WHEN HE LEFT the villa, Satnam had no inkling that the tempest of communal violence would take such a vicious turn that night. In his mind, the disturbing noises he had heard were nothing more than the usual outrage committed by the Goonda Party, the kind that he had become accustomed to over the last six months. The scenario that he witnessed as he reached the main street hit him with the force of a hammer. Dozens of gangs of Hindus and Sikhs were darting in one direction or another. Some of them appeared to be led by men in police and even in military uniform who were actively encouraging the hooligans to attack the Muslims and ransack their homes.
Satnam got into his jeep and went to the homes of some of the leading members of his Unity Council and persuaded them to join him. He would do what he could to curb the violence, he thought. But looking at the zeal with which the mobs were going about their unholy mission, he knew that even if God Himself descended into Amritsar, He would fail to dissuade these fellows.
He spent all night dashing from one side of the city to the other as he and his companions tried in vain to stem the tide. Their failure was absolute and the only thing they succeeded in getting were death threats from infuriated members of the rampaging mobs. Crazed by their mission of death and destruction, they saw Satnam and his group as an unnecessary distraction and made it plain, ‘Get out of our way, Sardarji, or you too will get a bullet in your head.’
The terror continued through the night as Muslim mohallas were set ablaze, homes were plundered, and young and old alike were slain without remorse. But the fires of revenge and retribution that had been stoked over the last six months continued to rage. How could they be quenched in just one night?
After a night of fruitless toil, an exhausted Satnam dropped off his friends and parked the jeep outside Vadhao Wali Gali. Fortunately, he had the keys of his home in his pocket. He had initially planned to drive back towards the Queens Road house but an afterthought changed his mind. He decided that he would gather his friends again first thing in the morning. Together, they would take a peace deputation to the key leaders of the city—the same leaders who had been busy fanning the flames of violence.
He opened the front door and went straight to his room upstairs. He pulled his bed out of the room and stretched out under the open sky without bothering to change his clothes. But sleep was a distant prospect. The cot felt like a bed of smouldering coals and every bone in his body appeared to crackle from its heat. He had witnessed the madness of March and was no stranger to the repeated bouts of violence endured by the city. But the events of the last few hours were of a different order of magnitude. The frenzied behaviour of the mobs had finally transgressed all boundaries of humanity. The men he had witnessed had truly turned into bloodthirsty beasts.
His thoughts went towards Krishna the moment his head touched the cot and he got up with a touch of remorse. ‘I should have gone to check on her. God alone knows how her sensitive heart will deal with a situation like this. How will she spend this night,’ he wondered. He wanted to leave right away, but the responsibility of his new plan kept him pinned to the bed.
He left home early in the morning, had a hurried breakfast in the bazaar and gathered his friends in the jeep. They made their way to the homes and offices of one leader after another to make their case. The project turned out to be harder than he had anticipated. To start with, several of the leaders had made themselves quite inaccessible. At a time when these captains of the fragile boat of the city were fully involved in attacks targeting the Muslim community, they had no desire to give their Unity Council the time of the day. And if they did manage to meet one or two of them, the response they received was nothing less than a resounding slap on their faces.
It was late in the afternoon. The sun was licking its blood-soaked lips as it headed towards the west. The darkness of the evening was making a determined effort to hide the bloodstains on the sun’s face with an inky layer of ash. Large flocks of kites and vultures were hovering menacingly, the stench rising from the rotting corpses in the streets below telling them that a feast was at hand.
Satnam and his friends were heading in their jeep towards the clock tower. Their progress had slowed to a crawl by the ever-increasing horde of men choking the bazaar as they trudged home with large bundles of loot. From their vantage point in the jeep, the array of bundles appeared to be floating through the streets on a gigantic stream of heads.
They reached Chowk Bijli but the vast crowd of people gathered around them forced them to stop the vehicle. Several other cars had also been stopped by a crowd that was packed shoulder to shoulder.
‘What’s going on here?’ Satnam wondered aloud as he and his friends left the jeep and pushed their way through the pulsating mass of humanity. The scene before them immediately forced them to lower their eyes in shame and embarrassment. A Muslim girl of eighteen or twenty had been stripped completely naked and was being taken in a parade towards the office of the gurudwara committee outside the Golden Temple.
A second fleeting look revealed the presence of a younger girl of eleven or twelve who was still fully clothed. Their appearance suggested that they were sisters.
