Continents Apart

The only thing clumsy about Anita Rau Badami8217;s new novel about the Partition is the title

Agood writer can make whole worlds come alive. Anita Rau Badami more than proved her story-telling abilities with Tamarind Mem and The Hero8217;s Walk; she follows up with a worthy third act in Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?, about which the clumsiest thing is the title. It8217;s a story of birth pangs, death throes, and the intervening period of struggle, beginning in pre-Partition Punjab, meandering through Bangalore and Canada, and ending with the Kanishka airplane tragedy in 1984. Badami pulls her reader gently into a slow-burning fuse of a story that ends by tearing your heart out.

Three women dominate the narrative: Bibi-ji, the Punjabi peasant8217;s daughter who makes good as an immigrant in Canada; Nimmo, her niece, who struggles to raise a family in the chaos of Delhi; and Leela, the south Indian who rents Bibi-ji8217;s home in Vancouver. Each bears emotional scars, each takes her place in the larger history of Partition and Sikh extremism, and each is linked to the other in life and death.

Bibi-ji bewitches the suitor intended for her plainer sister, and goes off to Canada to share in his entrepreneurial, large-hearted life. Her enjoyment of their material success and social prestige is marred by the guilt of having cheated her sister of this same life, and having condemned her to die brutally in the violence of Partition; but everything in Bibi-ji8217;s life is coloured by a streak of selfishness. When she finally finds the last of her family in the shape of Nimmo, the childless aunt makes a devil8217;s compact with the niece, offering to help clear the family8217;s debt in return for taking their eldest son, Jasbeer, back to Canada with her. It is yet another terrible choice, and one with tragic results.

Leela is a half-German, half-Kannadiga woman whose life has always hung in the uncomfortable, lonely spaces between worlds 8212; the space between her parents, the space between upper-caste Hindus and foreigners and, at the end of her life, the space between India and Canada. It is through Leela that Bibi-ji finds her long-lost niece, and through Bibi-ji that Leela meets her end.

The everywoman of the novel, the survivor, is Nimmo. She fights the childhood trauma of her mother8217;s death to make a happy home in which her husband Satpal and their three children can thrive despite financial difficulties. But Nimmo8217;s cocoon of safety and her drifts of love are breached by the violence of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, sentencing her to survival in an ocean of grief.

Badami, like all good writers, explores history in a way that makes the greatest impact 8212; that is, through characters you can empathise with, and thus suffer with. Leela8217;s story is the most slight, and the lessons of her life the most abstract 8212; literally a case of shooting the messenger. Bibi-ji is as fallible as she is lovable and loving, though there remains about her a touch of two-dimensionality. Nimmo8217;s story is beautifully nuanced, real, and heart-rending.

Unlike The Hero8217;s Walk, the writing in Badami8217;s third novel is plain to the point of pedestrian, but this self-effacing style powerfully sets off the explosive story. Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? is a moving exploration of some of the most painful wounds in the history of modern India.