“No, no, the curfew is still on. But the army wants to evacuate the pilgrims—the women and children and old people. I hear that they are detaining all the men in case there are terrorists among them.”
“But these buses will take us wherever we want to go?” Bibi-ji asked doubtfully. “So many of us?”
A short man beside them turned and said, “You are right, they won’t take us where we wish to go. Why should they? We will be driven to police stations and kept there until the end of curfew. Then we will be allowed to catch the bus or take a rickshaw home. But I don’t know what out-of-towners will do. The borders of Amritsar are sealed. No traffic in or out. Not even the trains are running. We are all trapped here.”
Kashmir looked fearfully at her companion. “Rani, I am not leaving this place. Where are we to go with these children if we cannot catch a bus back to the village?”
“She is right,” Rani sighed. She took the two little boys from Bibi-ji. “You carry on, sister. We will have to see what is possible for us.”
Bibi-ji nodded and pushed her way through the crowd towards the reception desk and Pa-ji. “Did you phone Balraj?” she asked hopefully.
“The phone lines have been cut,” Pa-ji said.
“Then what will we do out there? Nothing is open. How will we manage?”
“Just like all these other people,” Pa-ji replied. He held her hand in his, warm and firm, and they made their way out of the guest house to a small gathering of pilgrims. They seemed to be the only people outside the dark buildings, Bibi-ji noticed. “Where is everyone? Where are the soldiers?” she whispered to Pa-ji. “I thought you said there would be soldiers to protect us.”
Pa-ji shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe we should go back inside.”
Bibi-ji looked at her watch. It was five o’clock. She could not see the helicopter any longer. Now the sound of birds could barely be heard over the buzz of voices around her.
Suddenly a sharp sound rang out and a woman in the front of the crowd fell to her knees. Another woman bent down to help her and began to scream. Something was very wrong. An elderly man beside Bibi-ji was the first to realize what was happening. He turned back towards the guest house, pulling two small girls after him.
“Inside!” he shouted as he pushed past Bibi-ji. “They’re shooting! Get back inside!”
Someone else took up his cry. “They are shooting, Oh God, they are shooting us!”
People churned around, trying to run this way or that. Who was shooting whom? No one seemed to know. Bibi-ji felt someone shove her hard from behind, someone in a desperate rush to get back inside the guest house. She staggered and felt her hand being wrenched away from Pa-ji’s.
“Pa-ji?” She stopped abruptly, turned and shouted. “Pa-ji!”
She struggled to reach Pa-ji, who had been dragged away from her, away from the guest house, by the panicked movement of the crowd. She spotted his tall frame, his dark blue turban, impeccably wound as always, despite the fact that the only light in their room had been from the candle. He turned and waved to her urgently. Go in, his hand said, go in.
Another shot rang out. Bibi-ji saw her husband fall forward as if someone had slammed him hard from behind. She waited for him to rise. She no longer saw the crowd or heard the woman screaming beside the other fallen body. She was aware only of herself standing there and Pa-ji lying on the ground a few steps away. Reaching him, she knelt down slowly, her dupatta settling around his still body.
“Pa-ji?” she said, in the tone she always used to wake him for his morning tea. “Come, Pa-ji. It is not safe here.”
TWENTY-THREE
WHISPERS IN THE WIND
Vancouver
August 1984
A knife in the heart. A dagger in the back. An insult. An outrage. Shock, then anger, spread across the world like acid, burning into the soul of every Sikh, turning even moderate, temple once-in-a-while worshippers into true believers. Their most holy place had been desecrated by the Indian government. Tanks had rolled across delicate marble floors, crushing ancient inlay. The library had been consumed by flames; centuries-old sacred manuscripts had been destroyed. Pilgrims had been killed. Nobody was sure how many—some claimed that it was two thousand people and others insisted that it was much higher. Humiliation, indignity, death.
