THE TEMPEST OF communal violence had eased the past few days. The bleak atmosphere started to lighten up a bit. A sprinkling of crowds was returning to the bazaars. There weren’t too many customers, but the very fact that shops had opened after such a long period was a good omen. The wheels of commerce were starting to turn again. The dark clouds of fear had begun to thin out and a ray of hope was peeping through the gloom.
But alas, our hapless Amritsar! Its destiny hadn’t yet allowed it to turn the page of peace. People who had gone to bed sighing, ‘Thank God there’s a bit of sanity,’ woke up to shouts of ‘Murder … fires … bomb … ruin!’
Footprints of the ogre of communal violence were once again seen imprinted across the city. Both Muslim and non-Muslim neighbourhoods were being torched, the flames lapping at the farthest reaches of the night sky. Stabbing and hacking once again became commonplace and shiny new kirpans scoured the streets in search of fresh blood for their blades.
And the result? The sword of Damocles of the curfew that had been raised only a few days ago, once again descended to hover just above the city’s neck. Curfews of forty-eight to seventy-two hours were imposed in different neighbourhoods. The gates of schools and colleges had barely opened for students before being shut and bolted once again. Everything had changed in the space of less than two days.
This latest wave of violence was so ferocious and widespread that it made earlier incidents appear like a dress rehearsal of a particularly gruesome play. Corpses were again lining the streets and bazaars, their unholy count growing by the day. Until now, the orgy of bloodletting had mainly affected the urban areas of Amritsar but this time around, it had also taken the surrounding villages into its embrace. Dead bodies were being brought from the villages to Amritsar at such a rate that both the civil hospital and the mortuary had run out of space. Residents were being told to vacate some of the staff quarters around the hospital to make room for them. The numbers of those coming with serious injuries was even larger and many of the wounded and maimed could be seen strewn around the verandahs of the hospital. Soon, the spacious forecourt was also full and rows of beds bearing the wounded were snaking in a disorderly queue right along the road leading up to the hospital.
Satnam, meanwhile, appeared to be quite preoccupied with some ‘urgent business’ with his friends. The state of his mind in the midst of this ‘preoccupation’ can perhaps be gauged from one particular incident.
It was a searing hot afternoon in late May. Much of the city’s population was huddled indoors on account of the curfew and Satnam was lying in bed, the door of his barsati bolted from inside when Kesar Kaur knocked.
As soon as the door opened, she sat down near the foot of the bed and looked closely at her son’s disconsolate face. ‘Kaka! Can I ask you something?’ she ventured.
Satnam lifted his head and looked a trifle apprehensive, ‘What is it, Bhabo?’
‘Why do you look so depressed all the time?’
‘Me?’
‘Not you? Must be your shadow, then?’
‘Come on, Bhabo. You are always imagining things.’
‘Me, imagining things? Here, why don’t you see for yourself and tell me.’ She picked up a small mirror from the table and held it before his face.
He looked at his face in the mirror and it did look like his mother had described it. But instead of acknowledging that simple fact, he got irritated. He was, perhaps, already fed up answering his mother’s pointless and unending queries and this was the last straw.
‘Now, look Bhabo,’ he grumbled. ‘Stop bothering me all the time. As it is, I am…’ And he bit his tongue to stop himself mid-sentence.
But Kesar Kaur wasn’t going to be turned away so easily. The mother’s heart was in full flow as she continued, ‘But what’s eating you, I want to know. Are you worried that you’ve lost your shop?’ She continued without waiting for a response, ‘What’s lost is lost. No point in wallowing in sorrow over it. Look, there’s hardly any flesh left on your bones,’ she remarked as she caressed his back.
Her words only exacerbated his annoyance. He lifted his eyes and his lips twitched briefly before swallowing up his response.
Kesar Kaur realized that pressing him any further at this point was futile and tried to change the subject, ‘Your friends haven’t come by lately to play cards with you?’
‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled and turned his back to her. She sat beside him for a while without uttering another word.
She had observed some strange goings-on over the last few days and was worried. Three or four of his friends had started to turn up at his barsati almost every day, usually late in the evening. Some days they would come through the main door and on other occasions by clambering over the low parapets of the rooftop. Satnam would bolt the door once they entered his room. All she could hear were the muffled sounds of a discussion. ‘They came to play cards,’ he would reply to her questions. But she wasn’t easily fooled. The game of cards, she had noticed, had acquired a new dimension of late.
It wasn’t unusual for Satnam’s friends to sit in his room for hours as they played cards. It often seemed the best way of passing the curfew hours. But his door was always open when they played and she could often hear the banter and sounds of laughter. These days, the door was firmly shut and bolted and when she asked him about it, she got a lame response, ‘The kids have been making a lot of noise lately.’ The answer was patently dubious because there were hardly any kids to be found in the house. Young Narinder had left for Agra the previous week to visit his older sister. That left Munni, who was always by Krishna’s side. There was no one else who could be accused of making noise.
