SAAWAN SINGH WAS from the Ramgarhia clan, a man with a genuine flair for business. When he passed away a couple of years ago, he had left a modest fortune of thirty or forty thousand rupees for his family.
Satnam Singh was the second of Saawan Singh’s four children—two brothers and two sisters. His older sister was married into a family in Agra that owned a flourishing business and his younger brother, Narinder, was in Class Eight at Ramgarhia High School. That left the youngest, his sister Sukhwant. Barely five or six, she was the baby of the family whom everyone called Munni. An affectionate, happy, adorable child who was very much the favourite in the neighbourhood.
Satnam and his family own two separate properties—a store in Katra Sher Singh that his father had bought and the house at the far end of Katra Ramgarhia where they lived. When Saawan Singh was alive, the business was mostly limited to electrical supplies; but once Satnam took charge of the store, he diversified into new products like gramophones, radios, etc. for which he was able to secure distribution rights. He was also a natural mechanic who loved to fix things. This helped him set up a thriving business for repairing broken radios.
Satnam was around twenty-five and had studied up to FSc. Broad-shouldered and muscular, he looked somewhat stocky despite being above average in height. But then, he’d always been fond of regular exercise and had managed to avoid the kind of flab that has become so common amongst city-dwellers. If anything, his agility while moving and his poise while standing belied the sedentary nature of his occupation as the owner of a successful store.
Having studied at the local college, he had acquired the sartorial style of the educated youth. His beard was neatly pressed against his face with the hair-fixing gel that had become quite popular of late. His multi-hued leheriya turban also represented a certain aesthetic—folds of muslin rolled in neat, equidistant layers to cover the ears and rise upwards, and a pointed front carefully perched over the middle of his forehead like the prow of a sleek canoe. A far cry from those ungainly structures that some young folks had started sporting these days.
Through his years in school and college and even now when he was running his own business, Satnam had managed to steer clear of any kind of religious fanaticism. He was a devout Sikh, but he would never countenance disrespect of other religions. Over the years, this trait had helped him develop a distinctly multi-religious circle of friends. The wave of communal strife that had broken out in Punjab over the last few months had caused him a deeply personal anguish. He had to do something about it. And so, he had started reaching out within his relatively modest circle of friends and acquaintances, urging them to act as a force for peace in a rapidly unravelling situation. The Unity Council that brought Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs together on one platform was largely the fruit of his labour.
The initial response to the council was quite promising and they managed to organize a few good-sized gatherings in different parts of Amritsar. Their unequivocal message of peace and communal harmony appeared to strike a chord with the audiences and gave the council a glimmer of hope. The people of Amritsar, it appeared to Satnam, were prepared to confront the approaching storms of religious bigotry with resolve and purpose. But it turned out to be a case of wishful thinking. Over the last couple of weeks, he had the misfortune of seeing incidents that were the antithesis of everything that he stood for, of everything he and his friends at the Unity Council were trying to advocate. Persons who had placed their hands on their hearts and taken solemn vows to resist the communal frenzy till their last breath had suddenly changed colours. Each new wave of communal hysteria seemed to carry away a bunch of his own compatriots in its wake.
The impact wasn’t hard to discern. Meetings of the council, the ones that used to take place twice or even thrice a week in different neighbourhoods of the city, were becoming harder to organize. Even more telling was the rapidly diminishing turnout of members at these meetings. And if that wasn’t demoralizing enough, the fiasco at the last meeting of the council in the house near Khalsa College had been the last straw. He felt like someone had abruptly punctured his energy and vitality, leaving his body strangely enervated, his self-esteem in tatters.
That happened the day before yesterday. What he saw last evening was even worse, a sight that ignited every latent fear in his body. He knew now that it was only a matter of time before the communal inferno consumed everything that fell in its path. It wouldn’t spare Amritsar, nor Lahore, nor any other town or village in Punjab. A calamity of unprecedented proportions appeared inevitable, and it was hard to see how anyone could stop it.
So, what exactly did he see? What was it that caused such intense despair?
