Introduction

338
Sonja Lehmann
5.3.3. Transnational Illusions?
So far, the novel offers a grim perspective on the formation of transnational identities.
The promising initial transnational connections in the novel have turned out
to be illusions. Any trace of transnational sentiments that had been left in Kip
immediately disappears upon his hearing of the news of the atomic bombs. He is
“separate from the world” (EP 301) in the patient’s room, which is “crowded now
with the world” (EP 303). The two worlds mentioned here clearly stand for two
very different things. Kip is exiled from one of these worlds, the villa community,
and arrives in the other, in his real world again which is dominated by conflict
between nations and cultures. Brutally confronted with real life he can no longer
remain part of the postnational villa community and realizes that any connectedness
on his part to a Western nation will ultimately be denied so that he must
leave. In fact, he seems already partly gone while he still occupies the villa’s space,
which is conveyed by frequent references to Kip’s body surrounding the immediate
news of the bomb. Hana remembers the “line of movement Kip’s body followed
out of her life”, she hears “a scream emerge from his body” (EP 300) and
can see that “his brown face is weeping” (EP 301). The Kip who travelled with
her to India in his mind is no longer there, though. He seems split, his mind and
personality already elsewhere while only his body remains.
This is further emphasized by his reassertion of a purely Indian identity. He
can no longer be connected to several nations and realizes that he is no longer Kip
but “Kirpal Singh and he does not know what he is doing here” (EP 305). As a
consequence, he rejects his British uniform in favour of traditional Indian clothes
(EP 305) and finally leaves. The breach seems irrevocable as his return journey
indicates that he can no longer occupy transnational spaces. Having been fascinated
with churches and Christian art throughout the novel, he can now no longer
enter the church he wants to revisit, “unable to enter the intimacy of a home” (EP
310). Thus the community is disbanded: Kip has left, the patient dies and with
him his postnational ideals, and Caravaggio and Hana return to Canada. It seems
as if the possibility of transnationality has only been an illusion (see also Kella
102).
It is important to note that the novel does not end like that. Delbaere stresses
that an attempt at some reconciliation is already made through the novel’s use of
intertextuality during Kip’s journey home. Riding on his motorcycle he cannot
shake off the image of the patient who seems to sit in front of him and sings
Isaiah to him. She explains, “[t]he words that ‘shall not depart out of [Kip’s] mouth’ (p.
294) are those of Isaiah who, as we know, prophesied the recovery of the garden
in which the wolf would dwell with the lamb and the leopard with the kid” (Delbaere
55-56; emphasis in original). There is still hope that differences can be reconciled
which is further affirmed in the unbroken connection between Hana and
Kip (see also Papayanis 237). Younis sums up the novel’s sentiment precisely: