Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?
by Anita Rau Badami
Viking, HK$198
'Years before she stole her sister Kanwar's fate and sailed across the world from India to Canada, before she became Bibi-ji, she was Sharanjeet Kaur.' So begins Anita Rau Badami's third novel, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?, a story of guilt and misplaced longings that plague the characters across oceans and generations. The story spins through the lives of three women over 50 years and criss-crosses India and Canada.
Six-year-old Sharan wants nothing more than to escape the small, dusty existence of her village in West Punjab. There exists a world of luxury across the seas, she knows from the lavender-scented soap in a neighbour's house, sent all the way from Canada.
Hoping for a better life, her father too had sailed to Canada aboard the Japanese liner Komagata Maru. But denied permission to land, he returned a disillusioned man, leaving Sharan with no soap to wash the smell of dung from her hands. So Sharan, faced with the iniquities of the world, takes to sticking out her lower lip mutinously and querying, 'Why not?'.
Years later, the question serves Sharan well as she makes a comfortable life for herself in Vancouver while, in India, partition tears Punjab asunder throwing the lives of its inhabitants into chaos. Sharan loses touch with her elder sister, who seems to have disappeared in the maelstrom. Her attempts to track down the children come to nothing.