Bye-Bye

Blackbird
l l w i t r «l tkr SJmt^ M sVkmtwm « W M

C^flpter-II

Home and Away:

Home and Away: Bye-Bye Blackbird

Contemporary novelists have problematized the issue of diasporic dilemma in a diligent

manner by bringing to the fore the awareness of geographical dislocation, cultural

ambivalence, socio-political alienation, and the absence of centrality. Lost, lonely and drifting

human beings point to the absence of meaningful relationships in the era of technological

advancement and global interaction giving rise to alienation as a universal phenomenon. Anita

Desai's fiction can be analyzed by taking into consideration the psychological longings and

motivations of her characters through flash backs, self analyses, diary entries, subliming

dialogues and description of places and people whereby she explores the intricate facts of

human existence in search of identity and home against the backdrop of cross-cultural scenes

and the resultant alienation and frustration en route.

The diasporic writers have now scattered across the world and diasporic writing

evidences that Indian immigrants and expatriates have produced a rich harvest of literature in

multiple forms and genres. Nostalgia for home and identity crisis connect them with their

homeland and past associations feed their imagination to chart out something new and

worthwhile. Immigration is an old phenomenon, and The Book of Genesis tells the story of

alienation and exile of Adam and Eve, since then exile, exodus and migration have been the

fate of man. The motivation behind modern migration varies from political to religious

persecution to economic problems; whatever be the reason, the impact of cultural dislocation

on the individual psyche remains complex. Viney Kirpal obser\'es that it is not merely a

physical journey from one land to another but it involves severing of "spiritual and symbiotic

ties with his country" (The Third World Novel of Eapatriation 45).

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 With the publication of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Indian novel in English

has finally been accepted as a worthwhile literary endeavour. The efforts of several generations

of writers stretching from Bankim Chandra of postindepence period to the experimental duo of

G. V. Desani and Arun Joshi in the 1960s have attained triumphant heights in the outburst of

vibrant new talents in the 198()s and 90s. "If international acclaim is any measure of literary

merit, then it is fascinating to note that almost every second novel of 80s has either been

awarded a prize or has been shortsighted for it" (Kirpal. Introduction. The New Indian Novel in

English xiv).

In the contemporary literature, emotional problems reflect the frustrations, injuries, and

identity crises that an individual undergoes. Anita Desai. an expert in delineating the lacerated

psyche, portrays the ontological insecurity, alienation and anguish of uprooted individuals with

the tensions ensuing from cultural and geographical displacement in Bye-Rye Blackbird. She is

a powerful and persuasive voice depicting the struggle of the ones cut off from the ethnic roots

played out against the backdrop of alien surroundings.

The protagonists ... are constantly confronted with the stupendous task of

defining their relation to themselves and to their immediate human context.

(Mehta. "Dehumani/.ation of the Male in Anita Desai's Fiction." 36)

In Bye-Bye Blackbird, the interaction between the locale and the individual acquires a new-

dimension, for the tension here is between the white locale and the immigrant blackbird that

involves the issues of alienation and encounter that the immigrant has to confront in an alien

and yet familiar world. The migratory blackbird is drawn to and repelled by the White England

which is his new habitat now. Anita Desai captures this encounter in fictional terms through

Dev, "One of those eternal immigrants who can never accept their new home and continue to

walk the streets like strangers in enemy territory, frozen listless, but dutifully trying ...

however superficially, to belong" (208). The novel traces various phases through which Dev

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finally comes to accept his new home. Each phase in Dev's reconciliation suggests a psychic

situation involving cross-cultural contacts, cultural shocks and the impact they have on

individual sensibility.

Bye-Bye Blackbird explores the immigrant experience from an intellectual point of

view. The problems of alienation, immigration and expatriation can be best understood in the

light of two related terms - "exile" and "home." It is the mother country, native soil and

security that constitute one's self Exile is enforced or regretted absence from one's country or

home. It is "literally an uprooting and often as withering in its effect on the mind and spirit

which is deprived the sustenance it has drawn from native" (Joshi, V. S. Naipual 2). To an

exile, home becomes everything he has lost - identity, nationality, culture, and so on and so

forth.

Postcolonial India has witnessed the migration of educated Indians to the lucrative

abundance of the West. Desai depicts the gnawing sense of immigration sensibility in Bye-Bye

Blackbird through three different characters - Dev, Adit and Sarah - Sarah is an English lady

married to Adit Sen, an Indian immigrant. By marrying an Indian immigrant Sarah faces

cultural crisis that Krishnamoorthy Aithal rightly explains:

Anita Desai's novel Bye-Bye Blackbird deals with the theme of East-West

encounter. The novel covers numerous aspects of his encounter between the

British and the England, including the marriage. ("The Ballad of East and

West Updated." 101)

The theme of immigration and consequent alienation of the self has been a thematic

preoccupation from V. S. Naipual. Kamala Markandaya and Bharati Mukherjee who are

chiefly concerned with cross-cultural and racist encounter at the socio-cultural plane. Seldom

do they deeply and punctiliously probe into the psyche of the characters like Anita Desai. and

this differentiates her from others and transforms it into a living art. It is neither the concern of

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an absurdist nor the enigma faced by an existentialist but the simple, homely rendering of

emotional beings that face abnormal situations in living and partly living every moment of life

in an alien soil in a strangely fascinating way. The predicament of the tragic isolation of the

individual, the consequent sense of absurdity of human life and the very reality of human

existence powerfully comes forth in Bye-Bye Blackbird

Desai deals with emotional moods and attitudes of characters in context of their

spiritual, moral or ethical temperaments. The characters' alienated selves experience the pangs

of emotional isolation and in dealing with them, she adopts a realistic or metonymic mode of

writing. What matters to her is the character and not the tale, the situation and not the

environment, the depth and not the dimension. Esoteric passions and tensions captivate her

interest and she plumbs into man's perennial dilemmas: Love versus hate, action versus

inaction; possessiveness versus renunciation. In fact, she is mainly concerned with the things

that every individual longs for, the courage to live and the capacity to love as well as to be

loved and it is their alienated state that propels them from one crisis to another. They are

presented mostly as questers in search of love and accepted identity. Emotionally and

physically perturbed, they are relentlessly and maniacally driven by undefined hunger and

feverish lust which causes their downfall.

Bye-Bye Blackbird is different from her earlier texts for it does not seek to portray the

diseased psyche of women and the existential agony of sensitive men and women. It portrays

the lives of Indian immigrants in England and with her uncanny ability to probe into the minds

and hearts of her characters she explores the problems of belonging, adjustment and above all.

the annihilation of psyche in an alien environment.

The novel is divided into three chapters. "Arrival." "Discovery." "Recognition and

Departure," portraying the story of two Bengalis - Adit Sen and Dev, and Adit's English wife -

Sarali. Dev having intellectual pretensions comes to study at the London School of Economics

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"well in advance to make all the right approaches" (10); by right approaches he means

"approaching the professors and impressing them with the subtle complexities and the deep

wisdom of the oriental mind" (10). He stays with Adit Sen and his encounter between the east

and the west begins right from Adit's house. Adit is an anglophile and his newly arrived Indian

friend from Calcutta is critical of everything in England.

The process of alienation and rehabilitation involves a three tier operation:

construction, deconstruction and reconstruction; when a man decides to emigrate, his beliefs,

responses, attitudes, behavioural patterns already have a shape as per his belongingness to the

place; the man immigrates to the new place with its own life style, so the immigrant

deconstructs first what constitutes his being and then he reconstructs according to the life

pattern of the new place. The three tier operation is seen as follows: One, the departure from

the root place and arrival at the new one; Two, rehabilitation and reassociation with the new-

place; Three, rehabilitation and reassimmilation in the new place. These three basic factors

obstruct or facilitate the completion of the process of rehabilitation, the scale of sensibility, the

previous sanskars and the conditions at the rehabilitation phase (Prasad, Amar Nath, Indian

Women Novelists in English 53-54) and if the whole process works favourably, the

rehabilitation is smooth and complete.

