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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 northwestern 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 ¢
