Interview with author Anita Rau Badami

One of the places I've lived in in Canada is Vancouver. And there's a huge, vibrant, thriving Indo-Canadian community there. A large part of that community is Sikh. And I started hearing stories about how horribly things had degenerated in terms of relationships among that Indo-Canadian community -- between Sikhs and Hindus -- and I started thinking about how immigrants of all stripes manage to carry this baggage of history, of loss, of anger along with them, even while they're trying to leave behind that place where all this history occurred.

This seems to be a growing phenomenon -- the anger is translated very easily into violence. It's no longer contained within yourselves. It's just something that can be taken out on a whole bunch of people -- blow up a plane, blow up a place, blow up a building. And a lot of the people who cause this violence are not even recent immigrants. They are children of immigrants. So that anger is handed down. And that's something that fascinated me -- why do we do this? How long can we carry this anger? How long do we carry this attachment to that other place? How long does this history stay with an immigrant, before that immigrant starts to learn that okay, I no longer belong to that place, I belong to this place, and if I should be angry about anything it's about what's happening here rather than what's happening there. Why do we go back and meddle with that other place, which is now a foreign country? So I tried to explore that through this book.

CL: In the beginning of the book we see that Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims are living in one village in the Punjab, and even that Bibi-ji is told by her mother to be open to all religions. To what degree was this typical at the time?

ARB: In village India, even now, for the most part -- it's not just at that time. In India generally, now, there's a sense of harmony. People live as neighbours with Muslims -- especially in the big cities. You cannot help but live in close proximity to people of different religions. But suddenly something happened -- it was a conflagration, all of a sudden, and it's usually something to do with religion. It was really tragic. But for the most part, people did live together -- they'd live in different parts of the village. In a city now you can't live in a separate building -- it's impossible, it's so crowded. But in villages they did have separate areas -- the Muslims would live in one part of the village, the Hindus in another part and the Sikhs in a different part. So I suppose that helped maintain peaceful relations.

CL: Several of the female characters idolize Indira Gandhi. Was this common in India at the time?

ARB: In India, yes, she was very popular among women.

CL: And would you say she still is?

ARB: Well, toward the latter part of her tenure as prime minister she lost a lot of her popularity, especially after 1974 and 1975, when she imposed a state of emergency on India and on the Indian population, which in effect meant a suspension of all rights. You could just be thrown into jail, and you wouldn't know what you were accused of doing. And this, in a democratic country, is unpardonable. To most people -- almost everybody, I think -- she was very unpopular then. The government messed up with the whole Punjab situation, I think. Her popularity was going down slowly. But women still admired her for the fact that she had managed to stay afloat in a world where power was usually held by men.

CL: Throughout the book, it is primarily the men who make war and the women who suffer and want peace. Do you think this reflects reality?

ARB: Well, look around the world. It's usually the women and children who are left as widows and orphans and putting the pieces together, collecting what's left after the wars and holding it all together. I'm not saying that women keep out of wars -- they might be the players in the back, they might be the ones encouraging their sons and being proud of their sons and husbands for going out there and being revolutionaries. They wouldn't call them terrorists -- it depends on which side of the fence you're standing on. So yes, if you look around the world now, explosions happening all over the place, the people who seem to be taking part in the wars seem to be men, for the most part.

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