The problems arise with the rehabilitation of Adit, the new arrival, to study in London

School of Economics, who obtains a degree from a British university but it doesn't help him in

getting decent job in India. Consequently, he returns to England and works in a post office, in

the sorting office, in the camping equipment business and also works as a teacher and finally

accepts a little job at Blue Skies; he is happy with his job and expects to be the Director one

day. Dev disapproves his decision for accepting a subordinate position thinking that the

immigrant Indians are awfully submissive to the British.

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 The trouble with you immigrants ... is that you go soft. If anyone in India

told you to turn off your radio, you wouldn't dream of doing it. You might

even pull out a knife and blood would spill. Over here all you do is shut up

and look upon. (26).

In fact. Adit wants to lead a normal life without bothering his head about the differences that

shock Dev on his arrival in England. Dev is infuriated by the docile behaviour of Adit and

reminds him of his loss of self-respect. It is Dev's visit which makes him self-conscious

drawing him towards his country. Adit, like other individuals in the society, is a bundle of

habits, beliefs, goals, values, emotional responses and attitudes which are culturally patterned.

Christine Longford, a friend of Adit, introduces Sarah to Adit in a cocktail party. Sarah's

behaviour and shyness attracts him and he anticipates marriage for she is very much like a

Bengali girl. ''Bengali women are like that, reserx-ed, quiet. May be you were one in your

previous life. But you are improving on it you are so much prettiest" (73). After their marriage,

they settle down in Clapham and Sarah even cooks Indian food, but the typical Indian male

chauvinist in Adit finds pleasure in ill-treating Sarah: "These English wives are quiet

manageable really, you know. Not as fierce as they look very quiet and hard working as long

as you treat them right and roar at them regularly once or twice a week'" (29). Adit and Sarah

have to make adjustments owing to diverse cultures culminating into cultural incompatibility.

... the rituals and beliefs of the one mean nothing to the other, which makes

each of them, groan in pain at the lack of regard shown by other, for what

each holds dear. (Aithal, "The Ballad of East and West Updated," 7)

Even though Dev has married an English woman, he finds that the behaviour of the English

people with him has not changed at all. There is lack of warmth or affection in Sarah's father,

he remains engaged in the garden and does not even come to meet his daughter. By marrying

Sarah, he is personally involved with the people and the culture of the alien land. His hate,

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anger, frustration, become obvious and resultantly he fails to maintain the balance which he had

maintained earlier. Sarah's mother. Roscommon, hurts him in particular and he is deeply

touched by this. With the "sanskaras" of an Indian he feels that as son-in-law he deserves

special treatment in his in-laws house but the situation here is entirely different.

In the context of arrival and departure of the immigrants. Desai is concerned not only

with the space but the spatial (place) effects on the inner psyche of her characters, she avers,

"whereas there is concern with action, experience and achievement, a women writer is more

concerned with thought, emotion and sensation" (Sharma. R. S, Anila Desai 17). Erich Fromm.

a reputed critic, argues that "we are never free from two conflicting tendencies from bondage to

freedom and another to return to womb" {The Same Society 27). All the characters pass through

the cycle of reaction, hostility and frustration in the new country in search of material freedom,

but the process of severance of native ties and the feeling that no one cares for them generates

the nostalgic longing for going back home.

Anita Desai selects a minority of educated Indian immigrants to dwell on the interaction

between east and west. She renders the peculiarities and absurdities of the existence of

immigrants in an alien world with accuracy and detachment. The dull and drab superficialities

of the Indian immigrants' existence in England come alive in her poetic and occasionally

humorous prose:

Pack up all my cares and woe,

Here I go. singing low.

Bye-bye. Blackbird.

Where somebody cares for me.

Sugar is sweet and so is she,

Bye-Bye Blackbird. (21)

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Desai exhibits alienation and accommodation of immigrants in a world which is alluring and

appalling at the same time. It does not bring into fictional context the larger socio-political

aspects of the immigrant question, rather it deals with self-awareness of the educated Indian

immigrants, who keep wavering between acceptance and rejection of a world they have been

educated to admire and love but in reality this world proves to be strange and hostile to them.

Dev. a new immigrant, goes to England and stays with Adit Sen. and feels disgusted at

the insolvent treatment of the Indians by the English. Dev criticizes immigrants like Adit, who

are staying in England without uttering a single word of protest. He disapproves of their habit

to fight over trivial issues and waste their time in fighting with each other. He feels that they

are self-centered people, living and eating without complaining, and acting undemocratically.

On the contrary Adit seems satisfied with his life in London who has already spent some time

in England is all praise for this land of opportunity - a city of relief, comfort and happiness,

however, Dev is skeptical about this claim of Adit. There is a wide gap between Dev and the

socio-cultural environment which widens with his stay in England. He gets first shock on being

called a "wog" (16) by a school going boy, what is worse, he finds Adit indifferent and in

normal condition as if nothing unusual has happened. His tensions are not due to the fact that

he finds himself in an unfamiliar world, for it is a familiar world as this passage suggests:

Nothing in ... past twenty two years had resembled remotely this world he

had entered by stepping through the door of the King's Arms, this world of

beer-soft, plum-thick semi-darkness ... Yet it was known, familiar, easy to

touch, enjoy and accept because he was so well prepared to enter it - so well

prepared by fifteen years of reading the books that had been his meat and

drink, the English books that had formed at least one half of his conscious

existence. (12)

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What shocks Dev in particular is the pattern of hfe in England which is entirely different from

India. In England he finds everyone a stranger living in hiding which could never happen in

India. Indians are discriminated everywhere and they are subjected to the worst possible

humiliation. Indians are not allowed even to use the lavatories meant for the English. London

docks have three kinds of lavatories - ladies, gents and Asiatic. At every step Dev feels

dreadfully suffocated, experiencing a terrible sense of claustrophobia:

... the menacing slither of escalators strikes panic into a speechless Dev as

he is swept down with an awful sensation of being taken where he does not

want to go. Down, down farther down ... like a Kafka Stranger wandering

through the dark labyrinth of prison. (59)

The image of "Kafka stranger in the dark labyrinth of a prison" aptly describes Dev's state of

mind at this stage. He finds himself caught in a labyrinth with no possibility of escape. That is

why he implodes within, keeps saying to him, I am deeply hurt. Moreover, the element of

strangeness prevails everywhere in London, which exacerbates his suffering.

Everything tells you you're an outsider and not entitled to the country just

because you happen to have read and enjoyed its literature, or because you

belong to something called the Commonwealth ... you can't walk down a

country lane without a goose staring at you and hissing, 'Hey. you stranger,

what do you think you're doing in my lane?' (159)

Dev is troubled emotionally and intellectually on being regarded as a stranger. He suffers from

eerie silence and finds everything around him strange. Initially it is difficult for him to cope up

with various situations because the world he perceives around him is different physically and

socially.

Gradually Dev succumbs to the charms of London life - Anglophobia. This enhanced

susceptibility to illness occurs not as a by-product but as a direct outcome of social

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disorientation. Of all the novels of Desai this one is more close to her own experiences. In an

interview with Atina Ram. she states, "Of all my novels it is most rooted in experience and the

least literary in derivation" ("Anita Desai." 40). '"Bye-Bye Blackbird is the closest of all my

books to actuality, practically everything in it is drawn directly from my experience of living

with Indian immigrants in London" (Ram. Interviews 31) seizing the tumults of alienated

persons. R. S. Shamia rightly says that "the tension between the local and immigrant blackbird

involves issues of alienation and accommodation that the immigrant has to confront in an alien

and yet familiar world" ("Alienation. Accommodation and Locale in Anita Desai's Bye-Bye

Blackbird/' 2\-A9).

