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OCR
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 +
