The Air India disaster and its frustrating 21-year aftermath has been the subject of at least half a dozen non-fiction books of investigative journalism in this country, and they are still coming. But Anita Rau Badami’s new novel is, to my knowledge, the first attempt to deal with this shameful episode of Canadian history in fiction. Its interest, though, lies in the fact that its perspective is entirely different from that of most Canadians, who have no connection to the Indian subcontinent. While the majority of citizens in this country associate the phrase “Air India” with a massive breakdown in the performance of our intelligence services, most of which took place after the explosion that killed 329 souls over Ireland, Badami focuses entirely on the Indian and Sikh communities of Vancouver, their ties to the homeland, and the lives of certain individuals leading up to the disaster, many of them for decades beforehand.Her treatment also makes it crystal-clear that this terrorist act was not an isolated disaster, as many Canadians tend to view it. A string of horrific events in the late 1970’s led to the storming of the Sikh Golden Temple at Amritsar by Indian government troops in 1984, then the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, followed by massive and murderous retaliation against innocent Sikhs by Indians in many parts of that country. All of this culminated in the disaster itself in 1985, in which it is believed that Sikh extremists based in Canada planted a bomb on an Air India flight bound for Delhi from Toronto. It remains the deadiest terrorist incident in this country’s history.Badami, a fluent and somewhat old-fashioned storyteller, uses all these debacles as the highly concentrated end-point of her novel. For the first four-fifths of the book, she calmly and empathetically introduces us to her major characters, both Sikh and Hindu. First there is Bibi-ji, a pampered Sikh beauty who steals her sister’s suitor, marries him, and leaves India for Vancouver in 1951, where the couple soon opens a café called The Delhi Junction, a meeting place for the entire subcontinental community of the city, including Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims.Next, we meet Leela from Bangalore, white and Indian by race, Hindu by religion, who also follows her high-caste husband to Canada, along with their two children, in 1967. A classic in-betweener because of her mixed parentage, she “gets” the multicultural nature of her adopted country almost from the start and refuses to be sucked into the increasingly acerbic relations between Sikhs and Hindus in Vancouver.

Finally, Badami focuses on another Sikh, Nimmo, Bibi-ji’s long-lost niece back in India, whose entire birth family disappeared when she was five years old, during the brutal Partition of India and Pakistan. Now grown up and married to a young Sikh mechanic in Delhi, Nimmo raises her children in decent near-poverty, while trying to control the fear of violence and abandonment that is her legacy from childhood. It is her appalling fate to lose her second family, her husband and children, in the bloody anti-Sikh riots following Indira Gandhi’s death, and then, perfectly understandably, her whole grasp on reality.

What begins as a warily friendly immigrant community in Vancouver in the early 1950s, where Sikhs and Hindus get together over chai and amuse themselves with stories of “the strange ways of the pink-skinned goras” (that would be their white neighbours), turns slowly but inexorably into ethnic shards of humanity fuelled by fundamentalism and bigotry that explode into active hatred. The tolerant Bibi-ji, after her husband’s death, finds herself carrying a placard and shouting “Khalistan forever!” – an activity that, Badami notes shrewdly, allows her to fall into a deep and dreamless sleep for the first time in months.

As events move toward the tragic denouement that we know is coming, we are drawn ever closer to Leela, who clearly represents Badami’s own voice on what is happening to her community. On the one hand, Leela holds deeply Indian values, fussing over whether her son and his white fiancée have chosen an “auspicious” date for their wedding, while the young people scoff.

On the other hand, Leela comes to realize that what she and her family have built in Canada outweighs the traditions of the old country: “She had tried very hard to dislike Vancouver, to keep it at arm’s length. And now … she discovered that the city had stealthily insinuated itself into her mind and her heart.” A moving and illuminating thought, as Leela proceeds into a dark future.

Badami is to be commended for taking on this bitter subject, and for turning it not into a page-turning thriller but into a thoughtful, highly readable, and even slightly hopeful narrative. It deserves a wide readership.