Adit and Dev basically represent two types of immigrants with different orientations for

England. Adit follows what he thinks is an English style; "I like the girls here.... I like the

freedom a man has here economic freedom! Social freedom!" (20) and he despises the laziness

of the clerks, the unpunctuality of the buses and trains, and "the beggars and the flies and ...

boredom in India" (49). He is critical of the fact that "nothing ever goes right at home. There is

famine or flood, there is drought or epidemic, and always 'while in England' the rains fall so

softly and evenly ... the sun is mild ... earth is fertile. The rivers are full ... everything: so

wealthy, so luxuriant so fortunate" (29). In spite of apparent attraction for England and

repulsion for India, somewhere in Adit continues attachment for with motherland. The fact is

evident in his longing for India:

When I have a whole month of leave saved up, I will go, my mother will

cook hilsa fish wrapped in banana leaves ... my sisters will dress Sarah in

saris and gold ornaments. I will lie in bed till ten every morning and sit up

half the nights listening to the sehnai and sitar. (48)

Dev is contemptuous of the economic situation in India, and makes use of every opportunity to

berate the Indian mentality as provincial and narrow. He disdains India for its poverty and

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squalor like typical western educated colonial who is impatient with the slow pace of

development in his own country and leaves for the West, attracted like a moth to its glittering

opulence and fast paced life. Adit though loves and admires England, loves everything English,

but the "sanskaras" etched on his subconscious mind cannot be wiped out. The visit to the

countryside gives him an opportunity to recollect in tranquility and his stream of love for India

bursts forth.

The feeling of "being" and "not being" at home is a product of refugee sensibility, and

acceptance of new land as home, and their acceptance by the hosts is the major manifestation

of their very identity. Here migration signifies the migration of ideas and histories and the new

location becomes a site for internal and external conflict between the self and the other, the

other as the self, the other face to face with the self The central premise of the diasporic

writing is a journey that starts from one's homeland to an alien land and then with a sense of

loss in the hostile social environment, he ceaselessly struggles in the hope of change via

reconciliation, assimilation and affirmation. This is a journey from the centre to the periphery

and again from the periphery to the centre. The regions which the diaspora writers themselves

employ are the homeland, the alien land and the new homeland.

At the initial stage of immigration. Adit has admiration and satisfaction, he becomes

such a "spineless imperialist lover" (Bala and Pabby, The Fiction of Anita Desai 135) that

when Dev visits England to pursue higher studies, he is shocked to find Adit swallowing

ungrudgingly the humiliations thrown at him by the erstwhile masters without even trying to

assert his rights owing to the slave mentality or the dependent cast of mind. Adit tells Dev that

he hardly notices the drawbacks of England and considers himself an admirer of its golden

beauty. Adit suffers from an illusion which blinds him towards the attitude of the English. He

believes that he has realized the myth of succeeding in the land of golden opportunity but no

matter how hard he tries, neither can he escape being called a "wog" nor can he achieve

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absolute familiarity with people. It is a weekend at his in-law's house in the country that jolts

him out of his self hypnosis.

Desai captures the psychic journey of an Indian immigrant, that is. the conflict between

the imaginary world created through colonial education system and the reality that confronts

Dev: "It is not the unfamiliarity rather it is the gap between the expected and the immediately

received that keeps disturbing him.... The sight of beggars in the London streets shocks him.

'One expects them in India. But here beggars!'" (Sharma. R. S, Anila Desai 62). Dev grows up

on a literary image of England and the real urban London stifles him. Being highly self

conscious of his alicnness and inability to imbibe the English culture, he finds himself a victim

of the still continuing colonial legacy. It is only when he accompanies Sarah and Adit to

Hampshire, in the company of nature he rediscovers all the envisioned while reading the poetry

of Tennyson and Milton. "... this he ... saw from side to side as drunkenly as a bumblebee,

this was the England her poets had celebrated so well that he, a foreigner, found every little

wildflower. every mood and aspect of it.... It was something he was visiting for the first time

... yet he had known it all along - in his reading, his daydreams - and now he found his dreams

had been an exact, a detailed, and a brilliant and mirror-like reflection of reality. English

literature! English poetry! he wanted to shout. He finds peace in the English landscape ...

[with] renewed zeal to continue" (192-93).

Dev's dilemmas emanate from his emotional and instinctive responses to the English

scene, especially from an ex-colonized point of view. The colonized in spite of his bitter

experiences look towards the land of his one time master as a promised land, however in

reality when it does not cater to his needs, he sighs incoherently as Dev does. "Willingly

England had conquered his own country, then why ... would she give nothing in return?" (120)

and he turns into a disillusioned man. Dev pulls out his watch from under his pillow feels

disgusted to find it was barely five o'clock. "He wondered if he had died in the night of an

inability to acclimatize itself (5). he finds it difficult to adjust with the new surroundings.

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 Initially Dev does not desire to live in a country where he is insulted and unwanted. His

only desire is to go back to India as an England returned teacher for he realizes that it was

futile on his part to have come all the way to London for proper education. He regards his

friend Adit to be "boot licking today and a spineless imperialist lover you would sell your soul

and passport too for a glimpse at two shillings of some draughtly old stately home" (19).

The situation and condition in both places is difficult: In London everyone is stranger

and lives in hiding, they live invisibly and silently. He feels that the climate in London is

extremely difficult and Adit and Sarah are masochists to live in such a climate. He further sees

that the neighbours were rather silent. "If this were India ... I would by now know all my

neighbours even if I had never spoken to them. I ontry and not the Christian concept of God.

They proclaim their belief that it is not piety that makes a man worthy of his honour but service

and successful service to king and country in the name of God. According to him the people

who swarm in are tourists than worshippers and they come with guide books and whisper of

history and piety.

To disentangle from the influence of one's own culture, which is a part of one's

consciousness is not easy, and one is tempted to evaluate the alien culture with the measuring

rod of one's own. Hence Dev cannot understand the western culture, he finds it difficult to

adjust to the silence and emptiness that prevailed in London which was uncharacteristic of

India. The houses and blocks of flats, streets and squares all appeared to him dead and unalive.

He expects people to be more social like Indians. The emptiness of the houses and streets of

London makes him uneasy. He is unable to understand why Englishmen are so reticent and try

to confine to their own homes:

The English habit of keeping all doors and windows tightly shut ... guarding

their privacy as they guarded their tongues from speaking and their throats

from catching cold ... remains incomprehensive to him. (63)

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Homi Bhabha has described the estranging sense of the relocation of home and the world, he

conceptualizes:

... the recesses of the domestic space become sites for history's most

intricate invasions, in that displacement, the borders between home and

world become confused and uncanny, the private and public become part of

each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting.

{The Local ion of Culture 9)

The sense of displacement, desire for the return to roots, feeling of nostalgia, remembrance of

homeland and the experience of a painful process of acculturation and adjustment are common

to all who have left homeland for an alien land. To the diasporic writers the cycle of past,

present and future, is related to the feeling of nostalgia, sense of loss, and consciousness of the

new homeland.

Dev goes through different phases of the "bewildered alien, the charmed observer, the

outraged outsider and thrilled sightseer all at once and in succession" (85). He is in two minds

as to whether he should continue to be in London or go back to India. He notices an

expression on an English face that overturns his decision and drawing himself together, he

feels he can never bear to be the unwanted immigrant but must return to his own land, however

abject or dull, where he has. at least, a place in ... security, status and freedom" (86). Caught

between acceptance and rejection, expectation and reality, he is perfectly aware of

schizophrenia that is infecting him like a disease to which all Indians abroad are prone to.