He was passing Guru ka Bagh, a large maidan where hundreds of Hindus and Sikhs had gathered. In unison, they were shouting a slogan that sent a shiver down his spine:
If it’s Pakistan that you crave,
We’ll send you to your grave.
It was a grim, moonless night and the hours rolled by as he tossed and turned restlessly on the bed in his barsati, the single room on the flat roof of their house. His hand moved involuntarily to his forehead to wipe off a trickle of perspiration before coming down to fling the quilt aside. Its soft cotton felt like angry bristles on his tortured frame. Everything he had heard today and everything he had seen with his own eyes made it clear that the inferno was headed straight towards them. Wherever he went, angry voices proclaimed, ‘There’s going to be carnage, like it or not … rivers of blood will flow down the streets … you’ll see blood instead of colours at the Holi festival…’
Those dark prophesies of doom seemed to be coming true much faster than he thought. Returning home that evening, he saw the body of a Sikh near Moni’s Chowk. The poor fellow was a humble dhandorchi, a town crier, who was doing the rounds on his horse-drawn tonga, one hand erratically beating a drum as he urged Hindus and Sikhs to attend a large public gathering the following day. He was waylaid by some Muslim youth and hacked to death. And barely an hour later, the mutilated body of a young Muslim was seen at the corner of the street next to Jallianwala Bagh.
Satnam wasn’t unfamiliar with death; over the years, he had seen quite a few dead bodies as he joined friends and family at a cremation or a burial. But this was the first time he had encountered the sheer brutality with which man could wield a sword or dagger against his fellow man. How could they?
He couldn’t bring himself to eat his dinner that night and ignoring the remonstrations of his mother, he took the stairs to seek refuge in his barsati. Lying on his bed, he buried his head under the quilt. He wanted to unsee those mangled corpses, but there was no getting away from them. Try as he might, they continued to hover right before his eyes, keeping him on edge for much of the night.
He must have dozed off for a few minutes when he was jolted by a sharp cry. ‘Bhaji! Fire!’ he heard Narinder shout.
He kicked the quilt away and sprang from the bed. He could hear quite a commotion coming from the flat roofed houses in his neighbourhood. ‘Oh my God! Look at those flames touch the sky,’ someone shrieked.
Hurrying out of the barsati, he rubbed his eyes and squinted to focus on the flames. As he took in the scene unfolding before him, he felt his legs buckle. Hungry tongues of thick black smoke were leaping out of the inferno as it consumed one building after another.
‘One, two, three, four…’ his kid sister Munni counted, immersed in the macabre theatre unfolding before her eyes. ‘Bhaji, I can count the fires at six different places.’
Satnam paid no attention to Munni as he tried to focus on the flames spreading along the bazaar. The busy streets had erupted into an uproar as residents and onlookers spilled out of their homes. Satnam lingered on the roof for a while before hurrying back to his room to shield his ears from the din.
The neighbourhood spent much of the night on the rooftops of their houses. They could see that even the nearest of the fires was a fair distance away. But a sense of dread was palpable. It seemed only a question of time before the inferno took all of Amritsar in its evil embrace and reduced the city to ashes and dust. While the frightened faces, restless eyes and sagging spirits of some suggested a readiness to surrender to the inevitable holocaust, others had a different plan. Their high-pitched calls for revenge continued to rend the sky till the early hours. The dance of death had begun and Yamraj was hovering above their heads.
Morning finally arrived and people started to emerge from their homes and head towards the location of the fires. They stood and watched in stunned silence. In just one night, everything had changed. Forever.
Satnam also stepped out with three to four of his close friends and decided that they would first pay their respects at the Golden Temple.
The streets en route were unusually busy. He could hear echoes of the previous night as they jostled their way through the crowd. The grim tone conveyed the gist even before he heard the words, ‘Devi Wali Gali has been reduced to ashes … not a single home has survived on Satto Wali Gali; there isn’t a single building left standing…’
Satnam felt the ground slip beneath his feet. His friend Gurdeep was trying to catch his attention, ‘Didn’t I say that something major is going to happen on 5th March…?’ But his mind was in utter turmoil and Satnam found it hard to focus on Gurdeep’s words.
