Her watch told Bibi-ji that it was three o’clock in the morning but already, in the corridors of the guest house and outside her window, she could hear people move about. There was the sound of water running and the murmur of voices. The pilgrims were getting ready to visit the Harimandir Sahib before the heat made it impossible to walk barefoot on the marble walkway leading up to it. She looked out the window, filled with a childlike excitement. Somewhere out there the sun waited to explode into the sky. In another hour, the holy book would be carried from its resting place in the Akal Takht building, a plain structure that housed the temple offices, across the causeway and over the sacred waters of the lake surrounding the Harimandir Sahib, and finally through the great rosewood and silver doors to the spot where it would stay until nine that evening, when it would be borne back, the way it had arrived, to the Akal Takht.
Bibi-ji had no desire to miss this most beloved of rituals. She scrambled out of bed calling for Pa-ji to wake up as well, shaking him by his shoulder. “I’ll have my bath and then you get ready, okay?” She stroked a long strand of loose hair away from his sweating face. It grieved her that members of the community whom Pa-ji had known for so many years, some of whom had stayed at their home as new immigrants, should boycott their restaurant so resolutely. It made her angry that his generosity was being repaid with such ill will. She had been frightened in the past few months by the attacks on Pa-ji, and was glad that he was away from all that—for a few weeks, at least.
“I don’t want to miss the Sawari ceremony, so make sure you are up by the time I finish my bath,” Bibi-ji said, touching Pa-ji’s shoulder again. He stirred and sat up, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles, and after she had made sure that he was not going to slip back into sleep, Bibi-ji headed for the bath.
Day was breaking when they crossed the courtyard separating the living quarters from the temple, and already the plaza around the Harimandir Sahib was packed with worshippers. The dawn singers had started to recite the Asa di War, the first song of the morning, preparing for the arrival of the holy book. Bibi-ji caught Pa-ji’s hand and pushed her way through the crowd, pulling him behind her and ignoring his murmured protests that he was content to stay where they were, until they were near the Akal Takht building, directly across from the shrine. The priests would emerge from this building bearing the book on its cushion of tasseled silks, carried in its ceremonial palanquin of gold.
A tall, turbaned Sikh moved into Bibi-ji’s line of view. She wondered whether God would mind if she shoved the man aside and planted herself in front of him. No, she decided, God would consider it an act of devotion. Using her plump shoulders as a wedge, artfully placing her bare feet on other, less wary, feet and dextrously manoeuvring both her elbows, Bibi-ji carved a triumphant passage for herself and Pa-ji to the front of the crowd. Just in time, for at that moment the musicians set up a resonant thudding beat on the nigaras. The priests emerged from the Akal Takht building, ceremoniously bearing the Guru Granth Sahib. There was a concerted rush of bodies to touch the sacred book, the cushion and the palanquin, to throw rose petals, to be a part of the ritual. Bibi-ji planted her legs wide and firmly refused to let the rushing crowd dislodge her from her position at the head of the marble steps that descended to the causeway. The priests made their way across the lake in a flurry of tassled fans, rose petals and perfumed water, and as they reached the Harimandir Sahib the singers’ voices peaked in a joyous crescendo. As if in response, the sun rose and set ablaze the golden dome and spires of the Harimandir Sahib. Below it, the silent lake caught and cradled the glowing reflection in its calm depths. Bibi-ji held Pa-ji’s hand and wept quietly. In the enchantment of the moment, she forgot the armed men outside the temple and the disquiet she had sensed on the streets the previous afternoon.
They spent the morning in the cool of the Harimandir Sahib, listening to the soothing chant of the singers. At one o’clock they joined the other worshippers in the dining hall for lunch. Later they ambled around, stopping occasionally to chat with strangers, for in this place of God they all became kin. Later still, suffused with a feeling of well-being, they sat in companionable silence in the shade of one of the buildings and watched the crush of pilgrims who had arrived for the martyrdom anniversary celebrations. A child ran past squealing with excitement, trailing a bright yellow balloon. In the lake people dipped and bobbed and rose, their clothes drying in the hot sun minutes after they emerged. Women stood chattering in groups. It all seemed so normal to Bibi-ji, like any other festival day, that she began to wonder whether the rumours of armed men hiding inside the temple were exaggerated. Were the soldiers she had seen patrolling the streets figments of her imagination?