The Delhi Junction was closed indefinitely. At the Taj Mahal, Bibi-ji slept in the spare bedroom, unable to use the pink and gold room she had shared with Pa-ji. When she looked in the mirror now, she found that she had grown old. All these years she had seen herself through her husband’s eyes—a beautiful woman who never aged. But he was no longer here to look at her, and she crumbled, an old woman alone.
She could not remember much of what had happened after Pa-ji caught the bullet in his chest on that morning two months ago. She carried in her head nothing but the song of the raagis and the wail of a woman. Someone, she did not know who, had carried Pa-ji into the guest house. She must somehow have contacted Balraj and Manpreet, but she did not remember doing so. A funeral had been arranged for Pa-ji, but again she had little recollection of any of this.
Balraj had accompanied her to Delhi a month later when the statewide travel ban was lifted, and she had stayed with Nimmo for a few days before flying back to Vancouver. Mixed with her grief was her shame at having truly lost Nimmo’s son. Jasbeer had disappeared. All of Balraj’s efforts to locate him through contacts in the police services had yielded nothing. He had left the Damdami Taksal two years ago, Balraj was told. With some other students. But they did not know where he had gone.
Back in Vancouver, her friends arrived, offering words of sympathy. Leela and Balu, the Majumdars and all those—so many—whose lives had crossed hers and Pa-ji’s. But each time she accepted their words of condolence, she felt that in acknowledging Pa-ji’s death she was in fact causing it.
“How could this have happened in a temple?” she asked Lalloo, who had moved temporarily into the Taj Mahal. Leela had offered to come and stay with her, but Bibi-ji found that in this time of mourning she preferred her own people: she found comfort in hearing the sound of her mother tongue all around her. Then there were the inevitable house guests, those she would not turn away even now, for Pa-ji’s sake, whose voices she heard at night in the living room in front of the big television screen, rising as one in anger.
Lalloo’s voice was often the loudest, bitter in its pain. “They have no respect for us Sikhs,” she heard him cry one night. “That’s why they could go in like that and trample on our beliefs. I am beginning to like the idea of a divorce from India.”
“Yes, Khalistan is what we need!” This was a voice she did not recognize, a young man recently arrived from India. “They forget we are Sikhs, the lions who protected them from the Mussulman invaders, and now they treat us like this?”
“Blood for blood!” shouted another young man. “For every dead Sikh, a hundred Hindus.”
Bibi-ji listened, silent, dazed.
“We should hold protest marches every day in front of the Indian High Commission,” Lalloo said. “With the biggest rally on August 15th—India’s Independence Day.”
“I wish to join the rally too,” Bibi-ji said to Lalloo the next morning, surprising herself. She had never been one for protest marches and processions. But this year she needed to do something symbolic, for Pa-ji’s sake. Instead of celebrating Independence Day at the Patels’ as she had done for so many years, she would march in anger.
On the morning of August 15th she combed her long grey hair into a high bun, wore the red salwar kameez that Pa-ji had particularly liked on her, put on all her matching bangles and joined the protesters. “Indira Gandhi, down, down!” they shouted. “Khalistan forever!” “Blood in return for blood!” By the time she returned home, she was hoarse from shouting. And she was as hard-eyed in her rage against the Indian government and Hindus as the young men who surrounded her had been. That night, for the first time since Pa-ji’s death, she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
In early September The Delhi Junction reopened, with Lalloo at the cashier’s desk. Grim and unsmiling, he had abandoned the natty suit he usually wore for a plain white pathan outfit, had replaced his hat with a turban and had allowed his beard and moustache to grow. He had temporarily taken over the running of the restaurant. Bibi-ji had not come in since her return from India; she knew she would only see Pa-ji sitting at the till or leaning over the tables to talk to his customers, and would hear his bellowing laugh and cheerful voice.
By midday, the café was full of Pa-ji’s friends; even some of those who had shouted him down at the gurudwara committee meetings came to share their grief. And that old quartet of friends—Balu, Majumdar, Shah and Menon—were there too, sitting at their usual table.
“I still can’t believe it,” Balu murmured, looking at the counter, which seemed empty despite Lalloo’s presence. “What a horrible thing.”