‘Let him be,’ Kesar Kaur told herself. ‘If that’s the way he likes it, so be it.’ And she decided to stop probing him on the subject.
But there was another matter that had brought her to his room this afternoon. She had noticed that Krishna had virtually no clothes other than the ones in which she had come. She had given her one of her own salwar-kameez that could be altered to Krishna’s size. But that wasn’t enough. The girl needed at least another two or three suits and she wanted Satnam to help her buy the material.
After hearing his curt ‘I don’t know,’ Kesar Kaur paused for a couple of minutes. She was on the verge of bringing up the subject of Krishna’s clothes when she heard some heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. A minute later, three young men entered the room. One of them was carrying a large, striped canvas bag stuffed with something heavy.
A flicker of anxiety crossed Satnam’s face as he saw the men enter his room. ‘You carry on with your work, Bhabo,’ he spoke with a tremor in his voice. ‘We guys are going to play a few hands of cards for a bit.’
Kesar Kaur made her way down the stairs, hearing the door being closed and bolted from inside. The sudden arrival of the boys and the expression on Satnam’s face had sent her own head into a tizzy.
She went into her own room to lie down for a bit. Her heart was pounding as she replayed the scene she had just witnessed. ‘So, they close the door because they don’t want to be disturbed by the noise while they are playing cards. Fine. Although the young ones would never dare go upstairs and interrupt their game. Then why do they have to bolt the door from inside? And why did they look like frightened rabbits when they saw me? I pray to the Lord that they aren’t…’ The thought coming into her head was too scary to contemplate and she tried to shut it out by closing her eyes and turning her back towards the door.
But neither closing her eyes nor turning her back were going to drive away that chilling thought. She got up from the bed with a start and found her feet dragging her towards the stairs again. She took one step and paused to summon her courage. Taking a deep breath, she slowly tiptoed her way upstairs.
She approached the room with trepidation and leaned forward to press her ear to the door. This was clearly no game of cards, she concluded after listening to the muffled whispers. Didn’t she know what a game of cards was like? Loud and noisy, with whoops and cries heard throughout the house and beyond.
Her ears straining to pick up any threads of conversation, she peered closely at the two panels of the door to see if she could spot a crack. But the door was sturdy and didn’t appear to have any cracks that could aid her mission. The conversation was being conducted in hushed tones so she couldn’t hear a thing.
Disappointed, she returned to her room. She could feel pinpricks in every pore of her body. Her mind conjured one nightmare after another and she stayed on edge until she heard the door opening and heavy footsteps descending down the stairs.
She walked across to the window and sat quietly to watch the passers-by in their lane. A minute or two later, she saw the three young men leave, followed by Satnam himself.
Seeing the four of them exit so surreptitiously again set the alarm bells jangling inside her. She was also worried by the fact that the man who had come with the heavy bag was empty-handed when he had left.
She peered at the ground floor through the horizontal iron bars of the mugh that was a source of ventilation and skylight for the rooms below. Kanhaiya was snoring away in one corner on a rug. She heard the Baba cough once or twice from his room at the back. Krishna, Munni and a couple of girls from the neighbourhood were chatting underneath the mugh. One of the girls was telling Krishna how to knit a particular pattern of a jumper and Krishna was listening with rapt attention.
Kesar Kaur hurried up the stairs towards Satnam’s room. The door was wide open and she glanced around the room with the piercing look of a police inspector examining a crime scene. There was nothing that might help her cross the boundary between suspicion and certainty. The bedsheet was crumpled, as she would expect it to be. His books were neatly arranged on the study table exactly the way Krishna would have left them after dusting his room in the morning. The seat of the armchair seemed to be protruding at an odd angle and she pulled it from a corner to set it right. The pack of cards was lying under the flowerpot on the table at the exact spot she had seen it a little while back. It was clear that no one had touched them.
‘What were these boys doing for so long?’ she thought as she moved towards the closet on the left. It had a small brass lock and she knew that her bunch of keys had one for this lock.
She went downstairs to retrieve the keys from a cornice adorning the faux fireplace in her room.
Kanhaiya had woken up from his slumber and was absently scratching his head, his knees lifting awkwardly from the floor as he reached behind his neck.
The bunch of keys was quite heavy because it had a key for every lock in the house. Kesar Kaur was getting impatient with every extra minute it was taking for her to locate the right one. To make matters worse, Kanhaiya had piped up to ask, ‘Bibi ji, which fresh vegetables should I buy for dinner?’ Not getting a response, he raised his voice, ‘Hurry up and tell me, please. The curfew is about to be lifted for a couple of hours.’
