Sari alert
The publisher of Anita Rau Badami’s new novel, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?, went with the de rigeur sari-and-flowers cover. I thought my copy of Maps for Lost Lovers was identical, but actually it went with the mehndi-and-flowers option. Which is nothing like sari-and-flowers at all.
The silly thing is that Nightbird covers recent Punjabi history, so if you had to choose any orientalist cover it would be something with a salwar kameez.
Set in India and Canada, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? is the story of three women linked and destroyed by the political turmoil that sweeps through the Punjab first during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, and then in the 1980s when the demand for an independent Sikh state called Khalistan comes into violent existence. [Link]
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. [Link]
Hurree Babu notes a resonance in the title:
… the title immediately made me think of Khushwant Singh’s I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale; they could easily be the first and second lines of a Lyrical Indian poem. [Link]
Badami talks about her own experiences:
Of lapsed Hindu background, Badami drew on personal experiences for the book, such as seeing a man burned alive during anti-Sikh violence in Modinagar, as well as having had a neighbour in southern India whose husband died in the Air India disaster…
‘I found it incredibly difficult to get people here to talk about certain things. They’d tell me [only] the pleasant things, but not about the politics and how they felt after the Golden Temple was attacked, after Indira Gandhi was assassinated… On the one side, the Sikh side, there is a huge feeling of guilt — even if they weren’t involved…
‘The sense I got from talking to people was that [the disastrous handling of the Air India investigation and trial by Canadian authorities] was a racist thing, and that if there were more people who were white on that flight, it would have been different altogether… I was reading all the accounts — [the police] followed somebody who was practising how to explode bombs. The RCMP were sitting there in a car, listening to things being blown up. And nobody did anything! This thing could have been stopped. I found that unbelievable…
‘There were these people murdered in Delhi after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, and they still haven’t caught the perpetrators [even though] everyone knows who did it. Only one person has been convicted. I’ve discovered that these acts of violence that occur seemingly randomly, seemingly exploding out of the air, aren’t really. It’s something that has been building for many, many years…
‘In Calcutta, for instance, we used to live in this lovely railway colony… That particular street was known as the Street of Death, because there were many busy roads intersecting at that point, and these buses would come crashing around the corner and take wide, sweeping turns. I remember from when I was about 10 years old, there was a fellow who used to sell bananas on that sidewalk, and he used to live under the cart. One morning he wasn’t there, and there were just squashed bananas and blood stains everywhere, because a bus driver had lost control and driven over the banana-man…
‘One of my cousins married a Sikh guy, and I remember he had to be smuggled [to the airport] in a car, covered in blankets, to fly back to the U.S., where he had a family. He was one of the most cheerful of men to that point, but this incident scarred him so badly. He has [since] insisted his son wear a turban. He’s become very Sikh, very committed to Sikhism. And I don’t know how my cousin must feel, because she’s Hindu…
‘After a while [with Khalistanis] the Punjabi population had no clue who was the enemy. Really, after a while it was completely blurred; you had no idea who to support — everybody was rotten. A lot of people in the Punjab and in India felt that the extremism was imported from Canada, that there were people sitting here, leading a completely comfortable life and stirring up trouble. It was funded quite a bit from here…
‘When my first book, Tamarind Mem, came out… the first call was from a man — and this was an Indo-Canadian radio station — screaming at me for being a feminist and swearing up and down that he would not read the book….
‘… every one of those women in the room, from different parts of India, claimed that in her mythology or regional folktales there is such a thing as a nightbird, and that it is almost always a portent of some kind of doom.’ [Link]
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