Majumdar nodded but said nothing. He had taken Pa-ji’s death hard, for he had known the old Sikh for many years.
“We’re going to miss him,” Menon said. “Have you seen Bibi-ji since she came home?”
Balu nodded. “Leela and I went over to her house. She looked terrible. Terrible. Poor thing.”
An altercation broke out at a neighbouring table between an elderly Sikh and two younger men. “Are you saying that it was okay for the Indian army to invade our temple? What kind of talk is that?” one of the younger men shouted.
The older man held up his hand. “All I am saying is that there were militants and snipers from our own community hiding in every corner of the temple complex as well. They too had stockpiled arms, they too committed sacrilege by turning our temple into a war zone. How do we know it was not their bullet that killed our Pa-ji?”
Harish Shah, who had been quiet until then, leaned over and said in a low voice to his friends, “He is right, you know. What was Bhindranwale doing inside the Golden Temple? A preacher with guns and bombs? It is okay for him to start a war inside his own temple, but it was wrong of Indira Gandhi to send in the troops to stop it? What else could she have done?”
“I agree that it was wrong of Bhindranwale to turn the temple into an arsenal, Shah,” Majumdar said. “But Mrs. G could have used different tactics to deal with the situation.”
“You cannot destroy a nest of vipers by stroking them with your hand, Majumdar,” Shah replied, raising his voice. “What different tactics are you suggesting, may I ask?”
“She could have cut off water and electricity and waited until the food supplies had run out as well. That would have smoked them all out soon enough. And it would have avoided unnecessary bloodshed and destruction, not to mention further stoking of resentment.”
One of the young men at the neighbouring table scraped his chair back hard, glared at Balu’s table, and said something in Punjabi. The elderly Sikh caught him by the wrist and murmured placatingly. But the young man continued to glower at Balu and his friends before adding in English, “Bastard Hindus, you will pay for this.”
Shah looked belligerent, but before he could say something to exacerbate the tension building between the two tables, Lalloo came over, unasked, with their bill. “Maybe you should leave, my friends,” he suggested. “It might be better.”
“What if we don’t wish to leave?” Shah was irate. “I would like another tea, if you please.”
But his friends had risen to their feet. Majumdar paid the bill and urged Shah out of his chair and through the door. “Sorry, Lalloo,” he said as they left the restaurant. “Everyone is feeling emotional about Pa-ji. Shah didn’t mean anything.”
Outside, as they made their way to their cars, Shah turned on Majumdar. “I don’t bloody need you to apologize for me. I meant every word I said. And what do you mean by dragging me out like this? I wanted to tell that turbaned thug a thing or two. Didn’t you hear? He called us ‘Bastard Hindus’!”
“Why don’t we go to my place and talk there instead of shouting on the street like this?” Balu suggested. A group of young Sikh men brushed past on their way into The Delhi Junction, and he looked nervously at them.
“No, I have to go home,” Menon said. “But you know, Shah, I heard from some friends in India that it is even more tense in Punjab now. Anyone with a beard and a turban is suspect. The army and the police are dragging people out of their houses in the middle of the night and taking them away.”
“To be tortured, the rumours go,” Majumdar added. “People disappear without trace.”
A starched, sharp-edged silence followed. Shah shook his head and laughed. “Really, where do you get all this information? Or should I call it misinformation?”
“Well, I heard it some months ago from a young man who had been tortured,” Majumdar said. “Pa-ji brought him to meet me. He wanted some advice on how the poor fellow could enrol in a course at our college.”
“Nonsense. He must have made it up.” Shah laughed again. “And I have decided not to go to The Delhi Junction anymore. Not that I have anything against Bibi-ji, but I don’t trust her waiters—or Lalloo, for that matter. Did you see the look in his eyes when he brought us the bill? Those bastards are so angry with us, I wouldn’t be surprised if they spit in our food before serving it.”
Us and Them, Balu thought uneasily. When did we split into these groups? The Singhs were family. How could Shah, who had known them even longer than he had, abandon the friendship so abruptly and without a second thought?