As they reached the Golden Temple, the scenes unfolding before him were dragging his spirits to a new low. The entire rectangular path of the Parikrama around the sacred pool was overflowing with families rendered homeless by last night’s arson. Metal trunks, bedrolls and hastily wrapped bundles were strewn around families, providing a backrest or a pillow to hundreds of men, women and children. The women were sobbing inconsolably, while the men punctuated their own grief with a groan of anguish each time someone posed a question. The children looked nonplussed as they gazed at the tortured faces of their parents. Families that lived comfortably in homes like our own had been plunged into the ranks of the destitute, sleeping under the open sky and left with nothing but the meagre belongings they could rescue from the cauldron.
Now, our Amritsaris aren’t known for any particularly noble or outstanding virtues, but there is one trait that really does come to the surface in times like these. Their generosity and spirit of community service is second to none and the women of Amritsar are the true embodiment of the Guru’s teachings. They must have risen at the crack of dawn to cook large degchis of food and thousands of chapatis, with which they now filed into the Parikrama—the women carrying baskets of roti on their head and the men hauling large buckets of rice, dal and sabzi. Their arrival created a buzz among onlookers and refugees alike as they collectively marvelled at the phenomenon. When did they plan everything and when did they start cooking?
‘Here Ma ji, have a chapati please … here Bibi ji, take some rice … Bhaji, Bhenji, some vegetables for you? ... Veerji, please have some dal …’ Their voices echoed around the Parikrama as they offered food to folks who were accustomed to feeding others before touching a morsel themselves.
Eyes brimming with tears, their outstretched palms accepted the food and tried to force small bites down a reluctant throat. The body needed the nourishment but the spirit rebelled and tried to push it back up the gullet. Their tormented expressions sent a shiver down the spines of the volunteers, ladles often slipping from their trembling fingers even as they coaxed them to accept the Guru’s offerings.
Satnam absorbed the scene as he walked along the Parikrama with his companions. His friends would often stop to chat with someone they knew and commiserate over the tragedy, but Satnam felt that he could neither speak with anyone nor listen to another heart-breaking account. His heart was tugging at him to do something, but he couldn’t. He felt his stomach, his chest and his throat constrict in a flood of tears. He felt a desperate need to go to a desolate corner where no one could see or hear him wail out loud, a place where he could relieve himself of the burden he was carrying.
He was passing through a particularly busy section of the Parikrama and, seeing his friends stop once again, he decided to part company and move ahead on his own.
‘And you haven’t seen the serai yet,’ he heard a young man refer to the pilgrims’ inn adjacent to the Golden Temple. ‘You have to see it with your own eyes to believe the situation there,’ the fellow was telling his wife.
Having come to the end of the Parikrama, Satnam ascended the steps towards the gate that led to the Guru Ram Das Serai. The scene at the serai was beyond belief. Starting from the entrance and extending all the way through the eight expansive halls, the vast two-storey building was teeming with displaced families. Every room, every corridor, every verandah was bursting at the seams. Women were busy pouring their hearts out to anyone who might listen. A number of men, too, were narrating their own experience, their despairing voices adding to the grim cacophony. ‘The Muslims killed four of the seven members of our family … my husband was thrown into the street from the third floor of our home … these clothes that we are wearing, that’s all that we have left after our house was burned down…’
Several groups of volunteers had arrived at the serai with food for the poor sods and their generosity had also attracted a host of unintended beneficiaries—beggars and mendicants from the neighbourhood, pilgrims from distant lands, and even some men and women with the flowing, uncombed hair typical of the Bhatra bards who lived in Baba Pahauri’s mohalla. But the ones whose plight had drawn the volunteers to the serai appeared much too distraught to pay any attention to the food or water that was being offered. Except, perhaps, for the ones who felt compelled to extend their palms and receive some food for their children.
Satnam’s heart let out an anguished sigh as he hurried away from the serai.