The real crisis in Dev is amply evident for he realizes that it is going to be a distant

dream for him to settle down in London. "He is letting drop and melt away his dreams of

adventure of the unexpected, the spontaneous, the wild and weird, for a very enclosed part of

the world, pigeoncote in which it is necessary to find an empty and warm niche before one was

pushed over the ledge into the sea that lapped the island's stony shores" (104). In Bye-Bye

50
Blackbird the image of the city has a different perspective as it points to the void of existence,

which is mutely repulsive and incomprehensively cold.

Bye-Bye Blackbird brings to mind Kamala Markandaya's The Nowhere Man; the

conditions presented in both novels are the same wherein the novelists highlight the cultural

clashes. The protagonist Srinivas in The Nowhere Man is forced to leave his country during the

national freedom movement. England becomes homeland of Srinivas and his wife Vasantha for

the rest of their lives, they never return to India, even for a visit. His wife Vasantha is dead, his

younger son has been killed in the war, his other son Laxman considers himself English and

cannot conceive of anything Indian in relation to himself. His wife was his last link with India

and her death snaps that link too. Throughout The Nowhere Man Markandaya maintains a fine

contact between the Indian and English sensibilities; Indian mind is equated with instinct and

emotion and the English mind with reason and logic. The "nowhere" man, de-racinated.

deregionalized. that is what Srinivas becomes when he tries to synthesize his Indianness with

the English ways of life. He feels like a "Nowhere man looking for a nowhere country" (66).

The identity dilemma finds articulation in Bharati Mukherjee's Wife and M. G.

Vassanji's No New Land in which the protagonists of Indian origin are uprooted from their

moorings and are expatriated to alien countries. Being uprooted from the native cultural

traditions and values, the loss of indigenous language, man's position as a mere outsider or an

unaccommodated alien, together with multiple injuries and lacerations of the psyche, account

for the theme of identity atrophy in these two novels. Mukhjee's Wife is about displacement

and alienation, for it portrays the psychological claustrophobia and the resultant destructive

tendencies in the condition of Dimple Dasgupla who is entrapped in a dilemma between

"American culture and society and the traditional constraints surrounding an Indian wife.

between a feminist desire to be assertive and the Indian need to be submissive" (Jain, Writers

of Indian Diaspora 74).

in the 1970s have been uprooted from their native land and transplanted to the new world of

Toronto suburb of Don Mills, but their dreams of the new land are shattered as Nurdin is

haunted by old memories. Failure to find a decent job adds to his misery which is elevated

further when one night on his return home, he is shocked to know that he is being implicated

for allegedly assaulting a girl. Though ultimately he manages to come out clean of this stigma,

Nurdin has to reconcile himself as a marginal man whose fate has decreed him to live in two

worlds and in two cultures not merely different but completely antagonistic.

Apart from nostalgic reminiscences, a more serious consideration can also be perceived

in the writer's act of recreating the past, they are like folk historians, mythmakers and

custodians of the collective history of their people. In many instances "this reclamation of the

past is the first serious act of writing, having reclaimed it. having given himself a history, he

liberates himself to write about the present" (Vassanji, A Meeling oj Streams 63-67). The

diasporic writers, who have a straight forward exposition of journey, identify the regions with

the past, the present and the future. It denotes the life of an immigrant and the three regions are

the home culture, alien culture and the muiticulture. The first region of the diasporic world is

usually presented as a place of richness and warmth, a place of birth and ancestors where the

person who inhabits it lives free from the crisis of identity and untroubled by the sense of loss

which later shapes him in an alien land. The second region of the diasporic world is the very

antithesis of the wami glade. Far from being a place where one is a part of the social fabric, it

is likely to be a place where one is all alone, alienated, struggling for one's identity. The third

region of world of diasporic writers is the region of reconciliation, first with the self and then

with the new land.

Adit Sen in Bye-Bye Blackbird, the self-satisfied Indian gradually finds himself

estranged from the new environment. A person imbibes his culture as the very air he breathes:

52
it is not thrust upon him. Adoption to alien culture becomes difficult because the value systems

are different. The culture is threatened only when one confronts an alien society where he

becomes aware of the disparity between his native culture and the host culture. Adit despite his

attempts at acculturation realizes slowly that he is still a misfit. Like many other immigrants,

he has felt in his subconscious mind his disenchantment with the alien sophisticated culture.

All these years the conscious mind has been thrusting the subconscious under the guise of a

complacement life with his English wife, bell hooks writes in this context: "I had to leave that

space I called to move beyond boundaries, yet I needed also to return there.... At times, home

is nowhere. At times: one knows only extreme estrangement and alienation. Then home is no

longer just one place. It is location, home is that place which enables and promotes varied and

ever changing perspectives, a place where one discovers new ways of seeing reality, frontiers

of difference" ("Yearning." 145-53).

Gradually Adil no longer feels self-contained or smug in the very English atmosphere

that he had admired all along, a change comes over him. His final visit to his in-laws

disenchants him. the very truth that he is an Indian and can never breathe the English air freely

dawns upon him. The stay with them brings in nostalgic memories of his home and he starts

perceiving everything with a fresh perspective. "It was as though some black magician had

placed an evil pair of spectacle on his eyes" (177) distorting and terrifying what had till then

been familiar and cozy. For the first time, it strikes him that his position as a coloured

immigrant is founded on illusions and false hopes, and various factors contribute to this mood

of sadness. "This mood had begun to enter him. circulate within him and is after him during

the drive out of London, through the Hampshire fields, and has eventually accompanied him

through the dismal dinner and the night when Sarah had shut him out from her childhood of

one-eared pandas and jigsaw puzzles" (200). The feeling that he is different from the English

leads him on to a quest for his true identity and home. Like Adit, when one is physically

53
separated from home or homelands, one attempts to construct an image of home or family and

attributes to it those values which were ones held dear. "Home"' for A. K. Ramanujan in the

case of Diaspora writers, is a mythical place of desire in the imagination and a place of no

return assuming a dream like quality and retaining in it the seeds of ambivalence.

Returning home on blazing afternoon he looked for his mother everywhere,

she was not in the kitchen, she was not in the backyard, she was not

anywhere. (Harrison. The Oxford India Ramanujan V)

The breaking out of war between India and Pakistan creates another important structure in the

text. The war makes Adit nostalgic and awakens a desire in him of being back in India. The

love of motherland shakes the hidden dormant sentiments, he decides to go back to his country

immediately. There is dilemma in his mind to leave England or not. ultimately he listens to the

call of his conscience, realizes his social responsibility and says no to the artificial life of

England. Dev is much more sensitive than Adit regarding his relationship with the English. He

loves England and yet he hates it with all his heart, analyzing the mental perception of Dev R.

S. Sharma avers: ''In his [Dev's] often mutually contradictory responses to England. Dev

displays characteristic psychic traits of an ex-colonial. He suffers essentially from a Caliban

complex, now adoring, now loathing, the sensibility that he has imbibed from the colonial

rule" ("Alienation. Accommodation and Locale in Anita Desai's Bye- Bye Blackbird," 31-49).

Adit who once sees all gold in England now sees the falsehood, and the fakeness and

the unnatural strains of this and his own education, and fascination for British and poetry fall

away. ''He sees himself as an outsider not only by virtue of his color but by an imagination run

amuck" (191). It was also obvious that "it was not the occasional slights and insults directed

against him as a stranger, a non-belonger that had finally proved too much for him but the

placidity, and ease of England" (184) resulting in cultural shock, feelings of depression and

frustration that overwhelm him when he realizes the difference between the way of life he is

54
familiar with and the new environment. Despite his attempts at amalgamation, the alien culture

distances him; even marriage does not guarantee him equal status. The immigrant at such

moments often retreats to his own culture and past in search of his lost identity.

