Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? Read online

  CAN YOU HEAR THE

  NIGHTBIRD CALL?

  SHORTLISTED FOR THE ONTARIO LIBRARY ASSOCIATION’S EVERGREEN AWARD

  “Anita Rau Badami is a writer able to transport readers to another world. And it is a world the reader leaves, with reluctance, when her story ends. … Badami’s reading of immigrant experience is riveting. … A book chock full of intriguing detail.”

  —The London Free Press

  “Badami’s feeling for place is matched, if not surpassed, by her ability to create characters that move off the page and into your mind. [Her] richly textured narrative captivates the reader as it delineates with tenderness and wisdom the stories of individuals and of nations.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “[Badami’s] approach to this volatile subject [the Air India bombing] is broad in scope, carefully measured, under a keen, yet compassionate eye. … [She] offers no solutions, only a modest hope for reconciliation, within a richly detailed book peopled with appealing characters.”

  —The Gazette (Montreal)

  “There are scenes in this novel as harrowing as anything in recent fiction, Canadian or otherwise. … [It] is equally rich in the complex joy of struggles and the possibility for tension, misunder standing and, sometimes, violence.”

  —Calgary Herald

  “The deeper, sad truth about the book is that it is not just a story about Sikhs in Canada and India. … It’s a book, in essence, about home-grown terrorism wherever it is found … the publication of Badami’s novel has become more timely than ever.”

  —Times Colonist (Victoria)

  ALSO BY ANITA RAU BADAMI

  Tamarind Mem

  The Hero’s Walk

  IN MEMORY OF THE MAN ON THE BRIDGE IN

  MODINAGAR AND THE VICTIMS OF

  AIR INDIA FLIGHT 182.

  My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.

  —Agha Shahid Ali, “Farewell”

  “We went to him and said, ‘What’s this you’ve done? You’ve had all our men killed. You were known to us.’”

  —Nanki Bai’s testimony, from The Delhi Riots: Three Days in the Life of a Nation, Uma Chakravarti and Nandita Haksar

  “In one of the worst acts of aviation terrorism, Air-India’s Boeing 747, Kanishka, on its way from Toronto to India via London, was blown up off the Irish coast on June 23, 1985, killing all the 329 people on board.”

  —“The Kanishka Bombing,” www.hindustantimes.com

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE - BIBI-JI

  1. Childhood

  2. Theft

  3. Guilt

  4. The Delhi Junction

  PART TWO - LEELA

  5. Half-and-Half

  6. Fallen Arches

  7. Indra’s Net

  8. Introductions

  9. Coincidences

  PART THREE - NIMMO

  10. A Bin of Grain

  11. Give-and-Take

  PART FOUR - HERE AND THERE

  12. Educating Jasbeer

  13. The Small Joys

  14. Interlude

  15. The Writing on the Wall

  16. Maps, Coins and Flags

  17. A Brilliant Day

  18. A State of Emergency

  19. The Return of Dr. Randhawa

  20. The Nightbird

  PART FIVE - ENDINGS

  21. A Sense of Belonging

  22. Golden Temple

  23. Whispers in the Wind

  24. They

  25. Bibi-ji

  26. The Safest Place

  27. Silences

  28. Air India Flight 182

  Epilogue—June 1986

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE

  BIBI-JI

  ONE

  CHILDHOOD

  Panjaur

  1928

  Years before she stole her sister Kanwar’s fate and sailed across the world from India to Canada, before she became Bibi-ji, she was Sharanjeet Kaur. Her memories began from the time she was a six-year-old living in a village called Panjaur, a dot in that landscape of villages scattered across the fertile plains of West Punjab, alike in their annual yearning for the monsoon rains and a bountiful harvest. The house in which Bibi-ji, or Sharan as her family called her then, lived with her parents and Kanwar was as unassuming as its surroundings. One of a small cluster of Sikh and Hindu houses, it was separated from the Muslim homes by fields of swaying sugar cane. Built of mud and thatch, it was much smaller than the one made of brick and mortar farther down the dusty gulley. That house belonged to Sharan’s best friend, Jeeti, and never failed to create a tumultuous envy in her childish heart. Though she was fond of Jeeti, Sharan resented her for having so much—a brick house, servants who did the housework, fine clothes and a father who did not lie inert on a cot all day while his wife and daughters slaved away. But the thing she envied most of all was Jeeti’s supply of lavender soap, sent by Sher Singh, her father, all the way from Canada.

