FICTION
Public and private destinies
UMA MAHADEVAN-DASGUPTA
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The novel succeeds because Badami's characters are sensitively created.
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Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? Anita Rau Badami, Penguin/ Viking, p.405, Rs. 495.
ANITA RAU BADAMI'S third novel, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?, begins with an epigraph from Agha Shahid Ali's "Farewell" — "My memory keeps getting in the way of your history." The novel, which opens in a village called Panjaur in the West Punjab in 1928 and ends in Vancouver and Delhi in June 1986, is about the intertwined threads of memory and history that connect the grief of an old man, the betrayal of a sister, and the tragedies of families.
The tapestry of history
Not only in the backdrop, but vividly described as events that affect the lives of real, living people in all sorts of enduring ways, is the tapestry of history — the Komagatu Maru incident, the Partition riots, the Delhi riots of 1984 and the Air India bombing of June 23, 1985, when a Boeing 747, Kanishka, was blown up off the Irish coast en route from Toronto to India, killing all 329 people on board. —
The novel is an ambitious venture, and one that could have remained a contrived effort to string together a set of historical events on a fragile thread of plot. But as in her earlier novels, Tamarind Mem and The Hero's Walk, Badami's characters are too sensitively created to remain lifeless drawings. Leela, born between worlds and again forced to move between worlds when she goes with her husband and children to Canada; the tired, hardworking Nimmo in New Delhi worrying about the family's debts; and of course the matriarch Bibi-ji in Canada, transformed from the pert, pretty Sharanjeet Kaur who betrayed her quieter sister long ago and who has now lived with the guilt of that betrayal for the better part of a century.
Fast-paced
We are led to reflect not only on the ways in which public events intersect with individual destinies and the lives of families, but also on the ways in which personal choices affect the destinies of others. The narrative moves rapidly from India to Canada and back, and across decades, at the same time giving us glimpses of the lived lives of these women as they try to survive, keeping their families together, and their dreams afloat, in the turbulent tides of history.
Some of the best parts of the novel are those where Badami is describing the immigrant experience. Browsing through two-week old Indian magazines, Leela is amazed by the ways in which India seems to have changed. "Even the pictures of men and women in the advertisements astonished Leela — it was as if these people's bone structure had altered. They looked like her children — Indian, but with a subtle glossy westernness coating their brown bodies."
Occasional glitches
Occasionally, in the quest to draw the narrative together, there is a line that doesn't quite strike the right note — such as Leela's first thought when her husband announces that they will go to Canada. She thinks of the potted geranium that led her father to marry a white woman and produce a mixed-race child who is never quite secure about her identity. "Why, Leela wondered despondently, did her destiny appear to be linked to things that fell from the air?" And so, years later, when the family is planning to travel to India, we already know that it is Leela who will be on that ill-fated Air India flight. But such false notes are rare. Badami is too self-assured a storyteller to let the impersonal sweep of history eclipse the richness of the individual life story and the acute intensity of memory.
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