The distance in years as well as geography gives Adit a better perception of his country,

hatred recedes and its place is taken by nostalgia. The hypnotic charm that England had on him

is over, he confesses to Sarah that now he wants to go back home. Sarah dedicates herself to

her husband and binds the different threads in the story. "Whatever it is it will be Indian, it will

be my natural condition, my true circumstance. I must go and face all that now ... He decides

to discard the burden of this 'half-English' pretence and to go home" (204). An immigrant

usually passes through the phases of attraction, rejection and frustration as is the case with

Adit. It highlights that the new "home" is a location of cultural freedom quite unlike the

inevitable conservatism and claustrophobia that are associated with the place of one's origin.

The nostalgic response to homeland and reaction to the alien land lead to promising hope of

changing the alien land into a new homeland.

Hindu philosophy and ethics teach that right action for an individual depends on desh,

the culture in which he is born; on kala, the period of historical time in which he lives; on

shrama, the efforts and on gunas, the inmate psychobiological traits which is the heritage of an

individual's previous life. An association between social configurations and the inherited

"sanskaras" make one's culture strong. The Hindu or Indian culture, "like the evidence of the

senses which more often than not goes unquestioned, the materiality of culture is also rarely

summoned for conscious examination; yet it exercises an influence on individual thought and

behaviour that is somewhat comparable to the working of the reality and pleasure principles.

Instinctual reality demands ... their counterpart in cultural imperatives. Denial of these

imperatives can create tension and disease in the individual" (Kakar, The Indian Psyche 51).

The presence of two cultures in one's mind forms a wider and therefore

saner basis on which too originates the quest for identity ... the discordance

55
 between these two cultures can be creative as well as merely confusing.

Perhaps one can go further and suggest that the man with mixed allegiances

is contemporary 'everyman'. (Rajan, Commonweallh Literature 108)

Though Dev feels "he can never bear to be the unwanted immigrant" (86), he is finally drawn

into the magic of land which had enchanted Adit earlier. It is his association with nature at

Sarah's parents place that gives a healing touch to his troubled psyche. England ceases to be an

"aggression who tried to enmesh, subjugate and victimize him with the weapons of empire"

and becomes something he can "hold and tame even love." He no longer sees it with the eye of

the "once conquered race, or an oppressive and shortsighted visitor but of someone before

whom vistas of love, success and joy had opened" (229). The same visit serves as an eye

opener to both Adit and Dev resulting in their respective transformation. The visitor becomes

the exile and the exile retreats back to home. Desai successfully handles the nuances of

immigrant psyche as she herself has opined: "I wrote it in an effort to understand the split

psychology, the double loyalties of the immigrants" ("The Book I Enjoyed Writing the

Most," 24).

Avtar Brah expresses that the migrant authors have addressed issues in their fiction,

often with confused or mixed results, sometimes mired in essentiah'sms:

When does a location become home? What is the difference between

'feeling at home' and staking claim to a place as one's own. It is quite

possible to feel at home in place and, yet, the experience of social exclusions

may inhabit public proclamations of the place as home. (Cartographies of

Diaspora 193)

Sarah, the English wife of Adit, has been portrayed as a lifeless doll lacking spiritual depth and

insight, and more attention is given to her English origin than as an individual. Though Sarah,

who migrated to England is of Anglo-Saxon origin, yet she is quite oriental in her ways being

56
gentle and submissive like an Indian wife. Her marriage to an Indian immigrant makes her very

confused because she has to adopt the mixed cultures of the east and the west, however she

makes efforts to come to terms with both. By marrying an Indian, she has "lowered" her

position among her fellow countrymen and remains an outsider for the Indian community

because she is English. She lives in a familiar environment but still her identity crisis arises out

of the conflict between her identity as an English woman and her role as an Indian wife. The

English lady is highly self-conscious of her status and spends most of her time in introspection.

"Woman is a synonym of home, and whenever a true wife comes, this home is always round

her. The stars only may be over her head, the glow worm in the night-cold grass may be the

only fire at her foot, but home is wherever she is" (Millet. Sexual Politics 99).

Two modalities of "being home" and "not being home" can be crystallized as such:

"'Being home' refers to the place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries;

'not being home' is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety

based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of

differences even within oneself (Martin and Mohanty. Feminism 90). Caren Kalpan charts the

journey from "being home" to "not being home" as a move from "deterritorialization" "leaving

the safety of home which is a site of racism, sexism and other damaging social practices" (qtd.

in Rose. Feminism and Geography 194-97).

Basically Sarah has over sensitive disposition and marriage gives her nothing but

alienation and loneliness. By marrying an Indian, she has generated hostility among her

colleagues, in her mairiage to an Indian "she has become nameless, she has shed her name as

she has shed her ancestry and identity" (35). R. S. Sharma says. "Anita Desai focuses on this

disturbing aspect of loss of identity that immigration necessarily involves. The pathos of a

culturally alienated girl are most movingly rendered in Sarah's life" {Anita Desai 73). Jyotasna

Milan shows an atmosphere of suffocation, of things cluttered together, building an enclosure,

57
and of alienation of space, of unfamiliar rooms in which the woman roams like a ghost.

Exteriors and interiors are disconnected, both in the case of house, which lacks the care of a

home, and of the woman's soul, as if alienated from her body. She turns the gas on. makes tea.

cleans the house, and changes the faded sheets. People come and say. "Your house really feels

like home." astonished she looks at her house, wanders in the rooms, looks for a home, and

finds a room sofa. bed. chairs, another room bed. mats appliances. All these things enclose

every room where she is and her soul, astray, roams about, in search of home, as if no one"s"

{Ghar Nahi: Not a Home 57). In the course of time Sarah alienates herself from the public and

private life. In the school where she works, she avoids conversation with her colleagues who

often discuss her married life. Her colleagues wonder how she can adjust with an Indian

husband and she avoids their probing questions. In fact she loves India and knows something

about India through the pictures of Indian landscape, however, it is adjustment with Adit all

that matters for her. She stops cooking English food and learns to cook Indian food. After

marrying Adit Sen. Sarah feels as the "other" she has sacrificed a lot and even then she is

treated like the "other" by Adit. Seema Jena looks at this predicament of Sarah from a wider

perspective: "Anita Desai traces our attention to the annihilation of self that marriage involves

for a female" {Voice and Visions of Anita Desai 47).

Sarah suffers identity dilemma owing to her relationship with Adit. She is an alien in

her own country; she becomes nameless and silently suffers anguish and fails to hide the

turmoil within. Her marriage to "wog" compels her to "keep to the loneliest path" and walk,

drawing across her face, "a mask of serecy." Sarah's problem is rooted in her cross-cultural

marriage which leads to her identity crisis. She would hide herself from colleagues, her own

colleague .lulia does not spare her and looks for an opportunity to hurt her with painful words:

If she's that ashamed of having an Indian husband, why did she go and

marry him? (39)

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The most peculiar thing about this relation is that even a white girl Sarah is not liked by the

people of her own community for having married an Indian. She has to face the anger of the

White society because by marrying a brown Asian, she has broken the social code of England

and resultantly she is subjected to comments not only by her colleagues but even by the young

school children and she tries to avoid personal questions regarding her husband and family life.