But that evening, as they wandered through the strangely silent marketplace outside the temple walls, they could not miss the palpable tension in the air. Shops were shuttered tight, even though the area swarmed with pilgrims and business would have been good. And yes, there were the ubiquitous soldiers, standing silently in the doorways of cheap hotels and at the ends of the dark streets.
“I think we should go back,” Pa-ji said, looking around uneasily. “I am not sure what it is, but I can sense that something is wrong.”
“Yes.” Bibi-ji knew what he meant. They had grown accustomed to the flow of other waters. Here they no longer recognized the changes in current and tide until it was too late.
They returned to the Golden Temple and once again Bibi-ji felt heartened by the serene structure, now gleaming in its tranquil lake in the rays of the setting sun. Pilgrims continued to wander around it, not wanting to break the spell by leaving the sacred place. Bibi-ji looked up at the water tower that soared behind the guest houses and noticed two men wearing tall, bright orange turbans wound like Dr. Randhawa’s. Were they carrying guns? She shaded her eyes with a hand and gazed up, but the men were no longer visible.
“Did you see that?” she asked Pa-ji. “Men with guns? Not soldiers.”
“Where?”
“Never mind. I must have imagined them. It’s nothing.”
They had a quiet dinner and sat at the edge of the lake again, watching the sun dip below the horizon and listening to the evening singers’ mesmeric chanting. They would stay until the night singers arrived to chant the Rahras and the last hymns of the day before the holy book was returned to the Akal Takht, and the great silver and rosewood doors of the Harimandir Sahib were shut for the ritual cleansing of the shrine. Tomorrow, Bibi-ji promised herself, she would participate in that ritual.
By eight o’clock it was dark but for the stars in the sky and the lights glimmering in the surrounding buildings. The singing in the temple was occasionally drowned out by distorted sounds from loudspeakers making announcements in the streets outside the temple, but Bibi-ji could not understand what was being said. The announcements first increased in volume and then faded away as the vehicles carrying the announcers drove on.
Pa-ji leaned across to one of two middle-aged woman seated beside him. She was watching over six boys aged seven or eight, urging them to sit quietly and listen to the chanting.
“Sister, what are they saying out there?” he asked. “It is hard to understand.”
“They are announcing a curfew. There was one last night also.”
Then the lights died. The power had gone off not only in the temple, Bibi-ji soon realized, but all over the city. For a few moments, until her eyes adjusted to the intense blackness of the night and she began to make out the shapes of people and buildings, Bibi-ji was frightened, feeling as if she had suddenly lost her vision. Moments later, large bonfires flared up in various corners of the temple complex, throwing sharp-edged shadows on the walls. One of the teachers pointed towards the eastern gate of the temple and said, “Look, soldiers are coming in.”
“Where?” asked her companion, peering in the direction of her pointing finger. “I don’t see anything.”
“And there too, can you see now?” The first woman pointed at the opposite gate, and Bibi-ji, sq
uinting into the darkness, dimly saw a group of men running into the complex.
The woman beside her fished around in a large cloth bag and brought out an electric torch. She shone it around, counting the boys. “All of you sit close to Kashmir Miss and me,” she said, reaching across to grab a boy who was particularly fidgety. “If you get lost we will not be able to find you, do you hear?”
“Yes Rani Miss,” chorused the boys, squatting on the ground. The other woman, who Bibi-ji assumed was Kashmir, took some snacks from her bag and handed them around to her charges.
“Are you here alone with these boys?” Bibi-ji asked the women curiously. “Are these all your children?”
“No, they are from the school in our town,” one of the women said. “Kashmir and I brought them here for the celebrations.” She waved a hand around. “How were we to know that there would be trouble here? All those men with guns and bombs all over, is this any way to treat a place of worship?”
