Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?
Anita Rau Badami, 2006
Random House Canada
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780676976052
Summary
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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 24, 1961
• Where—Rourkela, Orissi, India
• Education—B.A., University of Madras; Sophia College
(Bombay); M.A., University of Calgary (Canada)
• Awards—Regional Commonwealth Writers Prize; Premio
Berto (Italy); Marian Engel Award
• Currently—Canada
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 copy-writer, 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. Can You Hear the Nightbird Call was published in 2004.
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. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
A big-hearted and compulsively readable novel...[Badami is] a gifted observer of the human comedy.
Toronto Star
Pulsates with humanity.... If you do manage to put this novel down, it’s probably only to compose yourself to keep on reading
Globe and Mail (Canada)
As Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? shows, the enduring state of ‘in-between’ that is part of both immigrant life in Canada and Sikh life in post-partition India is equally rich in the complex joy of struggle and the possibility for tension, misunderstanding, and, sometimes, violence
Calgary Herald (Canada)
Nightbird brilliantly tells the timeless story of immigrants who face hardship as they try to build new lives, straddling two worlds and never really fitting into either
Vancouver Sun
A powerful, heady mix of brilliant characters, poignant reality, and a rare depth of emotional integrity and commitment.... This is a book you will want to explore and savour.
Telegram (St. John's, Canada)
Discussion Questions
1. Reread the three epigraphs at the beginning of the novel and discuss how these three quotations provide the thematic "skeleton" for the novel. In particular, look at the first epigraph: "My memory keeps getting in the way of your history." What are some of the ways that memory and history intertwine in the lives of Badami's characters?
2. In an interview with Quill & Quire in September 2006, Badami explores the origins of Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? In the late 1990s, after she and her family had moved to Vancouver, Badami was preoccupied with certain themes. She explains that she "began wondering what you would do if you discovered that someone you loved—son, father, lover, husband—was involved in something terrible. Would I live with the knowledge, keep quiet about it, or would I feel morally obligated to inform the authorities? And then how would I deal with the consequences of losing that love?" Explore the many and various ways that Badami chooses to unravel these preoccupations in the novel.
3. When Leela's grandmother tells her the story of Trishanku, the king condemned to hang upside down between two worlds, Leela initially sees her own fate as similarly unfortunate. However, Venku, the cook, offers her another interpretation of the story, explaining that it is perhaps fortunate to have access to two worlds. Discuss how the various characters in the novel are caught between worlds and whether this in-between state is a boon or a curse?
4. "Forgetfulness was good, said Bibi-ji. A bad memory was necessary for a person wishing to settle in, to become one of the crowd, to become an invisible minority." (p. 136-7) Later in the novel we read this: "In the blank slate of a foreign country, Pa-ji came to understand, you could scribble the truth any way you wanted" (p. 203). In the novel, what are some of the repercussions of forgetfulness or of denying truth? Does a person have to dull their memory and forget their past in order to assimilate into a new culture or country? Do any of the characters in the novel do this successfully?
5. We learn of the nightbird of the novel's title though Nimmo: "Above all this noise a bird sang deliriously, as if determined to drown it out. Perhaps it was the fabled nightbird, so sweet and unearthly was its singing. Nimmo had a vague memory of her mother telling her stories about this bird, whose song was a portent of ill luck. Or was it death?" (p. 144). Who is the question in the title of the novel directed at? Why do you think the author chose to phrase the title as a question? What are some of the many ways in which signs and portents shape the novel?
6. Bibi-ji is selfish and impulsive, yet overall she remains a likeable character. How does the author manage to render the character likeable despite some of her less- than-desirable traits?
7. Where do you think the novel turns from one filled with humour and hope to one of great tragedy? Discuss the many ways that Anita Rau Badami foreshadows the harrowing incidents that happen in the last quarter of the novel.
8. What are some of the techniques that Anita Rau Badami uses to make Chapter 24 such a powerful one? What is the shift in perspective that is dramatically different from the other chapters? Who are the "they" of the chapter title?
9. Look closely at the character of Jasbeer and how he evolves throughout the novel. What are the seeds of his extremism? Why does displacement cause contempt and violence in some and hope and possibility in others? What are we to make of Jasbeer by the end of the novel?
10. Of the three main female characters—Bibi-ji, Leela and Nimmo—do you think we are meant to take one perspective as the author's?
11. Do you find the final scene of the novel offers any hope or redemption after the extreme violence and disintegration that precedes it?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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