines. While they
are there, the temple is stormed by Indian government troops
attempting to contain Sikh extremists hiding inside the temple
compound. The results are devastating.
Then, in October of the same year, Indira Gandhi is murdered by her
two Sikh bodyguards, an act of vengeance for the assault on the
temple. The assassination sets off a wave of violence against
innocent Sikhs.
The tide of anger and violence spills across borders and floods
into distant Canada, and into the lives of neighbours Bibi-ji and
Leela. Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?
weaves together the personal and the political - and
beautifully brings the reader into the reality of terrorism and
religious intolerance.
Bibi-ji turned to gaze out at the street. They could become far
more prosperous, she was sure of that. Opportunities lay around
them like pearls on these streets. But they were visible only to
people with sharp eyes.
"What are you looking at, Bibi-ji?" Lalloo asked, coming around to
the front with a box full of pickle jars. He lowered it carefully
on the floor and stared out the window.
"What am I looking for, Lalloo, for," Bibi-ji corrected. "I am
looking for pearls."
"I don't see anything there, Bibi-ji," Lalloo remarked after a few
moments.
She laughed. "Neither do I, but I will. I know I will." The war had
left the whole world poorer: why had Pa-ji not thought of opening a
used-clothing store instead of this Indian grocery shop? She
wondered whether the shop would do better in Abbotsford or in
Duncan, where there were more Sikhs than here in Vancouver. But no,
she had a feeling that it was a city with a future, one in which
she would be wise to invest her money and her hard work.
-from Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?
About the Author
Anita Rau Badami was born in India in 1961. Although her family's
roots are in southern India, Badami spent most of her life in the
north and eastern parts of the country, moving every two to three
years because of her father's job as an officer in the Indian
Railway. She earned a degree in English from the
University of Madras, studied journalism at Sophia College in
Bombay and then spent many years as a copywriter, journalist and
children's writer before emigrating to Canada in 1991, following
her husband to Calgary, where he had gone to pursue his master's
degree in Environmental Science. Raising a young son and grappling
with Canadian winters, Badami took creative writing courses, which
eventually led to her own master's degree in English Literature.
Her thesis at the University of Calgary went on to become her
hugely successful first novel, Tamarind Mem,
published in 1996. The novel landed her firmly on the map as a
talented new Canadian writer to watch.
In 2000, Badami published her second novel, The Hero's
Walk. By then she was living in Vancouver, where the family
had moved so that her husband could complete a PhD in Planning.
The Hero's Walk was met with great critical
acclaim; it won the Regional Commonwealth Writers Prize, Italy's
Premio Berto and was named a Washington Post Best Book of
2001. It was also longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin
Literary Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction, and was
shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize. Both Tamarind
Mem and The Hero's Walk have been
published in many countries throughout the world.
Shortly after the publication of her second novel, Anita Rau Badami
won the Marian Engel Award. She is the youngest woman ever to
receive this award, which is given to a Canadian woman author in
mid-career for outstanding prose writing.