Oldal 135 [135]
THE SOUTH ASIAN CANADIAN DIASPORA...
hybrid name expressed in the quote cited above characterizes her overall
favorable attitude to the position she occupies in the interstitial space of
different cultures in Canada.
Bibi-ji is a Sikh woman originally from the Punjab region in the north¬
western part of the Indian subcontinent, who emigrates to Canada to escape
the poverty of her family. As a matter of fact, she realizes the dream of her
father, who was among the passengers of the Komagata Maru and was forced
to return to the Punjab in humiliation after his failure to enter Canada.
His daughter does succeed in economic terms but her family life is utterly
shattered by the end of the novel as her husband becomes one of the victims
of the attack on the Golden Temple when they pay a visit to the sacral location
on their pilgrimage. There is a sense of foreboding in the whole novel from its
very beginning due to the inclusion of the nightbird in its title. The nightbird
is a four-winged creature “that made those who heard its song go mad. Only
those people who were about to die could hear this deadly bird"? explains
Nimmo, Bibi-ji’s niece, who herself goes insane after losing two ofher children
and her husband killed during the outbreak of racist violence directed against
the Sikhs in India in late 1984.
Bibi-ji’s and her husband’s financial prosperity in Canada is due to the success
of their restaurant, which they established with hard-earned money they
managed to save up over the years. The Delhi Junction, as the establishment is
called, becomes a hub of the South Asian community in Vancouver. The name
is borrowed from the railway station in Delhi, India, as the couple wishes
to attract crowds of customers like the railway station attracts passengers.
The food, the smells and the diversity of the visitors replicate those of the
subcontinent, their ancestral land, which is thus transplanted onto the soil
of their adopted home in North America in an attempt to overcome their
sense of displacement and to claim the place as their own. They also wish to
make the unfamiliar environment familiar and combat the unhomely, a desire
also expressed in the choice of the restaurant’s name. With this desire they
continue the tradition established and handed down by preceding generations
of immigrants, those European settlers of North America centuries earlier who
named their new homes in the alien environment after European cities such as
London, Windsor or Stratford, to list a few old-new place names as examples
from Canada. This visible minority group thus mimics the past acts of the
white majority. But the naming of the restaurant in Canada after a location in
India can also be regarded as an example of “colonizing in reverse”: the Sikh
couple from the East takes possession of the West in the manner their Western
colonizers did in their land in the East.
4 Tbid., 298.
16 C.L. Innes, The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English, Cambridge,
Cambridge UP, 2007, 177.
* 133 ¢