“It is the government, Rani,” whispered Kashmir. “That Indira Gandhi. She is the one who has no respect for our faith. She is the one who has sent the army into this sacred place.”
“But what about the extremists who have been hiding here all these months with their weapons?” Rani’s voice was bitter in the darkness. “How are they any different from the government?”
“Extremists? They are freedom fighters. My brother knows them well. Fighting for us. It is the government that is against us.”
There was an anguished pause. Then Kashmir turned to Bibi-ji. “And you, which town are you from?”
“We are not from here. We came from Canada for the celebrations. To offer seva. We did not know there would be trouble.”
“Didn’t know?” Rani was suddenly angry. “How could you not know? It is people like you sitting in foreign countries, far away from everything, nice and safe, who create trouble. You are the ones who give money to these terrorists, and we are the ones who suffer!”
Bibi-ji was silenced. Pa-ji was quiet too. Behind them, the singing intensified, rising and falling as the holy book was borne out of the temple and across the lake and returned to the Akal Takht building.
“Let’s go back to our room,” Bibi-ji said, suddenly feeling tired.
Pa-ji rose to his feet. “I can barely see anything,” he muttered.
“I have my torch,” Rani offered. Her voice was conciliatory and friendly again. “Why don’t we go together? It will be a big help to us if you could hold some of these children by their hands so they don’t get lost.”
They made their way hand in hand, the children quiet in the darkness. When they reached the guest house Rani shone the torch in Bibi-ji’s bag so that she could search for the keys to their room. The boys, safe again, began chattering and laughing.
“You should ask someone at the reception desk to send you a bucket of water for the bathroom, and some drinking water,” Rani advised. “Now that the electricity has gone, who knows? The water might stop too.”
“I’ll go and ask,” Pa-ji said. He waved to the teachers as they led their excitable young charges through the corridor and up the stairs to their room on the floor above.
The reception desk was illuminated with a petromax lantern. “Sat Sri Akal, ji,” the young man at the desk greeted him.
“Sat Sri Akal,” Pa-ji responded. “How long is this curfew going to continue, putthar?”
“I don’t know. But it is not a good idea even to leave this building. The army has entered the compound and I hear there might be trouble. Have you seen them? How hard they walk on this sacred ground. Even God must be terrified!” He lowered his voice. “And it is not just soldiers who desecrate with guns and bombs. Over our heads, on the roofs and under our feet in the storage rooms, our own brothers and sons and fathers, armed too, stamp as hard as demons.”
Pa-ji cleared his throat and the young man became businesslike. “But is there something I can do for you?”
“We wanted some water—to drink and to wash, just in case,” Pa-ji said apologetically. “But if it is too much trouble …”
“No trouble, I will organize it.”
“Can we have a few candles also?” Bibi-ji asked. “We will pay for them, of course.”
Back in their room, Pa-ji tiredly changed into his pyjamas and lay down with a sigh on the narrow bed. Bibi-ji lit one of the candles and stuck it on the rickety table. She moved around silently, performing her nightly rituals of brushing her teeth, washing and creaming her face and brushing her hair, all of which she had neglected the previous night in her exhaustion. The grooming soothed her tired mind as much as it did her scalp and skin. She felt Pa-ji’s eyes on her in the candlelit darkness.
“You are beautiful, my Bebby,” he murmured.
She moved over to his cot and leaned forward to place a kiss on the top of his head. She noticed that his once-thick, long hair had grown sparse; she could see his scalp gleaming through. She stroked his face. “Sleep, Pa-ji, sleep. Tomorrow we will ask Balraj to come and take us to his house if the curfew has lifted. I was a foolish woman to insist on staying here.”
“You are never foolish, my Bebby,” Pa-ji said. He caught her hand and carried it to his mouth. His moustache tickled the skin and she laughed softly. Pa-ji lay back and was soon asleep, his snores reverberating around the room in a rhythm that had long become familiar to Bibi-ji.