It would have wrecked her for the whole day to have to discuss Adit with

Julia, with Miss Pimm, in this sane, chalk-dusted, workaday office.... To

display her letters from India, to discuss her Indian husband, would have

forced her to parade like an imposter. to make claims to life, an identity that

she did not herself feel to be her own. (38)

Thus, she is pretending to ignore people in order to save her identity. She is always compared

with an imposter who always pretends to be somebody else in order to trick people. Like her

husband Adit, she also feels that she is leading an affected, artificial life. She makes claims for

an identity but she does not herself feel to be her own. On account of marrying Adit, she has

become a nowhere woman and fails to realize to which group she really belongs.

Sarah undergoes psychological imbalancing too. She is a product of happy English

home with set norms and was able to identify herself earlier and as such there was no conflict

in her before marriage. Tension creeps into her life after marriage and the struggle begins to

know her real self.

Who was she - Mrs. Sen who had been married in a red and gold Benares

Brocade sari one burning bronzed day in September, or Mrs. Sen. the

Head's secretary ... They were roles - and when she was not playing them,

she was nobody. Her face was only a mask, her body only a costume. Where

was Sarah? ... she wondered, with great sadness, if she would ever be

59
 allowed to step off the stage, leave the theater and enter the real world

whether English or Indian, she did not care. She wanted only its sincerity, it

truth. (36)

The very mode of self-interrogation - referring to herself in the remote third person - shows

that there is disintegration of her personality. It is evident that she is uncertain of her identity

and feels totally lost. Her security on being Mrs. Sen is problematic. She marries Adit because

she had a keen desire to know India, but her real self is caught in a tragic situation when Adit

declares his decision to go back. It must be said to the credit of Sarah that she makes sincere

efforts to identify herself with her husband.

What her husband brought her ... he seemed so rich to her, he seemed to

have so much to give her - so many relations and attachements, pictures and

stories, promises and warnings. (237)

Sarah faces troubles because she can't fully involve herself in her husband's culture, nor can

she remain completely rooted in her own society. In spite of her set efforts to prove herself a

faithful wife, she feels miserable to observe that the members of her own family are highly

critical or her. She perfonns all her duties with the conviction of a priestess and feels that

eventually she will succeed in her efforts.

Desai has taken a working woman as a character through whom she describes the

problems faced by working women in a hostile society. Being a foreigner Sarah is different

from other women portrayed in her works yet her self-control on her sense of sacrifice is

appreciable. Apparently Sarah may be a pathetic figure, suffering from alienation, yet her

courage and stoicism in trying to adjust are qualities worth admiring. It is her strong will power

that often comes to her rescue as she does not allow tensions to crop up between them. Hari

Mohan Prasad rightly points out:

60
 In her there is a real split, a real Dilemma, a real suffering, but she triumphs

over all these. She is a silent volcano, not dead, yet not bursting. She

understands Dev, she knows her mother well, keeps a balanced relationship

with friends and visitors, and shows a feeling for Adit. Right from the

beginning she has been quiet in her response. Dev's long arguments and

heated discussions of other friends never disturb her calm. ("Sound and

Sense." 64)

Adit is a typical man who never cares for his wife and her sentiments and almost all decisions

in the family are taken by Adit. Even without consulting Sarah he decides to return to India.

During the time when Adit prepares himself and Sarah to leave England. Sarah gets a

promotion in job. and this information unsettles Adit, he accuses Sarah of being the one who is

not interested to leave England, whereas she has already decided not to accept promotion.

Sarah seems to be more an Indian wife than an English woman. Usha Bande explains the

sources of Sarah's alienation:

Sarah in Bye-Bye Blackbird is a case of both social and psychological

alienation. The social factor stems from her marriage to an Indian settled in

England: her psychological trouble emanates from her pride system. {The

Novels of Anita Desai 119)

Katyayani personifies home as a cunning, omnipresent and omnipotent guardian of the

patriarchal order that bullies and intimidates its females by menacingly following her

everywhere, by threatening her with images of barren, hostile homelessness and by insisting

that her place is in the kitchen and the birthing room, not in the office or the street where she is

a danger to society.

... the house was also a strict disciplinarian guardian it always followed her

when the co-man would go out on the streets. It knew that the woman's
 being on the street was a danger to her and the entire society. (Katyayani. Is

Pauruspwna Samuy Me 68)

The question of being an exile in one"s own land is raised through Sarah who has a yearing to

marry Adit in order to fill certain gaps and charms in her life, however it is doubtful whether

she will fully succeed or not. Her life-affirming attitude and faith in making sincere efforts for

assimilation into an alien culture are clearly perceptible in her decision to come to India with

Adit in spite of the opposition of her parents. The marriage of Adit and Sarah also

emblematizes the efforts of reducing tensions due to racial discrimination. Desai in this context

observes: "I don't think anybody's exile from society can solve any problem. I think basically

the problem is how to exist in society and yet maintain one's individuality rather than suffering

from a lack of society and a lack of belonging" (qtd. in Jain, Stairs to the Attic 15). "Indeed, if

we think of home as an outer skin, then we can also consider how migration involves not only

a special dislocation, but also a temporal dislocation: 'the past' becomes associated with a

home that is impossible to inhabit, and be inhabited by the present. The question then of being

at home or leaving home is always a question of memory, of the discontinuity between past

and present" (Ahmed. "Home and Away." 329-47).

Socio-psycho-philosophic dimensions in Desai are not only natural but quite

convincing too. All said and done. Desai is an artist and Solanki perceives a consummate

creative artist in Anita Desai who exhibits tremendous potential and vitality. "In her writings

she not only offers an expose of human life in its shocking shallowness or outward show, but

also provides, down deep a philosophical probe or basis to sustain our life, she emerges neither

as a downright pessimist nor as an incorrigible optimist. All along, her earnest endeavour is to

hold a mirror to life, and in the process, to unravel the mystery of human existence" (Solanki.

Anita Desai's Fiction 185). Sarah has to annihilate her individual identity and self because

marriage leaves her with no choice, her predicament exemplifies "the annihilation of self that

62
marriage involves for a female, a theme that she [Anita Desai] picks up in her subsequent

novels" (Sharma, R. S. Anita Desai 90). Adit Sen. the husband, seeks his own self only and is

absolutely unaware of his wife's loss of self and identity.

Sarah's identity crisis is the major manifestation of Bye-Bye Blackbird. If a girl marries

in the same culture, it is comparatively easy to adjust in the new home and family, but inter-

cultural, inter-religious and inter-racial marriage causes hardships and adjustment problems

which are not easy to handle. Sarah has married a person whose race was once ruled over by

her own. and old prejudices die hard. This is the problem that leaves Sarah homeless in her

native country having ironic connotations. Sarah is not happy on account of the social

prejudice of her people yet she presents her own stance of an Indian wife, and she sensibly

takes care of things. It is praiseworthy that, in spite of being from an alien culture. Sarah

understands her husband and his family and country which she would accept wholeheartedly,

once they are in India.

The terms rootlessness, exile, displacement and alienation are partially judicious to

communicate the sensibility of expatriates. Expatriation sensibility involves social assimilation

and reconstruction of the psychology of a person:

Expatriation is actually a complex state of mind and emotion which includes

a wistful longing for the past, often symbolized by ancestral home, the pain

of exile and homelessness, the struggle to maintain the differences between

oneself and the new unfriendly surroundings, as assumption of moral and

cultural superiority over the host country and a refusal to accept the identity

forced one of the environment. The expatriate builds a cocoon around

herself, himself or refuses from cultural dilemma and from the experienced

hostility or unfriendliness in the new country. (Gomez, "The Ongoing

Quest," 72)

63
To be alienated from self and society are the tragedies of modem man. Desai presents the

problem of alienation being faced by most of her protagonists who find themselves unable to

ftilfill social expectations or play their ordained roles, hence they face a sense of rootlessness.

isolation and alienation. R. S. Pathak points out that "self-alienation is the more basic formal

rootlessness and can thwart the individual's mental and psychic development in an alarmmg

manner' ("The Alienated Self." 14). Reality for Desai is neither metaphysical nor socio-

political, she has given an existential dimension to the three most vital human predicaments -

anguish, alienation and despair. The development of plot in her novels is not a spatio-temporal

progression, it leads to the protagonist's self-discovery. "My novels are no reflection of Indian

society, politics or character. They are a part of my private effort to seize upon the raw material

of life ... its meaningfulness" (qtd. in Winson, Conlemporary Novelist 348).

