Anita Rau Badami lamented the unwillingness in current Canadian public culture to remember the 1985 Air India tragedy. This novel, her third and most recent, addresses this silence. The novel details the context of the tragedy and spells out the extent of the loss so that Canadian readers can grapple with this moment and appreciate that the tragedy. like the people involved in it, was Canadian. it is well—researched and well—crafted, tells a compelling story with rich and poignant ironies, and gives us heartbreaking. mind—numbing portrayals of the human cost of politically motivated disasters. The novel is structured as three women’s stories; the woman—centric locus on the domestic quotidian life of common people oilers a gendered critique of how a public catastrophe aiTects the everyday.
Its background consists of traumatic milestones of Sikh history which include the 1947 Partition and the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 in India. The novel connects these events from a Canadian/diasporie perspective, bracketing them within two historical phenomena connected to Sikhs in Canada: the memory of Koniagata Maru and the 1985 Air India bombing. it tells Canadian readers a story they need to hear and situates Badami as a Canadian writer in her choice and presentation of material.

Because the novel largely narrates the story ol the global Sikh community, the standard Critique of the diasporization of the history’ of the global South needs to he nuanced. As the novel suggests, the Sikhs in India and in Caiiada have a strong sense ol shared history and sometimes a common imaginary of movement through the Partition, the anti—Sikh riots in 1984, and the diasporic consequences o! past events like the blocking of the Komagata Marii (a ship filled with would—be Sikh immigrants turned