Excerpt: Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

How unfair, Sharan thought. Would she ever have the chance to sleep until the sun climbed into the sky? A tear worked its way down her cheek. Another tear joined the first, and soon a storm of weeping shook her small body. "Why do I have to get up?" she sobbed. "I don't want to!"

"There is no place in this house for wants, memsahib!" Gurpreet called sharply, smacking a ladle hard against the edge of a pot. Her daughter knew how effectively she used her kitchen utensils to indicate various degrees of annoyance, from mild indignation to rage. "Needs, yes, those I can take care of," she continued, "but wants are for rich people! Understand?" Another tap-tap of metal on metal. Sharper, more insistent this time.

A warm hand descended on Sharan's heaving shoulder and shook it gently.

"Wake up, child," said her father. "Amma is calling you."

Sharan sniffed a little louder, removed her hands from her ears and turned over so that her father could see she had been weeping. She opened her eyes dolefully and, pushing out her lower lip, allowed it to tremble, hoping that she looked tragic, that he would take her side, as he so often did. Was she not his favourite daughter? Was she not the only person who listened to his endless stories of a ship called the Komagata Maru and a voyage that ended in nothing?

But there was no help. Wake up, wake up. This was her fate, written on her forehead by the gods, she thought unhappily, rolling to a sitting position and wiping her wet face with the end of her faded kameez -- it was her wretched fate to have to wake up and dip her hands in piles of excrement. Every morning since she was four years old, she had had to start the day by picking up the hot, stinking shit that the family's two cows dropped in the courtyard. Then she had to make balls of the disgusting mess and pat them into circular cakes against the walls of their house. And the smell -- how the smell corrupted her waking hours and infected her dreams and ruined even her meals. This was what Sharan resented most of all, for she loved eating. Her joy at the sight of food turned even the simplest combination of rice and dal into a feast, but when she raised a morsel of food to her mouth she could only smell the overpowering odour that had written itself into her skin, instead of the fragrances of turmeric, fresh rice, butter melting on hot phulkas, green chillies frying. She wished then, with all her heart, that she, like the Arabian princess in a tale the wandering storyteller had told her, might wake up and find herself in a different home altogether, carried there by the jinns in the service of a handsome prince.

Later, in Vancouver, when she had lost her past, she would feel shame at her thoughtless girl's wish. She yearned for the return of that time when her family was entire -- her mother squatting by the clay stove, the harsh angles and hollows of her exhausted face exaggerated by the glow from the fire, her father with his distant eyes, and most of all Kanwar, her sturdy, loving, lost sister. Lost, because she, Sharanjeet Kaur, had been greedy for something much larger than the world she inhabited.

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Excerpted from Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? by Anita Rau Badami. Copyright 2006 by Anita Rau Badami. Excerpted by permission of Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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