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.
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. 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. 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. She disappears, leaving Bibi-ji bereft and guilt-ridden.
'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. Conflicts that will ultimately come to a head in June 1984, at the holiest of Sikh shrines, the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
