Author: Anita Rau Badami
Publisher: Penguin/Viking
Year: 2006
Language: English
Pages: 402
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0670999415
Description
Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? tells the stories of three women, linked in love and tragedy over a span of fifty years, sweeping from the Partition of India and Pakistan to the explosion of Air India flight 182 off the coast of Ireland in 1985. There is Bibi-ji—who steals the heart of her sister’s fiancé and goes with him to Vancouver, where they become pillars of the Sikh community—who is haunted by the subsequent disappearance of her sister during the violence of Partition; her neighbour Leela—trying to get on with the business of living in this new world of opportunity—who feels herself always a half and half, a newcomer struggling to find her way in the colourful desi community of Vancouver; and Nimmo, orphaned by the devastation that engulfed India after Partition, who tries to rebuild her life in Delhi. But for all three, the conflicts of the past re-emerge with shattering results.
Rich with Anita Rau Badami’s warmth and humanity, and the daily sights, scents and sounds of both India and Canada, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? also shows the tumultuous effect of the past on new immigrants, and the ways in which memory and myth, the personal and the political, become heartrendingly connected.
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR
Badami possesses great facility with the language and she uses it with a malleable elegance that is a pleasure to read. Her recall of detail and the ability to blend it into characters is remarkable.
-Biblio
Badami writes graceful, evocative prose and plays complex variations on her themes. All her characters are vibrant and deftly drawn, and her narrators’ opposing points of view create a poignant irony.
-Publishers Weekly
Tamarind Mem will help Anita Rau Badami establish herself as a post-colonial writer who is able to assert and foreground her Indian experience in a powerful way
-The Pioneer
An absolute delight to read . . . Tamarind Mem is a beauty, Simply written, unpretentious, [it] weaves a web around you as all good stories do and clasps you in its embrace.
-The Hindu
Engrossing . . . Fascinating . . .The Hero’s Walk demands to be read straight through.
-The Washington Post Book World
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. Indira’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
EPILOGUE-JUNE 1986