OCR Output

THE SOUTH ASIAN CANADIAN DIASPORA...

India on the grounds that the bomb explosion happened on an Indian flight
and was related to the rising Sikh separatist movement, which was also
behind the assassination of Indira Gandhi earlier.

Since then, official apologies have been made by Canada for both discrimi¬
natory acts; however, instead of providing closure, Stephen Harper’s 2008
apology “opened up a space for minorities to demand more adequate
statements, for compensation, and ultimately for a nation that remembers.”**
As Sikhs were the majority among the victims in both cases, these two tragic
incidents play an especially crucial role in how Sikhs situate themselves in
their relationship to their land of settlement. Alia Somani notes that there
has been a proliferation of texts about these tragedies in recent years, due
to which they are in the public consciousness now and also “seep into the
national imaginary.” She also argues that “a conscious and deliberate
remembering of the nation’s forgotten past can serve strategically to alter the
composition and text of the Canadian nation, to re-member [sic] it, and in so
doing ultimately to transform it into a more heterogeneous space.””°

History MEETS FICTION

The above mentioned four historical-political events play a significant
narrative role while also raising ethical questions in Badami’s intricately
structured novel where the focus keeps shifting from character to character
and from location to location as the chapters follow one another. In spite
of the symbolic weight carried by these incidents in the novel, Badami does
not aim to analyze the details of the global and national concerns in the
background of the historical events or the political masterminds behind
them. Her interests do not lie in histories on a large scale; what she writes is
the petites histoires of the ordinary people of South Asia.

The first three parts of Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? introduce Bibi-ji,
Leela, and Nimmo, the three female protagonists of the novel, one by one.
Bibi-ji, born as Sharanjeet Kaur, is one of the two daughters of a poor Sikh
farming couple in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent during the
British Raj in the 1920s. After marrying a Sikh young man from Vancouver,
later known as Pa-ji, she immigrates to Canada where, due to their hard work
and business sense, they prosper and become the proud owners of a restaurant
they call The Delhi Junction. It is one of their customers here to whom they
rent out their old apartment when his wife Leela arrives in Canada with their
children to reunite with him. As it turns subsequently out Leela happened to

38 Somani, What Is Remembered and What Is Forgotten?, 83.

3 Tbid., 75.
10 Ibid., 76.

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