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MÁRIA PALLA
1he regulars of Ihe Delhi Junction include a large variety of people: Hafeez
Ali, the Urdu-speaking Pakistani Muslim man, "Dr. Majumdar, a tall, suave
Bengali with a sardonic face; portly, balding Menon, who spoke English
with a heavy Malayali accent; the Gujarati doctor Harish Shah, also rotund
and balding; and the new arrival from South India who had shortened his
complicated name [...] to the more manageable Balu Bhat.”” Together with the
Sikh owners of the restaurant, they embody the diversity of the South Asian
diaspora, which, in turn, recreates the multiplicity of ethnicities, religions,
and languages of the subcontinent itself. Nevertheless, these guests from such
a heterogeneous diaspora all enjoy the same food. Thus, they provide a perfect
illustration of what the social anthropologist Pnina Werbner categorizes as a
“complex or segmented” diaspora as explained above.
Their ties to the distant homeland are not only manifest in the imported
culture, though, but also in the continuous influence the homeland politics
has on them: “In 1965, when war broke out between India and Pakistan, the
battle came to The Delhi Junction as well. [...] As the war across the world
went on and casualties mounted on both sides, conversation between the
two factions at The Junction ceased altogether.”“* But as time goes by, the
restaurant’s South Asian patrons begin to realize their transformation in the
diaspora space where they simultaneously become more alienated from their
homeland and acculturated to their hostland. That is what one of the Sikh
guests refers to when he says during a heated discussion of the emergency
declared by Indira Gandhi: “What does it matter whether we agree or do not
agree? [...] We are not Indians anymore, are we? We can only sit here and drink
Pa-ji’s chai and go jhabbar-jhabbar, that’s all.” The theme of belonging in a
transnational world, the involvement of the diasporans in their homeland’s
politics and the question of who is responsible for the diasporans are crucial
issues that arise from Badami’s narrative as it develops.
However, Badami adds one more dimension to the multiplicity represented
by the people of South Asian descent listed above when she introduces
“Colonel Samuel Hunt, ex-British India army,” turning the restaurant into
a truly transnational space. Sam Hunt frequents the place out of postcolonial
nostalgia because it is here that he can satisfy his acquired appetite for curries
after serving the British Empire in India for twenty-five years. Apparently,
colonization has had a lasting impact not only on the colonized, but also on the
colonizer, whose culture itself has changed in the encounter with those in the
colonies whom he was to “civilize,” obeying colonial ideology. Interestingly,
in Canada, where he is as much of an immigrant as the natives of the land
7 Badami, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?, 65.
18 Tbid., 67.
4 Ibid., 266-267.
50 Tbid., 57.
* 134 +