What was the mental state of the poor girls in a situation like this? What were their eyes, their heart, their tongue trying to convey? Satnam was in no condition to ponder on such questions. All he wanted was that someone should pump a bullet or two into his chest, kill him then and there, close his eyes before they witness a scene so shameful.
His friends joined him in cajoling the crowd to spare the girls. They shouted and argued, made fervent appeals and even invoked the noble traditions of the Sikh gurus and the Hindu gods to touch some chord of decency in the men surrounding them. But to no avail. Dejected, they got back into the jeep and went down a side street to make it to the gurudwara committee office ahead of the mob.
As the crowd of two-legged beasts made its way towards Guru Ram Das serai, they were accosted by two men standing on a ledge before the serai, shouting at the top of their voices as they struggled to make themselves heard. One was the secretary of the gurudwara committee and the other was Satnam.
The secretary was a large and imposing personality and the authoritative way he flung his arms forward with a stop signal immediately drew the attention of the mob. ‘Stop!’ he shouted. ‘Stop right there.’
The mob came to a halt. The secretary’s voice crackled like lightning as he glared, ‘Khalsa ji! With whose permission have you committed this despicable act? You ought to drown in shame, the whole lot of you. Ah! Look at the depths to which you have fallen! What have these poor girls done to you? How dare you treat them with such disrespect, may I ask?’
A few voices emerged from the crowd. ‘They sat in their house and fired bullets at our men.’
‘I’ll give you an answer for that too. But step back first and hand the girls over to me,’ the secretary demanded.
The crowd reluctantly retreated a couple of paces, pushed back perhaps by the sheer force of the secretary’s personality. Satnam quickly stepped down from the ledge and took off his turban. His hands moved with the speed of light as he unrolled its folds and wrapped the cloth around the naked girl’s chest and hips.
The secretary’s voice crackled once again, ‘Take these girls to the gurudwara’s guest house, Satnam Singh ji. Offer them some water and something to eat.’ Turning towards them, he said, ‘My daughters! You are now under the protection of Guru Ram Das. No one can dare harm you here.’
Satnam took the girls away from the crowd and hurried towards the guest house as the secretary again directed his ire at the mob. ‘Remember that this is the abode of Guru Ram Das, not of a degenerate like Massa Rangarh who desecrated this shrine by making it a den of vice and prostitution. You said these girls fired bullets at your men. I agree that firing at an innocent person is completely unacceptable. So enlighten me, will you? Why did they feel compelled to fire at you?’
Not a soul opened his mouth to speak. They stood in stunned silence as the secretary raged, ‘Is it true that you attacked their homes with the intention of looting their possessions and violating their women and these girls fired at you to defend their honour? Let me ask you a simple question. What would your sisters or daughters have done if they found themselves in a similar situation?’
An eerie quiet had descended over the mob.
‘Okay, let me set this matter aside for a minute,’ the secretary continued. ‘Let’s assume that the girls were at fault and deserve to be punished. But was this any way to punish them? To be honest, I wouldn’t have been so disappointed if you displayed your cowardice by murdering them. But to strip them naked and parade them through the bazaars? And to bring them to the threshold of the Golden Temple in this state? Did you even pause to think about the sanctity of this place, of the message that it carries? Isn’t this the abode of your gurus, where you come daily and recite Hey Nimaneeaa De Maan, Nitaneeaa De Taan, Nioteeaa Di Ot? Don’t you say “O Helper of the helpless, the Strength of the weak, the Supporter of the fallen” as you supplicate?’
An angry voice rose from the crowd. ‘The Muslims haven’t done any less to us. They’ve treated thousands of our women the same way. What’s the big deal if we’ve done this to one of their women?’
The secretary’s voice again rose in anger, ‘Khalsa ji! Your enemy has done something that is an insult to humanity itself and you want to bring yourself down to the same level? What is evil is evil and it makes no difference if the perpetrator is a friend or a foe. Besides, we have a shared responsibility towards our sisters, our daughters and our children. I’ve said this once and I’ll say it a thousand times over: what you’ve done to this girl is the height of weakness and cowardice. For your actions, you deserve the curse of Guru Ram Das. Your sins today cannot be forgiven. Ever.’
The secretary turned his back to the mob and walked towards his office and the crowd also started to disperse.
The following morning, Satnam’s jeep could be seen speeding along the Grand Trunk Road towards Lahore. He was accompanied by the two girls and a couple of armed escorts from the army. Tears of gratitude were streaming from the eyes of the girls.