She could not sleep, so she sat on the hard chair by the window, the candle flickering beside her, wondering what the day would bring. Out in the temple courtyard that surrounded the shrine and the dark lake, in the low light from dying bonfires, she could see groups of men gathering near various buildings and hear the sounds of running. Occasionally she heard a sharp command in the darkness. She fell asleep on the chair, her head uncomfortably wedged between the window frame and the wall.
A series of sounds, like those of a backfiring car, woke her abruptly. Pa-ji too was startled awake. He sat up and said blearily, “Bebby? What happened?”
“I don’t know. Something is going on outside,” Bibi-ji replied. She looked out again and was nearly blinded by a floodlight. A loudspeaker stuttered to life and a staccato voice announced, first in Punjabi and then in Hindi, that pilgrims inside the buildings were to come out immediately. They would be escorted off the temple premises by the army. Then there was silence.
“Where do they expect us to go in the middle of the night?” Pa-ji said, getting out of bed and joining Bibi-ji by the window.
“What should we do?” Bibi-ji asked. The candle had guttered away into a blob. She lit another one and squinted in the dim light at her watch. It was four o’clock, an hour before dawn. A crow cawed urgently in the distance, awakened by the bright floodlight, and soon other birds joined in a pre-dawn chorus. Another sound rose above the outcry—that of the morning raagis coming faintly from the direction of the shrine, beginning their chant to a new day. But their song was interrupted by the sound of a helicopter chopping through the dark air, brutish and ugly. Looking out of her window, Bibi-ji saw a circle of light beaming down from it and landing on one of the buildings beyond their own. The loudspeaker crackled again, and the disembodied voice asked women, children and the aged to come out. She saw a small group emerge from the guest house beside theirs and heard the thud of army boots as a group of soldiers sprinted across the expanse of marble floor to provide the promised escort. The group started moving towards the gate closest to the guest houses. The morning singers had entered the Harimandir Sahib, and their singing, fainter now, continued to thread its way into the cacophony—soldiers’ boots, the rumble of a tank entering the sacred space, men shouting indistinctly, the buzz of static from the army loudspeaker and the clatter of helicopters above it all.
Pa-ji moved to the door of their room. Opening it slightly, he peered into the corridor. “Better get dressed,” he said pulling his head back in and latching the door. “We will have to get out of here. I will see if it is possible to phone Balraj.”
“Perhaps
we can take a tonga or a taxi or something?” Bibi-ji said, clamping a lid on her rising panic. A moment later she remembered that a curfew had been imposed— they would not be able to find any transportation. Nothing in her previous experience had prepared her for a moment like this. “What kind of government would send an army inside a temple, Pa-ji? Is this Mrs. Gandhi truly mad?”
Pa-ji pulled on his trousers and shrugged quickly into a shirt. “We don’t know what is happening. There are extremists here too, it seems, inside their own sacred temple, defiling it with guns and bombs. It is better not to judge anybody yet.”
They left their suitcases in the room, locked the door behind them and joined the growing crowd of people that was emerging from other rooms and pooling near the reception desk. Bibi-ji spotted the two schoolteachers, Rani and Kashmir, holding some of the small boys by the hand and sharply instructing the others to stay close. “Hold on to my dupatta, hold my kameez,” they took turns repeating to the boys. “Whatever happens, don’t let go.”
Bibi-ji pushed through the crowd towards the two women while Pa-ji headed for the reception desk, which was already surrounded by people, to ask for a phone. “Wait for me at the door,” he said before leaving her side. “I don’t want you to go out there alone.”
She nodded and continued towards the teachers. “Do you want some help?” she asked.
The women nodded gratefully, and Bibi-ji took the small cold hands of two of the boys.
“What is happening?” she asked. “Is it safe to leave? Did you hear those helicopters?”
“Yes, we heard. It was impossible to sleep,” said Rani. “If we stick close to the soldiers, they say we will be safe. They will put us on buses and we can go home.”
“The curfew has been lifted, then?” Bibi-ji asked with relief.
Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? Page 25