  Years later, when she possessed enough money to build a house out of soap if she so desired, Sharan could barely recall Jeeti’s face or her elaborate home. And since, after Partition, Panjaur itself disappeared into that grey zone between India and Pakistan where floodlights threw every detail into stark contrast, barbed wire bristled and soldiers kept watch year-round, she could not even return to the place of her origins, a necessary thing if memory is to be kept fully alive. Yet some of those days remained in her mind, sharp and clear as shards of glass.

  The first of these was the day her father, Harjot Singh, disappeared. It was only the second time in his life that he had left his family, but this time he did not return.

  That day Sharan had been woken at five o’clock in the morning by her mother, Gurpreet Kaur. The late September sun was just rising, wreathed in mist. She lay on a mat in the courtyard of the house, her dark eyes squeezed shut, hands pressed tight against her ears to block the sound of her mother’s voice cutting through her comfortable blanket of sleep.

  “Do I have to do everything in this house?” Gurpreet shouted from the kitchen, where she was already cooking the morning meal though it was barely past dawn. “Look at this princess! Servants she has! Maids and chaprasis! Sharanjeet. Wake up this minute, or you will get a bucket of water on your face.”

  How unfair, Sharan thought. Would she ever have the chance to sleep until the sun climbed into the sky? A tear worked its way down her cheek. Another tear joined the first, and soon a storm of weeping shook her small body. “Why do I have to get up?” she sobbed. “I don’t want to!

  “There is no place in this house for wants, memsahib!” Gurpreet called sharply, smacking a ladle hard against the edge of a pot. Her daughter knew how effectively she used her kitchen utensils to indicate various degrees of annoyance, from mild indignation to rage. “Needs, yes, those I can take care of,” she continued, “but wants are for rich people! Understand?” Another tap-tap of metal on metal. Sharper, more insistent this time.

  A warm hand descended on Sharan’s heaving shoulder and shook it gently.

  “Wake up, child,” said her father. “Amma is calling you.”

  Sharan sniffed a little louder, removed her hands from her ears and turned over so that her father could see she had been weeping. She opened her eyes dolefully and, pushing out her lower lip, allowed it to tremble, hoping that she looked tragic, that he would take her side, as he so often did. Was she not his favourite daughter? Was she not the only person who listened to his endless stories of a ship called the Komagata Maru and a voyage that ended in nothing?

  But there was no help. Wake up, wake up. This was her fate, written on her forehead by the gods, she thought u
nhappily, rolling to a sitting position and wiping her wet face with the end of her faded kameez—it was her wretched fate to have to wake up and dip her hands in piles of excrement. Every morning since she was four years old, she had had to start the day by picking up the hot, stinking shit that the family’s two cows dropped in the courtyard. Then she had to make balls of the disgusting mess and pat them into circular cakes against the walls of their house. And the smell—how the smell corrupted her waking hours and infected her dreams and ruined even her meals. This was what Sharan resented most of all, for she loved eating. Her joy at the sight of food turned even the simplest combination of rice and dal into a feast, but when she raised a morsel of food to her mouth she could only smell the overpowering odour that had written itself into her skin, instead of the fragrances of turmeric, fresh rice, butter melting on hot phulkas, green chillies frying. She wished then, with all her heart, that she, like the Arabian princess in a tale the wandering storyteller had told her, might wake up and find herself in a different home altogether, carried there by the jinns in the service of a handsome prince.

