Twenty

Men wrapped head to ankle in muslin, bedrolls on their heads, children on their shoulders holding cooking pots, their faces black with dirt. Hundreds, one after the other, walking towards, no, walking away from burning streets. A war correspondent took this photo, the dam engineers told me, but the fighting is over now, the Muslims in muslin are gone, and this is Life, one of them said, and laughed and the other said Magazine, ha ha, and I laughed along like a fake joker in their gang and they told me I was safe to walk the Amritsar night streets back to my lodgings at Mrs Bhandari’s guest house. I must have been drunk to see what I saw, they said the next day, I must have been, because the fighting has stopped, they said, it’s safe here now. But I saw the men circle the woman. They circled her. Her scream was cut off. And the lines and lines of men, women and children in muslin and dirt repeated in my mind like a photograph of white birds, egrets of pain.