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THE SOUTH ASIAN CANADIAN DIASPORA...
where he was employed on his colonizing mission, Samuel Hunt “was doing
the splits between two cultures, just like the desis were,” notes the narrator.
Desi is a word of Hindi origin used to refer to people from India or South Asia
as opposed to the goras, which is a non-derogatory Indian designation the
narrator employs to identify white people.
The cultural mixing shared by South Asian as well as white immigrants in
Canada is also conspicuous in the choice of pictures that decorate the walls
of The Junction. The portraits of people from the East and the West include
those of Nehru, Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Marylin Monroe, Meena Kumari,
Clark Gable and Dev Anand,*' making the restaurant a hybrid space where
borders become meaningless and cultures turn fluid intersecting with each
other easily.
Fluidity does not only characterize the culture of Bibi-ji’s business
enterprise but also her attempts to enter other people’s lives, which she does
with ease. She frequently travels back and forth between her two homes,
her birthplace in the subcontinent and her place of residence in Canada, as
if physical borders did not exist. She returns to India for the first time to
meet her niece thought to have disappeared together with her whole family
amidst the violence that followed the Partition, effectively dividing the
Punjab region, the historic homeland of the Sikhs. After discovering that her
niece is married with two children and pregnant with a third while living in
dire conditions in Delhi, she offers to take the elder child, Jasbeer with her
to Canada where, she believes, he can take advantage of the opportunities
provided by the education system there.
Jasbeer is the character in the novel for whom the question of belonging
becomes the most acute and the most painful. He does not immigrate to
Canada out of choice but is uprooted from his home. He feels betrayed by his
biological family and shuns them, but at the same time he is also unwilling
to adapt to the new environment. His sense of identity is also strongly
influenced by the Sikh lore Bibi-ji’s husband introduces him to and gets him
into trouble at school, for example, when he takes a kitchen knife with him
as the best substitute for the short, curved sword called kirpan, one of the
traditional articles of faith Sikh men must wear. Gradually, in an attempt
to find a purpose in life and a community where he belongs, Jasbeer drifts
towards Sikh fundamentalism under the influence of one of the family’s Sikh
house guests from Britain who has no doubts about where the allegiance
of the Sikhs in the diaspora should lie, and who strongly urges the Sikhs in
Canada to join in the fight for an independent Khalistan as their duty. Jasbeer
becomes a member of the organization called Young Sikhs for a Free Punjab,
51 Ibid., 60.