Learning from History

Novelist Anita Rau Badami. Courtesy Random House Canada.

Nearly two decades: that’s how long it took the Canadian justice system to assemble a trial in the Air India bombing of June 23, 1985, that killed 329 people, largely Indo-Canadians, off the coast of Ireland. The ill-fated plane picked up most of its passengers in Vancouver, stopping in Toronto and Montreal before carrying on to London. Twenty years was also the approximate gestation period for Anita Rau Badami’s haunting new novel, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?, which aims to makes sense of the tragedy.

While the B.C. Supreme Court acquitted the men accused of planning the bombing on March 16, 2005  — citing insufficient evidence — investigators believe the gruesome plot was hatched by Sikh extremists in retribution against the Indian state. The impetus for Badami’s novel actually predates the Air India bombing by eight months. It was November 1984: Badami was freshly married and honeymooning with her husband, Madhav, in northern India. They had just learned of the murder of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. The killing was deemed an act of retribution for the army’s 1984 assault on the Golden Temple, the Sikh equivalent of the Vatican.

“After Indira Gandhi was assassinated, we did think that there might be some trouble. But nobody expected it to go beyond basic anger, sorrow or anything,” says Badami. At the time of Gandhi’s death, Badami and her husband were travelling by bus toward Delhi. “As we progressed down [a] hill to Delhi, we saw signs of growing anger against the Sikhs — which was really unfair, because it was two people who had assassinated the prime minister, but the anger was directed at Sikhs in general, who were innocent people,” she says. “We saw a man being thrown over a culvert into a dry riverbed; he had been set on fire. When we reached Delhi, it was like a war zone.” In the ensuing months, many Sikhs were murdered. Badami knew that the repercussions would be devastating. The Air India bombing proved her right.

As any writer will tell you, there’s often a substantial lag between the flash of inspiration and the moment pen is put to paper (or fingers to keyboard). For many years, the catastrophe felt too close, too raw for Badami. At the time of the disaster, she was living in the southern city of Madras (now Chennai). One of her neighbours was among the Air India victims; devastated by grief, the man’s wife later committed suicide. In the early ’90s, Badami and her son, Aditya, moved to Calgary to join her husband, who was working on a master’s degree in regional planning at the University of Calgary. It was only after she had published two acclaimed novels — Tamarind Mem (1996) and The Hero’s Walk (2000) — that Badami felt she had enough perspective to fathom the largest mass murder in Canadian history.

Courtesy Random House Canada.

Rather than anatomize the disaster itself, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? places the bombing on the continuum of India’s history. While Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs have co-existed peacefully in India, the impending departure of the British in the ’40s prompted some Sikhs to favour the establishment of an independent Sikh state. The new nation, to be called Khalistan, would comprise the Punjab region and Punjabi-speaking areas nearby. The Indian government rejected this proposal, and over the years, pro-Khalistan separatists grew more forceful. In early June 1984, Gandhi ordered the army to strike the Golden Temple, because it was rumoured to be harbouring armed Sikh separatists. There are conflicting figures about the number of Sikh civilians who died; most people agree that it was in the thousands.

“I was struck by the whole story of how this history, this baggage, had travelled to Canada and simmered over here and affected a planeload of innocent people,” says Badami, who now makes her home in Montreal.

Reaching back to 1928, her sweeping narrative tells of three Indian women: Bibi-ji, Leela and Nimmo. Bibi-ji grows up in the Punjab region in the decades before India’s partition. As a teenager, she cunningly steals her sister’s husband-to-be, Pa-ji, and emigrates to Vancouver in the 1940s, where they eventually open an Indian restaurant called the Delhi Junction. Born in Bangalore to a Hindu father and a German mother, Leela also follows her husband to Vancouver, where she befriends Bibi-ji. Nimmo, Bibi-ji’s niece, remains in Delhi, a direct witness to Partition, the bloody severance that turned India and Pakistan into sovereign nations in 1947. In the late ’60s, at the urging of Bibi-ji, Nimmo sends her first-born son, Jasbeer, to live with her childless aunt in Canada. It’s a heartbreaking decision that Nimmo will come to regret.

Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? is a bold yet even-handed analysis of Indian culture, but it also exposes the illusory promise of emigration: even if you distance yourself physically, you can never truly leave home. Entrenched in Vancouver’s Sikh community, Bibi-ji embraces Western living, paying only lip service to the tensions rending her native country. She raises Jasbeer firmly but fairly, while Pa-ji fulfils the boy’s material desires. Even so, Jasbeer falls under the sway of Dr. Randhawa, a visiting scholar who agitates for a Sikh state. As Sikhs become increasingly marginalized in India, Jasbeer grows more and more belligerent; eventually, he returns to his native land to study with the fiery cleric. To Bibi-ji, it’s a sign of nascent extremism — and evidence of her failure as a surrogate mother.

What is the cause of Jasbeer’s sudden fervour — boredom? Disaffection? A long-dormant hatred of Hindus? The author concedes she has found no satisfactory explanation.

“It’s happening now, at this point in time, where lots of young men, who are born and brought up in the West, suddenly start becoming fundamentalist,” says Badami. The news is lately full of examples, from the Toronto bomb plot uncovered in June to the thwarted London plane-bomb attack in early August; the suspects are young men born in Canada and the UK, respectively. “What is it that drags them there? I was curious about that, and I still haven’t found a particular answer. I think any of these people who turns into a quote-unquote terrorist gets there by different routes.”

Raised in a secular household, Badami says she holds no strong religious views. The intent of the book was to celebrate the essential goodness of the Hindu and Sikh traditions, but also to demonstrate how easily even so-called moderates can become militant. “The world now seems to be divided among religious lines,” Badami reflects. “Faith sustains people: people who are in trouble, people who have nothing other than their faith to hold them. Religion is part of human society and has been for thousands of years.” She pauses. “But when religion becomes a tool for fundamentalist of every stripe — government or otherwise — I think it is repulsive.”

With its historical scope and emotional heft, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? should score big come award season. But as the North American news media gears up to commemorate the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Badami laments the comparatively small space the Air India tragedy occupies in the public consciousness.

“Why did it not get more attention than it did?” asks Badami, ruminating aloud. “It looks like a lot of the early investigation was messed up. Perhaps there wasn’t access to the Indo-Canadian community, in terms of language and understanding the people who lived in those communities. Perhaps that was also a factor. And perhaps at that point in time, there was a reluctance to acknowledge these people as Canadians.”

She quickly admonishes herself. “But it wouldn’t be fair of me to say that without pointing out that those thousands of Sikhs who were murdered after Indira Gandhi’s assassination are still looking for justice, too.”

Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? is published by Random House and is in bookstores Sept. 5.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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