Two weeks later. All day Bibi-ji had been trying to clear out Pa-ji’s papers, but she had got nowhere; she had wept over every one. She could not bear to move a single page of his manuscript, which he had left spread out on his desk, or to straighten his chair. Abandoning the attempt to do anything in the room, she instead wandered around it, touching the rows of memorabilia on his bookshelves that were fighting for space with his books. From the walls, the photographs of his “relatives” gazed back at her, meaningless now without Pa-ji to give them life with his stories.
She looked out the window to see the view her husband had enjoyed when he stood in this spot and noticed a man coming up the driveway, a backpack slung over one shoulder, wearing a black turban, walking with a loping stride, his beard unruly and longer than she remembered it. The familiar figure was unmistakeable. She hurried out of the room and down the stairs.
“Jassu is home,” she called to the young men sitting in the living room. “Jasbeer is back,” she called to the women, who were busy—as if they had never stopped—making food in the kitchen. She opened the door and held out her arms. “I haven’t lost you, I haven’t lost you,” she whispered.
Jasbeer hugged her close. “I heard,” he said. “I just heard, Bibi-ji.”
He led her back into the house. Gently, he sat her down on the couch. “Tell me what happened,” he said.
Another week, and Dr. Randhawa arrived again at the Taj Mahal. He was as tall and grey as ever, and accompanied by an even larger entourage. This time Bibi-ji prepared a lavish welcome for him, cooking a variety of dishes with her own hands and insisting that his acolytes stay in the house with him as long as they wished. She suppressed her dislike of his pomposity, his arrogance. He had been right after all, she told herself. The Indians had humiliated the Sikhs and they had killed her Pa-ji. It was now a question of defending the faith, the thing that gave them, as a tribe, a face and a distinction.
Now large meetings were held at the Taj Mahal every day. Bibi-ji did not know many of the people who attended, and after a while she stopped trying to remember their names. Talk of revenge and of Khalistan whipped around like a bitter wind, fuelled by the arrival of yet more people from Punjab. Their stories were of more brutality, murders, disappearances, torture, humiliation. Jasbeer told Bibi-ji how dangerous it was to be a turbaned Sikh man in Punjab, how you could be picked up by the police or the army, thrown into jail or shot dead in fake “encounters.” She was tempted to ask him what he had been doing during his long absence, how he came to kno
w such things, but realized that she was afraid to find out.
October arrived in a flurry of red and gold leaves. Bibi-ji still moved mechanically—she could not believe that so many months of her life had gone by without Pa-ji beside her. One day, as she sat at her old spot in the kitchen—at the table, sorting out the mail—she saw a flimsy envelope from Delhi and noticed the familiar looping, careful handwriting. With a pang of pleasure or grief—she was not sure which—she picked up the envelope, tore it open and skimmed through it.
We cannot stop thinking about Pa-ji and how you must feel without him. This is a time for you to be with us, your family. Let me spoil you as a niece should, Bibi-ji. You have not allowed me the pleasure of this small task. How is our Jasbeer? I was so glad to hear from you that he is staying at home instead of wandering around Punjab in these terrible times. Our young men are hot-headed and jump into trouble without any regard for their safety or the safety of others. Pappu too has taken to saying uncomplimentary things about Indira Gandhi at the top of his voice. I keep begging him to keep his thoughts to himself since these are not good times for us Sikhs, and who knows what might be waiting for us round the corner? But he won’t listen to me. He says this is a democracy and we all have the right to speak our minds.
Bibi-ji, I went with Satpal to do seva at the Golden Temple, to join with thousands of other Sikhs who come daily to build our sacred place. I saw for the first time the bullet holes in the walls of the shrine and I cried with hurt and with fear. And anger—with the government for sending tanks into our temple. Are we the enemy, or are we citizens of this country?
I am not the only one who feels this way. Indira-ji may have withdrawn the army from the Golden Temple, but she has left a sea of anger behind. I hope we don’t all drown in it.
TWENTY-FOUR
THEY
New Delhi
October 31, 1984
Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? Page 26