Set in 1986, "Can You Hear the Nightbird Call" is narrated by three women - Chaya, Mummy-ji and Shalini - who bend rules to find happiness, and spans eighty years and two continents a world apart. Linking the three women is eighteen-year-old Jasbir, whose entire family was murdered in Delhi the day after Indira Ghandi's assassination. Brought to Canada by Mummy-ji, the young man spends his days wrapped in a blanket of rage, constantly reliving the slaughter. When Jasbir becomes a suspect in a terrible crime, Mummy-ji and seventeen-year-old Shalini, in love with the tortured youth, insist that he was with them and he couldn't possibly be the perpetrator of this horror. Yet Chaya, who has never liked Jasbir, insists that he was not in the house at all that day. Now, trapped together in an apartment in Vancouver, waiting to hear the verdict in Jasbir's trial, each woman narrates her history.
- ISBN10 0747584117
- ISBN13 9780747584117
- Publish Date 1 January 2007
- Publish Status Cancelled
- Out of Print 29 December 2006
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Format Paperback
- Language English