Now young Surrey-bred author Ranj Dhaliwal, who exposes South Asian gangsterhood in his recently released novel Daaku (New Star), is getting flack for saying he believes some local Sikh temple leaders instructed local hoods to do some judicious roughing-up. Or the death threats received by Vancouver Sun reporter Kim Bolan, author of Loss of Faith: How the Air India Bombers Got Away With Murder, for covering the same territory. Just remember the assassination of former Indo-Canadian Times editor Tara Singh Hayer, fatally shot in 1998 for his Air India probings. Writing about the politics of B.C.'s Indo-Canadian community is not something to take on lightly. Conflicts that will ultimately come to a head in June 1984, at the holiest of Sikh shrines, the Golden Temple in Amritsar.Anita Rau Badami: "a book that had to be written." 'Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?' moves elegantly back and forth between the Indian community in Canada and the increasingly conflicted worlds of the Punjab and Delhi, where rifts between Sikhs and Hindus are growing. She disappears, leaving Bibi-ji bereft and guilt-ridden. While Bibi-ji gains access to a life of luxury in Canada, her sister Kanwar, left behind to weather the brutal violence of Partition, is not so fortunate. Leela Bhat, born to a German mother and a Hindu father, who is scarred by her in-between identity as a "half-and-half" and by the great unhappiness of her mother, an outcast in their conservative Hindu home. There's the ambitious and defiant Bibi-ji, born in a Punjabi village, who steals the heart of her sister's fiancé, thereby gaining passage to a new life in Canada. Set against the tumultuous backdrop of a fragmenting Punjab and moving between Canada and India, 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 in 1947 to the terrible violence of modern times.
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