‘To hell with you and your vegetables,’ she hissed as she struggled to untangle the bunch. It took her a while to realize that the key she was looking for had been removed.
Flinging the bunch on her bed, she went downstairs and marched towards the house of her neighbour, the contractor Kishan Singh. She had seen an identical lock at their place.
Kishan Singh was away but his wife Karam Kaur handed her the full set of keys to her house. Her entreaties that Kesar Kaur sit for a while and have a cup of tea were of no avail. Picking up the keys, she rushed back to her place and went straight to Satnam’s barsati.
Bolting the door from inside, she tried out the neighbour’s key and the lock yielded immediately. Her hands were trembling as she nervously opened the closet and started to examine its contents, making sure that everything stayed in its place.
The upper shelf of the closet had some books, notebooks, diaries and various odds and ends. She took in the contents at one glance and decided to leave them alone. The middle shelf had most of Satnam’s winter clothes and she rifled through them quickly before concluding that there was nothing of special interest. Her attention now turned towards the lower shelf and she immediately spotted the striped canvas bag, partly covered by an old tablecloth.
She reached to pick it up. The bag was heavy and it was a bit of a struggle before she could lift it out of the closet and set it on the floor. After taking a quick look outside to check that if the coast was clear, she started to pull out the contents of the bag for a closer examination. First to emerge were three heavy khaki paper bags, a string tied firmly around their neck. She picked them up one by one and carefully unravelled the string.
The first bag opened to reveal a reddish powder with a distinctly pungent smell. The second one seemed a lot heavier and contained a solid white material. It had that strange smell that was usually found in the matchsticks of yore. The third one was the heaviest of the lot, it had shards of glass, as well as some powdered glass.
She reached into the bag for the last item. This wasn’t a paper bag, but a pouch wrapped in a bluish coloured piece of cloth. Her jaw dropped as she untied the knot and found herself staring at a small automatic revolver along with six bullets.
The pupils of her eyes froze for an eternity as she looked at the object in her hand. She felt her legs go weak and once again, her mind began playing a series of terrifying images.
‘Oh, my dear lord! How could he…’ She heard herself speak out loud as her eyes focused on the final item on the lower shelf of the closet. Her heart sank and a cold shiver went through her body as she tried to make sense of the object before her—a can with a gallon of petrol.
She tried to put everything back again, the task complicated by her trembling hands and heaving chest. It was a while before she was satisfied that she had returned each item to its original place.
Her head was spinning as she left the room and she had to use both hands to balance herself against the wall, gingerly taking one step after another as she made her way down the narrow stairway.
Seeking the refuge of her bed, she tried to process everything she had just seen in his closet. She could sense a numbness seep through her body as she wrestled with this nightmare, unable to see any way out of the darkness that had enveloped her. She knew her son well. He could be stubborn as a mule and if he had really set his mind to doing something, not even Brahma and Vishnu could deter him. A direct attempt to stop him at this stage would be counterproductive and might even stiffen his resolve.
She spent the rest of the afternoon and much of the night agonizing over the impending catastrophe. ‘Such an earnest and peace-loving boy—one who would sidestep an ant lest it get trampled under his foot—that boy is now ready to dip his hands in the blood of other human beings? What happened? How could he change so much in so short a time?’ She thought long and hard, sifting through everything she could analyse, before concluding that his recent drift towards violence must be linked to the arrival of the two refugees in their home.
Hearing the clock at the Golden Temple strike four in the morning, Kesar Kaur got up from her bed with a start. Her eyes felt raw from lack of sleep, but her mind had arrived at a clear decision. Rubbing her eyes, she started walking towards Krishna’s bed.
A half-moon was playing hide-and-seek with a small patch of clouds. Right now, a brown cloud had covered much of its surface, allowing only a few strands of silver moonlight to filter through the mugh and caress Krishna’s face. She was sleeping on her back, one hand folded across her chest and the other gently resting on Munni’s head. She was clearly in deep sleep, her long and even breathing visible in the ever so gentle movement of the fingers resting on her bosom. Her hand had the translucent quality of alabaster under the silver light of the moon.
Kesar Kaur leaned over to clasp her hand and shook it a few times to wake her up. Krishna’s eyes opened for a fraction but closed before her pupils could register her presence. Stretching her limbs in her sleep, she turned on her side, freeing her hand from Kesar Kaur and letting it rest on Munni’s back. The movement made Munni snuggle even closer to Krishna. Kesar Kaur put her hand on Krishna’s shoulder and gave it a determined tug. This time her eyes opened and she tried to focus on the face hovering above her.
‘Maasi ji?’ she mumbled in her sleep. Kesar Kaur signalled to her to get up and follow her. Krishna quietly pulled away from Munni and complied.