Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? by Anita Rau Badami

If there is a question we should agonize over as a country – and as a species, perhaps – it has to be about our willingness to hurt our own kind. This is of course a larger human problem, but somehow, closer home in India, the situation always seems more fraught and poignant. It must come from being something of a salad-bowl of a country – of being yoked together into nationhood despite acutely-perceived differences.

And if nothing else, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? makes you uncomfortably aware of the hollowness of notions like nationhood or even revenge; of the devastating futility of violence. The story, with its cat’s cradle of interwoven lives, hangs between the historical pegs of Partition, Emergency and the riots in Delhi after Indira Gandhi’s assassination.

The lives of three women – Bibiji, Nimmo and Leela – meet and diverge; with the meetings and separations being determined by chance. The beautiful, winsome village girl Sharan, or Bibiji as she comes to be known, manages to bewitch her sister’s intended husband. Living in Canada with him, she is spared the trauma of partition and its attendant violence. Her sister disappears, leaving behind a daughter called Nimmo who is also lost to Sharan. Stewing in guilt, Sharan searches for and finally meets Nimmo through Leela, another immigrant Indian.

Sharan tries to assuage her pangs of childlessness by ‘borrowing’ Nimmo’s son, Jasbeer. Having taken him to Canada with her, she slowly realizes that uprooting a child is perhaps not the best way to ensure a bright future for him. The disaster and pain that strike India later resonate in all three lives. Again and again the futility of violence and the devastation it wreaks on women is hammered home.

While Badami’s writing is lyrical and precise, the book’s structure seems a bit uneven. The beginning, with its wonderful, almost poetic descriptions of Sharan’s and Leela’s early lives, fills too much of the book. Then, after Sharan meets Nimmo, the story suddenly hurtles into rapid flow. It is as if having used up much space establishing two of her characters, Badami has to rush through the rest of the narrative. There is no clear exploration of the process by which a key character, like Nimmo’s son Jasbeer, has a change of heart, for instance. You almost wish Badami had chosen a smaller landscape so that she could explore the story in a more measured fashion. When the narrative hurtles into a bloodbath, you feel just a wee bit cheated.

But this is a minor complaint about an otherwise enjoyable and eminently thought-provoking book. Badami’s many descriptions, full of trenchant humour and economy, are delightful. For instance, Leela’s feelings about the South being different from the North underline the fact that this is a country where differences of caste, creed, community and colour lie like fault-lines which can almost neither be healed nor ignored.

Finally, Can You Hear… is about the precious fragility of people’s lives, as opposed to the hollowness of constructs like nationhood and religion, and the violence that invariably follow in their wake. There seems no end, you sense, to the human urge to destroy; just as there seems no end to the hope which fills the days of a woman who has lost her entire family and sits in an empty room with her memories.

Penguin Viking

(Anita Vachharajani © DNA)