  Later, in Vancouver, when she had lost her past, she would feel shame at her thoughtless girl’s wish. She yearned for the return of that time when her family was entire—her mother squatting by the clay stove, the harsh angles and hollows of her exhausted face exaggerated by the glow from the fire, her father with his distant eyes, and most of all Kanwar, her sturdy, loving, lost sister. Lost, because she, Sharanjeet Kaur, had been greedy for something much larger than the world she inhabited.

  But on that day in 1928, the six-year-old child thought only of how much she loathed the grating, ever-present irritation in her mother’s voice, the heat, the dust, the smallness of Panjaur, the seemingly endless quantities of shit that their bony cows produced morning, noon and night, her two faded salwar kameez suits, Kanwar’s silent acceptance of everything that was thrown at her, and most of all the fact that she had no soap with which to wash her hands after working on the dung.

  She dragged her feet out into the morning and splashed water from a bucket on her face. Having cleared the sleep from her eyes, she chewed the bitter neem twig that served as a toothbrush and stared out at the fields, which were separated from the house by a dusty lane and a canal of brackish water. She could see small splashes of colour where villagers were working in their fields or crossing them, carrying bundles of laundry, to reach the river. A child screamed from one of the nearby houses. Perhaps it was Jeeti’s brother, a spoilt child who howled for any reason and had to be regularly appeased with a treat.

  A cool wind blew in from the west and tore through the tall stands of sugar cane, making them bend and shudder in their shadowy depths. Another month and the Diwali festival would be here, Sharan remembered with a spark of pleasure. She ran out of the yard to the edge of the field, where a holy stone, believed by the Hindus of the village to harbour a powerful goddess, reared out of the earth. It was smeared with turmeric and vermilion, and someone had scattered flowers around it. She touched the stone, earnestly whispering a prayer, as she and Jeeti often did together. As a Sikh she already knew she was not supposed to worship idols and stones and pictures, but her mother had said that gods from all religions were holy and it would not hurt to pray to them now and again. Sharan begged the stone for a good harvest so that there would be money left over after paying off the moneylender and she would get a new set of bangles—red with gold stripes—just like Jeeti’s. She trailed back into the yard, chewing discontentedly on the neem twig, moments before her mother emerged from the house. Gurpreet stood at the door, arms akimbo, glaring at her younger daughter. “What are you doing for so long? Your teeth will fall out if you rub them so hard!” She pointed her chin at Kanwar, who had also woken before dawn and was now in the yard shaking a soopa of rice to remove the chaff from the grain. “Look at her, how much she helps me! And you …”

  Kanwar, who never did anything to stir her mother’s anger, waited until Gurpreet had retreated into the house before grabbing her sister around the waist and hugging her close. Tall and strong for her fourteen years, she lifted Sharan in the air, swung her around, set her down and tickled her vigorously. “Gudh-gudhee, gudh-gudhee!” she said, using the nonsense words she reserved for Sharan, prodding her waist, her round belly, the hollows under the childish arms. “Let’s see a smile! Khillee-khillee!”

  Sharan wriggled away, refusing to humour Kanwar although it was hard not to respond to her tickling fingers. Still, it was necessary to let the world know how resentful she was, so she shrugged out of Kanwar’s embrace and, picking up a basket as large as herself, walked off to where the cows were tethered. She scooped the slimy dung into the basket and took it to the side of the house where the sun shone all morning. Her father had already dragged his cot there and lay motionless, ignoring the hubhub around him. Sharan squatted beside the sun-stroked wall of the house and began to slap small balls of the dung against it, quickly patting each into a disc with her fingers.

  Soon Gurpreet and Kanwar left the house with a jangle of glass bracelets, each bearing a bundle of laundry on her head. Sharan watched them make their way through the rattling green of the sugar cane fields until they disappeared from sight.

  She worked steadily until the wall was covered with even dung pats like so many rough quarter plates. Then she put the basket away in a corner and washed her hands hard, wishing she had something other than wood ash with which to scrub. She longed to run down the road to Jeeti’s house and beg for a small smear of that most coveted of belongings—a bar of scented soap. Surely Jeeti would not begrudge her a tiny bubble or two?

