Oldal 133 [133]
OCR
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 discriminatory 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. e 131"