In the diaspora writings, the quest for identity and home in the land of adoption is a

focal point of speculation. The crisis springs out of the socio-psychic affinity with the native

culture and the new bonds of affinity with new culture. Marriage as a means of assimilation

secures an alarming place in many immigrant writings. Sarah also tries to adjust and

accommodate without showing the master-slave complex or superiority/inferiority syndrome,

yet her culture being isomorphic, she tries to build a harmonious matrimonial relationship by

keeping past and present in two watertight compartments. Hence her life becomes mechanical,

keeping an emotional distance from everyone and everything, she remains an outsider in her

own soil as well as in her acquired nation. Emptiness and dissatisfaction have been hers and

her final decision to follow Adit to India is a relief to her because in her homeland she

considers herself not as a person but only as performing the role.

The migrant Indians who relocate themselves in homes away from home express an

eagerness to have dual passports, an eagerness that is not only about materiality, dislocation

and relocation, but the irrepressible emotional reality of deep rooted longing to belong to

64
everywhere. The mention of "home" and "outside" is not a specification of India at ail. but

rather the disappearance of India if defined as the habitation of Indians. In Bye-Bye Blackbird.

it is not only Adit and Dev who share a colonial past and undergo identity crises even without

getting transplanted physically to another culture, but Sarah too loses her identity in her own

native soil. The crisis of identity is not particularly of anyone; it seems to have larger

dimensions. If it engulfs Dev. it also engulfs Sarah; if Dev is called a "wog" (16) she is called

Mrs. "curry" (36).

Her situation, more poignant than that of the uprooted aliens is cleverly manipulated by

Desai. Unlike Adit and Dev who willingly uprooted themselves from their native soil. Sarah

gets herself alienated from her society through her marriage. Her inter-cultural marriage does

not offer her anything grand and fabulous, strangely enough, it is Sarah who gives more to the

marriage. Although Adit outwardly disdains India and wants to be a true Englishman, he is out

and out an Indian; he eats curry, listens to sitar and remembers India nostalgically, in fact he

does not change, it is Sarah who changes her English ways - reads books about Indians and

listens to sitar recitals and annihilates her English self to become an Indian - and the departure

to India is a departure from one part of herself

Adit after serious considerations realizes that he has been leading an unreal life in

England; he wants to break loose from the unreal existence by turning towards his roots; he

desires to go back to his mother country to see Indian landscape of vastness and wildness.

sunrise and sunset. It seems as if "a sudden clamour was aroused in him. like a child's tantrum

to see again an Indian sunset" (Surendram, "Identity Crisis in Anita Desai's Bye-Bye

Blackbird," 50).

In fact, the decision to leave England is not as sudden as it seems, it is the result of a

series of experiences that he has been experiencing over a period of time. They suddenly

coalesce into an intense moment of decisive action after the crucial visit: "No England. I have

65
done with England now. Sarah, I am going back to India home" (203). The declaration disturbs

Sarah, but Adit's decision is fmal. The reason that he gives for his going is: "I can't live here

anymore. Our lives here have been so unreal, don't you feel it. Little India in London ... it is

all so unreal. I am twenty seven now. I have to go home and start living a real life" (204). Now

he gets delighted at the sight of anything Indian. In fact, his self introspection cleanses his

doors of perception:

The ferocity of his growing nostalgia broke that stone dam that had silenced

him for so long ... this nostalgia that had become an illness, an ache ... Adit

himself could not have explained.... It was not the occasional slights and

insults directed against him as a stranger, a non-belonger. that had finally

proved too much for him. but the placidity, the munificence and the ease of

England. (178-180)

Thus, the image of "stone dam that had silenced him for long" aptly describes his silence

during his stay in England. The stone dam breaks down on the arrival of his friend Dev who

continuously reminds him of his loss of self respect in an alien land. He feels the pain of being

an immigrant. On the other hand, Dev who initially feels alienation, adjustment problems, and

racial discrimination gradually adjusts himself to his "new home." A country which initially

was a land of dreams for Adit clutches his friend Dev.

England's greed and gold fingers had let go of Adit and clutched at Dev

instead. England had let Adit drop and fall away as if she had done with him

or realized that he had with her, and caught and enmeshed his friend

Dev. (223)

Sarah announces her pregnancy. Adit immediately forwards his wish; Sarah is caught in a

tragic situation as she is the only daughter of a middle class couple at Hampshire, a beautiful

country side. Sarah has three challenges before her: "There was the baby; there was the

66
voyage, the uprooting" (206). Regarding uprooting she somehow consoles herself, "1 think

when I go to India, I will not find it too strange after all. I am sure I shall feel quite at home

very soon" (219). Soon she realizes that going to India would mean "all pangs of saying good-

bye to her past twenty four years" (221).

Bidding good bye to England was no problem to her, because England would remain as

it is. It'll be an uprooting for Sarah who has to leave her country. It is really very difficult to

leave one's country, whether for social, political or economic reasons. It is therefore, believed

that individuals cannot exist apart from culture and society and they take on reality only in the

personalities and behaviour of individuals. Thus Sarah's decision to marry an Indian bears no

fruit but results in tension, depression and aggression. As such her identity is caught between

two cultures of origin and adoption. The identity crisis, the feeling of inbetweenness and

belonging to nowhere is the fate of immigrants. The immigrants might adopt and assimilate the

culture, but they aren't taken to be a part and parcel of the host country and their identity is

related to migrant history of their parents and grandparents. The reasons why Sarah avoids

society and loves solitude has been analyzed by Usha Bande in these words:

After wedding, her reticence turns into aloofness. Sarah loses her zest to

participate in living, apathy pervades her. She feels empty, and ineffectual in

directing her life. Sarah is not lonely, socially. At home, there are Adit, Dev

and their social circle. In school, she has her colleagues. But amid the crowd

Sarah is solitary: she cannot enjoy the company of her countrymen, nor can

she be at home is psychological, the latter cultural, alienation. She refuses to

work out any co-ordination and wants to escape socialization by hiding.

{The Novels of Anita Desai 47)

This analysis of Sarah's character can be concluded by the remark of Usha Bande that though

Sarah is displaced in her own country and her crisis of identity will not be solved even if she

67
goes to India, yet she can get over her crisis by developing her own inner resources: "If Sarah

is able to maintain the spirit of her constructive thought and if they are not followed by any

repercussions of self destructive feeling, she may assume responsibility for self. If she strives

towards clearer and deeper experiences of her feeling, beliefs and wishes, outgrowing narrow,

neurotic egocentricity and if she manages to relate herself to others, she will steadily gain inner

certainty which comes by belonging, through active participation in life" (Bande, The Novels

of Anita Desai 47).

This is the diaspora that Bhikhu Parekh says is not rootless at ail, that indeed ... far

from being homeless, it has several homes and that is the only way it has increasingly come to

feel at home in the world" ("Some Reflections of Indian Diaspora," 106). This is also the

Diaspora that can only claim belonging, according to Vijay Mishra, "in ... an imaginary index

that signifies its own impossibility as it struggles to possess the hyphen" ("The Diasporic

Imagination," 433). Rushdie suggests that "the writer who is out of country and even out of

languages may experience the loss of home in an intensified form" (Midnighl's Children 12).