  Sharan glanced at her father. His eyes were shut, and his breathing had evolved into a series of snores, which meant that he was fast asleep. She could run to Jeeti’s place and be back before he had finished a snore. She tiptoed close to the cot and peered at the hairy face with its unkempt beard and moustache, slack mouth, long thin nose and narrow forehead. His hair, which like that of the other Sikh men in the village was long and uncut, was loosely knotted on top of his head. His knobbly hands were clasped on his oil-slicked chest, which rose and fell to the rhythm of his breathing. Sharan wondered why her father slept all day long. As far as she knew, he was not a sick man. He did not constantly cough or wheeze or complain of aches like the grandfathers who gathered like a flock of cadaverous old crows around the banyan tree in the centre of the village every afternoon. Harjot Singh’s limbs were intact and he ate like a buffalo. But he rarely spoke, never left the house and always looked lost, as if there was something he had forgotten and he could only lie helplessly on the cot, staring off into the distance, until it to came back to him. Sometimes it seemed to Sharan that her father was not really there at all, that he was just a shadow. It would take many years for her to understand that Harjot Singh was not in fact there. In his mind he was continents away, in a green and blue city called Vancouver, which he had once seen from the deck of a ship—a place that had turned him away from its shores as if he were a pariah dog.

  Her breath feathered across her father’s face and stirred the wispy hairs of his long beard. Harjot Singh opened his eyes and caught Sharan in his gaze. He sat up, yawned mightily and drew her down on his lap.

  “Are you done, child?” he asked, one thin hand caressing her head, smoothing the tendrils that had escaped from the thick braids that hung down each side of her face. “Do you want to eat your food now? What has your mother made for us, hmmm?”

  Sharan gave him a sideways look, her chocolate eyes calculating. “Bappa, can I go to Jeeti’s house? I will come back very quickly. In this many minutes.” She held up five small fingers and tilted her head in a way she hoped was disarming.

  But Harjot’s gaze skimmed past her face, out of the narrow door that framed the stark sky above and the dust-strip of a road below, past the wave of sugar cane and the stretching mustard fields so golden bright it seemed the sun had turned liquid and poured across the earth, across the familiar l
andscape to that unknown distant land that was lodged within him like a thorn.

  Then he said sadly, as if his daughter had not spoken at all, “I was almost there, putthar. Like Sher Singh, I could have lived in Canada and become rich.” His gaze returned to rest on his daughter’s pleading face. “If they had allowed us to stay there, you know what your life would have been like?”

  Sharan sighed. “No, Bappa,” she said, and resigned herself to listening to the story that had begun years before she was born. She hated this ship that had caused the disappointment clogging her father’s heart, that had snatched his dreams away and turned him into a barren-eyed man with no desire to do more than lie on his cot.

  “If they had allowed me to get off the Komagata Maru, you and your mother and your sister would now be living like queens. We too would have had a pukka house with five rooms, three cows, and twenty chickens …”

  Six-year-old Sharan looked into his sombre black eyes and listened to his stories of a mighty ocean, of strange fish that flew out of its rolling depths to catch the sun’s rays, of dark forests of trees that grew tall and pointed like great arrows. She wondered at his tales of the unimaginably distant lands he had crossed to reach the place he called Canada. She marvelled at the thought of the bullock carts, buses, trains and ships that had carried him there. She had never stepped outside the close circle of her village, did not know what lay beyond the fields spreading out from the dust road outside their home, while her father had been to places like Amritsar, Delhi, Calcutta, Singapore. And Hong Kong! Where on earth was this strange place that sounded like the mournful call of geese flying over fields? She listened open-mouthed even though she had heard the story a hundred times already, her stinking hands a mere memory until, with a jangle of bracelets, her mother returned balancing one bundle of clean laundry on her head and holding another on her hip like a baby. She dropped her load on the ground and looked tiredly at her husband and daughter relaxing in the shade.