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MÁRIA PALLA and then decides to return to India to study at a religious school there. His whereabouts are rather uncertain from this point onwards as no one can tell in which country he might be. Eventually, Jasbeer renounces his separatist ideas and the enforced fight for a sovereign Sikh homeland, realizing how much harm he caused while collecting “donations” for the cause in the Punjab: “Every single time I saw a frightened face putting the last of their savings (...) into my bag, I felt more wretched and unsure. These people were giving me their last pennies because they were terrified of me. All they wanted was to be left alone to live their lives. And all I wanted was to go home. I was sick of the violence and the killing.” He finally understands his foster father Pa-ji, who advocated not bowing “to the wave of fundamentalism”® in spite of the scorn of numerous fellow Sikhs in Vancouver. Jasbeer embraces Pa-ji’s humanist pacifist views that he disregarded in his youth: “As a Sikh, I am interested in putting money into building things — like schools and hospitals — not for breaking up countries!” Ironically, peace-loving, generous and affectionate Pa-ji dies a violent death during the government soldiers’ attack on the extremists hiding in the Golden Temple in Amritsar. In a letter to Bibi-ji, Jasbeer announces that he will be home soon. Bibijis comments, however, are rather doubtful: “Home? She thinks. Her heart flutters with hope for a moment. But which one?”®* The novel ends with the same ambiguity in the last sentence as Jasbeer approaches the home in Delhi where he grew up. “He is nearly home"? is the final line of the novel, which implies that the reader can never be sure if the character will ever arrive at a place he truly belongs to any more. It is not only because of his realization of his misplaced faith and the arising doubts about his rootedness in any location he inhabited during his transnational life but also because his old home in Delhi will never be the same with his father, brother and sister killed in the anti-Sikh riots driving his mother to insanity. Jasbeer’s case is only one of several others in the novel illustrating the burden of occupying an interstitial space between different races and cultures. After Bibi-ji and Nimmo, it is Leela, the third woman-protagonist in Badami’s book whose story reads as a direct comment on the issue of interstitiality and hybridity involved in transnationalism. She is the “Half-and-Half” in the title of Chapter 5, the daughter of a Hindu father and a German mother. Her Indian grandmother keeps ostracizing Leela, the “half-breed,”” because she considers miscegenation intolerable. After all, Leela finds happiness in her 52 Ibid., 398. 53 Ibid., 283. 54 Ibid., 395. 55 Ibid., 402. 56 Ibid., 82. * 136 +