Dev does not have any well-defined destination, but then he takes a long walk in

countryside, and sees the beauty of the church, the light, the colours, and the calmness of the

surroundings, and all this gently moves him and he experiences himself closer to the new land.

He gets job as a salesman in Foley's book shop and also a room in a youth hostel of Battersea.

Finally, he goes to the railway station to say good-bye to Adit and Sarah. After their departure.

Dev wonders, "Why Adit was leaving while he stayed on? What had made them exchange the

garments of visitor and exile" (228). Then he catches the bus for Clapan flat where Dev is

finally left all alone. As Sarah is saying good-bye to her English self, Dev is saying good-bye

to his Indian self or it can be a prayer for rest and light for him and a good bye to his gloomy

self. The world beyond the home is described as an insane race of frenzied multitudes, and the

problem is that it has become impossible to withdraw from this race and find solace in the

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home. The recovery of home and the rehabiHtation of the family require a radical reorienting of

the cacophonous world outside the home.

Sarah's existentialist dilemma reaches its peak at the end. no doubt after marriage she

has sacrificed many things to buy peace in her family life, Bye-Bye Blackbird suggests a

peaceful conclusion: "Sarah and Adit held hands like a pair of children, feeling Bengali,

feeling India sweep into their room like a flooded river, drawing all that has been English in it"

(224). Though Desai does not elaborate her personal experiences, yet it is her creative insight

into the problems because her parents come from different cultural backgrounds that provide

her with an illuminating and subtle insight into the comingling of separate cultures as an

outcome of mixed marriage. Herein her characters are in search of home and identity: "Her

forte is the exploration of the deniability of the particular kind of Indian sensibility that is ill at

ease among the barbarians and philistines, the anarchists and the moralists"' (lyenger, Indian

Writing in English 464). With her sharp sensibility and incisive understanding, Desai is able to

enter into the minds of her characters and lay bare their feelings, turmoils, doubts and

frustrations. Since her preoccupation is with the inner world of the protagonist, she is able to

"probe into the dark interiors of the human psyche" and give "a description of the various

forms of loneliness and isolation that assail these characters" (Nityanandan, Three Great

Indian Women Novelists 20). D. S. Maini, a perspective critic of Anita Desai, maintains that

the novelist succeeds "within the terms of her own purpose and vision" (qtd. in Sharma, K. K,

Indo English Literature 230).

The significant symbol in Bye-Bye Blackbird is the blackbird which is a migratory bird.

The colour of the bird symbolizes the coloured immigrants in England who lead an insecure

life, not knowing whether their right to be there would be questioned. The motifs of journey

and departure signify the individual's quest for identity and home and the growth of his

character. Adit and Sarah present private discord but they fall prey to alien culture and

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maladjustments on the social level. Both Adit and Sarah are playing dramatic roles: Adit, that

of the successful foreign based Indian, while Sarah maintains the pleasant wedded life into an

over stimulant family of Indian in-laws who are waiting to receive her with extended hands.

Bye-Bye Blackbird also deals with the treatment of the psychic tumult of self-afflicted

characters. The three characters face the dilemma of finding their identity and home because

their background is rooted in the class society with group division by birth, and from a definite

sense of social placement they are placed in an alien culture encompassing an individual and

not a group. Gradually the attitude of the characters change, an English hater. Dev. stays back

in London and the English lover. Adit realizing the hoUowness of life in London, decides to

leave London for good. K. R. S. Iyengar rightly considers that Desai "vividly projects the

prison physical and psychological in which the coloured immigrant in Britain is caught

between both the difficulties of adjustment there and those of return to India" {Indian Writing

in English 470). Sarah can be either an Indian wife or an English woman but can never be both

at the same time. The daily discord of playing two entirely different roles torments her and

tears her apart. This dilemmatic condition of Sarah signifies the unconscious terror of the

relentless forces of self-pity and self-destructiveness. "It is symbolic of her disturbed psyche.

The water-maj-nmoth represents her hate. This indicates Sarah's wish to hide her identity and

not to perceive her genuine self, struggling for recognition" (Bande. The Novels of Anita Desai

126). Sarah also yearns for freedom, it is not freedom from traditions and conceptions but

freedom from the self S. Indira rightly says that "the problem thus lies within herself {Anita

Desai as an Artist 38).

Desai has brilliantly portrayed the dilemma of uprooted individual's quest for home and

identity through Bye-Bye Blackbird. "The experience of exile which begins as condition of

living often becomes a condition of mind. Cultural displacement makes them alienated and

lonely in spite of their adjustment" (Prasad, Hari Mohan, "The Theme of Exile." 216). Home is

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where the heart is. home is where one feels at home, where one can be oneself. The idea of a

home is a combination of memory and the imaginative world of the writers is largely peopled

by the community and family in which they are raised. Adit is going back to India with his

wife because he feels from the core of his heart that India is his real home.

Adit, Dev and Sarah, the three leading characters in Bye-Bye Blackbird face identity

crises. They are forced to manipulate in accordance with the social demands. Desai keeps her

characters in certain human conditions and then embarks on self analysis. The characters make

self-discovery and find themselves homeless and unidentified. Many a time they travel through

a world of fantasy in order to come to terms with the reality of the situations. Desai presents

the predicament of diaspora people who find it difficult to adjust in the present mechanical and

urbanized set up. The sensitive human beings suffer from a sense of homelessness and identity

dilemma which reflect their existential suffering. Desai unfolds the existential traits of man in

order to reveal his hidden motives behind the reality of conscious mind.

Bye-Bye Blackbird explores different factors of psyche. Elain Showalter talks of ''the

three phases of the emergence and growth ... the phases of limitation, protest and self

discovery" {A Literature of Their (Mn 13). Desai's work remarkably shows her awareness of

innumerable problems in relation to man-woman and their aspiration for home and accepted

identity. The immigrants in the country of their dreams outwardly seem happy but inwardly

lack the satisfaction in an alien land. It seems difficult to them to maintain a balance between

two cultures, that's why. Adit after years of staying in London decides to go back to his

homeland, however his friend Dev who had just arrived, tries to make his living in this alien

country. The novel portrays variety of immigrant experiences that vary from person to person

ranging from acceptance to ambivalence.

The metaphor of journey is employed to suggest metaphysical layers of meaning.

England is the magic island that draws migratory birds and each migratory bird is trapped in its

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soul. Similarly India is a magic island for Sarah. Desai's fable contrasts the life of imaginative

experience with life as lived on the realistic plane. The tension between the two is operative in

the lives of the characters so that the distinction between the exile and the visitor, does not

remain every rigid.

If plan and prophesies had any strength in them at all, it would have been

the steaming out on the train to catch the boat back to India. This was what

he had planned ... sincerely believed. It was Adit who had found himself a

pleasant groove to fit into, with his English wife and the education ... Why.

then, was it Adit who was leaving while he stayed on? What had made them

exchange the garments of visitor and exile? (222)

Apparently Dev succumbs to the snares of England that draws him away from India. Here

England itself appears as a temptress that draws the excolonials to its fold, treats them like

lovers who are desired and then abandoned altogether. Adit"s final rejection of England, thus,

suggests his growth as an individual in love with his motherland.

Beyond assimilation and rejection, the novel deals with the temptation that the colonial

culture has for the colonized. The blackbird thus stands both for the temptation and the gloom

that this temptation creates for the excolonial. If Adit is free of his temptation. Dev is free of

his gloom, and the novel, therefore, rightly bids the blackbird a "bye-bye." Desai emerges as

an artist of exceptional ability in expressing the diasporic hues in her writings by assimilating

the influences of the pioneers of modern western fiction into the venture of Indian English

fiction.

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